With one caveat—it's geared toward serving external customers as opposed to being deployed in an IT department—Freshdesk is a highly effective help desk platform.
Starting at just $15 per user per month, this Editors' Choice recipient has just about everything a small to midsize business (SMB) needs to get a better handle on resolving ticket items as they appear in the system, with the added bonus of a free version so you can try its features before taking the plunge with one of its four paid plans.
Unlike tools such as Freshservice and ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, which are aimed at enterprise help desks serving internal customers (with an eye toward change management and other components of the ITIL framework), Freshdesk is focused on processing service tickets from external customers while providing agents with information and resources in a speedy and easy-to-find manner.
Other products in this category include Cayzu and Zendesk Support as well as our Editors' Choice winner HappyFox.
Pricing and Plans
Along with the free plan (Sprout), Freshdesk comes in four paid editions: Blossom, Garden, Estate, and Forest.
Sprout is free for unlimited agents who can manage tickets submitted via phone (through integration with Freshcaller), email, or social media (Facebook and Twitter).
It includes basic automation features and access to both an internal and public knowledge base.
For $15 per agent per month, Blossom adds collision detection and traffic cop functionality (preventing multiple agents responding on the same ticket, or an agent responding without seeing updated ticket information); more advanced automation and workflow features; custom ticket views; basic SLA management; and integrations through the app gallery.
Garden, priced at $29 per agent per month, adds time tracking, ticket templates, customer satisfaction surveys, canned forms, and escalation emails for SLA violations, as well as customer journey and customer 360 (tools which let you see within the context of a ticket which knowledge base articles the customer has viewed, or information about the customer captured in previous tickets).
Estate is $49 per agent per month.
It supports customized customer-satisfaction surveys, advanced ticket assignment methods (round-robin and load-balanced), shared ticket ownership, multiple SLA policies, dynamic ticket forms, support for multiple products, and Freddy (Freshdesk's AI engine).
Finally, Forest delivers advanced features such as HIPAA compliance and IP whitelists for both customers and agents for $109 per agent per month.
All pricing levels also have access to mobile apps for iOS and Android.
Freshdesk is a bit cheaper than HappyFox, which offers feature-rich plans ranging from $29 to $89 per agent per month.
Unfortunately, HappyFox doesn't have a free plan, so you'll need to make your purchase decision based on its free trial (which you can get only after booking a 30-minute demo).
Cayzu's affordable plans start at $4 and top out at $39 per agent per month.
Zoho Desk takes the cake in terms of affordability, with a free plan for up to three agents plus plans priced at $12 and $25 per agent per month.
Interface and Unique Features
When you first log into Freshdesk, you'll notice a long, left-hand rail menu in an inviting blue-gray color.
Here you'll find access to your dashboard, tickets, contacts and companies, social network setup, knowledge base, user forums, reports, and any other modules your administrator sets up later (such as gamification).
The main window is your reporting dashboard, which is filterable by products and working groups such as product management or sales.
Within the dashboard, you'll be able to see the number of unresolved tickets, overdue tickets, tickets due today, total open tickets, tickets on hold, and unassigned tickets, among other metrics.
You'll also receive a quick view of today's trends in a clickable graph that lets you drill down into specific metrics such as average response.
Dashboards are customizable with widgets that range from score cards and bar charts to customer satisfaction statistics and trend data for SLA compliance.
Each widget type can be customized based on group, status, or category where applicable.
From any page in the software, you can create new emails, contacts, and companies simply by clicking the tab at the top right of the screen.
As you'd find on Facebook or Twitter, there's a Notification icon which indicates whether anything has happened pertaining to your specific helpdesk ecosystem (e.g., a ticket has been assigned to you or is now overdue).
You can customize your notifications so you don't get bombarded by pings; however, there are only seven different notification types so you won't be able to get too creative.
Desktop notifications may also be enabled for scenarios where you don't have the Freshdesk tab visible at all times.
Support reps will enjoy being able to toggle live chat on and off while they're in the system.
This means agents can accept chats from customers on the company's website while also managing data entry or resolving more complex ticketing issues with colleagues.
Nearly everyone will appreciate the app's gamification feature, Freshdesk Arcade, which sets Freshdesk apart from every other help desk competitor in the roundup.
