ConnectWise PSA vs Freshdesk comparison

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ConnectWise Logo
1,338 views|604 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
Freshworks Logo
3,291 views|1,982 comparisons
93% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between ConnectWise PSA and Freshdesk based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Help Desk Software solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed ConnectWise PSA vs. Freshdesk Report (Updated: May 2024).
771,157 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The most valuable feature is the management of projects from start to finish.""The initial setup isn't too difficult.""I like the search function up top where if you know what you're searching for, you can find it pretty quickly. Because you've got the option to change what the search parameters are, whether you're searching for a project, quote, ticket, or an invoice, you can kind of pick and choose what you're looking for.""The product has been pretty stable so far.""Contains every feature that a VAR or MSP would want.""All the features of ConnectWise Manage are valuable. However, ticketing, customer management, customer communication, technician efficiency, calendars, coding, billing, invoicing, and contract management are available. It's a complete solution. Additionally, the company is responsive with the ability to progress or make necessary changes happen.""It's a nice ticketing system.""I also like ConnectWise's ability to set up queries. I can set up all these different queries that look for specific things and end up with a list of results, like feedback from the client or the ticket status."

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"Its simplicity is most valuable. It is easy and simple, and it requires negligible training effort. I don't spend all my time goofing around trying to find stuff in the ticketing system.""We have made use of the training academy and the technical support team from Freshdesk. Both have been very good resources.""The user experience on the platform itself is fantastic. The UI is clean and uncluttered, so it's easy to find any information about your customer or the issue at hand. You can find out the person responsible for that particular issue, what the problem is, who the stakeholders are, and how to resolve it. There are lots of tools that will help you do that as well.""I like that it's very user-friendly. The way they designed this application, any layperson can just do some drag and drop actions and use it. It's not that difficult. It's also easy to implement. The most important thing is, you don't need to go to this application to create a ticket. You just send out an email, and the ticket is created automatically. I have never seen a feature like this before.""Freshdesk significantly improved our customer issue resolution process. We can now easily record and track all customer requests, ensuring that no tickets are lost.""The ticketing system is smooth, but since we use a free version, we do not have many facilities available.""The UI is easy to use.""It is quite easy to program custom apps and integrate them."

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Cons
"Has a very outdated 90s interface and not all features are accessible via the mobile app.""All other ticket systems can search previous tickets, whether they were homegrown in Oracle or something else. I'm talking about searching the actual contents of the discussions in the ticket. In ConnectWise, you can only search the summaries. It's ridiculous.""A lot of times, it'll take a couple of moments for things to go through. If you're not patient about it, it may seem like things aren't working.""The tracking inventory or the way it tracks the products is not very good.""There should be some improvements to the interface. It is not completely intuitive. When you click in a blank area of a screen, you'll find some options.""Sometimes it is a little bit slow, which is the only complaint I have about it.""If you've got 40 tickets that come in, that get generated, that don't get properly tagged with the company, you can't just check them all and reassign them to another company. You have to individually reassign each one of those tickets to a new company.""Their reporting options aren't great. BrightGauge was something that we added on, and that enhanced the experience."

