Table of Contents
Introduction
Freshdesk is a great customer support platform, but it’s not necessarily the best solution for every company.
If you are using Freshdesk and need more customization options, improved pricing, or features that better fit your team’s workflow, it’s worth considering alternatives. It’s 2025, and there are numerous options that will work well for your business.
In this article, we will take an in-depth look into some of the top Freshdesk alternatives you can use today, each with its own strengths to help you provide world-class customer service. This will help you focus more effectively on your growth perspective and scalability. So, without any delay, let’s get started.
What is Freshdesk?
Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer support software that assists companies in managing and resolving customer issues in a efficient manner. It provides features such as ticket management, multi-channel support (phone, chat, email, social media), automation, and self-service portals. Freshdesk seeks to simplify customer service processes by consolidating communication and making it easier for teams to work together, overall enhancing customer satisfaction.
What are the key features of Freshdesk?
Freshdesk allows you to manage customer conversations from email, phone, chat, social media, and more all in one unified platform.
Automatically converts customer queries from different channels into tickets, which can be tracked, prioritized, and assigned to the right agents.
Freshdesk offers automation tools to handle repetitive tasks like ticket routing, status updates, and follow-ups, saving time and reducing manual effort.
Customers can access a knowledge base or FAQs to find answers themselves, reducing the volume of support requests.
Provides detailed reports and analytics to monitor team performance, customer satisfaction, and identify areas for improvement.
Why do you need Freshdesk alternatives?
Freshdesk has some definite positives. It provides you with a lot of features at a lower cost than many other support software, and it also has one of the largest collections of integrations. Lots of people also report that it’s simple to downgrade or cancel your plan whenever you want to.
That being said, it’s not for everyone!
If you’re a little support team mostly relying on email, then Freshdesk is relatively inexpensive. But the more your team expands and you add other channels such as chat or phone, the prices rise rapidly.
Freshdesk is included in the larger Freshworks platform, which has support, sales, IT, and marketing tools. The pricing is based on a per-user approach, so your price increases every time you hire someone new. On top of that, you usually have to pay for additional tools to get new features. For instance, if you need live chat, you’ll have to purchase Freshchat. Want AI tools? That’s an additional cost. Need phone support? You’ll have to purchase Freshcaller as well.
Typically, the advantage of a suite like this is that everything plays nice together. But numerous users state that the Freshworks tools don’t always get along and transfer data to them.
Others also experience bugs and glitches, particularly with third-party connectors, and state it takes a significant amount of back-and-forth with the support department to receive assistance.
So, while Freshdesk is an excellent option for small teams starting out, if you’re expanding rapidly, you might want to consider a more reliable support platform.
Top Freshdesk alternatives to look out for
Let’s talk about the top Freshdesk alternatives that will help you effectively manage support in your business. Please note that the numbering of the tools is purely coincidental and in no way depicts the ranking of the tool.
Kenyt.AI
Kenyt.AI differentiates itself as it allows you to control and share both your shared and individual email accounts all in one place. You can insert all your business emails and control every inbox from one dashboard.
By default, team members’ personal inboxes are not shared with the team, but temporary or permanent access can be provided when necessary. This comes in handy where someone is on a trip or where an account manager has emails from several clients. The entire team is then able to sort through and respond to such emails together.
In addition to email, Kenyt.AI also integrates with live chat and allows you to create a knowledge base. Its AI will automatically respond to simple live chat questions based on information from your help centre. Collision detection, internal notes, and guest access enable your team to collaborate more effectively on customer requests.
Key Features
Manage shared and personal email address inboxes.
Temporarily or permanently share access to personal inboxes.
Establish private customer portals and define SLAs for responses and resolutions.
Develop internal knowledge bases and public support centres.
Synchronize customer information with Salesforce, HubSpot, and other such platforms.
Employ AI for authoring help articles and converting them into foreign languages.
HubSpot Hub
HubSpot Service Hub is a good alternative to Freshdesk, particularly for startups seeking robust support, sales, and marketing capabilities all under one roof. Their startup plan comes with massive discounts, 75% off the first year, 50% off the second, and 25% off the third. Further, the plans grant you complete access to Service Hub, CRM, and Marketing Hub.
You can expect to see lots of common features such as customer portals, SLAs, automatically answering question chatbots, and intelligent ticket routing. Because your CRM, marketing, and support software are all within the same stack at HubSpot, data can move easily between them without any additional effort.