Within Arcade, you'll find leaderboards for ticket resolution and badges for top performers and agents who accomplish unique tasks.
Arcade is extensively customizable, allowing you to determine what point values are given (or deducted) for different events such as ticket resolution in under an hour, within the SLA period, or late.
Bonus points can also be awarded based on customer satisfaction or resolution on the first call.
Agents can also level up based on point totals that reach certain thresholds.
You can even create quests to encourage agent participation in building out the knowledge base, customer interaction over social channels or forums, or simply encouraging efficient ticket management.
For the stoic admins among us, gamification can be switched off.
Note that while Freshdesk Arcade is a killer feature, you will need to be on a paid plan in order to leverage it for your help desk.
Ticket Management
Ticket management is essential for help desk software, and Freshdesk handles this area as well as any.
You can work on tickets in a card or table view, both of which support performing actions such as changing priority, status, or assignment without leaving the list, or select multiple tickets for bulk operations such as replying, assigning, changing the type or priority, and so forth.
You can also execute scenarios, which are essentially saved action groups containing multiple steps to be performed automatically.
Scenarios can set the priority/type/status; add a note or tag; assign to an agent or group; send an email to a group, agent, or the requestor; or even delete a ticket or mark it as spam.
Saved views can also be used in order to limit the list to certain common criteria without having to manually filter the list each time.
When you do need to manually filter a ticket list, you can either use the search button at the top of the screen or the filter panel which flies out from the right edge and enables comprehensive search functionality.
If I had one complaint about ticket list design it would be that Freshdesk's basic search function takes you out of the list view and into a search results area which includes tickets, contacts, solutions, and forum content.
Within each ticket you have a three-panel layout, the first of which contains high-level ticket info and a history of interactions or notes on the ticket.
Panel two contains property information such as a resolution due date, tags, status, priority, and assignment details.
The last panel contains customer contact information, agent time logs, and a to-do list.
Agents can reply to or forward tickets or add notes.
In each case the response can be typed out manually, selected from a suggestion list, or populated with a canned response.
Canned forms can also be leveraged to request additional information from the customer.
Once canned forms are submitted, the response information is populated back to the ticket, allowing the agent to continue supporting the customer without having to navigate another system.
Freshdesk offers social streams that lets you monitor for particular keywords and handles (such as your or your competitors' product names) and incorporate them into your ticketing system.
Agents can create a ticket from a tweet, direct message, or Facebook post and, more importantly, respond directly on social media without leaving the system.
Productivity settings in Freshdesk let you auto-manage the ways in which tickets are handled as they come into (or even sit in) the system.
This logic-based automated response system, dubbed Dispatch'r, is complex but basically "set and forget," which is nice for help desk admins and agents alike.
The automations are rule-based, using conditions and actions to perform steps without requiring manual interaction.
Observer is another rule-based automation tool that can watch for actions performed by specific user types.
A third assistant, Supervisor, can be used to monitor tickets which haven't been touched in a while and perform follow-up steps.
Each of these hacks are modern and refreshing elements that are helping to bring the venerable help desk category into modernity.
To ensure your team doesn't fall behind, the Supervisor feature runs an hourly check to see if any tickets haven't been updated in 30 days.
You can set automated responses to view, escalate, and resolve these tickets.
On a similar note, you can set up response templates to solve outgoing tickets for standard ticket requests.
There are more than 100 out-of-the-box, ticket-resolution automations.
Skills-based assignments let you auto-assign tickets to specific agents.
For example, if you have a handful of agents who speak Spanish, then all Spanish-language tickets will be assigned to these agents.
If there are no Spanish-language tickets available, then the agents will go back into the well for the next available general ticket.
You can limit the number of tickets a skills-based agent receives so that he or she isn't overloaded.
Freddy, Freshdesk's support bot for Estate or Forest pricing tier members, can be added to your website or self-service portal after you have published 10 or more public knowledge base articles, though 50 articles and 2,000 tickets are recommended.
Freshdesk recommends maintaining your bot through training, which involves answering questions the bot was unable to resolve on its own and continued development of the knowledge base content library.
