Zendesk vs. Freshdesk

Zendesk features Agent Workspace, an interface with a unified view that puts data from all channels in one place. This single view displays the customer journey, including conversation history, previous interactions, past orders, resolved support tickets, and more. Your agents will have the customer context and information they need to resolve issues faster and provide personalized support.

Freshdesk offers different interfaces for each channel, like chat, phone, and ticketing. This creates a disjointed experience for agents, causing them to toggle between apps, tabs, and systems to find the information or context they need to serve the customer.

To effectively provide the best customer experience, you need a flexible, agile system that integrates with various tools. Though Freshdesk offers a variety of out-of-the-box integrations and add-ons for agent productivity, time-tracking, and chatbots, Zendesk offers a robust library of customizable integration options that set up quickly, are easy to use, and provide more flexibility.

Our dedicated product management and engineering teams build and continuously optimize integrations with systems like Slack, Jira, Salesforce, HubSpot, and more. This allows you to focus your time and money on your customers instead of worrying about the technical stuff.

Our CX Trends Report shows that 37 percent of customers become angry, frustrated, or stressed when they can’t complete simple tasks. A low-quality self-service experience also leads to a higher ticket volume and more outreach to customer support teams, making customer service less efficient.

Both Zendesk and Freshdesk offer an array of self-service tools like help center articles, community forums, and client portals where customers can conveniently find the answers they need on their own time. Each software brand also allows you to create knowledge bases for internal and external customers.

Features from Zendesk, like Content Cues, automatically identify areas where you can improve your help center and knowledge base, so your team of experts can keep information up-to-date. AI and chatbots can offer chat support with canned responses, proactively suggest answers to FAQs, or surface help center articles to deflect the customer from creating a ticket for a common issue. With Freshdesk, however, support agents must manually sift through the help center to find outdated information and make improvements.

Customization options help keep your business in sync. Zendesk offers a flexible platform with various customization options so you can adapt to evolving customer or business needs. Our code and no-code functionality makes it easy to customize everything from reporting dashboards and your agent interface to adding your brand logo, colors, and themes to your client portal.

Unlike other solutions on the market, Zendesk AI is pre-trained and tailor made for CX, which means greater accuracy, easier setup and maintenance, and more cost-savings. Zendesk AI is also quick to implement with little to no technical support. Businesses get robust AI capabilities–agent assistance and productivity tools, intelligent workflows, machine learning predictions, and advanced bots–all from one platform, and ready to go from day one.

While Freshdesk offers AI features that are easy to implement, most don’t include pre-trained models tailored for CX. As a result, Freshdesk customers have to rely on manual setup to ensure the accuracy of their bots.

“The daily challenges related to using [Freshdesk’s] new UI made it very clear that we needed to prioritize exploring other platforms… [Freshdesk] apps didn’t really work as expected, and the product team couldn’t get the support it needed to troubleshoot them.”

Katerina Graham

Support Operations

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“When we were on Freshdesk, an agent would have eight, nine, 10 different tabs open—DHL, Australia Post, Magento, all these different tabs.”

Paul Waddy

Head of Operations

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Ola used Freshdesk for customer support, but by 2015, the tool didn’t offer the advanced configuration, scalability, or reporting options the company needed. Ola chose Zendesk because it was quick to deploy and easy to configure. Four teams at Ola now use Zendesk.

Sankar Rao Amburkar

Director of Products

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Although Zendesk has a higher price, your total cost of savings and faster return on investment make switching to Zendesk worth it. Zendesk reduces implementation and training costs with our fast setup and ease of use. This allows your teams to keep serving customers without any downtime. Our platform supports businesses of all sizes and provides tools that allow you to serve more customers at scale.

When comparing the customer support software features of Freshdesk vs. Zendesk, understand that while Freshdesk may appear to offer more, Zendesk prioritizes building best practice solutions over disconnected features and quality over quantity.

Freshdesk is great for the basics—but Zendesk boasts omnichannel support, so you can meet your customers where they are on the messaging platforms they prefer. Our Agent Workspace gives agents a single view of the customer journey with all the data and context needed to provide a top-tier customer experience. Custom dashboards, robust self-service options, and AI chatbots make the employee experience great, too.

At Zendesk, we hang our hat on making things easier for the agent and the customer. Our dedicated account and success teams are eager to jump in and streamline the process—simplifying anything you may need help with.

Zendesk is a robust, reliable, and scalable solution backed by experts and built to last. It’s an open and flexible platform that sets up quickly, is user-friendly, and has customization and integration options that fit companies of all shapes and sizes—from small businesses to enterprises. It can grow with your business as it scales, and it enables you to create an amazing experience for all your customers. You’ll get the best return on your investment.

Zendesk offers a free 14-day trial where you can try out the entire suite of features. The best part? Once you decide to switch platforms and sign up for a plan, your customer profile data is already there—so you can seamlessly pick up right where you left off at the end of the trial.