JS Help Desk – AI-Powered Support & Ticketing System vs UpdraftPlus

JS Help Desk turns your WordPress site into a complete customer support desk. Customers open tickets from your website – signed in or as guests – and your team answers them from one clear queue. Tickets, replies, attachments and customer details stay in your own WordPress database. There are no limits on tickets, agents or departments, no per-agent monthly fee and no outside service to sign up for. Install it, add a support page, and start answering. Trusted since 2014 – nearly 700,000 downloads and more than 7,000 sites answering their customers with JS Help Desk. New: JS Help Desk 5.0 5.0 is the biggest release in the plugin’s history. 12 paid features are now free, for good. Ticket history, internal notes, canned responses, help topics, email ban, auto cleanup, ticket limits, export, dashboard widgets, user options, ticket actions and AI Powered Reply moved from paid add-ons into the free plugin. An AI Agent that answers from what you have already written (add-on). It reads your knowledge base, FAQs and past replies, shows its sources, says how sure it is, and hands over to a person whenever it should. You choose how far to trust it – suggestions only, drafts for an agent to approve, or answering on its own – and whether it runs on your server, on your own model or with a hosted provider. Live chat (add-on, beta). A chat window on your site that answers from your approved content and brings in an agent the moment the customer asks. Nine add-ons instead of more than thirty. Grouped by the job you want done, and every paid plan includes all nine. Companies are free. Group customers by organisation and email domain. The help desk speaks your language. Translated into 17 languages, and the right translation installs itself. A cleaner admin. Menus grouped by subject, better keyboard and screen-reader support, and a block for every portal screen. Upgrading is safe. Tickets, settings and your old add-ons keep working, and nothing new is switched on for your visitors until you choose. Who it is for Online shops that want order questions, returns and complaints in one place instead of an overflowing inbox. Software, plugin and theme sellers who support customers by product, licence or purchase code. Agencies and freelancers looking after many clients, each with their own tickets. Schools, clubs and internal teams – IT, HR or facilities – who need requests tracked and answered, not lost in email. Why JS Help Desk Your data stays yours. Everything lives in your own WordPress database, not on someone else’s servers. Free means free. Unlimited tickets, agents and departments in the free plugin. No trial, no time limit. Made for WordPress. Shortcodes and blocks, WordPress roles for your agents, the WordPress privacy tools, and it works with your theme. Grows with you. Start free. Add service levels, email piping, a knowledge base, an AI agent or WooCommerce support when you need them. Useful links Try the live demo Documentation Plugin website Video tutorials Everything in the free plugin Tickets and the queue Unlimited tickets, agents and departments. Customer portal: customers open, follow and reply to their tickets on your site, without ever seeing the WordPress dashboard. Guest tickets: let visitors write in without creating an account. Priorities, statuses and custom fields on the ticket form, so you ask exactly what you need to know. Waiting on Agent / Waiting on Customer queues, worked out from who replied last. Find anything fast: search across subjects, messages, customers and ticket numbers; tags; saved views; keyboard shortcuts. Answering faster Canned responses for the answers you write every week. Internal notes your customers never see. AI Powered Reply suggests answers from replies your team has already written – no AI account needed. AI Copilot drafts replies, summarises long threads, pulls out the details and translates, with your own Zywrap key. Instant answers: matching help appears while the customer is still typing, so simple questions are solved before a ticket is filed. No double replies: see who else is viewing or typing on a ticket, and drafts are saved as you write. Help topics that route each ticket to the right department and priority. Email notifications with editable HTML templates. Your team Two agent levels on ordinary WordPress roles: Help Desk Agent for full queue work, and Help Desk Light Agent, who can read tickets and write internal notes but never reply to the customer. Agent Access: one screen showing who can reach the help desk, and why. Companies for customers who belong to an organisation. Keeping it tidy Ticket history and an activity timeline for every ticket. Reports by agent, department, priority and status, plus dashboard widgets. CSV export, filtered the way you need. Auto cleanup of old tickets, with a preview before anything is deleted. Email ban for addresses or whole domains, and ticket limits per customer. Setup checklist, Email Health and System Status screens that tell you what to fix – including whether your email is actually being sent. Trust and privacy GDPR tools: works with WordPress’s own Export and Erase Personal Data. Spam protection that needs no outside service, or Cloudflare Turnstile, hCaptcha or Google reCAPTCHA if you prefer, plus submission rate limits. Safe attachments: checked by their content, and never reachable by a public link. Terms and conditions checkboxes on the ticket form. Fits your site Colour themes to match your brand. 