From one customer to another, I know how important it’s to be satisfied with the service you get.
BUT IF my intuition is true and you’re not quite happy about the experience you’ve had with Freshworks, let me present you some alternatives you could choose from to improve your customer support management process with ease.
In this article, I will compare the top alternatives to Freshworks based on my experience and online reviews from verified users.
What is Freshworks?
Freshworks is a platform that offers multiple services to businesses in order to help them manage and improve their market experiences. These services focus on IT, customer service, sales, marketing, and HR particularly.
It was founded as Freshworks Inc. by Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy in Chennai, India, in October 2010; it’s based in San Mateo, California.
From small and mid-size businesses to larger businesses, this software-as-a-service solution provides aid to shed light on various problems.
While the problems might differ, three main functions are considered a part of customer support features within Freshdesk, a product made for customer support: collaborative ticketing, omnichannel, and automation.
Collaborative ticketing enables more than team collaboration; it leaves no room for confusion. You can prioritize, categorize, and assign tickets in a transparent platform where you resolve customer issues effortlessly.
With omnichannel, you will have the privilege of handling all of the tickets coming from different channels on one platform. These channels include e-mail, phone, live chat, social media platforms, websites, and WhatsApp.
Automations are one of the biggest helpers of any customer service platform as they don’t take much time from customer-facing teams, which need to constantly keep in touch with customers in order to improve customer experience. As a result, automations auto-assign tickets and categorize and prioritize them by learning from your past tickets, thanks to Freddy AI—the automated system of Freshdesk.
Freshworks Pricing
For customer support management, Freshworks has Freshdesk as a product to maintain customer interaction and enhance customer relationships. For this reason, the prices below will recognize Freshdesk as the source:
- Freshdesk has a free basic plan with limited features, supporting up to 10 agents.
- A more advanced plan, under the name of Growth, includes automation, custom ticket views, time tracking, and many more that are essential for any management tool for $15/month per user on the condition that you’ll purchase the service for a year. Otherwise, the pricing changes to $18/month per user.
- The Professional plan involves everything in Growth with additional features, such as customer segments, a multilingual knowledge base, and custom roles. The offered price for this plan is $59/month per user; however, when billed annually, the price decreases to $49/month per user.
- The most expensive plan, called the Enterprise plan, contains each item the Professional plan does with advanced features involving Freddy AI, such as an e-mail bot, auto-triage, and assist bot. The Enterprise plan bills $95/month per user, but on the promise of annual purchase, it becomes $79/month per user.
Freshworks Reviews
👍 Pros:
“Freshdesk provides very useful features with multiple support channels including live chat, e-mail, phone and social media. Furthermore, it is a cloud base software that is easy to use with smart automation features to ensure things are done smoothly and faster which enables more efficient business processes for a better customer engagement and experience.”
👎 Cons:
“I haven’t found anything not working well. I think it took us a little bit to learn how to create automatic triggers, but we were able to figure it out. I also wish I could change a job’s status from the recruit page rather than clicking into the job.”
Top Freshworks Alternatives
Here are the top 5 alternatives to Freshworks:
I’ll go over each tool and compare them to Freshworks in the areas they shine so that you can easily decide which would be a better fit for you and your business. Without further ado, let’s start with our first product:
1- HubSpot vs. Freshworks
HubSpot is one of the CRM tools that everyone in the SaaS business has heard of once, at the very least. Like Freshworks, it provides customers with many channels where teams work together to improve the customer experience their company offers. But here, the focus will be on HubSpot Service Hub, whose main aim is to manage the customer support process efficiently.
Compared to Freshworks, HubSpot offers a better quality of support in both workflow and personalized experiences, especially for self-service, by having a more extensive knowledge base and being more compatible with mobile optimization.
In addition, there is another shining star that almost every customer of HubSpot agrees with: the customer support it provides. Regardless of the type, the issue you have will be solved in an unchallenged time frame without a doubt because the tool doesn’t only help you support your own customers, it also supports you—one of its precious customers.
