How we rank

This page exists so you can check our work. Every ranking, every profile and every price on this site follows the rules below, and where we have broken them we say so here rather than quietly fixing it.

What we rank

• Customer service help desks: software whose core job is receiving, tracking and resolving customer support requests with an assignable status
• IT service desks and employee service platforms are a different buying decision and are out of scope for now
• A help desk is listed in the A-Z directory once we have checked its facts against its own site and recorded where we read them
• A help desk is ranked only once it has a full profile, because ranking something we have not researched is guessing

Where the facts come from

• The vendor's own site, pricing page, documentation, changelog, status page and newsroom
• Every fact carries the URL we read it on and the date we read it
• We never use review-site content, from any review site: not their text, not their ratings, not their tone, not paraphrased
• We do not republish vendor marketing copy either. If a claim only exists in an ad, it is not a fact
• Where a vendor's own pages contradict each other, we record the conflict rather than picking the version that reads better

How we handle prices

• Prices are read from the vendor's own rendered pricing page, never a marketplace listing or a cached summary
• Every price carries the date it was last checked, shown on the page
• We always state the billing basis next to the figure, because most pricing pages open on the discounted annual rate
• Where a vendor does not publish a price, we say "contact sales" rather than estimating one
• We have got this wrong once: an early version of the Gorgias profile took prices from a marketplace listing that covered only part of the bundle, and every figure was too low. It was corrected within two days, and the rule above exists because of it

What the ordering means today

• Rankings are currently ordered by editorial priority: our judgement, based on the research behind each profile
• That judgement is a human one and we are not going to pretend it is a formula
• A per-criterion scorecard is being built. Until it exists, no profile shows a score, and "not yet scored" means exactly that rather than zero
• Where we have not researched enough help desks to rank a category honestly, we do not publish that ranking. Four use-case rankings were taken down in September 2026 for exactly this reason

What money does and does not do

• Placement is never sold. No vendor can pay to be listed, ranked higher, or featured
• Some outbound links earn us a commission. Where that is true, the page says so
• Commission rates have no input to any ranking, rating or ordering, and the people writing profiles do not work from the commission data
• Our Agency sells help desk implementation services, so we have a commercial interest in this category. That is the reason we know it well and also a reason to check our work, which is what this page is for

Who writes this

• We have run customer support desks for six years. The opinions here come from operating these tools, not from summarising other people's reviews
• Opinion and fact are kept apart: verdicts, pros and cons are judgement; pricing, features and integrations are facts with sources
• Profiles are reviewed by a second person before publishing

Telling us we are wrong

If a figure here is out of date or a verdict misreads your product, tell us and we will check it against your own pages and correct it. Corrections are made on the page, with the date. We would rather be corrected than be quietly wrong.