Freshservice vs Freshdesk Comparison 2023: Which Is Best?

Welcome to the battle of help desk customer service systems. Today, we have two related tools: Freshservice vs Freshdesk.

Both of these platforms are made by Freshworks, which also makes Freshsales, Freshmarketer, and Freshchat. As you will soon read below, one of our two competing apps is intended more for IT purposes, while the other is more general customer service and support. Can you guess which is which? If not, that’s fine; just keep reading.

What is the difference between Freshservice and Freshdesk?

The main difference between Freshdesk and Freshservice is that Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer service platform that covers everything from help desk ticketing, self-service, and productivity, while Freshservice is a cloud-based IT service management tool, meaning it is geared more specifically toward information technology issues.

Your typical Freshdesk review often praises this platform for its ability to offer top-tier customer support for a range of problems and issues, not necessarily all related to IT issues. 

For example, Freshdesk could be used to run a store, whether it is online or on the street, helping customers with purchasing, returns, and other problems. It is well suited for managing customer expectations, particularly for service-level agreements.

Most of the time, a Freshservice review is quite positive. They discuss the need for ITIL, or the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, which is a system for keeping up with IT best practices. Freshservice brings together the best in both ITIL and ITSM, which stands for IT service management.

One thing to note is that it is possible to use both Freshdesk and Freshservice because the parent brand, Freshworks, makes it easy for collaboration across both platforms. This is an ideal pairing if you have a regular business that also uses a lot of IT systems.

Freshservice vs Freshdesk comparison chart

Let's have a gander at this table to summarize the ratings for each category in the Freshdesk vs Freshservice contest.

Freshservice vs Freshdesk Pricing

Freshservice offers a range of pricing plans and extras. The Starter plan is $19 per agent per month billed annually and $29 billed monthly. The Growth plan is $49 per agent per month billed annually, and $59 billed monthly. 

The Pro plan, which is the most popular, costs $95 per agent per month billed annually, and $115 billed monthly. And last, the Enterprise plan is $119 per agent per month billed annually, and $145 billed monthly. Freshservice also offers add-ons for additional fees. 

Freshdesk offers three paid plans — Growth, Pro and Enterprise. 

Growth costs $15 per agent per month billed annually, and $18 billed monthly. Then there is Pro at $49 per agent per month billed annually, and $59 billed monthly. Finally you got Enterprise for $79 per agent per month billed annually, and $95 billed monthly.  

Winner: Freshservice

Though this is a hard category to make a straight one-for-one comparison because both products have slightly different purposes, ultimately, we give the number one spot for pricing to Freshservice, as there is slightly more choice in pricing packages and add-ons whereas Freshdesk offers fewer options. 
 

Freshdesk vs Freshservice Free versions

Freshdesk offers a free version of its platform for customer ticketing, self-service and help desk business tools. It is good for up to 10 customer support agents. The free Freshdesk package comes with basic ticketing, a knowledge base tool, some reporting and analytics features, team collaboration tools, and 24/7 email support.

Freshservice, on the other hand, does not offer any free version of its ITSM platform. Although its cheapest package, the Starter plan, is relatively on the more affordable side when it comes to full IT management tools.

Winner: Freshdesk

Whereas Freshservice always comes with some price tag, Freshdesk has that sweet free package option, which you can't compare when it comes to the category of free help desk or service management software solutions.
 

Customer support

Freshservice ITSM has similar support for almost all their packages. All users get access to 24/7 email support as well as 24/5 phone support. The Pro and Enterprise plans offer 24/7 chat support as well.

Freshdesk's customer service options for its users are quite similar to Freshservice. All users on all plans get 24/7 email support, even the free plan users. 

The Growth plan gets you 24/5 phone support. At the Pro and Enterprise plan level there is 24/5 chat support, which is two days a week fewer than Freshservice's Enterprise plan chat support.   

Winner: Freshservice

Even though fewer of your team members will be using Freshservice, as it is mostly for IT reps and not for general customer issues, Freshservice wins this category for having superior customer support times.
 

Knowledgebase & learning

Freshdesk has some knowledge base and learning tools for all its users. The knowledge base is well organized and ar

ticles are categorized by topic like getting started, email channel and admin configuration. There is also a community forum, a video library of tutorials, and an FAQ with an easy-to-navigate dashboard.

As for self-service support with Freshservice, it all begins with a documentation center where you can access onboarding tips, guides, video tutorials and the API docs. Similar to Freshdesk, users can log in to the community forum for more tips and help.

