Freshdesk Vs. Zendesk Comparison in 2023

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Freshdesk and Zendesk are the leading providers of help desk ticketing online to thousands of businesses. Two of the biggest players in the ticketing support industry, both provide businesses of all sizes speedier as well as more efficient customer support.

In the case of Freshdesk vs. Zendesk, figuring out which is best for your company’s requirements can be confusing. In order to help you make an informed choice, we’ve outlined the pros and cons of each Freshdesk and Zendesk.

Freshdesk vs. Zendesk: At a Glance

Zendesk is a leader in the industry and a pioneer in the field of online help desk applications. Its core function is that Zendesk helps customer support agents manage, respond to, and resolve support requests promptly and in real-time.

It also offers the ability to design custom integrations, automations and monitor your team’s performance. Although companies of all sizes can use Zendesk, it is suited to organizations of a higher level by allowing you to customize workflows.

Freshdesk, in its promotional materials, has established itself as an immediate competitor and the most effective option for Zendesk. Together with Zendesk.

It offers businesses the capability to simplify their ticket management process and create custom workflows, all with a simple interface. Freshdesk offers a free forever plan, which create it perfect for small businesses.

Freshdesk

Why We Picked It

freshdesk

Freshdesk provides a top customer help desk at a reasonable cost. It takes a small amount of time to begin (the company says it only takes 6 minutes), and the interface is user-friendly for customers and employees.

Freshdesk provides a free plan that allows the use of up to 10 Customer service agents, which makes it a reasonable alternative for small-sized enterprises.

Additionally, it comes with the capability to integrate your agents’ daily workflow, which means you can boost their performance.

Pros

  • Free forever plan that can be used for maximum 10 agents
  • It is easier to utilize than Zendesk
  • Built-in gamification features
  • It is easy to customize

Cons

  • Limited integration
  • Can’t edit role permissions
  • No option for a customizable enterprise plan

Zendesk

Why We Picked It

zendesk

Zendesk is a dependable tool for connecting with your customers. It also provide you exceptional control over the user experience than its rivels.

With Zendesk, it is possible to create and manage help centers across multiple companies. It’s enormously beneficial to own products or multiple sub-brands beneath one umbrella.

You can also customize the appearance and experience of the online widget, ticketing system, and agent access, which makes Zendesk a great choice when you are looking for an application that you can adapt to your specific needs.

Pros

  • Robust free training library 
  • Built-in Industry-specific security features
  • Control multiple brands with a single central account
  • More support channels offered

Cons

  • There is no Free plan.
  • More expensive price per agent
  • You can’t edit comments on tickets after they’ve been posted.
  • It isn’t as simple to modify the appearance and feel

How the Platforms Stack Up

Freshdesk

Zendesk

Rating

4.2

4.4

Pricing (per Agent)

$0 to $79 per month when billed annually

$19 to $199 per month when billed annually

Free Trial

21 days

14 days

Free Plan

Yes

No

Ticket Management

Prioritize, categorize and assign tickets to the right agents. Collaborative ticketing, AI-powered ticketing, field service ticketing, contextual ticketing with custom objects.

Fully integrated ticketing system, 50MB ticket file size, multiple ticket forms, conditional ticket forms, integrating ticketing across email, tweets, Facebook

All-in-One Platform

Unified dashboard. Can easily integrate with Freshdesk Contact Center, Freshchat, Freshsales, Freshmarketer and Freshdesk CRM

Assist customers across any channels, Zendesk for service, Zendesk for sales, Sunshine Platform and Marketplace

Customer Support

Online help center, support within your product, web form

Email support and phone support

Self Service

Customers can find answers fast with advanced bots, a knowledge base help center with integrated forums and a web widget, messaging

Knowledge base articles, knowledge base comments to articles, customer service portal, online community, AI and bot support

Data and Analytics

Only one report available on free plan; all other data and reporting accessible on paid plans only

Custom analytics only available on Professional and Enterprise plans

Knowledge Bases

Can create external and internal knowledge bases on any plan

Can create external and internal knowledge bases on Suite and Enterprise-level plans only

Learn More

Pricing and Plans

Freshdesk and Zendesk both have distinct plans and structures. The main distinction between Freshdesk and Zendesk is that Freshdesk offers bulk pricing, while Zendesk offers a flat per-agent pricing structure.

