Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk sells to teams that will not book a call to learn a price. Every edition, Enterprise included, carries a published self-serve rate, and a three-user free plan catches the account when the 15-day trial ends.

Seats are $7 per agent per month on Express and $40 on Enterprise annually, or $9 and $50 monthly. Channels arrive by edition: social on Express, live chat, WhatsApp and the knowledge base on Standard, telephony on Professional. AI is metered in LLM tokens rather than resolutions, with 30M free tokens a month, or you connect your own OpenAI key and pay that provider. Zoho's price file also carries Africa and APAC dollar tracks below headline USD (annual Enterprise at $28 and $27 against $40).

Zoho publishes no price per token and no overage rate, so the AI line cannot be forecast past the free allowance. Audit logs, field encryption, sandboxes and custom functions are Enterprise only. Data Backup, the only export carrying attachments, is unavailable on Free and Express. Workflow rules, blueprints, SLAs and Zia configuration have no documented export path, no uptime commitment is published, and deleting an agent does not release its licence.

Zendesk and Freshdesk are the two products Zoho names in its free migration offer. Zendesk's cheapest seat is $19 a month against Zoho's $7, and it ships with data export switched off until you file a support ticket. Help Scout suits teams wanting none of this five-rung ladder. All four sit in help desk software.