Comparing Freshdesk Alternatives: 9 Top Options for 2025

There is no overall best customer support tool. But why is that? 

What's best for one company may be terrible for another. What makes something the "best" depends on highly individualized factors like the size of your team, how your agents do their work, what your budget is, and so on.

For this post, we're providing you with a list of the nine best Freshdesk alternatives for specific use cases. We did a deep dive into each platform to understand what is unique about them, what types of companies they're best for, and how they compare on pricing to make it easy to find the option that's the best for you.

Why look for a Freshdesk alternative?

There are some great things about Freshdesk. It offers more features for a lower price than many other support platforms, and it has one of the largest integration libraries on the market. Customers also report that it's easy to downgrade or cancel your subscription when needed.

While these advantages make the platform great for some, it's not right for everyone.

When you're a small support team that's primarily (or only) delivering support via email, Freshdesk is very affordable. But as your team grows and you start adding in channels, its cost can increase exponentially. 

Freshdesk is part of a larger suite of business tools (Freshworks) for customer support, sales, IT support, and marketing. Not only does its per-user pricing increase your costs every time you add a new team member, but you also have to continually purchase add-on products for new channels and features. Want live chat? You'll need to purchase Freshchat. Want AI features? Add the usage costs to your price. Want phone support? You'll need to purchase Freshcaller.

Normally, the advantage of having a suite of tools is that the products all work together seamlessly, but customers report that Freshworks' tools don't all integrate with or pass data between each other.

Other customers say that the platform glitches frequently, its third-party integrations have a lot of bugs, and that getting answers from their support team requires a lot of back-and-forth.

For small teams that are just getting started with support, Freshdesk can be a good omnichannel option, but if your team is starting to scale, it might be time to look for a support platform that's more reliable.

The 9 best Freshdesk alternatives

If you're ready to upgrade the platform you use to deliver support to your customers, one of the nine best Freshdesk alternatives below may be the perfect fit for your needs.

1. Help Scout – Best Freshdesk alternative for growing businesses

Help Scout is an affordable solution for growing businesses with predictable and all-inclusive pricing. You can deliver support via email, chat, self-service, and social on every plan. There's no upcharge for using its AI features, and its conversation-based pricing means you can add as many users as you want at no additional cost.

Overview

The heart of the Help Scout platform is Inbox, a shared mailbox that enables your team to work collaboratively to respond to customer conversations across all of the channels you support.

Inbox has all of the features needed to stay on top of the queue: conversation assignments, internal notes, collision detection, customer profiles, customer satisfaction surveys, and more.

In addition, it has features that can help with productivity and organization like tags, custom fields, saved replies, and workflows. Workflows help automate routine tasks like conversation assignments and tagging so your team doesn’t get bogged down by busywork.

Help Scout is also great for customer engagement. Its web widget, Beacon, can help keep your customers engaged through chat, targeted messaging, in-app surveys, proactive support, and self-service.

Speaking of self-service, Help Scout’s knowledge base product, Docs, makes it easy to publish the information your customers need to get the most out of your product, service, or business. Docs articles can be viewed via a customizable help center or accessed from any website or app via a Beacon.

For those looking to add AI to their customer communications processes, Help Scout offers four AI features that can help your team do their best work:

• AI Summarize: Condense long conversation threads into a few bullet points, helping your team get up to speed quickly.

• AI Assist: Lengthen or shorten a response, check grammar, translate text into a different language, or adjust the tone of a message.

• AI Drafts: Use AI to draft responses to your incoming conversations. Agents can choose to edit the draft or send it as-is.

• AI Answers: Add AI to any Beacon to answer customers' questions instantly.

AI Drafts and Answers are both trained on your help center content and your replies to previous conversations to ensure that the drafts and replies it creates are as accurate as possible.

Finally, Help Scout's reporting can help you keep track of your efforts. See how individual agents are performing, measure contact volume or response time, see which knowledge base articles are making an impact, and uncover where you have room to improve.

Key features

• Manage requests from all channels — email, chat, and social — in every plan.

• Use AI at no additional cost to draft email replies, perform translations, summarize conversations, reply to live chat inquiries, and check spelling and grammar.

• Add unlimited users at no additional cost; get the whole company involved if you want.

• Get requests to the right person/team, and save time with workflows and saved replies.

