Picking an Alternative for Your Help Desk

Jira Service Management Alternative: Choose Your IT Service Management Platform

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Posted by Natalia Tomchyshyn

Updated November 6, 2025

Looking for a Jira Service Management alternative? We’ve got several reasonable options for you. Since this platform delivers robust help desk and customer support tools primarily for IT teams, they can effectively fit this and other industries all at once. Thus, we selected competitors to Jira with similar scalability and toolset to handle IT service requests, ticketing, self-service, and other business operations.

What is Jira Service Management?

Jira ITSM helps software developers run ITIL-certified incident/problem management and service requests and enhances operational efficiency with real-time collaboration. It offers a powerful ticketing system with automated tasks, ticket routing, and best practices logging. Anyway, let’s see what solutions can prove themselves as Jira Service Management alternatives and provide good value for money.

Why Are Users Looking for Jira Service Management Alternatives?

Stepping away from your go-to choices can be hard. But when the comfort zone grows inconvenient for this or that reason, it’s time to move on. While Atlassian’s Jira Service Management is a highly efficient ticketing tool to bring different branches of software development together, it is not a one-solution-suits-it-all.

Here is a list of top 6 reasons why users drift away from Jira and start to look for an alternative:

High entry barrier
It really takes time with Jira Service Management to get the hang of. It’s a commonplace for the platform’s clients to note that it’s not beginner-friendly and requires a previous technical background to grab.
Unintuitive interface
Indeed, the Jira’s UI can be a bit cumbersome for beginners. Again, some decent technical skills come in handy in order to navigate the service effectively, which may cause users to go for services that are Jira Service Desk alternatives.
IT Asset Manager is difficult to set up.
Though Jira’s IT Asset Manager offers a wide range of customization opportunities, it has also got a pretty hard configuration procedure. The following items should be created manually:
- object schemas;
- custom attributes;
- relationships;
- automations.
Thus, a company needs to have a CMDB expert to operate the Manager in a productive manner.
The price can bite
If you are using Jira during any significant amount of time, the cost of the services can grow extensively. The price growth happens exponentially with the increase of your projects’ scope and the number of agents. Atlassian charges you per-agent and per-feature, so if you want to scale up, get ready to pay more (much more). That is why start-ups often go for Jira Service Desk alternatives that are more affordable, such as HaloITSM or ManageEngine.
Metered paywall
As a matter of fact, Jira Service Management offers its users a fully free plan for a certain range of services available. Yet there is a drawback. The next features are only reachable through additional payment:
- IT Asset Management;
- virtual agents;
- real-time incident tracking;
- etc.
Thus, Jira holds a snag when it comes to pricing, saving its most popular instruments for the Premium package or higher.
Integration restrictions As an Atlassian’s tool Jira Service Management is perfectly fitting to smoothly integrate with other Atlassian’s tools, such as Bitbucket, Trello or Confluence. At the same time this peculiarity of Jira’s can come as an obstacle for its integration with third-party IT ecosystems. For non-Atlassian services, such Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, native integrations are not always possible and require “transition” apps such as Teams, Google Drive or Outlook. Alternatively, scripts or automation tools, like Power, should be used.

Key Factors to Consider When Choosing a Jira Service Management Alternative

While Jira Service Management for sure is a widely popular choice when it comes to ITSM, companies may look for an alternative if it does not meet their unique needs.
There is a broad range of factors to pay attention to when carrying out the transition but we have narrowed it down to the 5 following major points:

Pricing
First things first - one should consider their budget before committing to any kind of service. It is especially true with platforms where their most popular and handy features come with a subscription of Premium level and above. Thus, it is necessary to evaluate your precise needs first. It is a widespread scenario when the ITSM presents a per-feature/per-agent subscription model with the prices getting higher concurrently with your requests. Consequently, one needs to look into the future and consider the pricing plan with keeping in mind your business scaling prospects.
Skill acquisition phase
The total majority of ITSMs out there have got their learning curve. While being overall user-friendly, it is not always the case that the relevant platforms exhibit UI as straightforward and easy-to-use as one would wish for. It can, thus, often be challenging to grasp the workflow hang without previously obtained technical skills. Namely, almost all customization features require rather complex configuration settings, with the use of AQL (unique query language). It is hence recommended to keep in mind the factor above to avoid feeling overwhelmed when rising on a challenge of switching to a new IT environment.
Community
People matter. Both when we talk about your personal connections and business relationships - one needs to do their best to surround themself with the right people to achieve the right results. And speaking about IT ecosystems, people mean business partners and (the one and only:) Customer Support. Best user experience can be hindered by poor support. And vice versa, when a Customer Support agent is knowledgeable, professional and (last but not least) polite, the service satisfaction levels skyrocket. Today, with AI-powered automation, live chat is as accessible as it can be. Yet at the same time, human-touch goes a long way, so it is vital to find yourself a Jira Service Management that can do both.

9 Jira Service Management Alternatives Worth Checking out

1. Zendesk

Zendesk is one of the most solid Jira Service Management alternatives. It comes as an easy-to-use help desk platform that can foster your customer support across multiple brands and departments. With its powerful ticketing system, this omnichannel tool is a tough alternative to the Jira ticket system.

Supported platforms: Web, Android, iPhone/iPad

Features

Source: Zendesk

Basic features:

Incident management and reporting
Multichannel ticketing
Automated ticket workflows & macros
Recurring tickets & workflows
Knowledge base build-up (internal knowledge base, FAQs, self-service portal)
Customizable reports & dashboards
Private comments & side conversations
Custom views
SLA management
Multilingual and multi-brand support
APIs & pre-built apps

Source: Zendesk

Unique features:

Print management
Net Promoter Score
Active Directory integration
Group management
Progressive dialer

Source: Zendesk

Security measures

Data encryption & backup, limited data disclosure, access control, GDPR compliance.

Pros

Flexible ticketing system
Over 100 integrations with third-party tools
Advanced agent performance tracking
Brand image promotion
Chat & messaging extensibility
APIs for custom ticket forms, ticket data migration, creating users, and searching

Cons

No single queue for all channels
Slow customer support from the vendor
Some help desk features are available only as add-ons

Speedy And Secure Zendesk Data Migration

Curious about how Zendesk Import can streamline your customer service workflows? Test our free Demo migration and explore how easily you can import your data to the desired help desk platform.

Run a Free Demo

Pricing

Zendesk offers flexible pricing making it a good fit for companies of any size. Thus, its typical customers range from start-ups to enterprise-level companies. There are three annually-billed plans:

Source: Zendesk

2. Help Scout

Help Scout provides software for customer support and help desk service for multi-size teams. When it comes to facilitating rapid growth, Help Scout may lose to more scalable platforms. This tool is most beneficial for freelancers and small businesses who deal with eCommerce and want to brush up their customer communications.

Source: Help Scout

Supported platforms: Web, Android, iPhone/iPad