Zoho Desk: A feature-rich alternative to Freshdesk
Zoho Desk and Freshdesk are both powerful, feature-rich customer service software solutions. How do they stack up against each other? Here's a detailed comparison to help you make the best choice for your business and customers.
Sign Up For FreeDoes Freshdesk have all that you need?
Many Freshdesk customers have been disappointed by its complex configuration processes and inability to accommodate the growing needs of their businesses. With this in mind, it's understandable that many of them look for a Freshdesk alternative.
Here's what Zoho Desk offers your business:
Effortless integration
Faster deployment
Transparent pricing
Free migration
Simplified onboarding
increase in first contact resolution.
faster response time.
increase in CSAT score.
reduction in customer churn rate.
* Metrics reported by our customers through an internal survey.
What's the price difference?
Number of users: 25
Save $975 or up to 49% in savings by switching to the best help desk software.
Feature comparison
When looking for a Freshdesk alternative, you should strive for a solution that delivers robust features at a reasonable price. Let's take a look at how Freshdesk Support Desk and Zoho Desk compare in specific categories.
Freshdesk centralizes customer support interactions from multiple channels, like email, social media, and live chat. But other channels, like Instagram, telephony, and LINE can only be accessed from their bundle plan or as add-ons. And for the Telegram and WeChat integrations, you'll be dependent on marketplace extensions.
Zoho Desk helps you provide a complete omnichannel experience to your customers with built-in email, live chat, telephony, social media, web forms, and instant messaging channels. You can view interactions from all your channels in one place, and equip your agents to offer instant and personalized responses.
| Telephony | $ | |
| Web forms | ||
| Telegram | $ | |
| $ | ||
| LINE | $ |
Telephony
$
Live Chat
Web forms
Telegram
$
$
LINE
$
Freshdesk allows agents to manage tickets by creating views in the form of lists, but does not offer easy and automatic organization of tickets based on priority, due date, status, or CRM status. Even a basic feature for cloning tickets to create same ticket for different customers, or help new hires work on existing tickets, is only available as a marketplace extension.
Keeping in mind the needs of agents, Zoho Desk is designed to be user-friendly and accessible to all with its new UI, user preferences, and accessibility controls. Along with these, agents can organize and view tickets according to their needs and preferences with Work Modes, Table View, and customizable filter views. Ticket management is a lot easier with all the essential features built into Zoho Desk.
| Quick Ticket View (Peek View) | ||
| Work Modes | ||
| Table View | ||
| Snippets for Faster Response | ||
| Email templates in Reply Editor | ||
| Split Tickets | ||
| Clone Ticket | Marketplace extension |
Quick Ticket View
(Peek View)
Work Modes
Table View
Snippets for Faster Response
Email templates in Reply Editor
Split Tickets
Clone Ticket
Marketplace extension
While both apps offer similar self-service options, Zoho Desk has an edge over Freshdesk in this category. With Freshdesk's help widget, you can only provide customers with a contact form and solution articles. This limits your ability to offer self-service options to your customers and customize the widget to suit your brand requirement.
Meanwhile, Zoho Desk includes ASAP, a self-service widget that can be added to your website or help center, so customers can get all their questions answered in one convenient place. You get to include knowledge base, community, contact form, live chat, Guided Conversations, and the Zia bot, and further customize the tool to suit your brand needs.
| ASAP widget | ||
| Private knowledge base for agents | ||
| Knowledge base | ||
| Multilingual knowledge base | ||
| Community forums | ||
| Guided Conversations |
ASAP widget
Private knowledge base for agents
Multilingual knowledge base
Community forums
Guided Conversations
Both apps suggest articles to agents while they communicate with customers, but in Freshdesk, you can access advanced AI-based features, like sentiment predictions, reply assistant, and conversational AI, only if you've subscribed to their omnichannel offerings or purchased them as add-ons.
Zoho Desk's AI assistant, Zia, caters to the needs of all stakeholders. It assists agents in providing personalized service with Sentiment Analysis and Reply Assistant, helps them search for tickets effortlessly with the Auto-Tagging feature, and alerts managers about heavy traffic on incoming tickets with anomaly notifications.
| Reply Assistant | $ | |
| Sentiment Predictions | $ | |
| Ticket Auto-Tagging | ||
| Conversational AI | $ | |
| AI Dashboard | $ |
Reply Assistant
$
Sentiment Predictions
$
Ticket Auto-Tagging
Conversational AI
$
AI Dashboard
$
Both Zoho Desk and Freshdesk offer automation features, such as SLAs and Workflows. However, Freshdesk's time tracking feature is not as extensive and easy to use as Zoho Desk's. With Zoho Desk, you also get Blueprint, an exclusive feature that provides agents with a deeper understanding of process flows, so they can execute them seamlessly.
| Custom functions in workflows | ||
| Multi-level escalations | ||
| Customer-based SLA | ||
| Round-robin ticket assignment by load balancing | ||
| Activity time tracking |
Custom functions in workflows
Multi-level escalations
Customer-based SLA
Round-robin ticket assignment by load balancing
Activity time tracking
Both apps provide plenty of customization options, like custom fields and layouts, domain mapping, and multi-language support. With Freshdesk, you can customize the help center, reports, and dashboards—but not the help desk itself. Agents cannot move and position icons according to their preferences.
