Top 10 Alternatives to Freshdesk: Comparison of Popular Help Desk Software Systems

Are you searching for a help desk software other than Freshdesk? Search no further. We did the digging so you don’t have to waste precious time doing research. From our own database of help desk solutions and product reviews, we’ve come up with this list of top 10 alternatives to Freshdesk that you can consider for your business.

While Freshdesk is one of the most comprehensive and capable customer support platforms around that can meet the demands of businesses of all sizes, it may not be cut out for you.

For instance, your CRM is built on another platform; having a help desk from the same vendor gives you a more seamless sales-service synergy. Or, you want deeper integration with Facebook and Twitter, some apps on our list do this better than Freshdesk. Should you want your help desk natively integrated into your website, a couple of vendors below have this capability that Freshdesk doesn’t.

We also made it easy for you to compare Freshdesk with the following apps by highlighting both solutions’ advantages of each other.

Your help desk or customer service team is one of the three vital customer-facing units of your organization, with the other two being your sales team and marketing team. It is important that sales, service and marketing are aligned, work in a coordinated manner, and have the same set of customer information. You’ll be better able to get new customers, serve existing customers, and drive revenue.

Did you know that the new battlefield for business is having a clear-cut customer experience strategy? That is a critical source of revenue growth for businesses as 86% of buyers are willing to pay extra to get a great customer experience. Each of your three customer-facing units has a stake in delivering that optimal experience expected by customers – from being wooed by personalized promotion, being treated as VIP during the point of sale, to having issues resolved quickly when they reach out afterward.

The efficiency of your help desk is gauged through KPIs and one of the key customer support metrics is average first response time (AFRT). The industry norm is that when customers reach out through social media channels, you should respond within an hour. When they use email, reply within 24 hours. When they call you through the phone, you must answer immediately. The benchmark for AFRT is that the shorter the response time, the better. Again that boils down to providing great customer experience, the opposite of which can have dire consequences.

Now that you know the importance of help desk and customer service solutions, it’s time to explore the leading platforms. In this article, we’ll detail the main features of Freshdesk (if you’re using it, you can skip this part). You’ll also get to know the top 10 Freshdesk alternatives including their key features, pricing details, and top integrations.  These will give you a better overview of the options that are available to your company.

What is Freshdesk?

Our review team currently rates this software as best in the customer support software category. Key Freshdesk features include AI-based lead scoring, self-service portals, smart automation, multiple SLA policies, integrated game mechanics, and multichannel capability.

Besides the unique features, you can also rely on the solution for standard tools such as a community platform, a knowledge base, and efficient help desk ticketing. The best part is you can easily convert your support emails into tickets and track them for an accurate and quick response. Plus, you can link forum queries to a ticket and vice versa, which helps you create streamlined answers to common issues and requests.

What are the main benefits of Freshdesk?

• Agents can collaborate on email and ensure no query is missed.
• You can label tickets quickly and accurately, and route them instantly to the right agent for fast resolution.
• You can automate all stages of your support process, from dispatching tickets to resolution.
• You can track customer posts about your product on social media and respond to issues on these channels.
• The app intuitively suggests answers from the knowledge base based on customer queries.
• Your customers can use the Freshdesk community to share advice, tips, ideas, and best practices among themselves.

If you are not impressed with what Freshdesk has to offer and look for more features, read on to learn about the top 10 Freshdesk alternatives that offer unique features of their own. We provide you with a fair amount of details about their main benefits so that you can find out if you should consider them instead of Freshdesk and vice versa.

Best Alternatives to Freshdesk

1. Zendesk

Zendesk is a top-tier cloud help desk system that offers enterprise-level features. It is built to provide you and your agents a complete set of tools for help desk, call center, customer support, chat, and knowledge base to enable unified customer engagement.

These allow you to deliver comprehensive support in every stage of the customer journey across all channels from a single platform.