Winner: Freshdesk

The category of knowledge base, self-service, and learning is a tight one, and both systems offer very similar tools. But, in the end, Freshdesk is the winner here.

Freshdesk vs Freshservice features & functionality

Time to do a side-by-side comparison of all the following tools and features. The ones we will look at today are:

• Ticketing system

• Email tools

• Basic ITSM

• Self-service portal

• Asset management

• Advanced service management

• Surveys

• Analytics and reporting

• Security

• Integrations
   

Freshservice or Freshdesk for ease of use?

As both Freshdesk and Freshservice are part of the same Freshworks family of apps, one could expect their user-friendliness levels to be on par with each other. This is mostly the case when comparing the two platforms for ease of use with customer support software. 

However, as Freshdesk is more for the common customer service rep, and Freshservice serves the needs of IT help desk tools as part of a larger service desk solution for IT support requests, the difference in ease of use makes itself known.

Winner: Freshdesk

Unless you are an experienced IT specialist, Freshdesk's interface, dashboard, and tools will feel easier to learn and use right out of the box than Freshservice. However, in the end, all Freshworks business SaaS is easy to use, with enough guides to get you started with a minimal learning curve.
 

Ticketing systems

A ticketing system is how you turn customer requests into support tasks to be handled by reps and agents, whether for IT or other more general customer service solutions. 

Freshdesk is truly a ticketing system platform with tools to easily create tickets, merge tickets, export tickets, monitor ticket activity, and track ticket status.

As Freshservice is more strictly IT, the ticketing system is more specific for these purposes. Most ticketing tools are part of the greater set of automation features, like the round-robin ticket assignment tool to assign agents to issues randomly. 

You can also add public notes and private notes to tickets as part of worker productivity and get ticket field predictions with their Freddy AI.

Winner: Freshdesk

To streamline tickets from different sources, you simply have more robust ticket features with Freshdesk than with Freshservice. So when agents are trying to help users, a top ticket management system comes in handy.
 

Email tools

Email is one of the main ways users reach out to companies for customer support purposes. Freshservice allows users to contact them via email. When it comes to IT operations management, you can embed an email widget on incident pages. 

Freshdesk also allows users to reach out with email, and you can use a shared team inbox feature. There is also email ticketing, meaning reps can create new tickets directly from those email requests. Automate email notifications to help agents never miss an issue. 

You can also use Freshdesk to send outbound emails from inside their platform, and the same goes for creating new articles from emails into the knowledge base. Custom email servers are also on offer here.

Winner: Freshdesk

While both Freshservice and Freshdesk emphasize the importance of multiple support channels for a great customer experience, with emailing being one of the key ones, Freshdesk lets its reps do more with emails outside of pure IT issues.
 

Basic ITSM

As already stated, ITSM is IT service management, and for Freshservice, this is the main purpose. Freshservice has a range of tools for ITSM and we will likely go into some of them in more detail below. 

For IT-related issues, you get multi-channel support communication to unify multiple ways for users to get in touch, self-service, knowledge management, incident management and SLAs, or service level agreements, with multiple SLAs and timezones, among others.

Freshdesk does not have any features that are specifically geared to ITSM, although it is possible to use Freshdesk for IT customer service. 

Winner: Freshservice

The category of ITSM is really a simple one, as Freshservice is designed to help users with this set of tools, and Freshdesk is not.
 

Self-service portal

Freshservice lets you create a self-service portal. One of its tools allows users also to see a service catalog. This streamlines the process by which a user can request support on their own. 

Freshdesk has more knowledge management and self-service portal features. These include a way to automate the solution suggestion process so that when users look things up, there will be intelligently selected articles or recommendations. 

Other FAQ tools make it easy to get answers to common issues and questions. 

Winner: Freshdesk

Running your customer support operations and leveraging self-service portals is a great way to increase productivity, and Freshdesk is the best tool for this purpose, especially as the system automatically improves the level of service offered to users who want to help themselves.
 

Freshdesk vs Freshservice for asset management

IT asset management, or ITAM, is clearly more inside the wheelhouse of Freshservice. 

They offer ITAM features like IT inventory management, asset lifecycle management, purchase order (PO) management, and more advanced tools like asset relationship mapping, software asset tools, QR and asset barcode scanners, and contract management.

On the other hand, Freshdesk is nowhere near as active as Freshservice is when it comes to ITAM, and this should be no surprise since anything IT-related is less a part of Freshdesk's toolkit.

