Freshdesk and Freshservice are both Freshworks products, but designed for very different purposes. Freshdesk is customer-facing help desk software, priced from $0 to $109/user per month. Alternatively, Freshservice is internal IT help desk software used to manage your company’s internal IT support with prices starting at $19 to $99/user per month.
When to Use Freshdesk
Freshdesk is a great tool for businesses with a customer facing website in need of a support center or customer portal. Features like online ticketing allow customers to create and submit their own tickets which reduces time that staff would take to record details over the phone. Other features like knowledge base allow you to create an information portal to help customers find answers to their questions quickly from content you’ve created, such as articles or replies to tickets.
When to Use Freshservice
Freshservice should be used when your company has an IT department responsible for managing internal hardware and software. It’s great for organizing and tracking incidents, handling technology releases, and for managing hardware issued to employees like laptops, or document approvals. This makes it particularly useful for larger teams, or those needing technology asset management.
When to Use an Alternative
Because they are part of the same software ecosystem, both work seamlessly with the company’s other tool, Freshsales CRM, which when linked, provides businesses with a 360 degree customer view. All three products’ user-friendly interfaces and low-cost starter plans make it easy for organizations to stay focused on their customers’ needs. Learn more about Freshsales by visiting its website and starting your free trial.
Freshdesk vs Freshservice at a Glance
| Pricing | ||
| Social Ticketing | ||
| Skill-based Ticket Assignment | ||
| Session Replay Freshmarketer Integration | ||
| Email/Call/Form-based Ticketing | ||
| Reporting | ||
| Knowledge Base | ||
| Team Collaboration | ||
| Canned Responses | ||
| Incident Management | ||
| Change, Problem, & Release Management | ||
| Asset Management | ||
| Software License Management | ||
| Contract & Project Management | ||
| More Information |
Freshdesk vs Freshservice: Pricing & Features
Freshdesk and Freshservice are similarly priced, with Freshdesk offering a forever free version while Freshservice only offering a free trial. Freshservice’s pricing ranges from $19/user per month to $99/user per month, compared to Freshdesk at $15/user per month to $109/user per month. Freshdesk focuses on customer facing tools like ticketing from your website while Freshservice focuses on resolving IT issues and managing internal assets.
Freshdesk Pricing
Freshdesk pricing is affordable for small businesses and includes a free forever plan that comes with basic support. The paid versions that are best for small to medium sized businesses range from $15/person per month to $29/person per month.
Freshdesk Tiered Features
| Pricing | |||
| Email Ticketing | |||
| Team Collaboration | |||
| Knowledge Base | |||
| Ticket Trend Report | |||
| Social Ticketing | |||
| Canned Responses/Templates | |||
| Automations | |||
| Collision Detection | |||
| Help desk In-depth Reports | |||
| Time Tracking | |||
| Customer Satisfaction Surveys | |||
| Session Replay | |||
| Multilingual Knowledge Base |
Note: There are two additional tiers priced at $49 and $109/user per month for larger and enterprise organizations. In the table below, we focused on tiers most suitable for smaller businesses.
Sprout
Sprout allows you to get started offering support via help desk to your customers for free unlike Freshservice which doesn’t have a free tier. Features include email and social ticketing to resolve issues and a knowledge base to arm your customers with information to solve their own issues. It also offers team collaboration tools and a ticket trend report to facilitate working across teams on customer issues and to gain high level insights on ticket trends.
This free plan is right for businesses just starting to offer a help desk for their customers. It’s great for migrating away from email-based support and offers efficiencies with tools like canned responses or ticket communication templates. Use this plan if you’re not quite ready for specialized help desk features like automation features, collision detection which alerts you to multiple agents working on the same ticket/issue, or customer satisfaction surveys.
Blossom
The features in this plan are great for taking the next step in supporting your customers with a help desk with automation and reporting that is more advanced than the ticket trend report offered in the Free plan. Features include the ones in Sprout along with Help desk In-depth, which is the advanced reporting around key metrics, such as number of tickets created and resolved. You can also automate key tasks with help desk automations, which saves time.
Blossom is right for businesses with growing demand for customer support and multiple agents resolving tickets. User per month of $15 is a great value for businesses needing tools such as the Collision Detection feature that alerts you to multiple agents working on the same ticket in a non-collaborative way. They also think it’s worth it to automate key tasks within the ticket resolution process, which can help agents become more efficient with their time.
Garden
The Garden plan is great for gaining performance insights such as performance reports and session replays, a Freshmarketer integration, which allows you to “replay” customer actions that led to support questions or tickets. It also gives the ability to create and send customer satisfaction surveys. Your agents can more quickly and accurately resolve customer support issues with these tools because they’ll have the right knowledge at their fingertips.
This plan is right for businesses wanting to take a proactive approach to customer support, as it can help them spot patterns and fix any performance issues that surface. Insights from customer satisfaction surveys can also be used to improve their product and support. The price is $29/user per month, affordable for a growing small business.