Zendesk offers smart and user-friendly features such as task automation and notifications to streamline help desk and support processes. It is able to consolidate and organize all customer interactions and queries from any channel through pre-defined and context-based ticket responses, customer search history, and web widgets. You also get analytics, reports, and dashboards as well as customer satisfaction ratings to help you understand your customer support performance. You can read our Zendesk alternatives if you need to discover more help desk solutions.

Zendesk

Try out Zendesk with their free trial

VISIT WEBSITE FREE TRIAL

Why use Zendesk instead of Freshdesk?

• It provides an intelligent shared inbox for all customer concerns and issues coming from various channels.
• It is available via a free plan and more than a dozen paid plans to suit budgets, teams, and businesses of whatever size.
• It’s one of the easiest to use and most scalable help desk solutions in the market.
• It is built on Zendesk’s flexible CRM platform that lets you design and deliver personalized customer experiences.

Why use Freshdesk instead of Zendesk?

• It offers high-quality social media integration.
• With the app’s built-in phone channel you can set up a call center in minutes.
• Customers can use the support portal and feedback widget to communicate their issues.
• Customers can find answers on their own using the support forums and knowledge base.

2. SysAid

SysAid is a powerful, customizable, and scalable help desk solution for large organizations. It is the perfect combination of help desk and asset management tools.

The platform is modular, so you can start with one module and add more as needed or when your team gets the hang of it. It includes modules for incident and service request management, IT asset management, chat, mobile device management, mobile apps, and industry benchmarking. On top of its ITIL capabilities, it offers self-service, mobile device management, chat, password reset, mobile apps, and industry benchmarking.

SysAid works on both iOS and Android devices, allowing users to access it from anywhere. You may integrate it with Microsoft Teams, Zapier, TeamViewer, Google Apps, and many others. You can read our SysAid alternatives if you need to discover more help desk solutions.

SysAid

Try out SysAid with their free trial

Why use SysAid instead of Freshdesk?

• It allows multiple users to work on various issues from a single email, enabling fast work progress and flow.
• It can determine when to escalate support issues and how to go about it.
• Its ITIL-compliant incident management features enable service desk workers to log, manage, process, and report IT-related concerns.
• With its Lightweight Directory Access Protocol authentication, it doesn’t require a separate login for asset management.

Why use Freshdesk instead of SysAid?

• The app can be optimized for search engines to enable customers to find what they need from anywhere.
• You can automatically categorize, prioritize, and assign customer queries.
• There is depth in multi-channel features.
• You can manage all your support emails in one place.

3. Salesforce Service Cloud

Salesforce Service Cloud is built to help you resolve cases faster and more reliably. By connecting your entire business, you can provide better customer service, resolve issues across all channels, and increase customer satisfaction.

Besides, this software helps agents identify more relevant cross-sell and upsell opportunities by providing clear visibility into which products and services customers already own. You can easily track, manage, and resolve issues with a unified view of every case, including any Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

Salesforce Service Cloud includes a service console, case management, omnichannel routing, account and contact management, social media customer service, customer self-service, live chat, and more. You can use it with GSuite, QuickBooks, Slack, DocuSign, and many other apps. You can read our Salesforce Service Cloud alternatives if you need to discover more help desk solutions.

Salesforce Service Cloud

Try out Salesforce Service Cloud with their free trial

Why use Salesforce Service Cloud instead of Freshdesk?

• From any location or device, the unified customer record allows you to adapt communications and offers based on client interactions or service activities.
• The AI tool examines deep data and trends from any system and gives practical recommendations.
• Improves marketing and client contacts and manages field service activities.
• Its computer-telephony integration (CTI) helps agents handle customer phone-in calls faster, thus increasing productivity and customer satisfaction.

Why use Freshdesk instead of Salesforce Service Cloud?

