Freshdesk is a good Zendesk alternative with affordable pricing plans and so many features. The best part is it supports a free plan.
Thrilled, huh?
I know.
But sometimes, just because you see something, doesn’t mean it’s happening.
So, let’s talk about Freshdesk pricing plans today.
I’ll dive deeper into Freshdesk pricing to give you a detailed overview of how much it costs. Once you’re done reading, you should be able to easily make up your mind if it’s the right tool for you.
Beware: After reading this review, you might decide that Freshdesk isn’t even the right help desk software for you. There are many great Freshdesk alternatives out there, including Gorgias, which offers many of the same features that are great for eCommerce businesses, at a reasonable price without any hidden costs. What you need is what you pay for.
TL;DR An overview of Freshdesk pricing structure
Freshdesk currently offers 5 plans: Sprout (Free), Blossom, Garden, Estate, and Forest.
It uses a combination of feature-based pricing and per user (agent) pricing models, meaning:
- The higher plan you use, the more Freshdesk features you unlock
- The more agents in your team, the more you have to pay
That means even though Freshdesk’s pricing starts off cheap but gets really costly as your needs and your team increases. Read on to learn more.
Deep dive into Freshdesk pricing plans
Make sure you read this section carefully before deciding to purchase a Freshdesk plan.
Freshdesk free plan—What’s the catch?
If you’re brand new to running a business or you’re looking for a “budget” Zendesk, it can be very tempting to sign up for Freshdesk’s free plan.
After all, Freshdesk offers some features at no cost, such as…
- Unlimited agents, ease of use.
- Ticket management: Email ticketing, automatic email notifications, merge tickets, ticket exports, ticket activities, set priority, set status, outbound email.
- Agent productivity: Shared canned responses, public and private notes in tickets, dynamic placeholders, to-dos, tags, and quick actions.
- Workflows automation: Automations that run on ticket creation.
- Customizations: Public portal customization
- Self service portal: Knowledge base, private knowledge base, FAQs, and email to knowledge base.
- Social support: Basic Twitter and Facebook channels.
- Mobile apps for Android and iOS.
- Reporting and analytics: Default dashboard and ticket volume trends.
- Customer support: 24/7 email support, knowledge base, and community forums.
If you once paid Zendesk a ton of money to get all of these features, Freshdesk’s free plan sounds great.
But there’s always a catch.
Before you blindly choose Freshdesk based on costs, you need to consider the following:
1. Freshdesk’s free plan isn’t very useful as you might think
Because the free plan lacks many fundamental features of a typical ticketing system. For example, it doesn’t support:
- In-app notifications
- Split tickets (it allows you to merge tickets but not split!!!)
- Ticket templates
- Sort ticket conversations
- Full Twitter and Facebook support channels (it gives you basic Twitter and Facebook support channels but doesn’t explain how basic)
- Metrics like satisfaction, ticket lifecycle, or team performance
As a result, you’ll quickly upgrade from Freskdesk’s free plan to a paid one if you actually want to manage support tickets effectively and improve your support team performance.
2. Freshdesk’s free plan offers limited support
For any mission-critical business tool, you have to have phone or chat support. But if you go for Freshdesk’s free plan, you can only:
- Read (general) knowledge base (which may not include answers to your questions)
- Or ask questions on community forums (where sometimes you may get different information, making you more confused)
- Or send a support email (you know you’ll have to wait, right? How frustrating it is!)
When something goes wrong, you want to be able to talk to a human. But unless you use at least the Blossom plan, which starts at $15/agent/month, you can’t contact Freshdesk by phone.
If the above hasn’t scared you off, then let’s move to Freshdesk’s paid pricing plans.
