Freshservice vs. Zendesk Suite

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Freshservice
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Freshservice is a cloud-based service desk and IT service management (ITSM) solution that currently serves more than 10,000 SMB, mid-market, and enterprise customers worldwide.
$29
per month per agent
Zendesk Suite
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Zendesk is a customer support solution with built-in ticketing, conversational messaging, and live chat, designed to help businesses of all sizes and industries deliver personalized service at scale. Zendesk's AI agents are trained in CX to help Service teams resolve customer issues faster and more accurately while still providing a human-centered experience. Zendesk ultimately aims to help businesses improve time to value, reduce effort per ticket, and keep costs low.
$69
per month per agent
Pricing
FreshserviceZendesk Suite
Editions & Modules
Starter
$29.00
per month per agent
Growth
$59.00
per month per agent
Pro
$119.00
per month per agent
Enterprise
Custom
Suite Team
$69
per month per agent
Suite Growth
$115
per month per agent
Suite Professional
$149
per month per agent
Suite Enterprise
Contact Sales
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
FreshserviceZendesk Suite
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional DetailsDiscount available for annual billing.20% discount available with annual pricing.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
FreshserviceZendesk Suite
Features
FreshserviceZendesk Suite
Incident and problem management
Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Product A and Product B
Freshservice
8.2
Ratings
1% above category average
Zendesk Suite
8.9
Ratings
10% above category average
Organize and prioritize service tickets9.10 Ratings9.20 Ratings
Expert directory8.30 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Service restoration8.30 Ratings00 Ratings
Self-service tools8.10 Ratings00 Ratings
Subscription-based notifications7.90 Ratings8.60 Ratings
ITSM collaboration and documentation7.60 Ratings8.40 Ratings
ITSM reports and dashboards8.10 Ratings00 Ratings
Ticket creation and submission00 Ratings9.30 Ratings
Ticket response00 Ratings9.30 Ratings
ITSM asset management
Comparison of ITSM asset management features of Product A and Product B
Freshservice
7.7
Ratings
6% below category average
Zendesk Suite
-
Ratings
Configuration mangement7.40 Ratings00 Ratings
Asset management dashboard7.50 Ratings00 Ratings
Policy and contract enforcement8.20 Ratings00 Ratings
Change management
Comparison of Change management features of Product A and Product B
Freshservice
8.0
Ratings
5% below category average
Zendesk Suite
-
Ratings
Change requests repository7.70 Ratings00 Ratings
Change calendar7.80 Ratings00 Ratings
Service-level management8.40 Ratings00 Ratings
Self Help Community
Comparison of Self Help Community features of Product A and Product B
Freshservice
-
Ratings
Zendesk Suite
8.5
Ratings
8% above category average
External knowledge base00 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Internal knowledge base00 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Multi-Channel Help
Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of Product A and Product B
Freshservice
-
Ratings
Zendesk Suite
9.0
Ratings
15% above category average
Customer portal00 Ratings9.20 Ratings
IVR00 Ratings8.60 Ratings
Social integration00 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Email support00 Ratings9.40 Ratings
Help Desk CRM integration00 Ratings9.20 Ratings
User Ratings
FreshserviceZendesk Suite
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.7
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.5
(0 ratings)
8.9
(0 ratings)
Availability
9.0
(0 ratings)
8.6
(0 ratings)
Performance
7.8
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.3
(0 ratings)
5.5
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
7.3
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Online Training
7.2
(0 ratings)
7.9
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.1
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Configurability
8.0
(0 ratings)
9.3
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
6.5
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
8.1
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
8.3
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
7.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
FreshserviceZendesk Suite
Likelihood to Recommend
Freshservice is a great all round product with many features. Asset management, Reporting, ticketing, automatization. It was much easier for us using the Freshservice app to scan barcodes for our new devices to get them in the asset management tool, automating certain tasks such as service requests for new devices automatically making a ticket and assigning assets to certain people and getting reports from this afterwards. For a medium to large size company this is great value. For a smaller business there are smaller bundles they provide which are much more affordable in case you do not need all of the features they provide. In summary, lots of features for a snappy, responsive piece of software.
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Benefits of Zendesk Suite:
Support across channels In the case of a retail company with chat, email, WhatsApp and social DMs all piling up together, agents do not have to change tabs - everything comes into one screen in the Suite.
An example could be a representative for this e-commerce company on a sale weekend when they have live chat up, and also must deal with emails and complaints on social. Zendesk Suite handled all of this interaction seamlessly.
Knowledge base + self service: A SaaS platform receiving constant flow of "how do I reset my password" questions. You set up a help centre once, and are able to deflect hundreds of tickets for months and years.
Even better when combining with Answer Bot, where the bot begins suggesting articles without even a human interacting with the tickets.
Scaling customer service teams: A startup that has just expanded from 5 customer service representatives to 50 customer service representatives. Zendesk Suite automates routing, SLAs, macros, and analytics, when it could never work with Google Workspace + sticky notes.
This is especially helpful when managers want to be able to report or analyze ticketing conversations to see trends in perhaps their backlog, or a customer service representative is running into consistent workflows.
Globalization: A company with support teams that are spread across time zones and languages. Zendesk Suite enables for business hours, language packs, and localized help centers. It even comes with routing either by skill or region
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Pros
  • Asset Management Module: The features I like most in this module are the discovery agent software, which allows us to collect device information without manual intervention, and the simplicity and robustness of the module itself.
  • Service Catalog: This feature allows us to create forms tailored to specific service requests based on group requirements. The ability to customize forms greatly helps both us and our end-users provide the necessary information to fulfill their requests.
  • Workflow Automator and Business Rules: These two allow us to have some automation in place, eliminating some of the manual steps and decreasing the number of human errors that may happen due to manual changes.
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  • UI/UX; mature macros and automations, slick and well thought out UI.
  • Reporting, reporting, reporting. With user, org, and ticket level tags, we can track every aspect of our ticket flow.
  • Extensibility; the app marketplace is a great resource for expanding functionality from the baseline offering.
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Cons
  • Workflow management is hard to troubleshoot