With HubSpot Service Hub as your customer support management tool, you can:
- Perform user, role, and access management on selected data, features, and many more.
- Allow customization for users in terms of texts, logos, and chat colors.
- Track vital metrics regarding the performance of customer support and improve workflow.
- Set up an automated reply to the support tickets based on their specific category and collaborate on tickets with ease.
- Create surveys to send out to customers and analyze their responses to find ways to boost the support team’s performance.
HubSpot Pricing
- Individual plan: 100% free (no credit card required)
- Starter plan: $50/per month for 2 seats ($45/per month when billed annually) + per additional user cost is $25 and $23, respectively
- Professional plan: $500/per month for 5 seats ($450/per month when billed annually) + per additional user cost is $100 and $90, respectively
- Enterprise plan: $1,200/per month for 10 seats with a cost of $120/per additional user
*To decide on a better plan that suits your needs, you can always get in touch with HubSpot’s Sales, as each plan has a button below leading you there.
HubSpot Reviews
👍 Pros:
“I love the modern and easy-to-use platform that Hubspot provides. I love Hubspot tasks, or as I like to refer to them as virtual sticky notes. They recently added the ability to create a recurring task and that has been a gamechanger for my team. I also love the live chat functionality and how organized and easy it is to use.”
👎 Cons:
“There’s a bit of a learning curve with the platform so learning the ins and outs can take patience, but once you get the hang of it, it’s smooth sailing. I appreciate all the help they provide through training and resources to get teams acquainted.”
2- Salesforce vs. Freshworks
Like the other cloud solutions, Salesforce has a few products that help marketing, sales, and support teams. For this article, the product Salesforce Service Cloud is taken as the main product.
While mobile optimization might be a common feature in customer support management tools, many people—including me, believe that Salesforce Service Cloud steps it up by advancing its mobile user support. It might sound like a small detail; however, every customer support team knows that neither managing customers nor agents are an easy job. That’s why this collaborative tool which smoothly enables remote agent management doesn’t go unnoticed by business owners.
Salesforce Pricing
- Essentials plan: $25/month per user when billed annually (up to 10 users)
- Professional plan: $75/month per user when billed annually
- Enterprise plan: $150/month per user when billed annually
- Unlimited plan: $300/month per user when billed annually
*All the plans above include a free trial, making it possible to try them out before committing to an annual purchase.
Salesforce Reviews
👍 Pros:
“Salesforce Service Cloud is highly customizable and allows for easy addition of case categories, new case forms, workflows that will help to enable easier escalation between groups and eliminate any of the back-and-forths you see in escalations between tiers. The addition of tons of plugins for software like Aha!, Azure DevOps, call center, and chat platforms are fantastic and serve us better.”
👎 Cons:
“On the flip side of things – the design of the interface is very text-heavy and not very colorful compared to other support systems. It would be nice to have easy ways of setting a Critical ticket to have red font text or a red highlight in a case queue or case listing, etc.”
2- Zendesk vs. Freshworks
Zendesk is a company that offers several solutions for teams, such as its customer relationship management tool, Zendesk Support Suite, which is quite famous for its ability to simultaneously improve customer support and sales process.
Even though Zendesk is close to Freshworks in terms of features, some particular components make Zendesk Support Suite a more compliant solution. One of the reasons is its seamless ticket management, as its users heavily appreciate the automated responses of Zendesk. Another is its SLA (service-level agreements) management system since tracking these agreements is crucial for the customer support teams.
Thus, Zendesk Support Suite might be a better option for you if you intend to put forward a more self-service experience for your customers, reducing the workload of your agents in the easiest way possible.
Zendesk Pricing
- Suite Team: $49/month per user when billed annually
- Suite Growth: $79/month per user when billed annually
- Suite Professional: $99/month per user when billed annually
- Suite Enterprise: $150/month per user when billed annually
*All the plans above include a free trial, making it possible to try them out before committing to an annual purchase. + Startups have the chance to benefit from Zendesk for six months free of charge.