17 languages, installed automatically, and full right-to-left support. Shortcodes and blocks for every portal screen. Moving from another help desk? Import from SupportCandy, Awesome Support and Fluent Support. Add-ons: nine packs, all in every plan When you need more, the paid plans add nine packs. Every plan includes all nine – plans differ only by the number of sites: Pro (1 site, $99 a year), Business (5 sites, $149) and Agency (25 sites, $249). Every plan comes with a 14-day refund. Compare plans. Agents & Teams – Roles and permissions, teams, automatic assignment, collaboration, time tracking and a credential vault. Service Levels & Automation – Response and resolution targets with business hours, escalation, automation rules, auto close and recurring tickets. Email – Turn incoming email into tickets, CC, Gmail and Microsoft sign-in, and templates in every language. Knowledge & Self-Service – Knowledge base, FAQs, downloads and announcements, so customers help themselves. AI Agent – Answers from your own content with sources and confidence, a review mode, a master switch, and usage and cost limits. Customer Experience – Multiple ticket forms, live chat, satisfaction surveys, your own branding and an installable portal. Commerce – WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads orders in the ticket, Envato purchase codes, paid support and support credits. Integrations – REST API, webhooks, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, Telegram, Discord and browser notifications. Reporting & Compliance – Analytics, scheduled Excel and PDF exports, retention rules and legal holds. Already running the older individual add-ons? They keep working after the update. When your license includes the pack that replaces them, License & Add-ons > Finish upgrade installs it and switches the old ones off. Nothing is deleted, and your settings are kept. Shortcodes and blocks Each of these is available as a shortcode and as a block in the “JS Help Desk” block category: [jssupportticket] – the whole customer portal [jssupportticket_addticket] – the ticket form on its own [jssupportticket_mytickets] – the customer’s own tickets Knowledge base, FAQs and Announcements blocks appear when the Knowledge & Self-Service pack is installed. Privacy & Third-Party Service Disclosure JS Help Desk runs on your own site. The services below are the only ones it ever contacts, and each one only in the situation described. Translations (jshelpdesk.com) JS Help Desk does not ship its translations inside the plugin. When your site uses a language other than English, the plugin downloads that language’s translation from jshelpdesk.com and saves it in wp-content/languages/plugins/, the folder WordPress uses for plugin translations. When: when the plugin is installed or updated, when the site language changes or WordPress installs a new language, and once a day to check for an improved translation. What is requested: a list of available translations (https://jshelpdesk.com/translations/v5/index.json) and, when one is needed, a .zip file containing a .po and a .mo file. These are translation data, never code. What is sent: nothing about your site. The requests are plain downloads, and the user agent does not include your site address. Turning it off: add define('JSST_TRANSLATIONS_AUTO', false); to wp-config.php. You can then install a language yourself from Help Desk > Configurations > Translations, or download the files there and upload them to wp-content/languages/plugins/. jshelpdesk.com Privacy Policy, Terms License and add-on updates (jshelpdesk.com) Only when an administrator enters a license key for the paid add-ons, the plugin contacts jshelpdesk.com to activate the license, check it, and download and update the add-ons it includes. What is sent: the license key, your site’s address, and the WordPress, PHP and JS Help Desk versions and site language. No tickets, customers or other content. Without a key nothing is sent. The free plugin never needs a license. jshelpdesk.com Privacy Policy, Terms AI services (Zywrap, Anthropic) The AI features that write text can use an outside AI service. All of them are off until an administrator turns them on and enters their own API key. AI Copilot (Zywrap): when an agent clicks an AI action such as “Generate Reply”, “Summarize”, “Extract Details” or “Translate”, the text of that ticket thread is sent to