• Stay organized with custom fields, views, message snoozing, tags, and teams.

• Track team performance and customer satisfaction with reports and CSAT/NPS surveys.

• Deliver personalized support with customer profiles and 100+ integrations.

Limitations

Help Scout integrates with phone support providers like Aircall, Talkdesk, and CloudTalk but does not offer phone support natively. It also does not offer features for building customer portals or creating community forums. If these are features you're using in Freshdesk that you want to make sure to get in an alternative, Help Scout might not be right for you.

Migrating from Freshdesk to Help Scout

Help Scout offers automatic migration from Freshdesk to Help Scout using Import2, and the service is completely free for most customers. Import2 will migrate all of your tickets/emails, tags, and customer profiles from Freshdesk to Help Scout.

Pricing

Free plan available for unlimited users and up to 50 contacts per month. Paid plans start at $50 per month.

2. Keeping – Best Freshdesk alternative for small businesses

Small businesses without a dedicated support team may want to consider Keeping as an alternative to Freshdesk. It's a Gmail add-on that adds a shared inbox to your existing account, allowing your whole team to see and reply to customer inquiries from their Gmail inboxes.

Keeping creates a separate "Keeping" folder in Gmail that houses emails sent to your support@ email address. All team members with access to the folder will see it in their Gmail sidebar. It also adds features that will save you time and keep you organized, like ticket assignments, saved responses, tagging, internal conversations, and basic rule-based workflows.

If you're looking for a Freshdesk alternative that lets you manage email requests in a shared inbox and doesn't require a lot of training for new users, it's a great, affordable option.

Key features

• Assign emails to individuals, set priorities, add tags, and change statuses.

• Create a database of saved responses to reply to inquiries quickly.

• Integrate with Shopify to see order details alongside customer emails.

• Collaborate on emails with teammates privately in a sidebar.

• Create simple rule-based workflows to route emails, add tags, and set priorities.

• Access reports on number of tickets resolved and average response times.

Limitations

Keeping is a very simple support tool that's designed for email support only, so if you're looking for more advanced features like SLAs, customer portals, and AI — or want to offer chat, social, or self-service support — it's not going to be the best choice for your needs.

Migrating from Freshdesk to Keeping

There are no services for migrating Freshdesk data to Keeping.

Pricing

Free trial available. Plans start at $12/user per month.

3. Zoho Desk – Best for access to a large suite of business tools

If you were excited about using Freshworks to consolidate multiple business tools under one brand umbrella but were disappointed to find that they didn't integrate properly, Zoho's products might be perfect for you. In addition to Zoho Desk — its customer service platform — it offers more than 100 different apps for sales, marketing, HR, finance, legal, development, and more.

As far as Zoho Desk goes, you can offer support across all channels — email, chat, phone, self-service, and social. Unlike Freshdesk, you won't have to purchase add-on products, but different channels are parts of different plans. You'll get email and social on the lowest-tier plan, chat and self-service on the second-tier plan, phone on the third, and AI features on the fourth. 

Zoho Desk's feature set is very similar to Freshdesk's. You can create community forums and customer portals, set SLAs with automatic escalations, route tickets via round-robin and skillsets, and create rule-based workflows. Its AI features can reply to emails for you, analyze sentiment, tag tickets, and surface insights for managers.

Key features

• Consolidate and integrate all business tools under the Zoho brand umbrella.

• Assign agents to specific customers to route inquiries to the right person automatically.

• Set up instant messaging with WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, Telegram, and more.

• Build automated workflows with a no-code drag-and-drop builder.

• Publish knowledge base articles in more than 40 languages.

• Create sub-tickets and connect them to a parent ticket for complex requests.

Limitations

As far as features go, Zoho Desk is very comparable to Freshdesk, so it will likely have all of the features you need. However, customers do report that the mobile app isn't as feature-rich as the desktop app, getting the system set up is complicated, and a lot of the options for customizing the platform require development support.

Migrating from Freshdesk to Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk has its own platform, Zwitch, that can be used to migrate your data from Freshdesk. It will transfer your agents, accounts, tickets, threads, and contacts as well as your knowledge base articles, categories, sections, and translations.

Pricing

Free plan available for up to three users. Paid plans start at $7/user per month.

