Customer Service & Helpdesk · Alternatives
Gladly alternatives
As of 4 Nov 2026, the panel rates Zendesk (3.5/5), HubSpot Service Hub (3.5/5) and Deskpro (3.5/5) highest among the other 35 Customer Service & Helpdesk products evaluated. Ratings that look equal are rounded to half stars; the order uses the unrounded rating, then the name. The highest-rated European alternative is Zammad (EU-Made). Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: how scores are made.
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European alternatives to Gladly
European by provenance (EU-made, EU origin with foreign ownership, or UK and wider Europe). Data hosting is stated only where the vendor’s own pages prove it.
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Zammad
EU-MadePanel rating
Zammad is an open-source helpdesk from Zammad GmbH of Berlin, available hosted or self-hosted.
- Data hosting: not stated on the vendor’s pages
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Userlike
EU-MadePanel rating
Userlike — presented on its pages as Userlike, now Lime Connect — is a messaging-first helpdesk, strongest on omnichannel and customer data protection, weakest on ticketing core, which sits at 4 with no spread.
- Data hosting: not stated on the vendor’s pages
- Free plan: yes, per the vendor’s page captured 5 Oct 2026
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HelpSpace
EU-MadePanel rating
HelpSpace, a small-team helpdesk from HelpSpace GmbH of Bad Vilbel, Germany, scored 6 to 7 on ticketing core, its strongest criterion, where rules, team and round-robin assignment, merge and split, and per-ticket SLA deadlines are documented — two judges gave 7 and four gave 6, held back by the absence of documented business-hours SLA policies, breach warnings, escalation and response-time reporting by agent and queue.
- Data hosting: not stated on the vendor’s pages
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Znuny
EU-MadePanel rating
Znuny is an open source ITSM and helpdesk platform, a community fork of OTRS, that can be self-hosted or run fully managed.
- Data hosting: not stated on the vendor’s pages
- Free plan: yes, per the vendor’s page captured 15 Sep 2026
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OTRS
EU-MadePanel rating
OTRS is a service-management and ticketing suite whose legal pages give a German contracting entity in Oberursel.
- Data hosting: not stated on the vendor’s pages
Other alternatives
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Zendesk
Rest of worldPanel rating
Zendesk is a customer service and helpdesk platform whose evidence runs deepest in knowledge and self-service, where scores cluster at 8-9: help centres in over 40 languages, approval workflows with review intervals, deflection reported as ticket-to-contact ratio and independently solved issues, and AI that drafts articles from ticket trends.
- Free plan: yes, per the vendor’s page captured 19 Oct 2026
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HubSpot Service Hub
Rest of worldPanel rating
HubSpot Service Hub is a helpdesk with a CRM core in every version, and the bench scores it strongest on omnichannel and on knowledge and self-service, where scores run 7 to 8, and weakest on sovereignty, at 3 to 4 — the only criterion below 6.
- Free plan: yes, per the vendor’s page captured 15 Sep 2026
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Deskpro
Provenance unknownPanel rating
Deskpro is a help desk built on a rules-based engine, and that engine is its strength: ticketing core scores cluster at 7, with omnichannel and knowledge and self-service at 7-8, and the judges' weighted verdicts run from 5.9 to 6.9.
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Crisp
Provenance unknownPanel rating
Crisp, a customer-service and helpdesk platform from Crisp IM SAS of Nantes, scores highest on integrations: a REST API the vendor describes as its backbone — token scopes, published rate limits, webhooks, SDKs for four platforms, an MCP server — fronts a broad marketplace.
- Free plan: yes, per the vendor’s page captured 26 Oct 2026
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Dixa
Provenance unknownPanel rating
Dixa, a customer service platform from Dixa ApS in Denmark, is strongest at omnichannel, where scores cluster at 7-9: twelve channels — phone, email, live chat, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, SMS, API messaging, help centre, form, Trustpilot and Yotpo — are stated to land in one timeline, with context carrying over from chat, email or phone.
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Intercom
Rest of worldPanel rating
Intercom is strongest at knowledge and self-service and omnichannel coverage, both 7 to 8, and weakest at customer data protection, where scores run from 2 to 6 — the widest split.
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eDesk
Provenance unknownPanel rating
eDesk (formerly xSellco) is a customer service and helpdesk product for e-commerce sellers, and its strongest scores sit in compliance: customer data protection, at 7 with no spread, rests on a step-by-step GDPR erasure walkthrough, a published data processing agreement and named subprocessors.
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Front
Provenance unknownPanel rating
Front is a collaborative customer service platform with a built-in help desk ticketing system, and the bench scores it strongest on channel breadth, weakest on sovereignty.
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HelpDesk
Provenance unknownPanel rating
HelpDesk is ticketing and helpdesk software from Text (formerly LiveChat Software S.A.).
- Free plan: yes, per the vendor’s page captured 13 Oct 2026
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LiveChat
Provenance unknownPanel rating
The bench scored LiveChat, from Text, Inc.
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Unblu
Provenance unknownPanel rating
Unblu Inc., headquartered in Basel, is a customer-service platform for financial institutions, and the bench's strongest scores land on customer data protection, 7 to 8, and sovereignty, 6 to 7: retention intervals are configurable per data category and executed by a garbage-collection job, the audit log stores the IP of every logged change, a data protection officer is named with a strict processor role, and hosting can be a Swiss sovereign cloud run by T-Systems Schweiz AG in Zollikofen and Bern or on-premise, with US-provider exposure on the Google Cloud and IBM deployment options.
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LivePerson
Provenance unknownPanel rating
LivePerson Conversational Cloud earns its strongest scores on integrations and omnichannel, both clustering at 6 to 7.
