Freshdesk is an advanced and complete tool for the organization’s helpdesk. But even such a popular and helpful solution may not fit each company. And as a result, you might consider one of the Freshdesk alternatives.
Some businesses might require more diminutive and straightforward software platforms offering lower pricing plans. Of course, you can use the Freshdesk app for free, but the number of features and functions is limited.
Fortunately, various Freshdesk alternatives exist across the entire Internet. You just need to find the right tool. We’ve analyzed the vital Freshdesk competitors, their strengths and weaknesses, and pricing tiers to help you make an informative decision.
A Quick Glance at Freshdesk Review
Today, Freshdesk is one of the most prominent cloud-based customer support platforms used by many leading companies like Decathlon and Bridgestones. The particular tool enables organizations to unify conversations from different available channels, including email, online chats, social media, and phone. Besides, this Freshdesk omnichannel approach allows users to address client requests and issues efficiently.
Thanks to Freshdesk customer support, your company can automate many repetitive tasks and provide customers with self-service options. Also, this platform promotes better cooperation across departments which leads to faster resolution time.
What Is Freshdesk?
Experts often regard Freshdesk as the best tool available in the client support software category. The main Freshdesk features involve lead scoring based on AI (artificial intelligence) technology, self-service portals, and smart automation. Besides, they also contain different SLA policies, multi-channel options, and integrated game mechanisms.
Apart from the unique features, your company can benefit from numerous standard options offered by Freshdesk. For example, Freshdesk knowledge base, community capabilities, and effective service desk ticketing are among them. Moreover, the help desk system allows converting your support emails into relevant tickets easily and tracking them to provide quick and accurate responses. After all, your support agents might link forum queries to tickets and then create streamlined answers regarding common problems and requests.
All unresolved tickets in Freshdesk
What Are the Benefits of Freshdesk?
- Support teams can cooperate by email. That helps forget about missed queries.
- Label tickets quickly and accurately and route them immediately to the suitable support agents to get faster resolution.
- Thanks to Freshdesk time tracking integration, you can analyze the time necessary for completing particular tasks.
- Each phase of your current support process is automated properly, from dispatching tickets to resolution.
- Track customers’ profiles on social media to find what they say about your products or services. Also, respond to emerging issues using the available channels.
- With a significant knowledge base depending on customer queries, Freshdesk can suggest answers intuitively.
- Take advantage of the Freshdesk community by sharing advice, tips, and ideas and explaining their best practices.
Why Look for an Alternative to Freshdesk?
Regardless of the high popularity and numerous features, Freshdesk solutions offer, users, continue to search for efficient Freshdesk alternatives. Here are several critical reasons that force customers to do that.
- Freshdesk is quite complicated for newbies.
- Its basic plans lack critical service desk features.
- Internal cooperation options need improvement.
Freshdesk may be a complicated platform to work with for newcomers. Even if your customer support agents have previous experience using a service desk, you need to provide them with training. For instance, you should have 1-2 days and a relevant demo to understand correctly how Freshdesk software works. Thus, Freshdesk is not a platform you can configure in a few minutes and start addressing customer issues.
Clients can choose a free Freshdesk plan or pay for a basic one ($15/agent/month) to start working. But if your organization wants to obtain the maximum possible benefits, you have to pay for Freshdesk’s premium tiers. The price here is costly - $99/agent/month. Unfortunately, the tool’s basic plans cannot provide essential features like skilled-based ticket routing, customizable reports, client roles, and agent shifts. That makes Freshdesk not a priority for companies with a relatively small budget.
Freshdesk offers customers different team collaboration features. However, many users can’t maintain a seamless conversation with other support agents. For example, many service desk platforms allow sharing internal notes and comments using the ticket space. In this case, users need to integrate Freshdesk with a specific tool called FreshConnect to keep in touch with colleagues.
15 Freshdesk Alternatives That Deserve A Second Look
Why Use Help Scout instead of Freshdesk?
HelpScout is among the leading Freshdesk competitors. Apart from scaling capabilities, this tool provides a personalized customer experience. You can choose Help Scout if you run a non-profit or startup and want to take advantage of discounts. It offers world-class reporting features, knowledge base, advanced API, numerous integrations, and up-to-date iOS and Android apps. That allows your support team focuses on the core customer-related operations.
Unassigned tickets in Help Scout
Pros of Help Scout
- Help Scout offers an excellent user interface to track emails and customer replies.
- The platform comes loaded with pre-built reporting dashboards to track the agent's daily performance.
- Your agents can see customer profiles they can update manually or use automation to capture data from Beacon.
- Help Scout provides powerful workflows that allow your support team to divide tickets into buckets. As a result, it helps increase velocity when responding to multiple similar items.
Cons of Help Scout
- Users need more in-depth metrics and statistics.