Freshservice Pricing
Freshservice pricing is affordable for small businesses but does not include a free plan like the one offered by Freshdesk. The pricing tiers best for small to medium sized businesses range from $19/person per month to $79/person per month.
Freshservice Tiered Features
| Pricing | |||
| Incident Management | |||
| Knowledge Base | |||
| Self-Service Portal | |||
| Reporting | |||
| Unlimited End-Users | |||
| Service Catalog | |||
| Asset Management | |||
| Unlimited Mailboxes | |||
| Change, Problem, & Release Management | |||
| Customizable Agent Roles | |||
| Software License Management | |||
| Contract & Project Management |
Note: There is one additional tier priced at $99/user per month for enterprise organizations. In the table below, we focused on tiers most suitable for smaller businesses.
Blossom
The features in Blossom are great for taking a first step in supporting your employees with an IT help desk solution. It includes features like incident management for tracking and resolving IT issues that come up such as hardware or software that doesn’t function properly. Knowledge base tools and the ability to create a self-service portal are also included in this plan along with reporting being able to support unlimited end-users.
Blossom is right for businesses with growing companies finding themselves needing to support internal users with technology issues that come up as they do their jobs. User per month of $19 is a nominal price to pay for being able to manage internal IT issues and to offer self-service tools so that users can troubleshoot and resolve their own problems.
Garden
Features in the Garden plan include features in Blossom and allow you to automate and customize IT purchases for end users with Service Catalog features. It also gives you the ability to manage assets such as laptops, desktops, and phones used by employees, unlike Freshdesk’s features which are customer focused. Compared to Blossom, Garden allows you to go beyond basic support and with tools to support departments’ unique needs.
Garden is right for companies with a lot of employees using technology whether it’s hardware or software that needs to be managed. It’s also great if there are teams or departments within a company that need to buy hardware or software specific to their jobs, and want to automate the purchase and approval process. The $49/user per month price is still affordable and comes with 100 assets under management.
Estate
Estate offers everything in the Garden plan along with tools to manage change, new releases, and problems. It also offers software license management features to keep up with employee software. Project and contract management tools are also part of this plan. Compared to Garden, this plan expands your management capabilities as your business grows needing additional tools to handle change and growth.
This plan is great for expanding businesses from being small to becoming medium-sized businesses. The $79/user per month is a good investment for the ability to manage internal growth and change as the business is growing.
Freshdesk vs Freshservice: Ease of Use
Like most Freshworks products, both Freshdesk and Freshservice are easy to use. The user interfaces for both are attractive and use simple point, click, drag, and drop to make changes and updates to tickets and incidents. Both also offer canned responses, which are similar to email templates to make ticket or incident communications easier and faster than creating them from scratch.
Below are more details about how easy it is to use each product:
Freshdesk Ease of Use
Freshdesk automatically creates support tickets from emails, calls, and social media. This eliminates the need to manually create tickets saving time and making it easy for tickets to be created. It also has a visually appealing dashboard which highlights important support metrics including number of tickets opened, resolved, and unassigned, making it easy to spot trends and take action. There’s also a ticket inbox highlighting all tickets from all channels.
Freshservice Ease of Use
Freshservice has a simple dashboard and user interface showing categories IT support staff care about such as tickets, incidents, or requests for new services. There’s a ticket list and a dashboard showing metrics around ticketing activity. Also, tools like Service Catalogs that allow users to request hardware or software for their jobs are also easy to set up and customize by department with a few clicks, including automatically sending requests for approvals.
Freshdesk vs Freshservice: Customer Service
Service for both Freshservice and Freshdesk are very similar because both products are created and owned by the same company, Freshworks. Below are the details around customer support provided by both products. In addition to the details below, both products list a phone number and support email address you can use.
Freshdesk Customer Service
Freshdesk offers customer support in a variety of ways. Support service options include Freshdesk Academy where you or your support agents can take courses on topics including admin and agent fundamentals and customer service skills. There’s also a knowledge base with topics including setting up customer self-service portal, phone, social, and email channels for creating tickets. There’s also a community you can connect with.
Freshservice Customer Service
Freshservice also offers customer support through videos and webinars, a knowledge base, an agent guide, a community forum, and via phone and email. Freshservice also offers communication via chat. The community forum allows you to start a new topic where community members can respond to your support related questions.
Freshdesk vs Freshservice: Customer Reviews & Alternatives
Overall, both Freshdesk and Freshservice have positive customer reviews. The Freshdesk review page on Fit Small Business shows customer review ratings at 4 out of 5 stars. There is no Freshservice review page as of yet, however, other review sites online show Freshservice average rating between 4 to 4.5 out of 5 stars.
Freshdesk Customer Reviews
Overall, Freshdesk customer reviews are pretty positive, being 4 out of 5 stars on our Freshdesk review page. Customers love the efficiencies the tool creates around setting up tickets automatically so that their support agents can spend more time resolving issues than creating tickets. They also like the easy to use interface. A few people have complained about pricing nuances, aspirational features and occasional customer support issues.