  • Some default fields can't be changed
  • FAQ has no history
  • Work flow management can't be managed via API or a command line
  • Service Requests and contracts have no possibilities to choose how pricing will be calculated, like per month, per user, per year, per lifetime...
  • Automatic backup of assets and FAQ is not possible
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  • The development of messaging out of the earlier Chat module is clunky and still has limitations for multi language flows.
  • When creating queries in Explore, you can't search for 'or' conditions, only 'And', meaning you have to build multiple queries and manually add them.
  • You can't download the charts in the reports, they come down as tables and then you have to make your own charts.
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Likelihood to Renew
We are pretty invested in Freshservice right now and have integrated it pretty heavily into our environment, so it would be hard to move away from it. For the most part, we are happy with Freshservice and the ease of use it gives us in managing tickets through the system. The only complaint we've had is customer service.
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Zendesk is super easy to use and navigate. I really enjoy the sleek layout, the ability to tailor tickets, the macro option, and the quick key guide they have to make your use of time even more effective. My whole team loves working with Zendesk and rarely ever has problems.
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Usability
Easy to navigate and use GUI. We have many infrastructure team members from various departments using Freshservice and their on-boarding and training was very straightforward and we have not received much, if any negative feedback from non-technology users in regards to overall usability, interface or functionality.
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I used to work without a ticketing service, and everything was handled on an email provider, this made it very difficult to track, no integrations to the software complicating the use of internal tools or other software like Guru, Zendesk Suite wasn't hard to learn, in fact it was very easy, very straightforward, and I was an admin learning to use several tools at the same time.
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Reliability and Availability
Downtime is minimal (it does happen but not often)
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In the past year, I'd say I have only noticed maybe two hours total of downtime in my own usage. Very minimal.
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Performance
Most reports are quick, however, it can take some time for emailed exports to come via email. It would be helpful to have the exports live in the system rather than having to wait on emails.
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There has been minor performance degradation on a very few days out of the two years I have been using the product.
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Support Rating
Support from OEM is decent but needs improvement. Sometimes OEM also needs to understand the criticality of the customer and help as an Ad-hoc, which is somewhat lacking at Feshservice. Although the normal support team is well-equipped and helps according to the matrix, if something critical for the partner or customer requires immediate attention, it still goes through the L1-L2-L3 levels, which wastes a lot of time.
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We rarely need to contact their support team, but when we do they are responsive. However there have been notable times when communication between myself and the support rep was challenging despite me providing clear explanation of the issue, screenshots, and a thorough explanation of the goal we hope to achieve. It took several back and forth attempt, on a few occasions, to get resolution on an otherwise simple request
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In-Person Training
Training was enough to use the base website
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No answers on this topic
Online Training
Their documentation is pretty good, but only available in English. This makes it difficult for some of our users to understand. There are also some basic video courses available.
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Zendesk has tons of available material for training - videos, webinars, articles, etc. The only reason this is not a 10 is because it can be hard to figure out how to navigate to these things and find what you are looking for.
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Implementation Rating
Creating the correct groups for the stakeholders and enabling the right notifications are one of the most important aspect of the implementation. Creating Change templates will also help in the long run and it's a good practice to create one, if applicable.
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There is not a lot of implementation, it's all setup and you just start using it. We did do some email to ticket setup and that worked really well. The only thing that didn't work for us was the Salesforce integration, maybe your mileage will vary.
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Alternatives Considered
Freshservice is ahead in some areas, behind in others. For example, workspaces have been part of other products for many years. Freshworks just introduced it in 2023. Integration with productivity tools is better than past products we have used. Apps continue to be added as well. We selected Freshservice as it was the best mix of functionality and cost. We don't need solutions as robust as ServiceNow, for example, but found that Freshservice had some comparable advanced features.
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Even these two have a ticketing system but that I also used previously but Zendesk Suite has a very clear ticketing system - it does not take much time to understand and use it, the interface is easy and the automation system also works up to the expectation, it is not just easy for the users but for us from the backed support as well, it is so user-friendly.
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Scalability
The software is very scalable from a small to mid sized team. The features have seemed to scale exceptionally well.
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WHY we will use Zendesk in HR and PD internally
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Return on Investment
  • Alleviate our support team by providing knowledge directly to the end users.
  • Better response times from our IT support team, thanks to automation and dashboard use.
  • Better tracking of our assets by assigning them to users so we know which device was handed out to who. During off-boarding, we know which devices to ask back.
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  • Customer Success looks at ticket resolution surveys as part of their CSAT scores and either thanks their customer for a positive review or reaches out if it's a negative review.
  • Sales uses Zendesk to make sure their new prospects are getting POCs properly set up quickly and fix any issues while they do a trial of our tool.
  • Onboarding uses Zendesk to quickly make sure new customers implementations and user access are set up to help them start implementation faster.
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ScreenShots

Freshservice Screenshots

Screenshot of Android App SupportScreenshot of Asset ManagementScreenshot of Project ManagementScreenshot of Asset ManagementScreenshot of Change ManagementScreenshot of Project Management

Zendesk Suite Screenshots

Screenshot of the Zendesk Agent WorkspaceScreenshot of Omnichannel MessagingScreenshot of Zendesk TicketingScreenshot of Bots powered by Zendesk AIScreenshot of Tone shift with Zendesk AIScreenshot of Zendesk ticketing side conversations