Zendesk Reviews
👍 Pros:
“Customizable and dynamic, you’re able to bridge together several teams or business units to work together in an effective way. We’ve been able to set up multiple integrations with other tools using webhooks and other native integrations to help make actionable triggers that save us time and process effort. Reporting is very powerful.”
👎 Cons:
“Lack of any form of onboarding. Yes, they have a very nice set of online documents, but when you get lost and need advice, that doesn’t seem to be an option except to chat with a salesperson.”
4- Zoho vs. Freshworks
Being a famous brand for its productivity tools and SaaS applications, Zoho is one of the suitable options you could put your trust in instead of Freshworks. Being home to almost the same features, both applications meet the customers’ needs to the fullest extent. Still, there is one BIG difference: Zoho Desk fulfills its promises for a significantly lower price.
Besides, the promises of Zoho Desk regarding the enablement of communication are highly appreciated, thanks to the thorough maintenance and transparency it accomplishes to provide when carrying out the live chat software features, such as pop-up chat, notifications, targeted e-mails, and in-app messaging.
Thus, you know where to go if you are looking for a cheaper alternative to Freshworks.
Zoho Pricing
- Free plan: €0 (up to 3 users)
- Standard plan: €9/month per user when billed annually (€18/month per user on monthly subscriptions)
- Professional plan: €15/month per user when billed annually (€30/month per user on monthly subscriptions)
- Enterprise plan: €26.25/month per user when billed annually (€45/month per user on monthly subscriptions)
*All the plans above include a 15-day-long free trial, making it possible to try them out before committing to an annual purchase.
Zoho Reviews
👍 Pros:
“At Zoho Desk, I am able to see all my agents who are working on customer queries raised by the client. Also, The UI is very user-friendly. Any agent from your organization can log in in Zoho desk and start working on it. Also, it is available on the mobile version. The history feature is too good.”
👎 Cons:
“I wish that it had a more customizable dashboard similar to what is offered by FreshDesk. I have used the view counters to replace that, but a visual dashboard would be great.”
5- Help Scout vs. Freshworks
Help Scout‘s game-changer is its sole focus on customer support as it doesn’t have any other products that offer assistance on various subjects. Easing collaboration on workflow automation, shared folders, mentions, integrations, searches, and notifications, Help Scout cares about saving time.
One crucial perk of Help Scout is the UI (user interface) which is a really important element for the customer support team that has to learn their way around and look at the screen during work hours. Fortunately, this customer support helpdesk has everyone’s back through its stellar UI, paving its way to being considered an alternative to Freshworks.
Help Scout Pricing
- Standard plan: $20/month per user when billed annually ($25/month per user on monthly subscriptions)
- Plus plan: $35/month per user when billed annually ($40/month per user on monthly subscriptions)
- Company plan: $60/month per user when billed annually
*All the plans above include a 15-day-long free trial, making it possible to try them out before committing to an annual purchase.
Help Scout Reviews
👍 Pros:
“Helpscout was easy to setup. And to maintain the system. And as a result my customers are helped much better. Also, they are very clear in there communication. Once, they announced a change in the system. They helped me on every aspect to implement this change and to make sure everything was setup correctly. Awesome support.”
👎 Cons:
“I would say mobile interface and user friendliness should be improved. Every time I have to use HS on my phone I struggle a lot. “
Conclusion
There might be a lot of options when it comes to customer support management, but don’t worry!
This article focuses on generating alternatives to Freshworks in order to supply you with the items that Freshworks fails to do so, saving you from a long research process. So, you can click on the links of the tools that catch your attention and try out their free trials without any problem.
I hope it’s a match!
Frequently Asked Questions
Who competes with Freshworks?
Freshworks has various competitors in taking the lead as a customer support tool, such as HubSpot, Zendesk, Salesforce, Zoho, and Help Scout.
Is Freshworks a competitor to Salesforce?
Yes, Freshworks is a competitor to Salesforce as both successfully produce decent products in various areas that help teams improve their workflow.
How is Freshworks different from Zoho?
Even though the products they produce have similar goals, Freshworks is different from Zoho in terms of UI, features, pricing, the general audience they serve, etc.