This brings HubSpot into the perfect fit for startups whose sales or customer success teams are responsible for support, since the same system is used daily by all. Your team won’t need to learn a different tool, saving time and frustration.
Key Features
All your CRM, marketing, and service data on one platform.
Save money with discounts if you are a startup.
Build secure portals just for certain customers.
Use a customer success dashboard to monitor health scores and reduce churn.
Zoho Desk
If you were anticipating Freshworks allowing you to do everything from one platform but were let down by how poorly the tools interacted with one another, Zoho could be a good alternative. In addition to Zoho Desk, its customer support software, Zoho has over 100 apps for sales, marketing, HR, finance, law, and more.
And the best news? They actually work well together.
You can handle customers through all major channels email, chat, phone, self-service, and social media with Zoho Desk. Unlike Freshdesk, you don’t have to purchase individual products for each channel. But the channels are different according to what plan you have. The bottom plan supports email and social, the next one has chat and self-service, phone with the third one, and AI tools with the top plan.
Zoho Desk’s capabilities are the same as Freshdesk’s, where you can create customer portals and community forums, assign SLAs with automatic escalation, route tickets via round-robin or skill-based assignment, and create rule-based workflows. Automation capabilities assist in responding to emails, tone analysis, ticket tagging, and providing valuable insights to managers.
Key Features
Unite all your business applications under a single Zoho account with robust integrations.
Automatically route customer requests by allotting agents to particular customers.
Serve customers via WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, and others.
Automate repetitive tasks using a drag-and-drop, no-code workflow builder.
Intercom
If you enjoyed the AI capabilities of Freshdesk and would like to automate even more customer support, you should try Intercom. It has all Freshdesk has to offer, such as automated chat and email replies, AI copilots for your agents, and intelligent insights and a whole lot more.
Intercom’s AI is able to sort and route tickets and even provide answers for customers. You can create complex workflows with their no-code builder to instruct the AI precisely how to deal with various sorts of questions. Intercom’s AI agent, Fin, draws on information from your website, previous responses, and help articles and also ties into other systems you have, so its responses can be even more personalized.
Even better, Intercom’s AI agents can also update information in your other systems. You can automate the work of cancelling orders, issuing refunds, altering reservations, or updating billing information.
Key Features
Support customers across email, chat, social, self-service, and phone.
Automate answering questions with AI over chat, social, and email.
Build AI workflows to direct tickets and manage frequent requests.
Insert collaborator seats to enable others outside support to assist with restricted access.
Zendesk
If you’ve grown out of Freshdesk and need something more adaptable, with a plethora of integrations and all the features you could possibly use, Zendesk might be an excellent solution. It’s more expensive than Freshdesk, but you receive all the same features as Freshdesk, along with a great deal more.
Zendesk integrates with virtually 2,000 third-party applications, such as CRMs, billing software, online shops, social media, etc. Zendesk has all channels out of the box, and, similar to Zoho, various channels are available in various plans. You can even include “light agents” who receive restricted access, which is excellent for individuals outside your core support team.
For AI, Zendesk provides smart assistants like Freshdesk’s AI copilot. They assist your team by making recommendations for responses and automatically processing tasks. You can even use AI to respond to live chat messages, create full knowledge base articles from quick notes, and forward tickets to the correct person.
Key Features
Serve customers on email, phone, social, chat, and self-service in one location.
Customize the platform to whatever extent you like, using coding or simple no-code interfaces.
Handle messages from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (X), WhatsApp, Slack, WeChat, LINE, and more.
Send and receive text message requests right from your ticket system.
Help scout
At the heart of Help Scout is Inbox, a team-shared mailbox that assists your team in managing customer messages from all your support sources.
Inbox has everything you need to remain organized: you can assign conversations to teammates, add internal notes, prevent duplicate responses with collision detection, see customer profiles, and even gather feedback using satisfaction surveys.
To increase the productivity of your team, Inbox also provides useful features such as tags, custom fields, saved responses, and workflows. The workflows can automate routine procedures, such as tagging or assignment of messages, so that your team can concentrate on what actually counts.
Key features
Manage customer queries from email, chat, and social, all part of every plan.
Deploy built-in AI at no cost to assist in composing responses, translating messages, summarizing chats, and proofreading spelling and grammar.
