Zoho Desk vs Zendesk vs Freshdesk
When it comes to customer service software solutions, Zoho Desk, Zendesk, and Freshdesk are well-known options in the market. If you're wondering how they stack up against each other. Here's a detailed comparison to help you make the best choice for your business and customers.
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Zendesk is a popular customer service software solution. However, it lacks certain essential features, leading to a heavy dependence on third-party integrations. Its complexity and non-intuitive user interface contribute to a steep learning curve, and difficult navigation.
While Freshdesk offers a good range of features, its configurations can be complex leading to a steep learning curve and a lengthy setup process. Additionally, it is not as cost effective and scalable as other solutions on the market.
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.
Switching from Zendesk or Freshdesk? We'll make it easier
Use Zoho Desk for free for the remainder of your Zendesk or Fresdesk contract
(Up to 6 months).
What's the price difference?
Number of users: 25
Save atleast 49% with Zoho Desk
Feature comparison
When choosing between three popular customer service solutions, you'll likely favor the one that has a strong feature set, enhances your employee and customer experience, and provides enough flexibility to accommodate growing business needs. Let's take a look at how Zendesk Support, Freshdesk Support Desk, and Zoho Desk compare in specific categories.
Customers expect flexibility in the way they interact with your business, so offering multiple communication platforms is essential. While all three applications offer "omnichannel experiences," their approaches differ drastically.
Zendesk primarily offers email and social media channels. But other channels, like phone, live chat, and instant messaging, must be purchased as add-ons. Even if you invest in these additional channels, you'll find your agents constantly switching between tabs to offer a unified experience to your customers.
Freshdesk centralizes customer support interactions across multiple channels, like email, social media, and live chat. Similar to Zendesk, it requires agents to become familiar with separate interfaces for the phone, chat and messaging, and email and web support platforms. Additional channels, like Instagram, telephony, and LINE, can only be accessed from Freshdesk's bundle plan or as add-ons. And for Telegram and WeChat, you'll be dependent on third-party integrations.
Zoho Desk helps you provide a complete omnichannel experience to your customers with built-in email, live chat, telephony, social media, web form, and instant messaging channels. You can view interactions from all your channels in one place, better equipping agents to offer instant and personalized responses.
Support
Support Desk| Telephony | $ | $ | |
| Live Chat | $ | ||
| Web Forms | |||
| Instagram DM | $ | $ | |
| $ | |||
| Telegram | $ | $ | |
| $ | $ | ||
| LINE | $ | $ | |
| Facebook feed | |||
| Facebook Messenger | $ |
Telephony
$
$
Live Chat
$
Web forms
Instagram DM
$
$
$
Telegram
$
$
$
$
LINE
$
$
Facebook feed
Facebook Messenger
$
Customer service solutions should be simple, comprehensive, and user-friendly, so agents can do more for their customers in less time.
Zendesk simplifies ticket management by offering a variety of views, but even within its views, you cannot categorize tickets into columns based on status, priority, due date, and CRM status. Moreover, for your agents to share knowledge base articles with your customers, you'll need a third-party integration and a subscription to the separate help center app. Even after this, you'll have limited insight into your tickets.
Freshdesk, like Zendesk, does not allow categorization of tickets into columns based on priority, status, due date, and CRM status. Its agent interface lacks depth and functionality. You cannot, for example, reply to or comment on tickets from the Ticket Display screen without opening the ticket. The ability to clone tickets is only available as a marketplace extension.
Zoho Desk is designed to be user-friendly and accessible for all with its intuitive UI, user preferences, and accessibility controls. 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.
SupportSupport Desk| Suggested Articles | Third-party integration | ||
| Merge Tickets | |||
| Split Tickets | Marketplace extension | ||
| Clone Ticket | Marketplace extension | Marketplace extension | |
| Ticket Timeline | Marketplace extension | ||
| Time Entry | Marketplace extension | ||
| Quick Ticket View (Peek View) | |||
| Table View | |||
| Search Facet | |||
| Email Templates in Reply Editor | |||
| Work Mode | |||
| Agent Collision Chat |
Suggested Articles
Third-party integration
Merge Tickets
Split Tickets
Marketplace extension
Clone Ticket
Marketplace extension
Marketplace extension
Ticket Timeline
Marketplace extension
Time Entry
Marketplace extension
Quick Ticket View
(Peek View)
Table View
Search Facet
Email Templates in Reply Editor
Work Modes
Agent Collision Chat
When you host a help center and a community, you provide a place for customers to help themselves and expedite the service process. This is why your customer service solution should make it easy to facilitate self-service experiences.
