Freshdesk vs. Zoho Desk: Which Help Desk Should You Choose?

As customer support becomes more and more complicated, the demand for the best help desk software is at an all-time high. 

Among hundreds of tools in the market, the competition is stiff between two dominant players — Freshdesk vs. Zoho Desk. Since both these tools offer identical features and come at a similar price point, choosing one over the other can prove to be the most grueling decision you will ever make. 

So which one is better and deserves your money? 

Well to settle this long battle and help you make the right decision, we have created this Zoho Desk vs Freshdesk comparison blog. We will compare their overall capabilities, features, as well as prices to help you see which software will work best for you. Let’s go! 

Introduction to Freshdesk and Zoho Desk 

Before we begin with the Freshdesk and Zoho Desk comparison, let’s take a step back and understand what these tools are all about. 

Freshdesk

Freshworks, the parent company of Freshdesk, was founded in India in 2010 by Girish Mathrubutham. Over the years, this leading software brand has built an array of customer service tools and acquired millions of dollars to fuel rapid growth and expansion. 

Freshdesk adopts a “fresh” approach to developing software-as-a-service (SaaS) that’s affordable, easy to implement, and designed to meet the needs of end-users. 

This help desk tool helps you unify conversations from email, chat, phone, help center, social media, etc., and allows you to resolve customer requests and issues in a timely manner. You can encourage self-service among your audience, automate repetitive tasks, and enhance team collaboration. 

Zoho Desk 

Zoho Desk was formed in 1996, and since then, the company has launched a wide range of software products to meet the needs of modern businesses. Zoho is a private company run by over 10,000 employees who work in offices based across the globe. 

There is no doubt that Zoho Desk is a strong Freshdesk alternatives competitor that helps you increase agent productivity, monitor customer happiness, and build a loyal customer base. 

To make the most of this help desk tool, you can easily connect it with other business apps your team uses and add custom capabilities through APIs. 

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Criteria of Comparison

In order to successfully compare two or more tools, you need to identify some commonalities between them. How easy is their interface to use? Are the tools priced high or low? What reporting or automation features are offered?

To help you find answers to these questions and more, we have jotted down various aspects on which we will be comparing these two help desk systems. We will be carefully evaluating the pros of the Zoho Desk and Freshdesk based on the following aspects: 

• Type of Users
• Interface
• Features
• Customer Support
• Pricing 

Freshdesk vs. Zoho Desk: Type of Users

Freshdesk 

As one of the leading help desk tools, Freshdesk is home to popular brands such as Bridgestone, Hamleys, 7-Eleven, and thousands more. 

Among their clientele, there are some big brands but most of them are small to mid-sized businesses. Since Freshdesk offers a forever free plan, it can be a good option for freelancers or small startups as well. Over the years, Freshdesk has gained tremendous popularity as it is easy to use and allows users to get started in no time. 

Moreover, you can integrate Freshdesk with your existing business tools such as Jira, MailChimp, SurveyMonkey, DropBox, Shopify, and others. 

Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk is another impressive help desk software that is used by leading brands such as McAfee, Godrej, Rogers, Cummins, and many more. 

Just like Freshdesk, Zoho Desk also offers a free plan and therefore, can be an ideal option for startups or some freelancers who are looking to offer decent support. If you are a medium-sized business looking for powerful automation capabilities, Zoho Desk can be a good option. 

Even if you are an enterprise with a large customer base, Zoho offers you more or less the same features as Freshdesk, that too at almost half its price (for the enterprise plan). You can integrate Zoho Desk with your existing tools such as Jira, Trello, Slack, Salesforce, Mailchimp, etc. 

Freshdesk vs. Zoho Desk: Interface

Freshdesk:

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On comparing Freshdesk and Zoho Desk, you will notice that Freshdesk offers a more user-friendly and better-looking interface. At the very first glance, the main interface looks clean, and agents will not have a hard time locating important features. 