4. Zendesk – Best Freshdesk alternative for enterprise companies

If you've outgrown Freshdesk and are looking for something that's much more customizable, offers more integrations, and has every feature you might ever need, Zendesk is probably the right choice for you. You'll pay more for Zendesk than you do for Freshdesk, but the higher cost will get you all of the features you had in Freshdesk and more.

Zendesk integrates with nearly 2,000 third-party apps. You can connect it to nearly every CRM, billing platform, ecommerce shop, social media site, and more. It supports all channels natively (though like Zoho Desk, different channels are packaged into different pricing plans), and you can even add light agents to give limited access to the platform to non-support team members.

As far as AI features, Zendesk has AI agents that are similar to Freshdesk's AI copilot. They support your team members by suggesting replies and executing actions for you. You can also use AI to automatically reply to customers over live chat, turn a few bullet points into an entire knowledge base article, and route tickets to the right team or agent.

In terms of customization, you can use Zendesk's Sunshine™ platform to build custom apps that make the platform work exactly like you need it to. Apps can be built by support teams using a no-code workflow builder, or you can bring in your development team for more complex builds — Sunshine™ uses open standards and common programming languages.

Key features

• Deliver omnichannel support across email, phone, social, self-service, and chat.

• Customize the platform as much as desired, either with code or with a no-code builder.

• Manage conversations from Facebook, Instagram, X, WhatsApp, Slack, WeChat, LINE, and more.

• Receive and reply to text message support requests from your ticketing system.

• Build both external and internal knowledge bases.

• Give non-support team members limited access at no additional per-user charge.

Limitations

As far as features go, Zendesk will have everything you could possibly need. However, customers report that Zendesk is a complex platform to set up — you're looking at a minimum of a month of setup time for small teams — your pricing will increase every time you want to access a new feature, and when you need support from their team, you might not get it.

Migrating from Freshdesk to Zendesk

Zendesk has built-in tools for migrating your tickets, users, organizations, and articles into its platform from other support tools. For complex migrations, you can also pay for Zendesk's professional services team to support you with getting everything moved over.

Pricing

Free trial available. Plans start at $19/agent per month.

5. Intercom – Best Freshdesk alternative for AI-first support

If you really liked Freshdesk's AI features and want to automate even more of your support operations, Intercom is a good option to consider. It has everything Freshdesk offers — automatic replies to customer questions via chat and email, copilots to help your agents work faster, AI-powered analysis and insights — and much more.

You can use AI to triage and route tickets and to generate answers for customers. Create detailed workflows using Intercom's no-code builder to dictate exactly what the AI should do for different types of queries. In addition to using data from your site, previous replies, help center, and other sources you feed it, Intercom's AI Agent, Fin, can also be connected to data from third-party systems to personalize its responses to customers. 

Beyond using third-party data to personalize responses, Intercom's AI agents can update data in third party systems. Set it up to automatically perform tasks like canceling orders for customers, processing refunds, changing reservations, and updating billing information.

As far as insights and analysis, Intercom's AI can interpret conversations to populate CSAT scores even when customers don't rate support interactions themselves, identify and point you to low-quality responses so you know where more training is needed, and show you where your help center articles are failing your customers when they're looking for answers on their own.

Key features

• Deliver omnichannel support across email, chat, social, self-service, and phone.

• Use AI to answer customers' questions automatically over chat, social, and email.

• Set up tasks to have AI agents route and triage tickets or handle basic requests.

• Add collaborator seats to give limited platform access to non-support team members.

• Use AI to automatically identify unhelpful support replies and knowledge base articles.

• Create and send bulk email, SMS, WhatsApp, and phone campaigns.

Limitations

If you were using Freshcaller to answer customer questions over the phone with AI, you won't find that feature in Intercom. Its AI features are limited to text-based support channels. 

Additionally, while Intercom has a basic plan that's comparable in price to Freshdesk, its more robust plans have a starting price that's more expensive than Freshdesk's priciest plan, so it's not a good option if you're looking to reduce your costs.

Migrating from Freshdesk to Intercom

Intercom does not offer any native migration tools for importing your Freshdesk data into its system. However, it does integrate with the third-party service Help Desk Migration, which can do the data transfer for you for a fee.

