Getting started
What nabudesk is, who it is for and how to begin.
What is nabudesk?
nabudesk is help desk software for customer support teams. It turns your support email into tickets in one shared inbox, tracks response and resolution deadlines with SLAs, and lets your team assign, automate and report on every conversation without switching tools.
Who is nabudesk for?
Support leads and founders at small to mid-sized teams, roughly 2 to 50 agents, who have outgrown a shared Gmail or Outlook inbox or a heavy legacy help desk. You pay for the agents you have, with no minimum number of seats.
What does setup involve?
A short guided setup walks you through six steps: brand your workspace, connect your support inbox, invite your team and groups, configure alerts and templates, set your business hours, SLA targets and ticket types, and create your first ticket. You do not have to finish everything on day one. A workspace is useful as soon as you have connected an email address and invited a teammate. See Set up your workspace.
Can I bring over my existing tickets and contacts?
Yes. On Pro and Enterprise you can import tickets, Help Center articles, contacts and organizations from a CSV file. You match your columns to nabudesk's fields, and any rejected rows are listed with the reason so you can fix and retry. Existing records are not duplicated, and imports never send emails or trigger automation. See Import and export your data.
Can customers read the Help Center?
Help Center articles are visible to people who sign in to your workspace. They are not published to your customers as a public website. Agents use them to answer faster, link them to tickets so you can see which article helped, and turn solved tickets into new article drafts. See Help Center articles.
Where do I get help if I am stuck?
Start with the documentation. Every page in nabudesk also has a Page guide button that explains its controls, and you can replay the welcome tour from your account menu. If you still need us, the support page shows who to write to and what to include.
Email and tickets
How messages arrive, how replies leave and what happens in between.
How do customer emails become tickets?
Customers keep writing to your normal support address. You forward that mailbox to a nabudesk address, using Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 or a similar provider, and each message arrives as a ticket. Replies stay in the same conversation. See Connect your support email.
Can we use more than one support address?
Yes. You can add several addresses, such as sales and billing, each with its own default group. One of them is the default address, used when no other matches.
Can replies come from our own domain?
Yes. Add your domain, publish the three DNS records nabudesk shows you, and replies are sent from your address once it is verified. Starter includes 1 custom domain, Pro includes 5 and Enterprise includes 20.
What happens when a customer replies to a resolved ticket?
The reply is added to the same ticket and the ticket reopens by itself, so the history stays in one place. The same message is never turned into two tickets.
Can we log requests that arrive by phone, chat or in person?
Yes. Email is the channel that creates tickets automatically. Anything else can be logged by hand from New ticket, using the channel that matches how it arrived so your reports stay meaningful.
Teams and access
Who can see and do what in your workspace.
How do roles and permissions work?
Every person has one role. The built-in roles are Account administrator, Administrator, Supervisor and Agent, and you can create custom roles that grant read or write access area by area, such as tickets, contacts, SLAs or billing. See Roles and permissions.
Can agents see only their own tickets?
Yes. Ticket visibility is set per person, separately from the role: only the tickets assigned to them (plus the unassigned queue), the tickets of their groups, or all tickets. Counts and lists always follow that setting.
What are groups for?
A group is a team queue, such as Billing or Technical Support. Groups can own tickets, receive the mail sent to a particular support address, follow their own business hours and have a channel in team chat.
Is there team chat?
Yes, on Pro and Enterprise. You can message agents and groups directly, discuss a ticket in a private thread attached to it, and see unread badges and who is online. Internal notes on a ticket, visible to your team only, are available on every plan.
Service levels and automation
Deadlines, working hours and the work nabudesk can do for you.
How do SLAs work?
An SLA policy sets target times for first response, every response and resolution for each priority, from Low to Urgent. nabudesk keeps the clocks on each ticket and warns your team as a deadline approaches, with reminders and escalation you can build per policy. SLA policies are part of Pro and Enterprise. See Service level agreements.
Do SLA clocks count nights, weekends and holidays?
Only if you want them to. Clocks can count only the time inside your business hours, so a ticket that arrives on Friday evening does not breach over the weekend, and they can pause while a ticket is Pending, waiting on the customer. Business hours are on every plan. Holidays come with Pro and Enterprise.
What can we automate?
On Enterprise, workflows run when a ticket event happens, such as a ticket being created or a customer replying. When the conditions match, they can assign an agent or group, set the status, priority or type, add tags and notes, and send a reply or an email from a template. See Automation workflows and round robin.
How does round-robin assignment work?
A round robin deals new tickets to a set of agents in turn, so the next ticket goes to whoever was assigned one longest ago. You can prefer agents who are online, skip agents who already hold a set number of open tickets, and limit it to certain ticket types, categories or groups. It is part of Enterprise.
How can we see how the desk is doing?
The dashboard shows live counts by status, average first response and close time, and how often SLA targets are met. Reports go deeper, with an agent scorecard, inbound volume, response and resolution speed, SLA compliance and a report builder, and any table can be exported as CSV, Excel or PDF. The activity log shows who changed what for the last 30 days. See Dashboard, reports, and the activity log.