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Kayako
Provenance unknownPanel rating
Kayako is judged as an AI help desk platform whose strongest area is knowledge and self-service, where scores cluster at 8-9 for semantic search, a 24/7 chat widget, articles drafted from resolved tickets, deflection analytics and on-demand translation.
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TOPdesk
Provenance unknownPanel rating
TOPdesk, a customer service and helpdesk product from TOPdesk Nederland B.V.
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Freshdesk
Rest of worldPanel rating
Freshdesk earns its highest scores where a buyer can check both the engine and the bill: ticketing core and pricing transparency sit at 6-7, built on routing and SLA policies by tier, a documented archive lifecycle — closed tickets auto-archive after 120 inactive days, turn read-only, and deleting them is permanent and irreversible — and public per-agent prices (Growth €17, Pro €52, Enterprise €84, billed annually) with add-ons metered to unit prices such as €45 per 100 AI Agent sessions.
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LeadDesk
Provenance unknownPanel rating
LeadDesk is a Finnish contact-centre platform that scores highest on omnichannel at 6-7 and integrations at 6-7: voice, email, webchat, SMS and Facebook Messenger feed a single conversation view of full customer history, telephony runs on the vendor's own infrastructure, and a claimed 100+ integrations include Salesforce, Zendesk, HubSpot, Dynamics and Pipedrive.
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Help Scout
Provenance unknownPanel rating
Help Scout is a customer service and helpdesk product built around Inbox, Agent, Copilot and Signal, and the bench's evidence is strongest on knowledge self-service, scored 7-8, and weakest on customer data protection, which drew identical 2s, and sovereignty, left unrated at 0.
- Free plan: yes, per the vendor’s page captured 13 Oct 2026
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Puzzel
Provenance unknownPanel rating
Puzzel is a Norwegian customer-service platform, strongest on omnichannel where scores cluster at 6-7: voice, chat, email, SMS and social are documented in one agent workspace with a single customer view, with WhatsApp and Meta named.
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Tiledesk
Provenance unknownPanel rating
Tiledesk, an open-core customer service and helpdesk platform from the Italian company Tiledesk S.r.l., scored strongest on integrations, where scores sit at 6: a documented REST API with Basic and JWT authentication and at least 200 requests per minute, webhooks, MCP, native OpenAI and Shopify connections, and SSO.
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Vivantio
Provenance unknownPanel rating
Vivantio is a customer service and helpdesk platform whose bench scores are strongest on integrations, 6-7, and the ticketing core, 5-7.
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Jira Service Management
Rest of worldPanel rating
Jira Service Management is Atlassian's cloud service desk, and the bench scores it strongest on integrations, customer data protection and pricing transparency, where five of six judges landed at 6-7: over 1,000 Marketplace apps, documented REST and bulk APIs, permission schemes with issue-level security, AES-256 at rest, audit logs from Standard, and public per-agent prices with an AI agent at $1 per resolution.
- Free plan: yes, per the vendor’s page captured 15 Sep 2026
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Gmelius
Provenance unknownPanel rating
Gmelius is a shared inbox and helpdesk built inside Gmail: AI assistants and rules tag and route incoming email, with delegation, shared labels, templates, kanban boards and email analytics.
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HelpCrunch
Provenance unknownPanel rating
HelpCrunch is a customer service and helpdesk product strongest on conversation continuity and self-service: omnichannel and knowledge and self-service cluster at 5 to 6, a chat-as-a-ticket model lets an agent switch a live chat to email mid-issue with replies returning to the same thread, and the multilingual help centre carries per-language SEO and a custom domain.
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LiveAgent
Provenance unknownPanel rating
LiveAgent, a cloud helpdesk from Quality Unit, s.r.o.
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Gorgias
Provenance unknownPanel rating
Gorgias is an ecommerce helpdesk, strongest on omnichannel, scored 7 with a minimum of 7 and a maximum of 7: email, live chat, SMS, Facebook and Instagram, and native voice with IVR, recordings and routing share one workspace and one customer timeline.
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Tidio
Provenance unknownPanel rating
Tidio is a multichannel helpdesk whose strongest scores are integrations and omnichannel: WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, email and live chat land in one panel with full message history, backed by Salesforce, Zendesk and Shopify connectors, a Jira integration and a documented ticket-data API.
- Free plan: yes, per the vendor’s page captured 26 Oct 2026
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Trengo
Provenance unknownPanel rating
Trengo, a customer-service and helpdesk platform, is judged strongest on omnichannel: apart from the data protection officer persona, which recorded 0 on every criterion, judges placed it at 6-7 for one shared inbox taking WhatsApp, email, social, live chat and voice, with SIP telephony documented in depth — calls made and received, logged under a linked user, feeding ticket creation — alongside customer-360 profiles and Meta and WhatsApp Business partner status.
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Smartsupp
Provenance unknownPanel rating
Smartsupp is a live chat and multichannel inbox from Smartsupp.com, s.r.o.
- Free plan: yes, per the vendor’s page captured 2 Nov 2026
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Hiver
Provenance unknownPanel rating
Hiver is a helpdesk in two editions — Hiver Omni, a dedicated omnichannel platform, and Hiver in Gmail, a Gmail-native helpdesk with shared inboxes — with modules named Ticketing, Automation, Analytics and Integrations, an AI layer that includes Agents, Copilot and a Help Center, and a vendor claim of more than 10,000 teams.
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iAdvize
Provenance unknownPanel rating
iAdvize, an AI shopping assistant for e-commerce storefronts from iAdvize SAS of Nantes, France, scores highest on integrations at 5-6: the assistant escalates conversations into tickets in six named helpdesks with context attached, ingests catalog and FAQ automatically from native Shopify and PrestaShop apps, answers "where is my order?" from live parcel status via Shipup, OneStock and Welcome Track, and synchronises consent with four consent tools.