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Espressive Barista vs Freshdesk comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 1, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Espressive Barista
Ranking in Help Desk Software
20th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
IT Service Management (ITSM) (17th), AI-Powered Chatbots (4th)
Freshdesk
Ranking in Help Desk Software
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
Customer Experience Management (5th), Field Service Management (3rd), Knowledge Management Software (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Help Desk Software category, the mindshare of Espressive Barista is 0.8%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Freshdesk is 2.9%, down from 4.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Help Desk Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Freshdesk2.9%
Espressive Barista0.8%
Other96.3%
Help Desk Software
 

Featured Reviews

Jim Lobao - PeerSpot reviewer
Has helped enhance our support ability, reduced our resolution time, and reduced our service desk costs
Espressive Barista's natural language processing and conventional AI still have room for improvement. We haven't yet found anything that resembles true AI that can learn autonomously without human intervention. However, Barista does help us identify and address some of these areas, allowing my team to step in and create intents and responses to questions. When a user asks a question that Barista doesn't immediately understand, we can recognize the pattern, capture it, and link it to a common intent. This is highly beneficial for acquiring such data, but it's a reactive approach and still requires curation. Natural language processing still has some way to go. One of our challenges is that our internal employees haven't yet adopted a natural way of interacting with Barista. Getting people to be concise and to the point, rather than being verbose as if they were interacting with a human, has been an ongoing challenge. While they may feel comfortable being conversational in Slack, expecting a human-like response, Barista is a different entity. Barista isn't interested in their recent vacation; it just wants to know they're locked out of their account. So, some users may assume Barista understands their intent when they say, "I'm back from vacation and locked out of my account." Barista, however, may interpret this as a request for the holiday schedule. Therefore, we're gradually educating our users to adapt their communication style for better success with Barista. Conversely, we desire Barista to adapt its behavior based on the interaction, the language used, and the way people communicate. I wholeheartedly desire an AI that can continuously learn and adapt to our organization's evolving needs. This is the most challenging aspect, as it involves understanding our organization's terminology, procedures, and toolsets. We've made significant progress in this area. However, from an NLP standpoint, we still face challenges with our nearly 3,000 Slack channel users, each with their unique communication styles. People ask questions in various ways, and sometimes there are misunderstandings. They want to interact with us naturally. However, we still struggle with natural language processing. People don't always realize that the bot is a virtual agent designed to be concise and efficient. Sometimes, less is more. It's been a difficult transition for people to grasp that they're conversing with a virtual agent, not a human. They still expect human-like interactions, such as discussing their weekend or holidays or simply pasting screenshots of errors. However, the bot can't interpret screenshots. If they provide the error code and some context about the application, the bot can better understand the issue. So, the key challenge is bridging the gap between human expectations and the bot's capabilities in terms of natural interaction.
Bharanidharan K - PeerSpot reviewer
User-friendly interface but needs enhancement in ticket tracking and response times
There is no room for improvement in Freshdesk. We can set a time period for particular employees as something that could be better. For example, if some new employees are unfamiliar with Freshdesk, it should be more user-friendly. They need to give shortcut keys to use the ticketing portal. If some users don't know how to generate a ticket, providing them with a help desk or tutorial portal would be useful for the end-user.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The solution is available to support us instantly as required."
"We have the ability to alter phrases, create new phrases, or enhance phrases, or change paths. From the dashboard, we are able to get a lot of information we need about what people are asking, where they are dropping off from conversations, and where they do not get the information they need."
"With respect to its natural language processing capabilities, it recognizes things that you wouldn't think it would recognize. Even in cases where it doesn't, it's pretty easy to go in and make the adjustments that are needed."
"Its ability to recognize phrases has gotten smarter over time."
"The bot is pretty easy to update and keep up to date. Espressive itself is pretty easy to work with."
"I like Expressive Barista's integration with Microsoft Teams."
"The most valuable feature is its scalability."
"Our developers have used the Barista Control Center to extend the platform by adding content, and they've found it fairly easy to do and manage"
"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."
"Omnichannel is one of the most valuable features of the solution."
"Their knowledge base is phenomenal. The way that it learns from our users is awesome, and responses are really awesome as well. It does a pretty good job of picking up what's needed. The knowledge bases are great."
"The organization that is possible with other departments is the solution's most valuable aspect."
"It's free of charge for us. For our scale of business, it's very important. We don't have a lot of tickets."
"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."
"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."
"Freshdesk's requirement for appending resolution details before allowing ticket closure ensures the automatic creation of a knowledge base."
 

