Zammad Pricing Explained (2026)
Zammad cloud starts at €7 per agent/month on annual billing, but agent caps on the lower tiers — not features — are what force most teams onto the €25 plan.
| Plan | Price | Billing | What you get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Self-hosted (community) | €0 | Free, AGPLv3 — you run the server | Full ticketing, all channels, LDAP/SAML, REST API, no agent limit |
| Starter v2 (cloud) | €7/agent/mo | billed annually (€9 monthly) | Email, web form and SMS channels — maximum 5 agents |
| Professional v2 (cloud) | €16/agent/mo | billed annually (€18 monthly) | Adds chat, Telegram, SLAs and knowledge base — maximum 35 agents |
| Plus v2 (cloud) | €25/agent/mo | billed annually (€27 monthly) | Adds phone, Facebook, WhatsApp, workflows, multilingual KB — unlimited agents |
| Self-hosted Business | €2,999/year | flat annual support subscription | Commercial support on your own install, email, 6-hour max response |
| Self-hosted Enterprise | €5,999/year | flat annual support subscription | Email and phone support, 4-hour max response; Corporation tier is €9,999 |
Headcount is the pricing model
Most help desks let you buy any tier at any team size and use features as the upgrade lever. Zammad does not. Starter v2 refuses to hold more than five agents. Professional v2 stops at 35. Plus v2 is the only tier with no ceiling.
That single design choice makes Zammad's bill unusually easy to predict and unusually easy to get wrong. You are not really choosing between feature sets — you are choosing a bracket that your hiring plan will eventually push you out of. A four-person support team on Starter that adds two people in Q3 does not pay €7 for the two extra seats. It pays €16 for all six, because it has been moved onto Professional. The bill more than doubles for a headcount change of 33%.
Worth knowing before you sign an annual contract: budget against where the team will be in twelve months, not where it is today.
Cloud at 5, 20 and 50 agents
| Agents | Forced tier | Monthly | Annual |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | Starter v2 (at its cap) | €35 | €420 |
| 20 | Professional v2 | €320 | €3,840 |
| 50 | Plus v2 (Professional caps at 35) | €1,250 | €15,000 |
The 50-agent row is where the conversation changes. Fifteen thousand euros a year for cloud hosting, against €9,999 for the Corporation self-hosted support subscription, which covers unlimited agents and a two-hour response target. At that size the open-source option stops being an ideology argument and starts being a budget one.
Where the Professional upgrade earns its money
The Starter to Professional jump is the one to say yes to. It buys live chat, Telegram, SLA policies and the knowledge base — the four things that separate a shared mailbox from an actual help desk. Nine euros more per agent for SLA enforcement alone is cheap by the standards of this category.
Professional to Plus is a harder sell. You are paying €9 more per agent for phone, Facebook and WhatsApp channels, workflow automation and a multilingual knowledge base. If you do not take phone support and you operate in one language, the only thing you are really buying is the removal of the 35-agent cap. Teams in that position should price out a self-hosted install before signing, because that is exactly the range where the flat support subscriptions start winning.
The free edition is free the way a puppy is free
The community edition carries no licence cost and no artificial limits — full channel support, LDAP and SAML, the complete REST API. What it carries instead is operational work: a server to size, Elasticsearch to keep healthy, backups to test, and a maintenance window every time a release lands. Teams already running Linux infrastructure absorb that easily. Teams whose IT function is one overloaded generalist should price the cloud tiers and stop pretending otherwise.
If you want the source-available deployment with somebody to call, the paid support subscriptions at €2,999, €5,999 and €9,999 per year are flat, so their value rises with every agent you add.
Annual versus monthly, and VAT
Annual billing saves €2 per agent per month on every cloud tier. On Starter that is a 22% discount and worth taking. On Plus it is under 8%, which is thin enough that keeping monthly flexibility during a growth period is defensible.
Every price Zammad publishes excludes VAT. If you are comparing against a US help desk's headline number, add your local rate before deciding anything.
Who this suits
Zammad prices well for European technical teams of five to thirty agents who want SLAs and multi-channel ticketing without Zendesk money, and for larger organisations with the infrastructure competence to self-host. It prices badly for teams that sit just above an agent cap, for anyone with a lot of occasional responders who would benefit from a cheap collaborator seat, and for support orgs that lean heavily on AI drafting — where €0.03 per call quietly stops being a rounding error.
List prices move. Zammad's own pricing page is the authority, and the VAT and currency treatment there will matter more to your actual invoice than anything on this page.
What the pricing page doesn't show
- Starter caps at 5 agents and Professional at 35. Hire one more person and you move a whole tier, which is a price jump you did not plan for and cannot negotiate around.
- AI features on cloud are metered at €0.03 per AI call rather than bundled. Heavy summarisation or draft-reply use turns a fixed per-seat bill into a variable one.
- All published Zammad prices exclude VAT. EU customers should add their local rate before comparing against a US vendor's tax-inclusive-looking sticker.
- The free self-hosted edition costs nothing in licence and real money in infrastructure — a server, backups, Elasticsearch, TLS renewal and someone's time for upgrades every quarter.
- Self-hosted support subscriptions are flat annual fees, not per-agent, so a 6-agent shop pays the same €2,999 as a 200-agent one. Below roughly ten agents that maths works against you.