- Help Scout offers only two levels of organization in terms of docs sites. So, users cannot group their content, creating more sub-folder layers.
- Although the native reports are appropriate, analyzing the data more profound may become challenging.
Help Scout Pricing
- Standard: $20/agent/month
- Plus: $35/agent/month
- Company: individual contract
Why Use HelpDesk instead of Freshdesk?
HelpDesk is a Freshdesk alternative that helps organizations manage communication with clients. This tool allows storing all the messages using one place and tracking their status. Moreover, HelpDesk contains features that encourage efficient communication and increase agents’ productivity. Finally, clients can contact your support team via the most preferred channel.
A ticket list in HelpDesk
Pros of HelpDesk
- Assign tickets to specific agents and smoothly manage your company’s workflow.
- Use tagging to organize all tickets into separate groups.
- HelpDesk provides the appropriate information security thanks to data encryption.
Cons of HelpDesk
- Newbies may require more detailed training to start working with HelpDesk.
- Support agents cannot customize templates and emails with no HTML knowledge.
- HelpDesk offers a limited number of potential integrations.
HelpDesk Pricing
- Free trial
- Starter: $4/agent/month (billed annually)
- Team: $19/agent/month (billed annually)
- Enterprise: individual contract
Why Use Zendesk instead of Freshdesk?
Zendesk is probably the number one alternative to Freshdesk. The platform is sophisticated enough to satisfy complex requirements and, at the same time, simple enough to get started. Zendesk lets your company have conversations with clients on various channels, including email, chat, voice, and social media. With this tool, your team obtains a unified agent workspace that allows it to provide customers with a more personal experience.
Create a ticket in Zendesk
Pros of Zendesk
- Your support team can use Zendesk's flexible trigger capabilities for automating numerous tasks and repetitive work.
- With Zendesk, agents can save time significantly by creating complex message templates.
- The tool offers transparent communication controls that help increase communication efficiency with clients and stakeholders.
Cons of Zendesk
- The configuration process appears confusing at first.
- Although API is quite powerful, support agents often find it hard to utilize.
- Tagging and sorting options need some improvement.
Zendesk Pricing
- Suite Team: $49/agent/month (billed annually)
- Suite Growth: $79/agent/month (billed annually)
- Suite Professional: $99/agent/month (billed annually)
- Suite Enterprise: $150/agent/month (billed annually)
Why Use LiveAgent instead of Freshdesk?
LiveAgent serves as a fully-featured service desk and live-chat platform that allow your company to personalize customer interactions. Apart from offering the fastest chat widget available today, the tool provides an omnichannel universal inbox. Besides, your agents can benefit from a built-in call center and an advanced customer service portal. After all, LiveAgent is famous for its customer segmentation, automation options, and robust analytics package.
A dashboard in LiveAgent
Pros of LiveAgent
- LiveAgent provides well-structured communication details.
- If your company does not need to create the whole support portal, you can use and customize the available knowledge base.
- Thanks to customizable labels and tags, your support time can prioritize workflows.
Cons of LiveAgent
- Reporting options require improvements since customers need more details and less general data.
- Merging tickets from mobile devices is often a tricky process.
- The automatic generation of ticket numbers may provoke confusion for users.
LiveAgent Pricing
- Free: to get started
- Ticket: $15/agent/month
- Ticket + Chat: $29/agent/month
- All-inclusive: $49/agent/month
Why Use Zoho Desk instead of Freshdesk?
Zoho Desk is also a great alternative to Freshdesk. This platform help organizations manage their communication with customers using the phone, email, webchat, and social media. Besides, it allows assigning calls to specific agents depending on their departments or teams or automatically routing such calls to them. Ultimately, Zoho Desk enables your organization to provide consistent service for building meaningful client relationships.
A first ticket in Zoho Desk
Pros of Zoho Desk
- Zoho Desk offers a user-friendly dedicated mobile app for iOS and Android platforms.
- The tool allows tracking all the tickets and support agents easily using the dashboard interface.
- Your support team can insert tags with all tickets to divide them into specific categories. That provides efficient further analysis and troubleshooting.
Cons of Zoho Desk
- Zoho Desk often loads or nags. That lowers its efficiency significantly.
- The platform lacks compatibility with several Apple products. Thus, Zoho Desk should not ignore the customer base that uses Apple solutions.
- The level of live-chat customization is relatively low.
Zoho Desk Pricing
- Free trial
- Free: to get started
- Professional: $15/agent/month
- Enterprise: $30/agent/month
Why Use Hiver instead of Freshdesk?
Hiver contains all the necessary features of service desk software, including tagging emails for shared inboxes, auto-assignment options, and email templates. Moreover, the tool provides the appropriate analytics capabilities for tracking different customer service metrics. For example, thanks to collision alerts, your support agents receive notifications. That helps avoid duplicate responses.