the Zywrap API (api.zywrap.com) to produce the result. Zywrap Privacy Policy Hosted AI engine (Anthropic): if an administrator chooses Anthropic as the AI engine and enters their own key, the question and the passages needed to answer it are sent to api.anthropic.com. Credentials stored in the help desk are never sent, and outgoing text can be redacted further in the AI settings. Anthropic Privacy Policy On your own server: the AI engine can instead run without any outside service, or on a model you host yourself (for example Ollama or LM Studio), in which case nothing leaves your infrastructure. AI Powered Reply, in the free plugin, searches replies already written on your site and contacts no one. Marketing consent (Mailchimp) If an administrator connects a Mailchimp account and a customer ticks the newsletter consent box, that customer’s name and email address are sent to the administrator’s own Mailchimp list (api.mailchimp.com). Nothing is sent without the customer’s consent or without a Mailchimp key. Mailchimp Privacy Policy Spam Protection (CAPTCHA) JS Help Desk can verify that a ticket submission was made by a person. It ships with a self-hosted verification method, and optionally supports four third-party CAPTCHA services. The default makes no external requests. Out of the box the plugin uses its built-in check – a honeypot field, submission timing, and a small proof of work performed in the visitor’s browser. Nothing is loaded from a third party and no data leaves your site. Third-party services are opt-in. Cloudflare Turnstile, hCaptcha, Google reCAPTCHA v3 and Google reCAPTCHA v2 are offered as alternatives. One is used only after an administrator selects it and enters the site key and secret key of their own account with that provider. If either key is missing, the plugin falls back to the built-in check rather than blocking submissions. Why the provider’s own domain is used. A CAPTCHA is an anti-abuse service that issues a token at its own edge and validates that token against its own records. The challenge script therefore cannot be served from your site, and the response cannot be verified locally – both requests are required for the feature to function. When a provider is selected, its script is loaded on the ticket form and the visitor’s response is verified server-to-server: Cloudflare Turnstile – challenges.cloudflare.com (Terms, Privacy Policy) hCaptcha – js.hcaptcha.com, api.hcaptcha.com (Terms, Privacy Policy) Google reCAPTCHA v2 and v3 – www.google.com/recaptcha (Terms, Privacy Policy) What is transmitted. Only the challenge token generated in the visitor’s browser, your secret key, and the visitor’s IP address are sent to the selected provider’s verification endpoint. Ticket content, subjects, names and e-mail addresses are never sent to a CAPTCHA provider. Choosing none of them. Administrators who do not want any third-party request can leave the built-in provider selected, or turn verification off entirely.

The UpdraftPlus Backup & Migration Plugin is trusted by the WordPress community to backup, restore and migrate their WordPress websites. UpdraftPlus is actively installed on more than 3 million websites around the world. Backup with UpdraftPlus UpdraftPlus is the world’s highest ranking and most popular scheduled backup and migration plugin. Backup to your preferred storage location and restore in just three clicks. Backup to Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3 (or compatible), Rackspace Cloud, FTP, DreamObjects, Openstack Swift or email. The paid version also allows you to backup to Microsoft OneDrive, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Backblaze B2, SFTP, SCP, pCloud, WebDAV or UpdraftVault, our integrated storage option for UpdraftPlus. Backup manually or schedule to run every 2, 4, 8 or 12 hours, daily, weekly, monthly or fortnightly. Restore with UpdraftPlus Your WordPress website is vulnerable. Your site may get hacked. Something could go wrong with an update or your server could crash. You might need to reverse a change made or a mistake caused by human error. Whatever the reason, you can restore your WordPress website in just a few clicks with UpdraftPlus. Choose which components to restore (e.g. plugins, themes, database etc.), click again to restore, then click again to return to the main screen. Migrate with UpdraftPlus It’s easy to migrate your WordPress website to another web host, server or domain with this free version of UpdraftPlus. To migrate, simply download your database, plugins, themes etc. from the source site, then upload them into your destination site. When migrating, a built-in search-and-replace engine identifies old strings and replaces these to reflect the new location. UpdraftPlus saves you time and reduces the risk of broken links or missing files associated with manual migrations. Why UpdraftPlus? Writing a reliable backup and migration plugin that ‘just works’ consistently across millions of