Zendesk does not allow you to create a help center or community forum within the app. To do this, you need to purchase two additional apps. You'll also notice that in order to create a community, you must have a subscription to Zendesk's help center product. Zendesk's embeddable widget includes live chat, community, FAQs, and more, but you'll be required to have subscriptions for these individual products to make it work.
Freshdesk offers self-service features similar to those found in Zoho Desk. It includes a knowledge base, community, and rules-based chat bot. However, with Freshdesk's help widget, you can only provide customers with a contact form and solution articles.
Meanwhile, Zoho Desk offers a built-in help center and community. It also 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 can include a knowledge base, community, contact form, live chat, Guided Conversations, and the Zia bot in ASAP widget without paying extra.
Support Support Desk| ASAP | $ | ||
| Knowledge Base | $ | ||
| Multilingual Knowledge Base | $ | ||
| Community | $ | ||
| Guided Conversations | $ |
ASAP
$
Knowledge Base
$
Multilingual Knowledge Base
$
Community
$
Guided Conversations
$
AI is a crucial part of customer service, acting as a resource for both customers and agents.
Zendesk and Freshdesk have similar AI offerings. Both offer customer sentiment predictions, anomaly notifications, and answer bots as add-ons.
Meanwhile, Zoho Desk's built-in AI assistant, Zia, caters to the needs of all stakeholders. It assists agents in providing personalized service with sentiment analysis and reply assistance, helps them search for tickets effortlessly with the auto-tagging feature, and alerts managers to heavy traffic on incoming tickets with anomaly notifications.
SupportSupport Desk| Reply Assistant | $ | ||
| Sentiment Predictions | $ | $ | |
| Ticket Auto-Tagging | |||
| Anomaly Notifications | $ | ||
| KB Conversation Assistant (ASAP) | $ | $ | |
| Zia Answer Bot | $ | $ |
Reply Assistant
$
Sentiment Predictions
$
$
Ticket Auto-Tagging
Anomaly Notifications
$
KB Conversation Assistant (ASAP)
$
$
Zia Answer Bot
$
$
Zendesk, Freshdesk, and Zoho Desk all offer SLAs and workflows to help you effortlessly streamline your customer service operations.
However, using Zendesk, your agents will have a hard time keeping up with ticket activity, as the app only sends email notifications. If you want to receive in-app notifications, you'll have to rely on third-party apps. Moreover, if you want to automate equal ticket assignment to your agents, you will be required to look for other options, as Zendesk does not offer this feature natively.
Freshdesk offers in-app notifications and round-robin ticket assignment, but does not enable activity time tracking. In Freshdesk, time is automatically logged, but the timer must be activated manually. The app does not include custom functions in workflows, so your ability to automate other business processes is limited.
With Zoho Desk, you can truly automate your customer service operations with load balancing ticket assignment, custom functions in workflows, time tracking, and more. Most importantly, you can set up process flows that suit your business needs with Blueprints. This ensures that every procedure takes place in a systematic and timely manner until a resolution is reached.
Support Support Desk| Custom functions in workflows | |||
| Multi-level escalations | |||
| Customer-based SLA | |||
| Round-robin ticket assignment by load balancing | |||
| Time Tracking | Marketplace extension | ||
| Activity Time Tracking | |||
| Blueprints |
Custom functions in workflows
Multi-level escalations
Customer-based SLA
Round-robin ticket assignment by load balancing
Time Tracking
Marketplace extension
Activity time tracking
Blueprints
It's easier to work with a help desk when it can be tailored to your business needs. These three apps provide plenty of customization options, like custom fields, domain mapping, and multi-language support.
In Zendesk, ticket templates can only be accessed through an add-on. With Freshdesk, you can customize the help center, reports, and dashboards—but not the help desk itself. You can also organize agents into groups. Meanwhile, Zoho Desk lets you 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. Plus, with Zoho Desk agents can organize and rename modules in their accounts, switch to Night Mode, choose their font type and size, and set their preferred display layout.
Support Support Desk| Customize Tabs | |||
| Custom Form Fields and Layouts | |||
| Field Dependencies | |||
| Department-Specific Layouts | |||
| Teams | |||
| Night Mode | |||
| Display Screen Settings |
Customize Tabs
Custom form fields and layouts
Field dependencies
Department-specific layouts
Teams
Night Mode
Display screen settings
Numbers give you all the insights you need to make improvements to your customer service operations. And when they are easy to extract, generate, and customize, you can use them to strengthen customer relations.