Another Forest feature lets admins test configuration changes in a sandbox environment prior to implementing them in the production support system.
Once developed and tested, changes may be promoted as a whole or in increments depending on your needs.
Reporting and Exporting
Freshdesk's reporting feature lets you ask single questions ("What is the avg first response time for John Smith last month?") to receive graphical responses.
The tool's intelligent querying will help you build reports by expanding upon your questions.
Start your question with "How many" and the system offers choices such as "tickets were resolved," "tickets were received," or "tickets were reopened." Click one of the options and additional terms appear, letting you get as granular as you'd like without having to know ahead of time what data you're trying to surface.
This makes basic reporting tasks incredibly intuitive, but leaves something to be desired for users looking to perform sophisticated analysis.
For the more data-hungry, you'll want to look into scheduled ticket exports, which may be used to produce JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) files containing ticket events.
These can be emailed or made available via API, and imported into a variety of data analysis tools for further analysis.
Freshdesk still lacks features such as change management, asset management, and project management, primarily because those aren't the focus of the solution.
Freshservice, the company's sister product, handles the full ITIL cycle for executing changes and releases, as well as asset and project management.
If you are a managed services organization, then Freshdesk may not be for you.
If you're not concerned about such high-level functionality, however, you'll be hard pressed to find a tool that's as capable and easy to use as Freshdesk.
Although it hasn't knocked HappyFox out of the top spot for SMB helpdesk management, it's put itself right alongside.
Pros
Gamification features are tops
Scenarios are an easy way to increase agent efficiency
Free tier allows smaller customers to get a feel for the system over a long period of time
Cons
Reporting tools offer both ends of the spectrum—simple and comprehensive—but not a lot of flexibility in the middle
Key features (team dashboards, chatbot, social signals) only available at highest pricing tiers
The Bottom Line
Freshdesk is the gold standard for help desk offerings aimed at smaller businesses.
A friendly price and a very easy interface make it an excellent pick for Editors' Choice.
Freshdesk Specs
Asset Management
No
Tickets From Social Media
Yes
Remote Control
No
Knowledge Base
Yes
Self-Service Portal
Yes
Smartphone Apps
No
Support Widget
Yes
Live Chat
Yes
Chatbot Support
Yes
Custom Reporting
Yes
With one caveat—it's geared toward serving external customers as opposed to being deployed in an IT department—Freshdesk is a highly effective help desk platform.
Starting at just $15 per user per month, this Editors' Choice recipient has just about everything a small to midsize business (SMB) needs to get a better handle on resolving ticket items as they appear in the system, with the added bonus of a free version so you can try its features before taking the plunge with one of its four paid plans.
Unlike tools such as Freshservice and ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, which are aimed at enterprise help desks serving internal customers (with an eye toward change management and other components of the ITIL framework), Freshdesk is focused on processing service tickets from external customers while providing agents with information and resources in a speedy and easy-to-find manner.
Other products in this category include Cayzu and Zendesk Support as well as our Editors' Choice winner HappyFox.
Pricing and Plans
Along with the free plan (Sprout), Freshdesk comes in four paid editions: Blossom, Garden, Estate, and Forest.
Sprout is free for unlimited agents who can manage tickets submitted via phone (through integration with Freshcaller), email, or social media (Facebook and Twitter).
It includes basic automation features and access to both an internal and public knowledge base.
For $15 per agent per month, Blossom adds collision detection and traffic cop functionality (preventing multiple agents responding on the same ticket, or an agent responding without seeing updated ticket information); more advanced automation and workflow features; custom ticket views; basic SLA management; and integrations through the app gallery.
Garden, priced at $29 per agent per month, adds time tracking, ticket templates, customer satisfaction surveys, canned forms, and escalation emails for SLA violations, as well as customer journey and customer 360 (tools which let you see within the context of a ticket which knowledge base articles the customer has viewed, or information about the customer captured in previous tickets).
Estate is $49 per agent per month.
It supports customized customer-satisfaction surveys, advanced ticket assignment methods (round-robin and load-balanced), shared ticket ownership, multiple SLA policies, dynamic ticket forms, support for multiple products, and Freddy (Freshdesk's AI engine).