Zoho Desk gains a slight edge here by empowering you to customize both your help desk and self-service portal. With Zoho Desk, you can categorize your agents by department and team (instead of by a more general "group" in Freshdesk), and create department-specific layouts that capture information under different departments and team modules. This helps you effectively organize service activities in your help desk. Agents can even organize and rename modules in their accounts, switch to Night Mode, choose their font type and size, and set a preferred display layout.
| Custom tabs | ||
| Custom ticket status and grouping | ||
| Custom form fields and layouts | ||
| Field dependencies | ||
| Department-specific layouts | ||
| Teams | ||
| Night Mode | ||
| Display screen settings |
Custom tabs
Custom ticket status and grouping
Custom form fields and layouts
Field dependencies
Department-specific layouts
Teams
Night Mode
Display screen settings
Both apps include plenty of reporting features, but customization options are limited in Freshdesk. With Zoho Desk, you can keep an eye on every possible help desk metric and customize reports and dashboards according to your needs. But with Freshdesk, you can only create 15 custom dashboards, and cannot export reports in HTML, Excel, or CSV format—just PDF. If you want a report on the performance of Freshdesk's Freddy bot, you'll need another app. To review the performance of agents and the flow of tickets across all channels in Freshdesk, you'll need to subscribe to their Omnichannel edition.
| SLA dashboards | ||
| Agent Dashboard | ||
| Export reports to CSV, XLS, or HTML | ||
| Custom dashboards | ||
| Response, Resolution, and FCR Dashboards | ||
| Radar mobile app (for managers) for iOS and Android |
SLA dashboards
Agent Dashboard
Export reports to CSV, XLS, or HTML
Custom dashboards
Response, Resolution, and FCR Dashboards
Radar mobile app (for managers) for iOS and Android
Pricing comparison
| Free | $0 - |
| Standard | $14 |
| Professional | $23 49 |
| Enterprise | $40 99 |
| Free | $0 |
| Growth | $15 |
| Pro | $49 49 |
| Enterprise | $79 79 |
Free
Free
$ 00
-
Standard
Growth
$ 14 75
15
Professional
Pro
$ 23 49
$49 75
Enterprise
Enterprise
$ 40 99
$79 150
The simplicity of Zoho Desk's UI has really helped my digital transformation team to reduce the number of hours spent, from 5 to only 2.5 or 3 hours, in training and onboarding the new agents/users of the help desk technology.
Kushagra SahniChief of Staff, Centilytics
The average response time for agents before Zoho Desk was 7 hours, but with the process in place, the agents are now responding to each ticket within 3 hours.
Jim FrancisSystems Manager, Land Title Guarantee Company
We analysed other products on the market, but Zoho Desk blended into our organization structure better than anything else.
Swaroop Naik Senior Manager, Software Development, Mercedes Benz
Switch to Zoho Desk effortlessly
On-demand webinars
Learn to connect with customers and strengthen your support operations with our informative how-to webinars.
Learn more
Hassle-free migration
We provide you with all the assistance you need to migrate your data seamlessly.
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24/7 support
Our documented and on-demand support helps you get fast and comprehensive answers to all your questions.
Learn moreMake the switch to Zoho Desk today!
Frequently asked questions about Freshdesk alternatives
A Freshdesk alternative should not only have a robust feature set, but should also be easy to use, scalable, affordable, and customizable. That's why Zoho Desk stands out as a reliable and seamless alternative to Freshdesk.
There are multiple players in the market like, Zendesk, and Salesforce Service Cloud, but Zoho Desk offers a robust feature set at a competitive price making it the most reliable and feature-rich alternative to Freshdesk.
Hidden costs in Freshdesk extend beyond licensing fees. Although Freshdesk offers multiple Support Desk editions, but functionalities like telephony, Instagram, LINE, and advanced AI are only available as add-ons or can be accessed from their bundle plans.
In customer service, lost time equals lost opportunities for making customers happy. Freshdesk customers have often complained about technical glitches, delays, and breakages in the system, resulting in a cluttered interface and poor connectivity with customers. Freshdesk offers multiple apps to work with, meaning your agents must familiarize themselves with "similar but different" interfaces, increasing the learning curve.
These factors can affect the quality of your customer service operations, proving to be more expensive than the licensing fee.
Freshdesk offers multiple apps that open in separate tabs, affecting the centralization of customer service requests and increasing agents' work when searching for essential details. The telephony, live chat, and ticketing interfaces all differ. Plus, Freshdesk's complete omnichannel offerings need to be purchased as add-ons.
Meanwhile, in Zoho Desk, all your customers' requests from email, live chat, telephony, social media, web forms, and instant messaging channels can be viewed in one place, meaning your agents are better equipped to offer instant and personalized responses.
Compare other help desk solutions
with Zoho Desk
All prices shown here are in USD. The names and logos for Zoho are trademarks of Zoho Corp. All other trademarks, brand names, or product names
belong to their respective holders. Comparison information as of 03.04.2023