Most useful reporting features that help you track important customer service metrics are not built into Zendesk—they’re available through another app. It's important to note, you will have to be on Zendesk Support’s Professional Plan or higher to use this additional app.
Customization options are limited in 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.
Zoho Desk gives you a set of built-in reports and dashboards for almost every help desk metric you'd want to track. In addition to basic dashboards, like Agent and Ticket overviews, you can set up Knowledge Base, Community, SLA, Time Tracking, and Zia dashboards.
SupportSupport Desk| SLA dashboards | $ | ||
| Agent Dashboard | $ | ||
| Custom dashboards | $ | ||
| Response, Resolution, and FCR Dashboards | $ | ||
| Radar mobile app (for managers) for iOS and Android |
SLA dashboards
$
Agent Dashboard
$
Custom dashboards
$
Response, Resolution, and FCR Dashboards
$
Radar mobile app (for managers) for iOS and Android
Pricing comparison
/user/month billed annually Support/user/month billed annually Support Desk/user/month billed annually| Free | $0 - | Free | Free | $0 - | |
| Express | $7 | - | - | ||
| Standard | $14 | Support Team | $19 | Growth | $15 |
| Professional | $23 49 | Support Professional | $55 55 | Pro | $49 49 |
| Enterprise | $40 99 | Support Enterprise | $115 115 | Enterprise | $79 99 |
Free
Free
Free
$ 00
-
$ 00
Express
-
-
$ 7 75
-
-
Standard
Support Team
Growth
$ 14 49
$19 75
$15 75
Professional
Support Professional
Pro
$ 23 99
$55 150
$49 150
Enterprise
Support Enterprise
Enterprise
$ 40 99
$115 150
$79 150
Clean UI, tons of features also in the lower tier price packages, very fair pricing especially in comparison to companies like Zendesk or Freshdesk. We have been using both of these competitor tools (and are still using them at other projects) but given my experience with Zoho Desk we are likely to move all projects to Zoho Desk in the near future.
MoritzSource: G2
The ease of using the platform, how fluid it is to navigate, and how easy it is to learn. You can be up and running in minutes with more features than Zendesk even offers. I would know, used to use them for 10 years.
Joshua FrazierChief Engineer, Calvary Solutions
Source: G2
Having come from Freshdesk, I find the interface much clearer and the setup less clunky than Freshdesk, and the mobile app is more intuitive.
Diamond Standard came up with the idea to create a ticket for every online inquiry from a client via Zoho Desk. It would then review said ticket and parse that information to the appropriate executive internally, effectively and even more efficiently usurping any need for technology like Zendesk.
Chris Dessi Chief Revenue Officer, Diamond Standard
So much easier to use than Freshdesk, and at a fraction of the price of Zendesk. Zoho Desk does everything that we need.
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Frequently asked questions
To use Zendesk Support as a comprehensive solution, you will be required to bring multiple applications together.
For a complete omnichannel experience in Freshdesk, you'll be required to select the bundle plan or use add-ons.
Zoho Desk offers you a complete customer service solution that is feature-rich, scalable, reliable, and available at an affordable price.
All three applications use AI to increase agent productivity and boost customer satisfaction levels. However, Zendesk and Freshdesk only offer this essential feature with their higher plans, or require you to purchase it as an add-on.
Zoho Desk's AI assistant, Zia, caters to the needs of all stakeholders. With the recent advancements in AI, Zoho Desk has made a new addition to Zia. Now, Zia is powered by ChatGPT.
Zoho Desk understands that customer happiness is directly impacted by agent happiness. This is why Desk is designed to be easy to use and accessible for all with its intuitive interface, user preferences, and accessibility controls.
Desk also stands out in terms of automation and collaboration capabilities. If you have processes that require many steps and extensive collaboration with various teams, you can set up process flows with Blueprints. Plus, custom functions in workflows ensure automatic updates in your customer service solution or external application, helping streamline your business processes.
Zoho Desk is also the most affordable and feature-rich solution. Its most comprehensive edition is available for just $40. The highest edition of Zendesk Support will run you $115 per user per month, while Freshdesk Support Desk's highest plan costs $79 per user per month, billed annually.
Comparatively speaking, Zendesk does not offer a free plan. Its basic plan starts at $19 and Freshdesk's paid plan starts at $15. Meanwhile, Zoho Desk offers a free plan and its Express edition, starting at just $7, is built for small teams looking for an easy-to-use and scalable customer service solution.
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 11.08.2023