Freshdesk offers four different packages for Support desk application: Free, Pro, Growth and Enterprise. The free plan is zero for 10 agents and allows ticketing via social media and emails, knowledge bases, dispatch rules, and trends reports.

The Enterprise plan offers advanced features like audit logs, skill-based routing, and bot sessions.

Zendesk provides three Support plans: Support Team and Support Professional and Support Enterprise. The tiers vary between $19 per agent per month and up to $99 for each monthly agent and are billed annually.

The most affordable plan offers social and email ticketing, built-in integrations, and integrated analytics. The next level of plans is the Suite plans which include Suite Team, Suite Growth, and Suite Professional plans.

Growth and Professional; both provide several help centers with API limits, advanced customizing tickets, and multilingual assistance.

Zendesk also provides two additional plans that are geared toward enterprise-level businesses. They provide the most outstanding amount of data sharing and customization.

Although Zendesk does not have an affordable plan, it offers 14-day trial trials on every plan except for the highest-priced enterprise plan.

Best value: Freshdesk offers more affordable pricing plans when compared to Zendesk and is an ideal choice for small and medium-sized companies.

If you’re looking for a simple-to-use solution, Freshdesk can save you money. If you require more support for a large enterprise, Zendesk may cost more, but it’s worth the higher cost.

Freshdesk Vs. Zendesk: Price & Plan

Freshdesk

Zendesk

Free Plan

Growth Plan

Team

Professional

$0 per month

$15 per agent per month, billed annually

$19 per agent per month, billed annually

$49 per agent per month, billed annually

Up to 10 agents

Everything in free plan

Integrated ticketing

Integrated ticketing

Integrated ticketing

Automation

Business rules

Business rules

Ticket dispatch

Collision detection

Customer details and interaction history

Customer details and interaction history

Knowledge base

1,000-plus marketplace apps

Out-of-the-box reporting and analytics

Out-of-the-box reporting and analytics

Ticket trend reporting

In-depth help desk report

Apps and integrations: pre-built

Apps and integrations: pre-built and custom

Out-of-the-box analytics and reporting

SLA management and business hours

-

Business hours: Essential

Choose your data center location

Custom email server

-

Customer satisfaction surveys

Team collaboration

Custom ticket views

-

Multilingual support and content

24/7 email support

Custom ticket fields and status

-

Automatic redaction

-

Custom SSL

-

Service-level agreement (SLA)

-

Easily track time spent by agents on tickets

-

Live agent dashboard: viewable

-

24/5 phone support

Online support, bot support, web form

Online support, bot support, web form

Integrations

integration

The two Zendesk and Freshdesk are great on their own. However, they can also be integrated with a range of other tools and systems that can assist you in streamlining your support processes.

Trello, Salesforce, Shopify, Slack, and Jira are the most popular integrations.

Through these integrations, you can connect to platforms you already use to build complete customer information, sales details, and support tickets all in one location.

It helps you manage and respond to customer queries quickly and efficiently, as and keep other departments informed and plugged into support calls.

In the case of the comparison of Zendesk Vs. Freshdesk, Zendesk Marketplace is home to more than 1200 apps and pre-built integrations, while Freshdesk provides more than 1000 integrations. Both platforms provide an array of integrations with other platforms and apps.

Freshdesk lets you connect to tools and applications that you already use, such as WhatsApp, Freshdesk Telephony Partner Extension, Salesforce, and Mailchimp, to just.

You can also build integrations to Freshworks Neo. It lets you develop and adapt the software to the specific requirements of your company.

Zendesk lets you connect to collaboration tools like Zoom, monday.com, Asana, and Atlassian. Zendesk also comes with pre-built integrated apps like Certainly, Ada, and Shopify.

Additionally, If you can’t find the solution you’re looking for, you can build almost anything using its API and framework for apps.

Best value: Zendesk offers more integrations than Freshdesk; however, both offer powerful integration and application options with similar advantages.

The applications and integrations most beneficial to your company could differ based on your specific needs and workflow.

Customization and Branding

Zendesk provides many customizable options, but they’re restricted to specific plan tiers.