Here’s what one Freshdesk customer had to say:
Jayant Ingle, Director, Framesbuy
“We were in need of a help desk solution as managing customer queries had gone out of control. Emails were missed and monitoring queries had become problematic. When everything was going haywire, Freshdesk came to our rescue. This software gave our customer support team tighter control over their operations. The support team as well as customers are easily able to use Freshdesk. Emails get converted to tickets and are then routed to the right agent for a quick response. Both customers and support team members can keep the track of the query status whether it is open, closed, resolved or pending.”
Freshdesk Alternatives
Freshdesk alternatives include standalone customer facing support software like Zendesk and CRMs like Agile CRM that include help desk software in its set of features. Both tools offer ticketing features to track and resolve customer issues and the tools to create a knowledge base for self-service.
Freshservice Customer Reviews
On various review sites, Freshservice has ratings ranging from 4.0 to 4.6. Customers seem to really like how easy Freshservice is to use. They particularly like how easy it is to create tickets and filter them by a variety of categories like user, department, agent, and other categories. They also like that administration is simple with the software, however, some users didn’t like features around asset management, with some features requiring manual work.
Freshservice Alternatives
Freshservice alternatives include IT help desk software such as SpiceWorks and Samanage. Both tools offer incident or internal ticketing features to track and resolve user issues and the tools to create a knowledge base for self-service. They also offer features such as asset management to keep track of company devices.
Customer Service & IT Help Desk Software: Who It’s Right For
Customer service help desk software helps companies track and respond to product-related concerns from customers. It works by capturing and resolving customer issues with tickets and support content. Alternatively, IT help desk software allows companies to offer internal tech support to its employees and technology management for business owners and managers. It works by allowing you to manage incidents, software upgrades, and company assets.
Who Customer Service Software Is Right For
Customer service help desk software is right for companies that have complex products that generate a lot of user questions that need to be addressed immediately to ensure a positive customer experience. Types of questions or support inquiries can range from how to use the product to error messages received to product bugs and glitches.
The following product types can benefit from customer service help desk software:
- Software (cloud or native): Any type of software, whether cloud-based or native will encounter bugs, glitches, or simple user error. A customer service help desk will get user questions and issues answered and resolved quickly.
- Hardware: Like software, hardware can break down or there can be features that users find difficult to use. Support software allows you to offer a better customer experience by tracking and addressing common issues and responding to customers right away.
- Online Courses: Online courses cover skills and information customers have not mastered, thus triggering a lot of questions. Having a way to track and answer questions related to the content and the platform helps improve the course and the experience.
- Appliances/Electronics: Similar to hardware, appliances and electronics such as TVs, stoves, etc., break down or have features that may be difficult to use. A help desk allows you to track recurring issues and address questions or problems immediately.
Creating a help desk for customers with Freshdesk allows you to address and track product related issues. For instance, ticketing tools allow customers to submit and create tickets from your website. They also allow tickets to be created from issues logged on social media. There’s even a tool to form a knowledge base so customers can access information from content you’ve already created and find answers to their questions.
Who IT Help Desk Software Is Right For
Internal IT help desk software is right for companies with at least 10 employees or contractors, have at least 10 assets (desktops, laptops, phones, etc.) to manage and support. It’s also right for businesses that manage internal IT projects.
Professionals and companies with the scenarios below can benefit from IT help desk software:
- Companies With Several Employees & Assets: If your organization has at least 10 employees and 10 assets like laptops under management, IT help desk software can help you keep track of their location and track and resolve any common bugs or glitches.
- Businesses With Multiple Software Licenses: Keeping track of multiple software licenses with varying expiration dates is easier with help desk software than spreadsheets.
- Organizations Managing Projects: If your company manages a lot of IT projects, having full-featured IT help desk software with project management features is key because you can track where you are with timelines and tasks in one central place.
- Businesses With Technology Dependent Core Operations: When companies core operations depend on technology, such as relying on video conferencing to make sales, IT help desk software can help track and resolve issues quickly.
Creating an internal IT help desk to support your employees and contractors with Freshservice allows you to address and track issues related to technology that lets your team do their jobs. Incident management tools in this software allows employees to submit incidents for hardware and software issues. There are also knowledge base tools to let them troubleshoot on their own. Asset management also lets you keep track of hardware and software in your business.
Bottom Line
Both Freshdesk and Freshservice are outstanding, easy to use, affordable tools that make setting up and running a customer support help desk or an internal IT help desk easier and less expensive than doing it yourself. Both tools allow support agents to be more efficient with automation tools that eliminate manual work.
These tools can be made even more powerful when combined with a CRM. Luckily, the same company that provides both also offers Freshsales CRM. With it, you can communicate with customers and teammates effectively, solve problems quickly, and run internal operations more smoothly. Visit Freshsales to learn more and take advantage of its forever free plan today.
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