• The app is easy to set up and you can add agents quickly.
• Freshdesk is also more scalable compared to Salesforce Essentials as it can support all business sizes.
• It has integrated game mechanics to boost agent performance.
• Lastly, it can compile customer feedback to help you improve overall operations.

4. Freshservice

Freshservice is a cloud-based fully Information Technology Infrastructure (ITIL)-compliant help desk solution that not only provides complete control and management of your IT department and its assets but also aligns your IT infrastructure to provide outstanding support for your customers.

Your business stands to gain a great deal from the solution’s outstanding incident management, SLA management, and knowledge management tools.

Freshservice is easy to set up and configure, and the addition of gamification capability will help your agents meet the pressure of their daily tasks with fun and better engagement instead. For more options on your help desk shopping, read our expert piece on Freshservice alternatives.

Freshservice

Try out Freshservice with their free trial

Why use Freshservice instead of Freshdesk?

• Its configuration management database (CMDB) is top-notch and covers all the assets in your organization. Any change in your company that affects your assets is updated instantly, for better assessment.
• It lets you isolate or connect problems to previous records, so you can do more in-depth analysis.
• Its knowledge base allows for automatic conversion of incidence as a helpful article to guide agents in similar cases, along with the ready answers for them to use.
• It easily lets team members work together on a ticket, or call on the help of other experts.

Why use Freshdesk instead of Freshservice?

• The app can be optimized for search engines to enable customers to find what they need from anywhere.
• You can automatically categorize, prioritize, and assign customer queries.
• It has in-depth multi-channel features.
• You can manage all your support emails in one place.

5. Zoho Desk

Businesses can use Zoho Desk to provide high-quality customer support by using tools that enhance agent productivity. Managers can utilize the reporting and analytics features to evaluate agent performances to find areas for improvement and to make smart business decisions.

The app also benefits customers who can find prompt and reliable support easily and quickly.

Why does Zoho Desk stand out among the crowd? It provides task automation, multiple support channels, and useful tools that companies can use to provide fast and responsive customer support. Employees from different units can collaborate using this app and provide customers with a unified and superior support experience. If you want more options, take a look at these top-rated Zoho Desk alternatives.

Zoho Desk

Try out Zoho Desk with their free trial

Why use Zoho Desk instead of Freshdesk?

• Zoho Desk offers help desk essentials and standard features.
• You can use a range of useful tools to build closer and more profitable relationships with customers.
• Businesses can choose either the ticketing system or call center functionality as needed.
• Your customers can use social networks such as Twitter and Facebook to communicate with you and get their issues resolved
• You can create content-rich knowledge bases that your customers can use for self-help.
• Small teams can use the free plan while the paid pricing packages are affordable even for startups.

Why use Freshdesk instead of Zoho Desk?

• You can automate tasks to enhance your support team’s productivity.
• FAQs can be answered with a canned response.
• You can automatically prioritize and assign tickets to the right agents.
• Finally, the supervisor can check the application for the day’s unresolved tickets and issue alerts to agents to follow up on them.

6. Wix Answers

Wix Answers is a single platform for all customer support channels. It is ideal for small support teams that handle a high volume of users and want to improve service quality. It is ideal for large organizations that need modern tools to manage complex support environments with thousands of daily customer inquiries and issues coming in from various channels.

Agents can also use the AI-powered reply box in Wix Answers to communicate with other agents or stakeholders. They can access a customer’s profile right on the same workspace. In turn, your agents ask fewer questions and can focus on actually answering clients’ concerns.

In addition, Wix Answers offers powerful automation tools that free up agents to focus on higher-value tasks. Besides, you can use it with other third-party apps like Salesforce, Shopify, and Slack. Overall, Wix Answers is ideal for anyone looking for a low-cost, scalable help desk solution. You can read our Wix Answers alternatives if you need to discover more help desk solutions.

Why use Wix Answers instead of Freshdesk?