Customized capabilities include organizational and user fields and group views, agent statuses, triggers and automated role and permissions, views and live-agent status drill-ins objects, integrations and apps, and customized courses and accreditations.

If you choose Zendesk Enterprise, you can remove Zendesk branding from your support widgets and modify the agent workspaces to increase efficiency. The drawback is that changing an organization’s Zendesk design settings for appearance is challenging.

The activity feed and dashboard also don’t have the ability to customize and don’t allow customization for every agent.

Freshdesk can be fully customized, so you can adapt the software to suit your requirements.

A few customization options include customized fields role, apps and workflows, ticket status automating ticket assignments, and custom reports.

Freshdesk can also allow you to create support for time zone and multilingual languages for your team across the globe.

You can also alter the look and feel of Your Freshdesk portal to match the colors of your company’s logo. It includes the option to alter the header and footer, and other components that make up the website.

Note that not all customization capabilities are available in the Freshdesk plans. Each plan offers a limited number of customization capabilities.

Best Value:

Freshdesk could offer a few more customization options than Zendesk, specifically concerning workflows and forms for tickets. Zendesk, on the other hand, provides a powerful API tool that offers additional flexibility in terms of customization.

Through Zendesk API, you can create custom integrations, build tickets, bulk-import resources and custom apps, and transfer data from external sources. In the end, both provide flexible customization options.

However, the selection will be based on what features can benefit your company in the greatest way.

Security

security

Freshdesk and Zendesk have a serious approach to security and have implemented various security to safeguard customer data.

Freshdesk along with Zendesk utilize strict access control in order to ensure only authorized personnel are able to access data of customers. They also regularly check their systems for unusual activity and have a complete disaster recovery strategy.

Each platform comes with a broad array of security features, including vulnerability scanning, security audits by third parties, and access control based on role.

Freshdesk is a global security platform that guarantees every company has complete security, privacy, and data protection throughout their business.

Freshdesk can fully comply with GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2, and ISO. As a default, all Freshdesk accounts include a customized SSL certificate.

It employs AES 256-bit encryption that secures the communication between your system and the servers to ensure that all data is kept in a secure location and is backed up.

Zendesk also complies with various regulatory and industry standards, including SOC 2 Type II, ISO, and FedRAMP AWS LISaaS.

Zendesk employs AES-256 encryption keys to safeguard customers’ data and ensures that all data stored in the service is encrypted within AWS. Zendesk will also ensure that the data exchanged between your company and Zendesk is protected during transport by utilizing industry-standard HTTP/TLS over public networks.

Freshdesk comes with SSL encryption for free in all plans to provide additional security. It also offers PCI-compliant protection in Enterprise plans.

Nearly all security measures are included in every Zendesk plan, except for the most advanced security features like HIPAA conformity and ticket redaction application (to mention only a few). They are only available on Enterprise and Professional plans.

Best Value:

Overall, Zendesk and Freshdesk have strong security precautions to guard the customer’s data. While there are some minor variations in their security policies, Both platforms are considered extremely safe and reliable when handling customer service.

Data and Analytics

data analytics

Both Freshdesk and Zendesk provide reporting capabilities. However, there are specific differences between them.

Zendesk reports are more extensive, with a more significant number of metrics and reports that are more customizable.

Zendesk provides immediate access to customer insight providing, multichannel analytics, analytics that the head of CX teams and historical data in real-time and pre-built dashboards that can be used for any channel, customized charts and dashboards, and the capability to publish and schedule reports and dashboards.

This customization phase can be highly effective but could be more complicated and time-consuming to set up and utilize.

Freshdesk reporting is more user-friendly, making it easy for users who need to be tech-savvy to start using. Freshdesk provides a range of reports for quick insight and analysis, each with high-quality visualization capabilities and vibrant colors, making them easier to comprehend.

Freshdesk allows you to modify reports as you go without programming, design and modify dashboards and stay abreast of the latest developments by displaying dynamic dashboards, KPI alerts, and dynamic dashboards.

Overall, Freshdesk offers more out-of-the-box reports, whereas Zendesk needs more customization.

Freshdesk’s free plan comes with ticket trend reports and out-of-the-box analytics for no cost; however, you’ll be required to purchase an upgrade plan for more advanced features.

