Freshdesk

Growing support teams of 3-50 agents who need email, chat, phone, and social ticketing with SLA enforcement without Zendesk's per-agent pricing

Customer Service ★★★★☆ 4.3/5 Free (paid from $15/agent/mo) Visit Website

Free plan supports up to 2 agents with email and social ticketing, a knowledge base, and ticket dispatch rules at no cost
Growth plan at $15/agent/month includes SLA management, business hours, collision detection, and automations; Zendesk's equivalent Suite Team starts at $55/agent
Freddy AI suggests response templates to agents, auto-categorizes tickets by topic, and powers a customer-facing chatbot that deflects common questions
Parent-child ticketing splits a complex issue into sub-tickets assigned to different teams (e.g., billing and technical) while tracking them under one master ticket
Marketplace offers 1,000+ apps including Salesforce, Slack, Jira, Shopify, and WhatsApp integrations installable in one click

Freddy AI Copilot and AI-powered ticket routing are billed as a separate add-on starting at $29/agent/month on top of your plan
Custom analytics dashboards and CSAT trend reports require the Pro plan at $49/agent/month; Growth only provides pre-built summary reports
Sandbox testing environments for workflow changes are exclusive to the Enterprise plan at $79/agent/month
Field service management (technician dispatch, scheduling, and GPS tracking) requires the separate Freshdesk Field Service add-on

Key Features

Omnichannel ticketing from email, chat, phone, WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, and web portal into a unified agent inbox
SLA policies with escalation rules, business hours configuration, and breach notifications
Freddy AI for agent-assist suggestions, auto-triage, canned response recommendations, and customer-facing chatbots
Knowledge base with SEO-optimized articles, category nesting, and article versioning
Parent-child and linked tickets for splitting and tracking multi-team issues
Customer satisfaction surveys (CSAT) sent after ticket resolution with response tracking
Scenario automations for one-click bulk actions like tagging, assigning, and replying to groups of tickets