• It has a timeline that shows agent-customer interactions in order, and agents can see the entire ticket’s history and context, helping customers faster.
• No more tabs, panels, or menus because Wix Answers has a one-tab workspace.
• The Wix Answers workspace includes an AI-powered reply box that can suggest articles and save responses for consistency.
• It has real-time dashboards and reports that managers can use to monitor their agents’ performance across all support channels.

Why use Freshdesk instead of Wix Answers?

• You can track your agents’ turnaround time for each query and identify trends to enhance your support.
• Plus, you can set up a single support system for all your products and brands.
• Support users and customers across different time zones and languages.
• Get a full overview of your support with drill-down tools to get to the bottom of issues.

7. Hubspot Service Hub

Hubspot Service Hub plus HubSpot CRM, Marketing, and Sales provides a complete suite of tools to help you engage, guide, and grow your customers. With it, you and your customer service teams can provide the best customer experience.

Service Hub is designed to help your service team respond faster to customer issues, provide personalized support, and gather vital feedback to better understand your customers. Thus, you bring satisfaction to your customers.

Service Hub also provides you with a complete front-office solution, with one customer view across sales, marketing, and service. The unified platform gives your marketing, sales, and service teams access to a single customer record for optimal support.

With this platform, your team can organize and systematize customer service. It will also show you how to use conversation to delight modern customers and turn them into brand advocates. You can read our Hubspot Service Hub alternatives if you need to discover more help desk solutions.

HubSpot Service Hub

Try out HubSpot Service Hub with their free trial

Why use Hubspot Service Hub instead of Freshdesk?

• Service Hub’s Conversations feature allows you to engage more customers with context.
• Service Hub analyzes ticket data and creates simple, well-structured articles ready to publish on your site, thus saving you time from answering the same questions.
• It analyses data to create comprehensive reports of what you need to know.

Why use Freshdesk instead of Hubspot Service Hub?

• Get customer feedback to evaluate your support performance
• Use gamification to motivate your agents and keep track of their performances.
• Multi-level SLAs ensure all tickets are addressed well in time.

8. Atera

Atera is an online remote monitoring and management (RMM) solution designed for use by IT professionals and IT managed services providers (MSP). It provides a centralized platform that brings together in one place IT monitoring and management processes as well as help desk, billing, reporting, and other business functions.

With the software’s remote support and monitoring capabilities, MSPs are able to manage and resolve customer IT issues anywhere and anytime.

Atera is accessible from mobile, tablet, and desktop computers and has the ability to monitor any number of workstations and servers. It is considered the first of its kind to combine RMM, professional services automation, and remote control functions in one solution. Among its other features are patch management, scripting, real-time notifications, and powerful integrations. Atera utilizes a technician-based pricing scheme that starts at $89/month. Need more solutions? Head over to our Atera alternatives page and check out other options.

Why use Atera instead of Freshdesk?

• It’s loaded with all the tools and features needed by MSP businesses.
• It offers a single dashboard operation for creating tickets, managing alerts, running scripts, connecting remotely, and more.
• It allows you to manage your technicians from your mobile device.
• It lets you manage and monitor an unlimited number of servers and workstations.

Why use Freshdesk instead of Atera?

• You can customize the app to promote your brand by adding the company logo and colors.
  Freshdesk offers cheaper pricing packages.
• It integrates easily with Google’s suite of products to enhance productivity.
• It integrates with more than 60 collaboration, cloud storage, CRM, ecommerce, and productivity applications.

9. NICE inContact CXone

NICE inContact CXone is a contact center software solution that enables businesses to transform customer and employee experiences. The app suite includes omnichannel routing, analytics, workforce optimization, automation, and artificial intelligence. A 360-degree view of customer interactions allows call center teams to be more productive and maximize their operations.

NICE inContact’s nationwide phone and internet network is carrier-grade with guaranteed voice quality in over 150 countries. To boot, you can streamline global operations and prepare for the future with future-proof technology.