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"There are a few things we have asked for, like a forward button. When a ticket comes in, we forward it, but it doesn't sync up with the forward. That is the one they have to rework. The other is when we forward the ticket, it doesn't go all, or certain things don't go with it. We have told them about it, and they are working on it. It would be better if they gave us a more standard reporting template. Although they already have some, many aren't usable. It would be easier if we had more templates to work with.""Having so many tags makes everyday work a lot more complicated, and a lot more time-consuming.""If Freshdesk had forms in it so that I could go to the portal and fill out a service request, that would improve it immensely and make it more valuable for enterprise customers, but that's not a current functionality. You can't have a certain catalog of any type. You can't be like, "Hey, I want to just go submit a ticket," and then type in. You can't prompt them to ask anything. It is just a blank form.""I would like on-the-go translation,""Sometimes our requirements are not matched with Freshdesk's free version as most of the advanced features are not available to us.""I would like to see improvements in the account management aspect, having a customer portal for better visibility into my subscription, invoices, and trouble tickets.""I would like to be able to change the subject in emails for ourselves. If we could have the option to do that, it would improve our speed and the overall cleanliness of the CRM.""The reporting, analysis modules and insights capabilities for this solution could be improved."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "There are some different add-ons and benefits that are optional and come at an additional cost."
  • "The cost can be the main barrier. It's not a solution for a three person company. It just isn't going to be cost effective. Because ConnectWise Manage does have everything there, the licensing is a little bit restrictive as far as how they want to granularly assign licenses rather than having more of an all-inclusive package."
  • "We're paying $940 a month for 14 users."
  • "The pricing of ConnectWise Manage is reasonable."
  • "I have one monthly license for all of the ConnectWise products I use, and it's $85 per user."
  • More ConnectWise PSA Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "It was definitely not expensive. It was two grand or maybe three grand total for a year. It has just straight and simple standard licensing fees. There is no additional fee."
  • "The price could be better, but it's okay. Compared to ServiceNow and JIRA, Freshworks offers a competitive price. There are also additional licensing costs because you need Microsoft Outlook. Each new email account costs around $15 to $19."
  • "The best system plan is enterprise. It costs basically 79 Euros per agent per month when it's billed annually and 95 Euros per agent per month when it's billed monthly."
  • "We use a licensing model only so we pay for the number of agents we have configured in the system only."
  • "Freshdesk was the best solution with the best price. It was cost efficient and included all the features that we needed."
  • "We use a combination of Freshdesk, Freshservice, and Freshchat. We use the whole suite. Weirdly enough, we pay more for Freshdesk than we do for Freshservice. I would rate it a three out of five in terms of pricing. You can get different bundles, and you can always move to different plans that are standard. Freshservice can go anywhere from $19 up to $120 per agent, per month. There is such a wide range, and it is very customizable to your needs."
  • "It is costly."
  • "The pricing is pretty manageable and acceptable."
  • More Freshdesk Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:I have one monthly license for all of the ConnectWise products I use, and it's $85 per user. In addition to the standard license fee, I think there's a $1,500 implementation fee.
    Top Answer:ConnectWise PSA’s graphical interface is a little old. They could make it more refreshing.
    Top Answer:Freshdesk significantly improved our customer issue resolution process. We can now easily record and track all customer requests, ensuring that no tickets are lost.
    Top Answer:I would like to see improvements in the account management aspect, having a customer portal for better visibility into my subscription, invoices, and trouble tickets. Additionally, more flexibility in… more »
    Top Answer:I use Freshdesk to manage IT support tickets for our team of 15 IT professionals across multiple countries. It has been effective in ticket management, and we find the price-to-functionality ratio… more »
    Ranking
    15th
    out of 59 in Help Desk Software
    Views
    1,338
    Comparisons
    604
    Reviews
    5
    Average Words per Review
    339
    Rating
    7.8
    9th
    out of 59 in Help Desk Software
    Views
    3,291
    Comparisons
    1,982
    Reviews
    9
    Average Words per Review
    667
    Rating
    8.1
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    ConnectWise Manage
    Learn More
    Overview

    ConnectWise PSA is an award-winning professional services automation solution that connects your entire organization. Save time throughout your entire business lifecycle with the powerful automation and standardization that ConnectWise PSA brings to the table. A single view of your business operations makes it possible to streamline your business even further.​

    Key features and benefits of ConnectWise PSA:

    Help desk

    Centralize your help desk with features that allow you to organize and standardize your service requests and streamline workflow automation to ensure your support operations are as efficient as possible. Keep your help desk responsive and productive no matter how challenging the issue is.

    Cloud billing

    Managing recurring billing can be a streamlined and straightforward process. You can standardize and simplify the way you manage customer contracts, including cloud. Easily manage, monitor, and bill for other public cloud services such as Microsoft 365 and Cisco Cloud Solutions.

    Sales and marketing

    The competitive landscape has made the window of opportunity for growing your business more challenging. Take control for generating leads with sales and marketing features that help you build a stronger, more predictable pipeline and improve communication with prospects to ensure high conversion rates.​

    Procurement

    Supplier operations can be hit and miss, making the procurement process far more challenging. Optimize internal purchasing and receiving workflows to keep your operations department and customers in the know.​

    Time tracking and billing

    Time tracking and billing reduces revenue loss and client skepticism. Your team can easily enter and track their billable time by the minute and by client, project, or task and include detailed notes to avoid client audits. With these efficiencies, your team will have more time to better serve your business and your customers.​

    Project management

    Don’t miss a beat. Project management gives you what your team needs to track the progress of multi-faceted projects and project milestones, so you can deliver what you promise to your clients on time and on budget.

    Reporting

    Knowledge and visibility are key components of a successful IT service provider. Leverage a reporting engine that give you the insights and metrics to help you make data-driven decision across all areas of your business.

    What can ConnectWise PSA do for you?

    Improve employee experience

    Give your teams a PSA that helps them perform more effectively and provide the best experience possible—for them and your customers. Keep everyone in the know, increasing management’s confidence in the ability to sustain and grow a happy customer base. ​

    Enhance the customer experience

    When your teams have what they need to do their job well the first time, your customer experience gets better and better. Provide amazing service delivery, timely and accurate invoices, and automate important reports to keep your customers happy (and in the know). Pair that with the end-user portal available, and your customer experience just got even better!​

    Give your team precious time back

    With coupling centralization and automation, your teams will function more efficiently than ever, giving everyone more time to focus on what’s important. You'll get more time to focus on growing your business!​

    Increase revenue and decrease costs

    When your systems are centralized and your operations more efficient, you can save time and reduce costs. In essence, you can improve revenue and decrease costs through all your gained efficiencies.

    Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer support solution that provides organizations with the features necessary to effectively streamline their support processes. This includes powerful multichannel capability, integrated game mechanics, smart automations, and more.

    The solution is designed to automate agent workflows and resolve routine questions using AI and bots. Freshdesk allows managers to prioritize, categorize, and assign tickets to their agents, making it easy for them to collaborate and quickly respond to customers. 

    Freshdesk Features and Benefits

    Some of the solution's top features and benefits include:

    • Simplified ticketing: With Freshdesk, you can easily prioritize, manage, and assign trackable tickets. The management system ensures that multiple agents don’t work on the same ticket by accident. You can easily set deadlines for ticket resolution based on specific categories and create custom statuses that suit your workflow to identify what stage a ticket is in.
    • Automation: Automatically assign tickets to agents and groups based on keywords and requests and set up automated repeated actions and provide quick, consistent responses to common questions using pre-formatted replies. In addition, you can choose to prevent the reopening of tickets when customers reply with a thank you.
    • Improved collaboration: Share tickets with other teams while retaining full visibility into the progress being made on the issue. Related tickets can be linked together to better keep track of the big picture. Tickets can also be split into smaller child tickets and assigned to multiple agents to help resolve complex, multi-stage issues.
    • Build up your knowledge base: Create effective support documentation by enabling agents to convert their ticket replies into knowledge base articles, while they reply.
    • Metrics and reporting: See how different agents and groups are performing by viewing various help desk metrics and improve performance by identifying problems based on insights.

      With Freshdesk’s reporting tools, you can schedule the periodic delivery of out-of-the-box and custom reports to your inbox. The solution’s customer satisfaction reports provide you with feedback on how your customers rate your support.
    • Forum moderation: Set up moderation workflows to ensure that forum posts that violate your guidelines are not immediately published. Critical issues raised in the community are automatically converted into tickets to ensure they get the required response.

    • Integration: Freshdesk’s open API can be used to integrate the solution with multiple  third-party systems. 
    • Comprehensive security: Freshdesk’s security features allow you to:

      • Set custom access permissions for agents.
      • Perform comprehensive audits of networks and systems.
      • Secure your own support domain or vanity URL with custom SSL certificates.
      • Whitelist IP ranges and restrict login access outside of work, or link IP whitelisting to a VPN.
      • Set up SSO scripts for credential authentication.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Freshdesk stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Two major ones are its effective ticketing system and its intuitive interface.

    Deepak B., an application manager, writes, “Freshdesk has allowed us to measure and track the response and resolution time of tickets which has been reduced from seven to eight hours down to 30 minutes to one hour. This information is valuable for board meetings.”

    Sample Customers
    IT Connexx, High Standards Technology Inc, Solvere One, MyIT, ConnectWise, Simpatico Systems, Fred IT Group, ECS, OneStop, K2 Technologies, Clark Integrated Technologies, Jmark, Geek on Wheels
    Honda, 3M, Hugo Boss, Petronas, Sony Pictures, The Atlantic, goodreads, Clear Channel Radio, Penn University of Pennsylvania, unicef, Kuoni, Movember
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company57%
    Non Profit14%
    Security Firm14%
    Energy/Utilities Company14%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company30%
    Comms Service Provider6%
    Financial Services Firm5%
    Manufacturing Company5%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company21%
    Retailer21%
    Comms Service Provider11%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company23%
    Media Company6%
    Real Estate/Law Firm6%
    Retailer6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business84%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise5%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business32%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise52%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business59%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise28%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business27%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise56%
    Buyer's Guide
    ConnectWise PSA vs. Freshdesk
    May 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about ConnectWise PSA vs. Freshdesk and other solutions. Updated: May 2024.
    771,157 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    ConnectWise PSA is ranked 15th in Help Desk Software with 19 reviews while Freshdesk is ranked 9th in Help Desk Software with 27 reviews. ConnectWise PSA is rated 8.2, while Freshdesk is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of ConnectWise PSA writes "Its macros, shortcuts and custom queries are really helpful ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Freshdesk writes "Incredibly user-friendly, flexible, and affordable". ConnectWise PSA is most compared with ServiceNow, Datto Autotask Professional Services Automation, JIRA Service Management, Kaseya BMS and ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, whereas Freshdesk is most compared with JIRA Service Management, ServiceNow, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Spiceworks and TOPdesk. See our ConnectWise PSA vs. Freshdesk report.

    See our list of best Help Desk Software vendors.

    We monitor all Help Desk Software reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.