Freshdesk’s Blossom plan
Price: $15/agent/month, billed annually
What you get:
- Everything in the free plan
- Ticket management: Advanced Freshchat and Freshcaller integration, multiple shared inboxes, in-app smart notifications, split tickets, sort ticket conversations
- Agent productivity: Filtered search, custom ticket views, agent collision detection
- Business rules management through Service Level Agreements
- Self-service: Auto-suggest solutions
- Help widget: Embeddable contact form, embeddable solution articles
- Social support: Advanced Facebook and Twitter support channels
- Reporting and analytics: Help-desk in-depth report
- Ticket forms: Custom ticket field, custom status
- Customer support: Phone support during business hours
What you don’t get:
- Chat support
- Ticket template
- Satisfaction metrics
- Omnichannel features
Freshdesk’s Garden plan
Price: $35/agent/month, billed annually
What you get:
- Everything in the Blossom plan
- Time tracking
- Customer satisfaction, CSAT surveys
- Performance reports
- Multilingual knowledge base
- Email marketing and CRM apps, custom apps, and more
What you don’t get:
- Chat support
- Omnichannel features
- Customizable agent roles
- HIPAA compliance
Freshdesk’s Estate plan
Price: $49/agent/month, billed annually
What you get:
- Everything in the Garden plan
- Chat support
- Round-robin routing
- Custom roles
- Custom reports and dashboards
- Custom segments
- Dynamic ticket forms
- Round robin ticket assignment
What you don’t get:
- Chatbot
- HIPAA compliance
Freshdesk’s Forest plan
Price: $99/agent/month, billed annually
What you get:
- Everything in the Estate plan
- Chatbot
- Sandbox
- HIPAA compliance
- IP whitelisting
- Full SLA management: Escalation emails for SLA violation
The only line item worth $99 on this list is a chatbot, which comes for the basic plan on practically many other helpdesk software out there.
Is Freshdesk a (bettter) version of Zendesk?
The answer is yes.
Compared with Zendesk, Freshdesk has a user-friendly interface, more affordable pricing plans, and a wide range of features.
And the most interesting part is both of these leading customer service platforms share the same drawbacks:
- Some features are available only in the form of paid add-ons. For example, with Freshdesk, you have to pay extra money to purchase Freddy AI if you want to use a chatbot. A worthy note that Freddy AI also follows a feature-based pricing model.
- Their pricing plans don’t provide the same level of support for all plans. As explained above, you have to upgrade your plan to the Garden plan if you want to get phone support from Freshdesk’s customer support team.
So, who should use Freshdesk and Zendesk?
Here’s a guide for you:
If you’re running a large organization or an enterprise, Zendesk might be a perfect solution. Meanwhile, Freshdesk is better if you’re a small business or startup owner.
What if you’re running an online business?
Then, both Zendesk and Freshdesk aren’t for you.
Meet Gorgias—a dedicated ticketing system for online businesses
Unlike Freshdesk and Zendesk, we don’t give you a massive list of features which we know, as an eCommerce merchant, you might not need many of them.
We have laser-like focus on your customer service pain points and try to develop the dedicated customer support software that helps you overcome those challenges.
Thousands of online business owners have switched from Freshdesk to Gorgias. Here are the over-the-top amazing features that we’re humbly proud to introduce to you:
- World-class customer support team: Our team members live in different time zones, which helps us deliver the best customer support experience possible.
- Feature-rich ticket management: Create new tickets, assign/reply/resolve them. Add tags to manage your tickets with ease.
- Multi-channel support: Phone, SMS, live chat, email, social media (Facebook Messenger, Instagram, etc.).
- Powerful automation: Use macros, automation rules, customer sentiments, and tags to reduce repetitive tasks. You don’t need to waste a lot of time doing repetitive tasks anymore. Also, with macro variables, you can add custom variables from your ecommerce platform into any message.
- Real-time dashboard and reporting: Response time, resolution time, tickets created, tickets closed, and more. Also, revenue statistics available.
- Affordable pricing plans: Our plans are consistent with the size of your store, starting at $10/month.
- Ecommerce-focused integrations: Shopify, Magento, Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, Yotpo, Smile.io, to name a few.
Ready to switch?
Join our buyout program to get full access to Gorgias at no cost and prepare for your most profitable BFCM ever.
We’re more than happy to serve you!