Cons

"I would like to see the continued expansion of all of the automation capabilities."
"Expressive Barista could improve by adding native integration with WhatsApp, one of the top communication channels in South Africa. When we're trying to sell Barista to customers, we have to tell them that the solution doesn't have out-of-the-box support for WhatsApp. We can develop it, but then we need to have a conversation about how much that will cost."
"I would like to see improvement to the out-of-the-box verbiage, with the questions going to the right place."
"Espressive Barista's natural language processing and conventional AI still have room for improvement."
"My only comment would be if they wanted to use this as an IT service management tool, maybe they could think about Barista making tickets and having change management and problem management capabilities."
"The knowledge management could definitely be improved."
"The reports provided by the solution are not customizable."
"Although they've done some work on their metrics dashboard, there is some fine-tuning to do for people that just want to go in there at a glance and see their metrics."
"I would like to see a little bit more color in the solution."
"With the advancements in AI now, I will say Freshdesk should consider integrating more AI, but so far, I am satisfied with every single feature."
"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."
"With the advancements in AI now, I will say Freshdesk should consider integrating more AI, but so far, I am satisfied with every single feature."
"I would like a better integration towards Azure DevOps. The current integration is more complicated and doesn’t work as well."
"It should enhance its service and its reporting capabilities."
"We have many cases where a ticket comes in, and it ends up having multiple team members working on it. It would be really nice to be able to assign a single ticket to multiple people, rather than having to create the parent-child hierarchy that they have set up. It generates a proliferation of tickets that I really don't want to have. Having to jump from a parent to one child and then to another child makes it harder for me to be able to see the entire case from end to end. A simple example is our new hire process or our termination process. We have people who leave. We also have people who come on board. We have got multiple people participating and doing things related to the leaving or onboarding process. Currently, I have to go to different tickets to be able to see whether all tasks are really done or not. If I could assign lots of people to one ticket, it would be really nice."
"Having so many tags makes everyday work a lot more complicated, and a lot more time-consuming."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is expensive. It's not a cheap thing."
"The price for the licensing is fair."
"The solution is affordable."
"The pricing isn't overly burdensome. It's going to be interesting to see how new models come in with new capabilities but, as it is, as a base system, it's pretty good."
"User-based licensing has been working well for us, and we believe we are deriving significant value from it."
"We use a licensing model only so we pay for the number of agents we have configured in the system only."
"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."
"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."
"We pay approximately $70 per agent to use Freshdesk. We have 10 agents, which is approximately $700 or $800 per month. It is a fixed license, there are not any additional fees."
"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."
"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 pricing is pretty manageable and acceptable."
"Freshdesk was the best solution with the best price. It was cost efficient and included all the features that we needed."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
48%
Retailer
7%
Healthcare Company
5%
Manufacturing Company
4%
Computer Software Company
23%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Educational Organization
6%
Financial Services Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business21
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Espressive?
The most valuable feature is its scalability.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Espressive?
Espressive has been very accommodating in trying to meet our needs and adapt to our current situation. User-based licensing has been working well for us, and we believe we are deriving significant ...
What needs improvement with Espressive?
Espressive Barista's natural language processing and conventional AI still have room for improvement. We haven't yet found anything that resembles true AI that can learn autonomously without human ...
What do you like most about Freshdesk?
Freshdesk significantly improved our customer issue resolution process. We can now easily record and track all customer requests, ensuring that no tickets are lost.
What needs improvement with Freshdesk?
With the advancements in AI now, I will say Freshdesk should consider integrating more AI, but so far, I am satisfied with every single feature.
What is your primary use case for Freshdesk?
As a customer success manager for over six years, I can sum up the benefits I've seen from using Freshdesk: it has played a huge role in ensuring that my customers stay happy, and happiness means d...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Honda, 3M, Hugo Boss, Petronas, Sony Pictures, The Atlantic, goodreads, Clear Channel Radio, Penn University of Pennsylvania, unicef, Kuoni, Movember
Find out what your peers are saying about Espressive Barista vs. Freshdesk and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,760 professionals have used our research since 2012.