Even if you receive hundreds of requests or complaints every day, you can keep them well organized in one place. Agents can easily sort and filter customer support tickets with the help of multiple metrics on the right side of the screen. They can sort and categorize tickets based on priority, tags, source, date, and so on.

In addition to this, all the tickets generated from chats, calls, emails, social media, etc., can be found right in the main dashboard. 

Zoho Desk: 

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Although Zoho Desk offers an easy-to-use interface, it still appears quite outdated compared to Freshdesk. As soon as you open a support ticket, you can view the entire conversation thread, and check attachments, approvals, tags, history, and more. Agents can also easily access communities, chats, and social media accounts from the top of the screen. 

While comparing Zoho Desk vs Freshdesk, you will realize that Zoho gives more options to customize your interface. 

For instance, you can personalize small details – you can apply your company logo to the domain, create custom fields to store additional information and design your own chat or email templates.

Freshdesk vs. Zoho Desk: Features

1. Ticket Management

Freshdesk:

Freshdesk offers a simple yet powerful ticketing system that can help your customer service team collaborate in real-time. 

With the Collision Detection feature, agents can see who else is viewing or replying to a ticket. This is a great feature to save yourself from the embarrassment of sharing multiple replies with a single customer. You can even merge similar tickets together and enhance efficiency. 

Freshdesk allows you to create SLA rules so that agents are clear about their deadlines. Agents can receive reminders or notifications when tickets are left unattended, and you can even choose to automatically escalate them to the manager. 

Zoho Desk:

Zoho Desk ticketing system offers multi-channel capabilities. You can collect support tickets from multiple channels such as email, phone, live chat, social media, etc., and organize them in a single interface. 

During Freshdesk comparison with Zoho Desk, you will realize that the latter makes it easier for you to keep your tickets well-organized. For example, you can filter support tickets by urgency, type of customer, priority, or ticket status. Once the filter is applied, the relevant tickets will appear on top so that your agents can easily prioritize their tasks. 

Moreover, when you integrate Zoho Desk with Zoho CRM, agents can find relevant customer information right within their ticketing system. 

2. Live Chat

Freshdesk:

Like most help desk tools, Freshdesk allows you to assist your customers in real time via live chat. You can take this a step further by sharing proactive chat messages with customers to let them know that your team is available to offer help. 

In addition to live chat, Freshdesk also helps you improve your social media messaging. With WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat, and Facebook integrations, you can track all social media messages in one place and respond faster. 

You can even build chatbots to assist customers with their basic queries and route conversations to relevant agents. 

Zoho Desk: 

With Zoho Desk, you can embed a live chat window directly into your help center. So when customers can’t find what they are looking for, they can reach out to you in seconds. 

When chat conversations require more time and attention, Zoho allows you to convert them into trackable tickets. While comparing Zoho Desk vs. Freshdesk, you will notice another important difference. When there are no agents available to take chats, Zoho allows you to set a wait time, after which the chat is automatically converted into a ticket. This is a great way to ensure that no conversation is missed. 

In addition to this, you can even create distinctive live chat widgets for your different brands so that your customers can never fail to recognize you. 

3. Knowledge Base

Freshdesk: 

Freshdesk allows you to create a multilingual knowledge base that supports around 42 languages and makes it easier for you to manage a global customer base. Agents can review each others’ support content, publish videos, images, or attached files in your help center and encourage self-service. 

Unlike Zoho Desk, Freshdesk helps you save your team’s valuable time with bulk actions. For instance, you can make required changes to multiple categories, articles, or folders at once. 

With Freshdesk, you can publish SEO-optimized content, track the performance of articles over a period of time, and capture feedback from your audience directly on your help pages. 

Zoho Desk: 

Unlike Freshdesk, Zoho Desk allows you to create a multi-brand help center. So what does that mean? Well, it means that you can customize your knowledge base completely for each brand you support and set up different help content for every brand.