Add as many team members as you wish without additional cost.
Utilize workflows and saved responses to handle requests quicker and respond faster.
Keeping
If you’re a small business that doesn’t have a full support team, Keeping can be a suitable replacement for Freshdesk. It’s a Gmail add-on that converts your standard inbox into a shared help desk. Your entire team can see and respond to customer emails directly from Gmail, no need to master yet another tool.
Keeping creates a dedicated folder in Gmail where all emails sent to your support@ address are saved. Access can be seen by everyone with the view of this folder within their Gmail sidebar.
It also contains useful features such as assigning emails to team members, utilizing saved replies, tagging, initiating internal chats, and setting up basic rules to automate tasks.
If you’re looking for an easy, low-cost solution to handle customer emails with minimal setup and training, Keeping is an excellent choice.
Key Features
Easily assign emails, set priorities, add tags, and update statuses.
Respond quickly to frequent questions using saved replies.
Integrate with Shopify to view order information alongside customer emails.
Work privately with team members in a sidebar chat.
Conclusion
Selecting the appropriate customer support solution is based on your own requirements, team size, and financial resources. Although Freshdesk works well for many businesses, there are numerous powerful alternatives that could be a better fit for your objectives.
Regardless of your emphasis on ease of use, scalability, or comprehensive integrations, the products covered in this list offer you an abundance of excellent choices to evaluate.
Among Freshdesk alternatives, Kenyt.AI is one of the most reliable options, particularly for businesses wishing to incorporate AI-driven automation, WhatsApp support, and smooth CRM processes into customer service activities.
Contact our sales team, review features, and choose the right one that gives your business the power to provide top-notch support.
Frequently Asked Questions
There are a number of helpdesk platforms that act as good alternatives to Freshdesk, with some offering specific features designed for specific business requirements. Some of the top ones are –
Kenyt.AI: A reliable AI-based helpdesk platform that combines CRM and conversational AI, which enables businesses to automate support and maximize customer interaction across various channels, such as WhatsApp.
Zendesk: Renowned for having a robust ticketing system and high integration capabilities.
Zoho Desk: Integrates smoothly with other Zoho products and is ideal for companies already in the Zoho ecosystem.
Help Scout: Has an easy-to-use interface with a strong emphasis on email-based customer support.
Intercom: Merges messaging platforms with automation to maximize customer interaction.
All of these platforms are strong, so the best option will be based on your particular needs and current workflow.
Yes, there are free alternatives to Freshdesk that are well-suited to business on a budget-
Kenyt.AI: Although initially a paid service, Kenyt.AI has flexible plans and trials that permit businesses to try its AI-powered helpdesk and CRM feature without too much commitment.
Zoho Desk: Has a free plan for small teams, which includes basic ticketing and customer handling features.
FreeScout: An open-source helpdesk solution that companies can host themselves, allowing for flexibility and customization without the cost of licensing.
Although these free alternatives might be limited in functionality from their paid counterparts, they can be suitable for startups or small companies requiring basic support features.
Small businesses looking for Freshdesk alternatives are commonly advised to use the following platforms –
Kenyt.AI: Best suited for small businesses interested in tapping into AI and automation without high initial investment. With its simple-to-use interface and support for WhatsApp, it is an effective tool to automate customer support.
Help Scout: Famous for simplicity and email-based support, perfect for small teams.
Zoho Desk: Has a free plan and is compatible with other Zoho tools, making a solid suite for small business use.
Kenyt.AI is unique in that it unites AI-driven automation with a hassle-free multi-channel support system, such as WhatsApp, email, and live chat. With this, businesses are able to automate regular questions, direct tickets wisely, and deliver personalized answers quicker than conventional helpdesk software. In comparison to other Freshdesk alternatives, Kenyt.AI provides a very scalable and affordable solution that is tailored to suit the requirements of businesses of all sizes.
Aaron Jebin is an enthusiastic SAAS technical content writer interested in writing for new and existing technologies, platforms, and tools. With an experience of over 5 years in technical writing, he is keenly focused on developing articles to provide readers with complete solutions to the common problems that arise in the everyday workplace. His writing mostly focused on team building, work ethics, business analysis, project management, automation, AI, customer and employee engagement methodologies. He has an interest in baking cakes and making stained glass art. He is currently honing his drifting skills.