Winner: Freshservice

Here is another category where Freshservice's emphasis on all things IT related means it is the clear winner of this asset management category.
 

Freshservice vs Freshdesk for Advanced service management

While we have already looked at some basic ITSM tools, like multi-channel support and SLA policy features, here let us look at some more advanced features.

Freshservice offers problem management, which helps businesses get through disruptions. They also have a release management tool, and this is good for tracking the building and testing of new plans throughout the support lifecycle. 

Finally, there is change management, which is useful for monitoring planned and needed changes, including change requests.  

Winner: Freshservice

Freshdesk does not really have any features to help with problem release or change management to the extent that Freshservice makes these tools a large part of their platform.
 

Surveys

Freshdesk is a fantastic customer service system when it comes to satisfaction surveys. This software tool for surveys includes standard CSAT surveys, and these are highly customizable too. It also allows you to manage surveys for customers across the globe with multilingual satisfaction surveys. 

As for the difference between the two platforms when it comes to surveys, Freshservice, unlike Freshdesk, only offers the basic CSAT survey option, though it is likely you can customize it a bit as well. 

Winner: Freshdesk

Keeping your customers happy is one of businesses best practices, and CSATs, as well as other surveys are a great way to achieve this. Freshdesk's customer satisfaction survey tools offer more options than Freshservice.
 

Freshservice vs Freshdesk for Analytics and reporting

No matter what Freshservice plan you take, everyone gets an analytics starter package. 

They also offer a more advanced pro analytics tool as well as a business team dashboard feature for customizable reports, especially at the level of enterprise reporting. 

Whereas Freshservice has analytics and reporting that are good but basic, Freshdesk pulls out all the stops. 

There is a default reporting dashboard you can customize, in-depth reporting for your help desk, great metrics like ticket volume trends, timesheet summaries, agent and group performance levels, and ticket lifecycle analytics. 

Freshdesk has more tools, all to help your business team make informed decisions about their customer service solution.

Winner: Freshdesk

The difference between Freshdesk vs Freshservice is something you should pay attention to when it comes to analytics and reporting, especially for customization. Freshdesk is better.
 

Security

Freshdesk does decent advanced security. There are SSL certificates, you get single sign-on tools, including with SAML, and they use custom email servers for better protection. You can also use advanced password policies for agents as well as for customers.

Meanwhile, over at Freshservice, the security features for their help desk and IT support protocol are quite similar. 

There is GDPR compliance, custom SSL certification, domain restrictions, custom domain mapping, custom mailboxes, and advanced access controls to create custom roles for each rep on your team. 

Customizable agent roles are ideal for managing in-house IT support in the most secure manner.

Winner: Tie

The category of security ends up being a tie between Freshservice vs Freshdesk. Regarding cloud-based customer support, any Freshworks product guarantees a high level of safety, privacy, and security, regardless of whether it is for software or hardware systems.
 

Integrations

When it comes to integrations, both Freshdesk and Freshservice access their integration library through the greater Freshworks platform, though there are some differences in what is offered. 

Freshservice has native integration with many useful SaaS, like service bots from Slack or Microsoft Teams. There is also Google Calendar, Zoho Assist and an API rate limit tool.

Freshdesk's integrations through the Freshworks library are quite huge. You got WhatsApp, Slack, Shopify, and Mailchimp. There are also integrations for WordPress, Stripe, Zoho CRM, Salesforce, WooCommerce, and Squarespace.

Winner: Freshdesk

This is a close category to judge, but in the end, Freshdesk does come out first when it comes to customer service integrations.

A note on Freshservice Freshdesk integration 

But what about a Freshdesk Freshservice integration? Is that a thing? Well, as both of these SaaS are made by the same brand, that is Freshworks, you bet there is a great native integration between the two. 

You can really streamline the process of managing your IT tickets, SLAs and other help desk customer support via the Freshservice Freshdesk integration within an organization that uses both platforms.

Is Freshservice better than Freshdesk? Our conclusion

Now that you have gotten to the end of Freshdesk vs Freshservice battle, it should be quite clear which system is best for you. 

If you are simply looking for an IT support system that knows the ins and outs of ITSM and ITIL, then look no further than Freshservice. In this case, the two are really not very comparable. 

However, if you want a general customer support help desk and ticketing software, then go for Freshdesk; you won't be disappointed. 

Of course, there are plenty of other service desk software options out there if you are not that into the Freshworks brand, so feel free to peruse the reviews, do the free trials, and think for yourself for once.