You can even map your newly created knowledge base to your own domain and make it a true extension of your brand. To ensure better security, you can choose to grant public access to your support content or require visitors to set up their accounts before they get to see anything. 

You can also allow your audience to submit tickets directly from the knowledge base if they are not able to find relevant information.

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4. Reports & Analytics

Freshdesk:

Freshdesk’s inbuilt reports provide you with a 360° view of your support operations. The reporting interface is pretty minimalistic, and you won’t have a hard time locating metrics that are relevant to your business. 

With Freshdesk, you can easily see your unassigned tickets so that your team knows which tickets are awaiting a response. Support managers can even monitor the average first response time and the percentage of tickets resolved as per the SLAs. 

Unlike Zoho Desk, Freshdesk takes customized reporting to the next level. Agents can simply drag & drop widgets from their widget library and create meaningful reports. 

Zoho Desk: 

Zoho Desk offers detailed reports to understand and improve team performance. The reporting dashboard looks simple, clean, and presents information that your team will find useful. 

With the Reporting Overview, you can see a snapshot of your targeted help desk metrics and visualize patterns in incoming tickets. 

Customer support agents can quickly view their backlog or pending tickets over the last week and see how customers have rated them. On the other hand, help desk managers can understand the channels that customers love the most and compare ticket response and resolution times for any given period of time. 

Moreover, with the SLA Metrics Dashboard, you can view SLA violations by agents, time, or channel. 

5. Automation

Freshdesk: 

Freshdesk offers AI-powered automation to help you streamline your teams’ workflows. The tool can automatically prioritize tickets and assign them to the most-suited members of your team. 

Freshdesk’s AI called Freddy can help your team rise above manual and repetitive tasks. For instance, Freddy can learn from past tickets and automatically suggest ticket fields or labels for new tickets. 

Moreover, with AI-powered chatbots, your business can deliver instant and precise answers to the questions put forth by your prospects or existing customers. You can even allow agents to convert their ticket responses into knowledge base articles. 

Zoho Desk: 

Zoho Desk can help you automate your ticket routing process. You can set up assignment rules to ensure the right tickets end up with the right agent or department. This will save managers time and energy, so they can focus on critical tasks.

You can even maintain your SLAs by sending automated alerts or reminders to agents. Just like Freshdesk, even Zoho Desk offers AI technology called Zia. Zia can speak to your customers, share relevant articles from your knowledge base, auto-tag tickets, and help your team with sentiment analysis. 

You can even share automated messages with your customers to update them about the progress of their tickets. 

Freshdesk vs. Zoho Desk: Customer Support 

Freshdesk: 

Freshdesk offers a dedicated email as well as a contact number for support. Even when it comes to providing interactive support content to users, this company does a commendable job. 

As a Freshdesk user, you can access relevant information in the form of a vast video library. You can view interactive videos on topics such as creating knowledge base articles, setting up a multilingual knowledge base, using canned responses, and much more. 

Moreover, if you are a new Freshdesk user, you can enroll your support agents in the Freshworks Academy, where they can hone new skills, get certified, and become a part of their community. You can even ask questions, post tips, or interact with other users on the Freshworks community forum. 

Zoho Desk: 

Zoho Desk offers human support round-the-clock but only for 5 days a week. Now, this can be a major issue if your business is open on all seven days of the week. In order to get premium or enterprise support (24×7 assistance), you will have to pay an additional 20% to 25% of your license fee. Moreover, you will get a technical account manager only with the Enterprise plan. 

Even though you are required to pay additional dollars for human support, you can refer to Zoho’s extensive help center for free. You can find relevant information around topics such as documentation, integrations, webinars, and find the latest product updates or features. 

If you do not find the right answers, you can write an email to their dedicated support email account. Users can also explore Zoho via their social media accounts on Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. 

Freshdesk vs. Zoho Desk: Pricing 

Freshdesk Pricing:

Free: Forever free plan

Growth: $15/user/month

Pro: $49/user/month

Enterprise: $79/user/month

Freshdesk comes with a 21-day free trial that lets you explore the tool’s interface, features and see if it matches your needs or not. 