Finally, Forest delivers advanced features such as HIPAA compliance and IP whitelists for both customers and agents for $109 per agent per month.
All pricing levels also have access to mobile apps for iOS and Android.
Freshdesk is a bit cheaper than HappyFox, which offers feature-rich plans ranging from $29 to $89 per agent per month.
Unfortunately, HappyFox doesn't have a free plan, so you'll need to make your purchase decision based on its free trial (which you can get only after booking a 30-minute demo).
Cayzu's affordable plans start at $4 and top out at $39 per agent per month.
Zoho Desk takes the cake in terms of affordability, with a free plan for up to three agents plus plans priced at $12 and $25 per agent per month.
Interface and Unique Features
When you first log into Freshdesk, you'll notice a long, left-hand rail menu in an inviting blue-gray color.
Here you'll find access to your dashboard, tickets, contacts and companies, social network setup, knowledge base, user forums, reports, and any other modules your administrator sets up later (such as gamification).
The main window is your reporting dashboard, which is filterable by products and working groups such as product management or sales.
Within the dashboard, you'll be able to see the number of unresolved tickets, overdue tickets, tickets due today, total open tickets, tickets on hold, and unassigned tickets, among other metrics.
You'll also receive a quick view of today's trends in a clickable graph that lets you drill down into specific metrics such as average response.
Dashboards are customizable with widgets that range from score cards and bar charts to customer satisfaction statistics and trend data for SLA compliance.
Each widget type can be customized based on group, status, or category where applicable.
From any page in the software, you can create new emails, contacts, and companies simply by clicking the tab at the top right of the screen.
As you'd find on Facebook or Twitter, there's a Notification icon which indicates whether anything has happened pertaining to your specific helpdesk ecosystem (e.g., a ticket has been assigned to you or is now overdue).
You can customize your notifications so you don't get bombarded by pings; however, there are only seven different notification types so you won't be able to get too creative.
Desktop notifications may also be enabled for scenarios where you don't have the Freshdesk tab visible at all times.
Support reps will enjoy being able to toggle live chat on and off while they're in the system.
This means agents can accept chats from customers on the company's website while also managing data entry or resolving more complex ticketing issues with colleagues.
Nearly everyone will appreciate the app's gamification feature, Freshdesk Arcade, which sets Freshdesk apart from every other help desk competitor in the roundup.
Within Arcade, you'll find leaderboards for ticket resolution and badges for top performers and agents who accomplish unique tasks.
Arcade is extensively customizable, allowing you to determine what point values are given (or deducted) for different events such as ticket resolution in under an hour, within the SLA period, or late.
Bonus points can also be awarded based on customer satisfaction or resolution on the first call.
Agents can also level up based on point totals that reach certain thresholds.
You can even create quests to encourage agent participation in building out the knowledge base, customer interaction over social channels or forums, or simply encouraging efficient ticket management.
For the stoic admins among us, gamification can be switched off.
Note that while Freshdesk Arcade is a killer feature, you will need to be on a paid plan in order to leverage it for your help desk.
Ticket Management
Ticket management is essential for help desk software, and Freshdesk handles this area as well as any.
You can work on tickets in a card or table view, both of which support performing actions such as changing priority, status, or assignment without leaving the list, or select multiple tickets for bulk operations such as replying, assigning, changing the type or priority, and so forth.
You can also execute scenarios, which are essentially saved action groups containing multiple steps to be performed automatically.
Scenarios can set the priority/type/status; add a note or tag; assign to an agent or group; send an email to a group, agent, or the requestor; or even delete a ticket or mark it as spam.
Saved views can also be used in order to limit the list to certain common criteria without having to manually filter the list each time.
When you do need to manually filter a ticket list, you can either use the search button at the top of the screen or the filter panel which flies out from the right edge and enables comprehensive search functionality.
If I had one complaint about ticket list design it would be that Freshdesk's basic search function takes you out of the list view and into a search results area which includes tickets, contacts, solutions, and forum content.
Within each ticket you have a three-panel layout, the first of which contains high-level ticket info and a history of interactions or notes on the ticket.
Panel two contains property information such as a resolution due date, tags, status, priority, and assignment details.
The last panel contains customer contact information, agent time logs, and a to-do list.