Languages and regions
Support rarely happens in one language or one time zone.
Which languages does nabudesk support?
The nabudesk website and documentation are available in English, Spanish and French. nabudesk is built for teams that serve customers in more than one language and region: tickets are email conversations, so customers can write in any language and your agents reply in kind, and the wording of the emails nabudesk sends is yours to edit under Admin → Email templates.
Can different teams follow different working hours?
Yes. A schedule is a named weekly timetable with its own time zone, and you can keep several, for example for a regional team in another time zone. One is the default, and each group can follow its own, so SLA clocks count each team's real working day. Pro and Enterprise add holidays, including regional holidays for your country. See Business hours and holidays.
AI assistant
What it does, what it costs and where your data goes.
What does the AI assistant do?
On Pro and Enterprise, agents can draft a reply from the whole conversation, refine a reply before sending it, and turn a solved ticket into a Help Center article draft. The result always lands in front of an agent, who edits and approves it before anything is sent or published. See AI assistant.
Which AI vendors can we use, and who pays?
You bring your own account: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini or any service that works like the OpenAI API. Usage is billed by your AI vendor, not by nabudesk, so there is no per-seat AI fee. Your key is encrypted when saved and never displayed again, and an admin page lists each call: who made it, which feature, which model and whether it worked.
Does our ticket content go to the AI vendor?
Yes. When an agent uses the assistant, the text of the ticket is sent to the vendor you chose, so turn it on only if that fits your data policies. nabudesk records each call but does not store the text of prompts or replies.
Can we leave AI switched off?
Yes. The assistant stays off until an administrator sets it up and switches it on under Admin → AI assistant, and agents only see the AI button in the reply box once it is enabled. Everything else in nabudesk works the same either way.
Security, privacy and data
How your workspace is protected and who owns what.
How is our data protected?
Access to a workspace requires an authenticated session, role-based permissions and group scoping limit what each person can see and change, and data is encrypted in transit with TLS. An activity log records significant account and workspace activity. The Security page describes the controls and operating practices in detail.
How do people sign in securely?
Each person can add two-factor authentication, with a code from email or an authenticator app and backup codes, or sign in with a passkey instead of a password. A session list lets them end any device they do not recognize. We recommend two-factor authentication or a passkey for every administrator. See Your account and sign-in security.
Do you sell our data or train AI models on it?
No. nabudesk does not sell personal information and does not use customer ticket content to train public generative AI models. The Privacy Policy explains what we collect, why and who we share it with.
Who owns our data, and can we take it with us?
You do. Customers keep ownership of their customer data, including tickets, contacts, messages and uploaded materials. Starter includes CSV ticket export, and Pro and Enterprise add the full export tool for tickets, agents, contacts and organizations in CSV, JSON or XML. If you cancel, you keep full access until your current period ends and your data stays in the workspace.
Where is data processed?
nabudesk may process data in the United States and in other countries where we or our subprocessors operate. Where required, we use transfer mechanisms such as standard contractual clauses. The Privacy Policy has the details, including how we handle data subject requests.
Where can I find your security and compliance documentation?
Start with the Security, Privacy and Terms pages. For security questionnaires, trust reviews or to report a vulnerability, write to [email protected]. Enterprise customers may request additional security review materials under NDA where available.
Plans and billing
Prices, seats and what each plan includes.
How does the free trial work?
New workspaces get a 14-day free trial of the plan chosen at sign-up. No credit card is required, and you can switch plans at any time during the trial.
Can I switch plans later?
Yes. You can choose a different plan from your workspace billing settings at any time, and the change goes through secure checkout.
What counts as an agent seat?
Every workspace member who can sign in and work tickets uses one licensed seat, including admins and supervisors.
Do you bill per agent?
Yes. Plans are priced per agent per month with no minimum. You pay for the seats you license, up to the maximum for your plan.
How do annual plans work?
Annual billing gives you a 20% lower per-agent rate and is charged once a year.
What happens if I cancel?
Turn on “Cancel at period end” and you keep full access until your current period ends. Your data stays in the workspace.
What does each plan include?
Every plan includes the shared inbox, unlimited tickets, email to ticket, groups and roles, and business hours. Pro adds SLA policies, holidays, team chat, import and export, API access and the AI assistant. Enterprise adds automation workflows, round robin, webhooks and to-do lists. See the pricing page for the full comparison.
Is there a limit on tickets?
No. Every plan includes unlimited tickets, contacts and organizations. Plans differ in features, in the maximum number of agents (25 on Starter, 50 on Pro and 200 on Enterprise) and in the number of custom sending domains.
Can I change the number of seats?
Yes. Under Admin → Billing you can change plan, switch between monthly and annual billing, adjust seats and open the payment portal for payment methods and invoices. See Plans, seats, and billing.
Does nabudesk store our payment details?
No. Payments go through a payment provider's secure checkout, and payment details are not stored in nabudesk.