The basic plan called Growth starts at $15/user/month and offers basic features such as help desk reports, collision detection, time tracking, and more. 

Although the basic plans start low, Freshdesk’s topmost plan called Enterprise can prove to be quite expensive at $79/user/month. For a hefty price, you can get features such as skilled-based routing, email bot, Article Suggestor, Social Signals, and more. 

Zoho Desk Pricing:  

Free: Forever free plan

Standard: $14/agent/month

Professional: $23/agent/month

Enterprise: $40/agent/month

Just like Freshdesk, Zoho Desk also offers a forever free plan that is limited to up to 3 agents. The pricing is simple and transparent, and you can even enjoy a 15-day free trial to get the look and feel of the tool. 

Zoho’s basic plan called Standard starts at $14/agent/month and can offer features such as social and community channels, SLAs, customer happiness ratings, and more. With the Enterprise plan ($40/agent/month), you can get Zia – Artificial Intelligence, Multi-Level IVR, Multi-Brand Help Center, scheduled reports, and more. 

In this Freshdesk Zoho Desk comparison, it is evident that Zoho is more affordable than its counterpart. In fact, if you are an enterprise with advanced support needs, you can go for Zoho’s Enterprise plan that costs less than half of Freshdesk’s same plan. 

So Which One’s The Best?

Well, in this Zoho Desk vs Freshdesk comparison, there is no absolute winner. Both the tools have been leading players in the market for decades and offer almost identical features. However, there are still some situations where you can choose one over the other. 

When to Choose Freshdesk?

Freshdesk is an all-in-one customer support tool that offers an easy-to-use interface at a decent price point. In addition to some must-have ticketing features, you can also get powerful automation and reporting capabilities. However, some Freshdesk plans can cost your business heavily and make you pay far more than what you get. 

When to choose Zoho Desk?

Zoho Desk is pretty much close to Freshdesk in terms of features. You can go for this tool, especially if you are using other Zoho apps such as Zoho CRM, Forms, SalesIQ, etc. Moreover, if you are a large corporation or enterprise, Zoho Desk’s “Enterprise” is cheaper and will help you offer support to a large audience. 

But wait a minute, we do have a perfect alternative to these tools. 

ProProfs Help Desk as an Alternative to Zoho Desk & Freshdesk

Do you find Freshdesk expensive, or are you tired of Zoho Desk’s outdated interface? Well, here we present ProProfs Help Desk, a tool that costs much less but ticks all the boxes. Let’s see how ProProfs puts your team in a better position. 

• Ease to use and set up: ProProfs Help Desk offers a Gmail-like interface that you would already be familiar with. There is no need to conduct rigorous training sessions as agents can start resolving support tickets in no time. Moreover, with advanced search functionality, you can search for all your past customer conversations in seconds. 

• Omnichannel ticketing: ProProfs Help Desk helps you gather customer conversations from every nook and corner and organizes them in one place. So no matter if a customer drops an email, sends a live chat message, or shares his query via a web form, you can cater to your customers’ needs easily. 

• Chatbots: You can design chatbots for different scenarios — to qualify and grow leads, generate sales, or improve customer support. With ready-to-use conversation templates, you can get your chatbots live in minutes. Offer 24×7 assistance to customers and enhance the support experience. 

• CSAT & NPS surveys: ProProfs makes it easier for your team to share automated email surveys right after interacting with customers. They can rate an agent’s knowledge, skills, and other factors. Moreover, you can even share CSAT and NPS surveys with your audience to monitor and improve the customer experience. 

We are sure after reading this detailed Zoho Desk vs. Freshdesk comparison blog, you will be able to find the perfect tool for your team. If you are looking for a tool that costs less and comes packed with AI-powered features, then ProProfs Help Desk can prove to be your ideal support partner. We suggest you opt for the free trial of these tools and explore every feature yourself.