How Hiver integrates with Gmail
Pros of Hiver
- Hiver offers excellent customer service and support by providing quick responses to inquiries.
- All emails can be converted into tickets easily and resolved by a wider group of support agents.
Cons of Hiver
- Some users may consider Hiver an expensive help desk option.
- You can create a support ticket only when a relevant email is received.
Hiver Pricing
- Lite: $15/agent/month (billed annually)
- Pro: $39/agent/month (billed annually)
- Elite: $59/agent/month (billed annually)
Why Use Kayako instead of Freshdesk?
Kayako offers multiple support channels, including email, phone, and live chat, existing in a fully integrated system. Such a combination can address many critical concerns related to multi-channel customer support and helps service agents cooperate more efficiently. Also, Kayako provides an effective ticket management system that allows prioritizing tickets according to specific factors.
A ticket sample in Kayako
Pros of Kayako
- Kayako offers a reasonable pricing structure.
- This customer support platform is scalable enough to provide clients with all necessary features for tracking their service job.
Cons of Kayako
- Some of the most advanced features are offered only by the most expensive pricing tiers. The number of good features predicted by basic plans is limited.
- It is hard to attach and receive documents.
- Kayako’s user interface appears clunky and cumbersome.
Kayako Pricing
- Inbox: $15/agent/month
- Growth: $30/agent/month
- Scale: $60/agent/month
Why Use Salesforce Service Cloud instead of Freshdesk?
The primary goal of Salesforce Service Cloud is to help you build one-to-one relationships with all customers. Businesses can also use this platform for automating numerous client service tasks. With Salesforce Service Cloud, you can assign requests to appropriate agents and provide customers with links to valuable articles or tutorials.
Open cases in Salesforce Service Cloud
Pros of Salesforce Service Cloud
- Salesforce Service Cloud offers an option to escalate requests or route them to live support agents.
- The tool has appropriate customization opportunities, which helps users focus on their needs.
- You can access Service Cloud 24/7 using your preferred channel.
Cons of Salesforce Service Cloud
- The platform’s user interface may appear complicated at first. Besides, modifying and administering Service Cloud is quite complex.
- You need to provide your admins, supervisors, and support agents with detailed training. That allows for understanding the different application’s functions better.
Salesforce Service Cloud Pricing
- Essentials: $25/agent/month (billed annually)
- Professional: $75/agent/month (billed annually)
- Enterprise: $150/agent/month (billed annually)
- Unlimited: $300/agent/month (billed annually)
Why Use Intercom instead of Freshdesk?
Intercom serves as a high-quality customer communications platform. As an alternative to Freshdesk, this tool enables users to maintain better relationships with their clients. In addition, they can provide personalized, messenger-based experiences through the customer journey. You can successfully deliver such experiences by using chatbots and personalized messaging.
User autom messaging in Intercom
Pros of Intercom
- Intercom offers an incredibly dynamic communication style. So you can leave the boring ticketing systems in the past.
- Your support team can separate several Intercom accounts to make specific departments focus only on their issues.
- The platform has many additional features, including push notifications or mail marketing campaigns.
Cons of Intercom
- Users claim that reporting options can be more robust.
- Intercom lacks some critical integration options.
- Executing user-initiated actions is relatively slow.
Intercom Pricing
- Free trial
- Starter: $79/month
Why Use HappyFox instead of Freshdesk?
HappyFox is among the leading help desk tool providing omnichannel support for client requests. Such requests may come from email, webchats, phone, or social media pages. Besides, you can integrate HappyFox with different business applications dealing with accounting, customer feedback, CRM systems, etc. Also, HappyFox offers iOS, Android, and Windows versions of their app.
All tickets in HappyFox
Pros of HappyFox
- HappyFox offers a portal that allows submitting tickets, minding progress, and reacting to the support team’s updates and plans.
- With HappyFox, your support agents can mark their tickets in various progress places.
- Although the platform’s portal appears basic, you can customize it with color schemes and logos.
Cons of HappyFox
- Users report some difficulties when making changes on mobile devices.
- Sometimes, the tool’s interface is quite busy and overwhelming.
- There can be minor issues with notifications that come from email.
HappyFox Pricing
- Mighty: $29/month
- Fantastic: $49/month
- Enterprise: $69/month
- Enterprise Plus: $89/month
Why Use Jira Service Management instead of Freshdesk?
Jira Service Management, the platform built on JIRA, is widely used as an alternative to Freshdesk. However, your support agents know about its significant flexibility if your organization is already using JIRA for management processes. This tool offers an intuitive user interface, appropriate SLA support, customized queues, efficient request management, and real-time reports.
All open tickets in Jira Service Management
Pros of Jira Service Management
- Customize the platform for your support teams. The tool is also incredibly adaptable when scaling.
