Freshdesk vs. Zendesk: Which should you use? [2025]

Consumers aren't shy about posting negative reviews of businesses with poor customer service. The struggle comes in maintaining multi-channel customer support—and that's where customer service software comes in. I spent time testing two of the most popular platforms on the market: Zendesk and Freshdesk. Here's how they stack up. 

• Freshdesk is cheaper and offers a limited free plan

• Zendesk makes it seamless to collaborate on tickets

• Zendesk allows you to engage with customers across more channels

• Zendesk offers more diverse filtering for ticket dashboard views

• Zendesk is more unified, where Freshworks is more a la carte

• Freshdesk's AI focuses on daily tasks, Zendesk's AI on optimization

• Both platforms have excellent integrations, including with Zapier

Zendesk vs. Freshdesk at a glance 

Once upon a time, the differences between Zendesk and Freshdesk were clear. Zendesk was the powerhouse of efficiency and robust features, while Freshdesk was the simpler, more affordable alternative. But Freshdesk has done a lot of catching up since it first launched in 2010. Here's a handy table that highlights some of the major points of comparison between Freshdesk and Zendesk, but keep reading for a deeper dive. 

Before diving in, a quick note: I was testing Freshdesk Omni, which technically includes multiple Freshworks products (more on that below)—it's the product that's most on par with the Zendesk for service offering.

What's not different between Zendesk and Freshdesk

If you're looking for a tie-breaker between Freshdesk and Zendesk, skip past this section. 

• Knowledge base and self-service: Both offer customizable internal and external knowledge bases, so customers and employees can access troubleshooting guides, FAQs, or any other essential information they might find useful. 

• Reports and data analysis: Zendesk and Freshdesk both come with pre-built dashboards and report templates, or you can create your own. 

• App integrations: Both platforms have well over 1,000 apps spanning a broad range of categories, and both apps integrate with Zapier. 

• CSAT surveys: Both apps include surveys to gather feedback from your customers at the end of a support session.

Freshdesk is slightly cheaper and offers a limited free plan

Freshdesk was founded partly in response to rising Zendesk prices, so it's no surprise that Freshdesk continues to be the more cost-effective option.

Comparing the top-of-the-line plans with similar features, Freshdesk Omni is slightly cheaper: It costs $109/agent/month vs. Zendesk's $115/agent/month (both billed annually). 

Neither company offers a free plan for their omnichannel products, but Freshdesk does allow you to use the individual products that make up its Omnichannel Suite (Support Desk and Contact Center) for free. The main issue is that each of these tools has their own pricing and plan limitations.

• Freshdesk itself offers the main ticketing, collaboration, and knowledge base features. It's free for up to 2 agents with basic reporting features.

• Freshchat handles live chat and emails and provides a unified workspace to let your agents hop from channel to channel seamlessly. It's free for up to 10 agents, and you can integrate it with your website, mobile app, and email.

• Freshcaller has all the phone features in one place. It's free for as many agents as you need, but it doesn't offer numbers or free minutes.

And, of course, there's the issue that each is a separate app, with distinct settings, each on its own browser tab. The modularity is good for upgrading and downgrading at will, but it may start adding drag on agent productivity.

If you don't need all the bells and whistles, and your budget is limited, Freshdesk can save you some money in the long run. If you want a customizable and comprehensive support platform, Zendesk is worth the bigger price tag.

Zendesk makes it seamless to collaborate on tickets

When it comes to seamless team collaboration, Zendesk comes out on top. 

Zendesk has a really neat feature called "Side conversations," which allows you to discuss a ticket with other team members via email, Slack, or another child ticket (i.e., a ticket created from a side conversation) right from Zendesk. Plus, all side conversations appear directly within the ticket as a comment but remain hidden from the customer. 

Note: You cannot use the Zendesk Support mobile app to create, view, or reply to side conversations. 

Freshdesk offers something similar with Freshconnect—an app from Freshworks that integrates with Freshdesk and allows teams to collaborate on tickets directly in Freshdesk. But while you can see conversations at a glance inside Freshdesk, you'll still have to open the Freshconnect app for the full picture. You can also integrate Freshconnect with popular communication apps such as Slack or Microsoft Teams, but this will only notify you that there's a new message or reply waiting in Freshconnect. For example, if you receive a notification in Slack that there's a new message for you in Freshconnect, you'll have to switch to Freshconnect in Freshdesk to view the message and reply.

If your customer support team receives a high volume of tickets, it can be easy to lose track of what's happening at any given time in a ticket—especially if you have to toggle between apps to manage the ticket and pull in help from other teammates. If this is the case for you, Zendesk is the winner.

Zendesk allows you to engage with customers across more channels

While Freshdesk and Zendesk both allow you to communicate with clients via popular communication channels (e.g., email, live chat, and AI-powered chatbots), Zendesk offers even more channels, including text, WhatsApp, and Line. This is one of the many reasons why we named Zendesk one of the best live chat apps for customer support. 

And on a picky note: Freshdesk uses Freshchat—another app from Freshworks that integrates with Freshdesk—to communicate with customers. Meanwhile, chat support is simply baked into Zendesk. While this isn't necessarily a dealbreaker, keeping track of all the different Freshworks products really made my head spin—especially when searching for articles on how to use each product.  

Zendesk offers more diverse filtering for ticket dashboard views 

Both Freshdesk and Zendesk offer simple and intuitive methods to filter and save ticket views, but Zendesk provides more filters and customization. 

In Freshdesk, the ticket dashboard is simple. You can sort and filter tickets through a dozen or so metrics, based on what's most important to your task (agent, status, response due by, and so on). 