Pricing

Free trial available. Plans start at $29/seat per month. Fin AI resolutions cost $0.99 each on all plans. Unlimited uses of Copilot — Intercom’s AI-powered agent assist feature — cost an additional $29/agent per month.

6. HubSpot Service Hub – Best Freshdesk alternative for startups

HubSpot Service Hub is a good alternative to Freshdesk for startups that need robust systems for support, sales, and marketing. Its startup plan can reduce the cost of its software by as much as 75% for your first year, 50% for your second, and 25% for your third, and it includes full access to the brand's Service Hub, CRM, and Marketing Hub products.

Service Hub has a lot of the features you're used to from Freshdesk. You can create customer portals, set SLAs, launch a chatbot to answer questions automatically, and route tickets to the right teams. Because your CRM, marketing tools, and help desk are all managed by the same brand, all of the data from each system passes to the others instantly and seamlessly.

HubSpot's connection between the systems makes it particularly useful for sales-led startups without a dedicated support team — or with sales/customer success team members providing support. Because your help desk is in the same system they use as a CRM day to day, they'll be familiar with the interface and won't have to struggle to learn a new tool.

Key features

• See all data from CRM, Marketing Hub, and Service Hub in the same platform.

• Get a significant discount on multiple business tools if you meet specific criteria.

• Build secure portals for specific customers.

• View a customer success dashboard with health scores and insights to reduce churn.

• Answer customer questions instantly with AI that's trained on your help center content.

• Send NPS, CSAT, and CES surveys to customers.

Limitations

HubSpot is missing some features you might have been using in Freshdesk. You can't use it to create community forums, and its skill-based routing rules are only available on its Enterprise plan. And while you can accept inbound phone support calls using HubSpot, you won't get any of the call center features of Freshcaller like IVR, voice bots, or converting calls into tickets.

Migrating from Freshdesk to HubSpot Service Hub

HubSpot does not offer any native migration tools for importing your Freshdesk data into its system. However, it does integrate with the third-party service Help Desk Migration, which can do the data transfer for you for a fee.

Pricing

Free plan available. Paid plans start at $15/seat per month.

7. Front – Best Freshdesk alternative for agencies

Front is unique in that it lets you manage and share email across both your shared and personal email accounts. Companies can add all of their email addresses to the system — both jessica@ and support@ — to manage all of their email inboxes in a single platform.

By default, personal email inboxes aren't accessible by other members of the team, but you can give either temporary or permanent access to a personal inbox to others when needed. This is helpful if someone's going to be out of the office, as well as if you have a single point of contact — such as an account manager — that multiple clients email. You can triage and reply to emails sent to that individual as a team.

Beyond email management, you can also use the platform to deliver live chat support and create a knowledge base. AI will automatically answer simple live chat questions for you using knowledge from your help center, and features like collision detection, internal discussions, and guest access will help your team collaborate on incoming requests more easily.

Key features

• Create inboxes for both shared and personal email addresses.

• Share access to personal email inboxes temporarily or permanently.

• Create private customer portals and set SLAs for reply and resolution times.

• Build both internal knowledge bases and external help centers.

• Sync customer data from Salesforce, HubSpot, and Microsoft Dynamics 365.

• Use AI to create drafts of help center articles and translate articles into other languages.

Limitations

Front integrates with Aircall and Dialpad but does not offer phone support natively. It also does not have a community forums feature. If these are features you're using in Freshdesk that you want to make sure to get in an alternative, Front might not be right for you.

Migrating from Freshdesk to Front

Front does have a custom-built tool for importing data from Freshdesk into Front, but according to its support docs, the tool is deprecated. They recommend using third-party tool Help Desk Migration, which can do the data transfer for you for a fee.

Pricing

Free trial available. Plans start at $19/seat per month for up to 10 seats. AI Answers are an additional $0.70/resolution on all plans.

8. Text – Best Freshdesk alternative for à la carte pricing

For customers who want to deliver multi-channel support, having to subscribe to multiple Freshworks products to do so can be frustrating. However, it can also be an approach to saving costs if you don't need to deliver support across every single channel. If you want to minimize costs by buying products for only the channels you plan to use, Text is worth considering.

Text offers multiple support products that are entirely focused on individual channels. HelpDesk comes with all of the features you'll need for email support, LiveChat has all of the features you need for real-time chat support, KnowledgeBase lets you create internal and external help centers, and ChatBot lets you answer customers' questions with AI.