- Jira Service Management provides an open, collaborative platform that ensures more efficient cooperation within your company.
- Track work across your organization.
Cons of Jira Service Management
- The platform is quite costly compared to other competitors, while the user limit is low.
- The mobile application is not as efficient as the desktop version.
- JIRA Service Desk provides no integrated knowledge base.
Jira Service Management Pricing
- Free trial
- Free: to get started
- Standard: $20/agent/month
- Premium: $40/agent/month
- Enterprise
Why Use TeamSupport instead of Freshdesk?
TeamSupport is a high-quality help desk platform that provides necessary cooperation features and collects real-time information. That helps organizations understand and analyze their pain points better. Thus, firms can deliver the appropriate level of support to customers. TeamSupport is a perfect option for B2B software and technology companies.
A list of customers in TeamSupport
Pros of TeamSupport
- The platform’s customer support portal is considered user-friendly, and customers can assign and track tickets easily.
- TeamSupport provides comprehensive business intelligence (BI) capacities to maintain efficient real-time collaboration.
- With TeamSupport, your agents obtain advanced built-in reports and access to incredibly detailed metrics.
Cons of TeamSupport
- TeamSupport often has slow loading issues, affecting organizations offering different products and services.
- Many users report customizability issues, especially when it comes to dashboard and reporting options.
TeamSupport Pricing
- Essential: $49/agent/month
- Professional: $79/agent/month
- Enterprise: $99/agent/month
Why Use Freshservice instead of Freshdesk?
Organizations implement the Freshservice ticketing system as a relevant plug-and-play widget necessary for ITIL departments. Such a universal helpdesk platform operates using some channels and allows automating incident management thanks to specific advanced tools. After all, Freshservice focuses on analyzing issues and preventing damage.
A detailed ticket in Freshservice
Pros of Freshservice
- Freshservice offers up-to-date asset management options. That helps track all of the organization’s possessions.
- This tool contains an integrated billing system. So you can forget about data migration from another platform.
- Thanks to RESTful APIs, Freshservice can provide many third-party integrations.
Cons of Freshservice
- Non-premium customers may face some scalability problems.
- The available billing kit is rather basic to meet the users’ demands. It can satisfy only a small number of clients.
Freshservice Pricing
- Free trial
- Starter: $19/agent/month (billed annually)
- Growth: $49/agent/month (billed annually)
- Pro: $89/agent/month (billed annually)
- Enterprise: $109/agent/month (billed annually)
Why Use Front instead of Freshdesk?
Front is a popular customer communication platform that offers advanced team collaboration features and contextual information. That helps provide customers with fast, accurate, and personalized responses. Moreover, Front contains powerful automation options to deprive your organization of different manual workflows through the system. Compared to Freshdesk features, Front also has detailed analytics that can enhance team performance and client relationships.
Solve an issue in Front
Pros of Front
- With Front, multiple agents can be involved in a single support process.
- The platform offers outstanding task management and inbox organization features.
- Front provides a new approach to notifying each email, discussion, mentioning, and tag. It means that your support team will never miss something critical.
Cons of Front
- Front’s mobile app has limited features.
- The tool appears expensive, especially for companies with few users.
- New formats are absent.
Front Pricing
- Starter: $19/agent/month
- Prime: individual contract
- Enterprise: individual contract
Why Use Groove instead of Freshdesk?
Groove helps businesses streamline collecting customer inquiries. Besides, this platform enables support agents to provide essential customer service via multiple channels. That includes Twitter, Facebook, and live web chats. Organizations also apply Groove for establishing a knowledge base and client portals.
Unassigned tickets in Groove
Pros of Groove
- Thanks to a clean and intuitive user interface, your support agents can immediately start using Groove.
- The available automation options help categorize all incoming tickets.
- Groove offers a great variety of third-party integrations.
Cons of Groove
- Users regard Groove as a platform with limited options due to its essential reporting functions.
- Groove provides no opportunity for your organization related to customizing or branding current customer-facing portals.
Groove Pricing
- Starter: $12/agent/month
- Plus: $20/agent/month
- Pro: $35/agent/month
- Company: individual contract
Do Freshdesk Alternatives Meet Your Needs?
Freshdesk serves as an efficient customer support software that allows:
- Cooperating across the organization to resolve tickets efficiently;
- Handling client requests using different communication channels;
- Enabling clients to find required help by themselves;
- Identifying customer support trends and measuring performance.
Although Freshdesk offers competitive features, it also has many disadvantages. They include complicated setup, the absence of critical functions in the tool’s basic plans, etc. That forces companies to look for the most suitable Freshdesk alternative. Thus, each platform mentioned is feature-rich, trusted by numerous organizations, and a popular option among businesses of different sizes.