Zendesk, on the other hand, allows you to organize your tickets based on multiple, customizable conditions. Plus, you can reorder how the fields appear in your Zendesk ticket dashboard. 

Note: With Freshdesk, you can filter and save views directly from the ticket dashboard. Zendesk, on the other hand, forces you to navigate to the Admin Center to create new ticket views. 

Zendesk is more unified, where Freshworks is more a la carte

Freshworks' offering is a bit complex to navigate. We've been talking about the Freshdesk Omni suite in this article, which is composed primarily of these three products:

• Freshdesk for handling tickets

• Freshchat for chatting with your customers in multiple channels

• Freshcaller, a telephone service

Some of these products are available on their own, so you don't have to buy into the all-in-one solution right away. In fact, you can use the free plans of both Desk and Chat to solve a few customer service challenges right away.

In addition to this, Freshworks offers other complements:

• Freshsales and Freshsales suite, a CRM solution for keeping track of leads and running your own outreach efforts

• Freshmarketer, a marketing platform that connects to your eCommerce website to run ad campaigns, keep track of metrics, and ensure growth

• Freshservice, an ITSM suite for IT management.

It's a bit confusing, but if you don't want to pay upfront for a big solution or don't want the entire feature set, you can mix and match to find exactly what you need. The advantage is that, once your data is with Freshworks, you can upgrade or downgrade at will to match what your business is facing.

Zendesk bundles all of its customer service features into one single big product. The two add-ons it offers add advanced AI and increased privacy and data protection, both at high price points per agent. There are also two other parts to this:

• Zendesk for sales is a CRM, offering similar high-quality user experience for sales teams

• Zendesk for employee service is a tool for keeping all your HR tasks in order.

• Sunshine Platform helps your developers implement customer service wherever you do business, no matter the platform or tech stack you're using

Overall, in terms of experience, Zendesk feels a bit more whole, where Freshworks feels a bit more scattered. I won't pass final judgment on something that boils down to personal and team preferences, but keep this in mind when choosing which one is best for your specific case.

Freshdesk's AI focuses on daily tasks, Zendesk's AI on optimization

AI adds a lot to customer service: ticket categorization, generating messages, sentiment analysis, the list goes on. Freshdesk's approach is more on the front-line of work, helping agents tackle daily challenges as they chat with customers. Zendesk offers similar features, too, but adds AI-powered optimization on top to improve efficiency.

Let's start with Freshdesk's Freddy AI. It automates conversations, generates messages as you interact with customers, and rewrites anything to match the appropriate tone and intent at every step. This feature set also includes other Freshworks products, so if you use its CRM or marketing platform, you'll be able to access AI-powered lead scoring or audience segmentation.

Since last year, the Freshdesk team doubled down by adding:

• AI autotriage, which can read ticket content to understand needs and predict which are more urgent, and then sort the list based on these insights. Closely connected, it also offers AI prioritization based on sentiment analysis, bumping harsher messages to the top of the list so you can quickly deal with the most painful problems first.

• Assist Bot helps new agents stick to the brand voice during their training, also offering ways to deploy structured, step-by-step conversations to qualify customer needs. You can build these flows in a no-code builder and then make them available to your agents.

• Thank you detector notices when a ticket is solved. It closes it for you, just in case you forget to do so.

Zendesk has equivalent features, but they work in a slightly different way. The most visible one is the bot builder, where you can create virtual customer support assistants to join your human ones, automating lower-difficulty conversations. The other features are harder to spot because they work behind the scenes, automatically prioritizing tickets, adding context cues for content managers, and enabling semantic search in the help center.

This year, Zendesk is focusing on optimization:

• Industry-specific AI intent analysis models better handle tickets in education, insurance, travel, and hospitality, further increasing accuracy of all other AI features for these sectors.

• Enhanced QA Bot helps your team run quality control on your AI agents, so you can tweak them to progressively handle more critical requests over time.

• Zendesk Workforce Management tracks agent performance, activity, and schedule, helping to plan days and optimize your customer service operations. On top of this, it understands demand over time, forecasting workload peaks and valleys so you can save on overtime and scale your team appropriately.

Both platforms have excellent integrations, including with Zapier 

Whichever customer service software you choose, you want it to play well with the rest of your tech stack. Freshdesk and Zendesk both connect with thousands of other apps natively, so you shouldn't have trouble on this front.

And using Zapier, you can automate your team's processes by connecting Freshdesk and Zendesk to more than 7,000 more apps. That way, you can automatically keep your team in the loop with notifications, add new tickets to your project management tool, create tickets from forms, and anything else you can think of.

Learn more about how to automate Freshdesk and how to automate Zendesk, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

Freshdesk vs. Zendesk: Which should you use? 

Freshdesk offers a free plan, is slightly cheaper, and has a "build your own package" vibe that's great for companies that are scaling or just getting started with customer service. If you're ok with having a few core features scattered between tabs and different apps, it can be a solid option for the long run. And its Freddy AI feature set has plenty of tools to solve daily issues, so your agents will never wonder what to do.

Zendesk is a better fit for larger companies with complex customer service needs. The AI features focus on optimization, helping you increase support quality without increasing your budget. The high-quality onboarding experience, better ticket collaboration, and access to more channels will all be welcome features for your team. They'll be spending less time figuring out what to do and more time getting it done.

Related reading:

• The best live chat apps for customer support

• The best customer service software

• How automation can help your customer support team

This article was originally published in December 2018 by Jeremy Moser and has also had contributions from Jessica Lau. The most recent update was in November 2024.