Key features

• Pay only for the specific support channels your team plans to use.

• White label any of the products to customize them with your own branding.

• Pay a flat fee for a set number of AI resolutions instead of paying for each individually.

• Create different email templates for different teams to use in HelpDesk.

• Track visitor journeys with LiveChat to see all pages they viewed.

• Route live chat conversations to the right agent automatically in LiveChat.

Limitations

While Text's products can be a low-cost option if you only need to deliver support on a single channel, the cost will get much higher if you want to scale to other channels in the future. There are also some features you might have used in Freshdesk that you won't find in the Text suite, such as phone support, customer portals, SLAs, and community forums.

Migrating from Freshdesk to products in the Text suite of tools

Text does not offer any native migration tools for importing your Freshdesk data into its products. However, it does integrate with the third-party service Help Desk Migration, which can do the data transfer for you for a fee. Help Desk Migration has import services for HelpDesk and LiveChat only — not KnowledgeBase or ChatBot.

Pricing

Free trial available for all products. HelpDesk plans start at $29/agent per month. LiveChat plans start at $20/person per month. KnowledgeBase plans start at $49/month. ChatBot plans start at $52/month for up to 12,000 AI-generated resolutions per year.

9. Gladly – Best Freshdesk alternative for phone support

Gladly is a great option for retail and ecommerce companies that deliver support primarily via phone. While it doesn't have AI-powered voice answers like Freshcaller, it does offer a lot of features that save your agents time and let customers self-serve their own support requests.

Gladly's IVR system can be used to not only route customers to the right agent but also to automatically provide them with information like order status updates and loyalty points balances. You can build an IVR tree that's as simple or as complex as you need it to be with a visual builder that lets you control every aspect of the automated phone support experience.

Customers can also opt into turning their phone call into an SMS chat if they don't want to have to wait on hold for an agent to help them. Instead, they can just wait to receive a text message that answers their question. On the back end, agents can listen to what the customer said before the transition and also see an AI-provided summary of it, then they can type a reply just like they would for a live chat request.

Gladly also supports callback requests for customers who don't want to wait on hold, automatically routes customers with specific attributes to the right agent via workflows, and allows customers to leave voicemail messages.

Key features

• Set up and manage phone, email, chat, SMS, social, and self-service support.

• Provide customers with simple updates automatically through an IVR system.

• Give customers the option to transition phone support requests to email or SMS.

• Accept payments from customers through messaging channels.

• Route customers to the right agent based on status, sentiment, language, and more.

• Merge duplicate requests/replies from different channels into a single ticket.

Limitations

Gladly's pricing is not publicly available, which generally means its pricing is high. It's almost certain to be more expensive than Freshdesk, which is priced for smaller teams. There are also some features in Freshdesk that you won't find in Gladly, such as community forums and customer portals.

Migrating from Freshdesk to Gladly

Gladly has a tool that will import your historical conversations from Freshdesk into its system. It only imports text — no images, attachments, metrics, or recordings — and you'll need to pay for the historical import add-on to use it. 

Pricing

Pricing for Gladly is not publicly available, and no free trial is offered. Request a demo on Gladly's website to get a quote.

Choosing the right Freshdesk alternative for your team

As we said in the beginning, our goal is to help you find the best Freshdesk alternative for your specific use case. Hopefully the details above helped, but we recommend doing a few more things that will help you make sure you're making the right choice.

First, get demos or start free trials of the tools you're considering (or do both). Demos are great for getting answers to questions you weren't able to find the answers to on your own, and free trials let you use the tools as you would in your day-to-day work. There's no better way to decide if a platform is right for you than to actually use it.

Second, read through online reviews to see what other customers think about the tool. Want to avoid the clearly incentivised five-star reviews from happy customers and the overly dramatic one-star ones? We recommend checking out the three-star reviews to get a more balanced perspective.

Finally, reach out to the support team to see how quickly you get a response and how helpful that response is. No matter how easy a platform is to use, you'll inevitably need help at some point, so it's important to make sure that the software you choose offers the same level of exceptional support that you strive to deliver to your own customers.

Follow these steps to have more confidence that the Freshdesk alternative you choose is going to be the best possible option for your team.