NICE inContact helps small businesses modernize their systems to grow, perform better, and save money. Pricing models allow for flexible capacity expansion, so you can add or remove seats without paying hardware or maintenance fees. NICE inContact can be used in BPOs, government, education, finance, and healthcare. If you need more solutions, check out our NICE inContact CXone alternatives page and see other options.

NICE inContact CXone

Try out NICE inContact CXone with their free trial

Why use NICE inContact CXone instead of Freshdesk?

• Clients can expect crisp calls from NICE inContact.
• They offer a money-back guarantee if these standards are not met, which is unique in the industry.
• You get a comprehensive view of each customer interaction, so you can understand what drives customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction.
• With NICE inContact CXone Workforce Management software, you can maintain operational efficiency and promote schedule adherence.

Why use Freshdesk instead of NICE inContact CXone?

• It provides multiple support channels such as phone, email, chat, social media, and forum.
• Your agents can view queries quickly and identify the right response for each query.
• Plus, you can set priorities based on your service level agreements (SLAs).
• It offers enterprise-grade ticketing that is suitable for large organizations.

10. vtenext

vtenext is an open-source, end-to-end customer relationship management system that combines CRM and BPM capabilities. The platform manages marketing, sales, post-sales, and customer service activities, and because you can perform all these in one place, you can stay on top of your company’s processes and uncover ways to improve your systems.

Achieving a balance between profit and utility is difficult in business, but vtenext makes it simple. It has tools for evaluating product sales margins and profitability, thus helping you to make required adjustments to increase revenue and consumer base.

Since vtenext has a business process management engine, you can build and deploy transparent, automated, and repeatable business processes. It can cover every major activity in a business, from lead generation to support ticket administration.

You do not need coding skills to use the platform. In fact, non-programmers may easily traverse it and fully utilize its features. Even better, vtenext has native mobile apps for iOS and Android that include most of the cloud-based features and integrate with popular apps like Salesforce, Shopify, Gmail, Mailchimp, and Outlook. You can find more options on our vtenext alternatives page.

Why use vtenext instead of Freshdesk?

• You can manage and profile leads across channels with vtenext’s marketing features.
• It helps you to develop and manage sales processes, allowing you to collaborate with your team and follow up on customers.
• The program can also handle client complaints and refunds.
• It provides a forum where users can share how to best use the platform’s numerous capabilities.

Why use Freshdesk instead of vtenext?

• Freshdesk offers cheaper pricing packages.
• You can customize the app to promote your brand by adding your company logo and colors.
• It integrates with more than 60 collaboration, cloud storage, CRM, ecommerce, and productivity applications.
• Plus, it integrates easily with Google’s suite of products to enhance productivity.

Solid Choices for Your Help Desk Needs

If you have been paying attention to this presentation of alternatives to Freshdesk, you may have noticed that some of these applications, like Zendesk, are great for scaling to any type of organization, from small businesses with simple setups to larger corporations with more complex demands.

On the other hand, some like Wix Answers are good at providing support to your ecommerce concerns. Still others like Zendesk and ManageEngine ServiceDesk excel at integrating additional functions like IT asset management and project management.

Thus, your choice of application really depends on the unique needs of your business. Still, if you want to further explore more options, you can read our extensive listing of the 20 best help desk software solutions of the CURRENT YEAR.

When you’ve figured out the specific features that you want, avail of the free trial offered by these applications before you finalize your purchase. Why not start out with our top alternative product on this list?

By Christopher Robinson

Christopher Robinson is a senior productivity research analyst who specializes in optimizing online collaboration and project management using Scrum and agile approaches. In his work, he always emphasizes the need for distributed work training and the formation of efficient work habits. His work was mentioned in various business publications, including Entrepreneur and InfoQ. He’s a strong proponent of the GTD model. He has been cooperating with the FinancesOnline team for 5 years now, and his publications always focus on practical aspects of productivity tools that can have an actual, transformative impact on a company.