different WordPress deployments is hard. UpdraftPlus is relied upon to do exactly that. We’re trusted and actively deployed on more websites around the world than any other WordPress backup and migration plugin. UpdraftPlus: Backs up, migrates and restores Offers a huge number of remote storage locations Allows you to schedule backups, so you can ‘set and forget’ Is comprehensive and easy to use Is proven to work on over 3 million sites. UpdraftPlus Premium The free version of UpdraftPlus will back up and migrate your website perfectly well. However if you need more features and options you can purchase our Premium version. Backup and Migrate with UpdraftPlus Premium, and: Get automatic backups before updates. Restore the very latest version if a WordPress or plugin update breaks your site. Backup Incrementally. Changes are added to the master, saving server resources vs repeatedly backing up in full. Get more remote storage options including Microsoft OneDrive, SFTP, Microsoft Azure, WebDAV, Google Cloud, SCP, Backblaze and pCloud. Get 1GB of integrated storage with UpdraftVault for 99.999% reliability, redundancy and scalability. Get more control over how many backups are stored in a specified interval. Restore from other backup plugins including BackWPup, BackupWordPress, Simple Backups and more. Run backups at set times e.g. during periods of low traffic. Backup to more than one location for added protection. Get detailed reports. Includes cryptographic checksums so you can verify the integrity of the backup files and more. Get Premium migration. Migrating to the destination site is more direct and can be done from the source site. Get Multisite / multi-network compatibility. Backup non-WP files and databases e.g. tables belonging to your e-commerce store or customisations to WordPress core. Get database encryption. Manage your backups and migrations from the WP-CLI. Get Premium Support. Find out more on our comparison page. UpdraftPlus Premium is available for purchase here. Managing multiple websites? UpdraftCentral is a powerful remote control dashboard for WordPress that allows you to manage your backups, as well as updates, users, pages, posts, plugins and themes from one central location. Choose between: UpdraftCentral (free, self-hosted) UpdraftCentral Premium (paid-for, self-hosted) UpdraftCentral Cloud (paid-for, fully-hosted) Optimize your sites centrally by combining the power of WP-Optimize and UpdraftCentral or manage your backups centrally by combining the power of UpdraftPlus with UpdraftCentral. Need to create a temporary clone of your site? UpdraftClone makes it quick and easy to create a temporary sandbox for changes you want to try out. Simply select the versions of WordPress and PHP that you want, and we’ll do the rest. More about UpdraftClone The full suite of plugins from Team Updraft and friends UpdraftPlus. Backup, migrate and restore. Rated 5* on the plugin directory and trusted by more than 3 million WordPress website owner WP-Optimize. Clean the database, compress images and caching. Optimize your WordPress website. 5* user rating. 1 million + active installs. All-In-One Security (AIOS). Secure your WordPress website. Comprehensive, feature rich and easy to use. 5* user rating and 1 million + active installs. WP Overnight. Quality Extensions for your WooCommerce store. 5* rated invoicing, order and product management, customer management solutions and more. Easy Updates Manager. Take control of updates. Lots of features for free, and a Premium version with even more – over 300,000 users. Internal Link Juicer.Boost your SEO. Automate internal links within your WordPress website. Save time and rank higher in the search engines. For other useful, free plugins see our lead developer’s profile, here. Are you multilingual? Can you translate? Do you want to help people that speak your language to backup, migrate and restore their WordPress websites? The UpdraftPlus backup, migration and restoration plugin is ready and waiting. The translation process is easy, and web-based – please go here for instructions: https://updraftplus.com/translate/. Or, if you’re already an expert WordPress translator, just pick out the .pot file from the wp-content/plugins/updraftplus/languages/ directory – if you scan for translatable strings manually, then you need to get these functions: _x(), __(), _e(), _ex(), log_e(). Many thanks to our existing translators. License Copyright 2011-24 David Anderson This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA Non-English translators are provided by volunteers, and wordpress.org does not give plugin developers control over their translations; thus relying on them is at your own risk; UpdraftPlus cannot guarantee that translations from the original English are accurate. We recognise and thank those mentioned at https://updraftplus.com/acknowledgements/ for code and/or libraries used and/or modified under the terms of their open source licences.