Agents can reply to or forward tickets or add notes.
In each case the response can be typed out manually, selected from a suggestion list, or populated with a canned response.
Canned forms can also be leveraged to request additional information from the customer.
Once canned forms are submitted, the response information is populated back to the ticket, allowing the agent to continue supporting the customer without having to navigate another system.
Freshdesk offers social streams that lets you monitor for particular keywords and handles (such as your or your competitors' product names) and incorporate them into your ticketing system.
Agents can create a ticket from a tweet, direct message, or Facebook post and, more importantly, respond directly on social media without leaving the system.
Productivity settings in Freshdesk let you auto-manage the ways in which tickets are handled as they come into (or even sit in) the system.
This logic-based automated response system, dubbed Dispatch'r, is complex but basically "set and forget," which is nice for help desk admins and agents alike.
The automations are rule-based, using conditions and actions to perform steps without requiring manual interaction.
Observer is another rule-based automation tool that can watch for actions performed by specific user types.
A third assistant, Supervisor, can be used to monitor tickets which haven't been touched in a while and perform follow-up steps.
Each of these hacks are modern and refreshing elements that are helping to bring the venerable help desk category into modernity.
To ensure your team doesn't fall behind, the Supervisor feature runs an hourly check to see if any tickets haven't been updated in 30 days.
You can set automated responses to view, escalate, and resolve these tickets.
On a similar note, you can set up response templates to solve outgoing tickets for standard ticket requests.
There are more than 100 out-of-the-box, ticket-resolution automations.
Skills-based assignments let you auto-assign tickets to specific agents.
For example, if you have a handful of agents who speak Spanish, then all Spanish-language tickets will be assigned to these agents.
If there are no Spanish-language tickets available, then the agents will go back into the well for the next available general ticket.
You can limit the number of tickets a skills-based agent receives so that he or she isn't overloaded.
Freddy, Freshdesk's support bot for Estate or Forest pricing tier members, can be added to your website or self-service portal after you have published 10 or more public knowledge base articles, though 50 articles and 2,000 tickets are recommended.
Freshdesk recommends maintaining your bot through training, which involves answering questions the bot was unable to resolve on its own and continued development of the knowledge base content library.
Another Forest feature lets admins test configuration changes in a sandbox environment prior to implementing them in the production support system.
Once developed and tested, changes may be promoted as a whole or in increments depending on your needs.
Reporting and Exporting
Freshdesk's reporting feature lets you ask single questions ("What is the avg first response time for John Smith last month?") to receive graphical responses.
The tool's intelligent querying will help you build reports by expanding upon your questions.
Start your question with "How many" and the system offers choices such as "tickets were resolved," "tickets were received," or "tickets were reopened." Click one of the options and additional terms appear, letting you get as granular as you'd like without having to know ahead of time what data you're trying to surface.
This makes basic reporting tasks incredibly intuitive, but leaves something to be desired for users looking to perform sophisticated analysis.
For the more data-hungry, you'll want to look into scheduled ticket exports, which may be used to produce JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) files containing ticket events.
These can be emailed or made available via API, and imported into a variety of data analysis tools for further analysis.
Freshdesk still lacks features such as change management, asset management, and project management, primarily because those aren't the focus of the solution.
Freshservice, the company's sister product, handles the full ITIL cycle for executing changes and releases, as well as asset and project management.
If you are a managed services organization, then Freshdesk may not be for you.
If you're not concerned about such high-level functionality, however, you'll be hard pressed to find a tool that's as capable and easy to use as Freshdesk.
Although it hasn't knocked HappyFox out of the top spot for SMB helpdesk management, it's put itself right alongside.
Pros
Gamification features are tops
Scenarios are an easy way to increase agent efficiency
Free tier allows smaller customers to get a feel for the system over a long period of time
Cons
Reporting tools offer both ends of the spectrum—simple and comprehensive—but not a lot of flexibility in the middle
Key features (team dashboards, chatbot, social signals) only available at highest pricing tiers
The Bottom Line
Freshdesk is the gold standard for help desk offerings aimed at smaller businesses.
A friendly price and a very easy interface make it an excellent pick for Editors' Choice.