Zendesk provides out-of-the-box reports across all plans. However, note that no free plan comes with Zendesk, and the most affordable plan is \$19 per monthly agent and is charged annually.

Zendesk has similar features similar to Freshdesk; however, users have reported that creating individual reports may take time and effort.

Best Value:

Ultimately, Freshdesk reporting is a more straightforward and user-friendly choice. Zendesk reporting also gives you additional advanced customizable options for businesses needing more insight into their operations in support.

Knowledge Bases

knowledge base

Both Freshdesk and Zendesk offer the capacity to build internal and external knowledge bases. Employees exclusively use internal knowledge bases, whereas the self-service or external knowledge base is customer service.

The knowledge base feature enables companies to offer self-service support for their customers via every channel. The knowledge base can be personalized by adding FAQs, articles, guides, and tutorials.

Both platforms provide search capabilities and analytics to assist businesses in knowing how they are utilized and where it requires improvements.

Freshdesk’s knowledge base features an intuitive and straightforward interface that makes organizing and creating knowledge-based articles simple. Additionally, it offers customizable options for rich text formatting and much more. 

The users can write articles and then organize them into folders, categories, and solutions articles. Freshdesk also has a powerful search feature that is compatible with 42 languages.

Find answers to any topic when using the service or product. Find answers using the help widget available on the site, or search for answers through the forum for community members.

Zendesk has an extensive library of self-service resources that can assist you in setting up and utilizing Zendesk and finding the answers to frequently asked questions from the experts in members of the Zendesk community.

Users can build customized templates for knowledge articles and set their search feature to automatically suggest articles, build multiple support form types using sophisticated formatting tools to produce more complex articles, and more.

Zendesk provides a variety of integrations to allow companies to integrate the knowledge base information on their websites and applications.

Best Value:

The difference between these two is that Freshdesk lets you build any knowledge base in any plan, including its free plans. Because Zendesk doesn’t have an affordable plan, you’ll have to purchase a subscription to this feature. It’s only available on the Enterprise and Suite plans.

Channels

Zendesk and Freshdesk both offer multichannel support. It allows companies to offer customer support through multiple channels, including chat, email, telephone, social media, and phone.

This tool can interact with your customers and set up the channels, making it more straightforward for customers to access the assistance they require.

Best Value:

Zendesk supports more channels in-built than Freshdesk. Freshdesk can also not provide multichannel support in its free plan, so you’ll have to switch to an upgraded plan to avail of this feature.

Bottom Line

Overall Both Freshdesk and Zendesk have powerful tools that assist businesses in improving their customer service operations, But each platform comes with its strength and weakness.

It is crucial for companies to analyze their requirements and pick the best platform to match their particular needs.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Is Freshdesk user-friendly
Freshdesk is widely recognized as simple to use. In addition to being simple to install and not requiring any hardware, cost, or downloads, you’ll discover it to be a VoIP service that is more user-friendly than other VoIP platforms.

If you’re having any issues or concerns, you are able to contact customer support or access the help assistance center anytime.

What is the advantages of utilizing an online CRM?
The benefits of CRMs include sales automation, contact management, tracking email trackers, and pipeline management.

What is the function of a CRM?
CRMs track and manage prospects and customer interactions from a central place. It could include contact details, sales interactions, meeting notes, and much more.

Who Is Freshdesk Best For?
Freshdesk is an excellent choice for startups and large, medium, and small transitional companies. It’s considered intuitive, quick, and easy to use and install. Also, it has a great phone system and ticketing. Freshdesk is a top choice for ticketing and telephony.

It has excellent customer reviews; however, users say that Freshdesk could use improvements in areas such as analytics, reporting, and automation, and it is lacking in the realm of deep capabilities and customizations, making it a good choice for large enterprises.

Who Is Zendesk Best For?
If you’re a more significant multi-brand enterprise and require more outstanding capabilities and integrations, Zendesk will likely be a better match.

Zendesk, on the other, however, isn’t able to boast the best customer feedback and is reported to offer poor customer support, which has caused businesses to switch software service providers. Some users also say they cannot consistently deliver email and aren’t equipped with high-quality telephone systems.


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