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Freshdesk vs Intercom Customer Communications Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Freshdesk
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
Customer Experience Management (4th), Field Service Management (3rd), Help Desk Software (7th), Knowledge Management Software (5th)
Intercom Customer Communica...
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
CRM Customer Engagement Centers (12th), CRM (29th), Social CRM (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Customer Relationship Management solutions, they serve different purposes. Freshdesk is designed for Customer Experience Management and holds a mindshare of 5.4%, up 4.6% compared to last year.
Intercom Customer Communications Platform, on the other hand, focuses on CRM Customer Engagement Centers, holds 0.5% mindshare, up 0.2% since last year.
Customer Experience Management
CRM Customer Engagement Centers
 

Featured Reviews

Alexey Timchenko - PeerSpot reviewer
Incredibly user-friendly, flexible, and affordable
Automation and ticket routing rules in Freshdesk save us daily by streamlining routine tasks. We use reports to identify issues, allocate resources, and continuously improve our processes. It is a vital part of our daily operations, helping us stay proactive and efficient in handling various types of tickets. The reporting and analytics tools in Freshdesk are effective for measuring customer service performance. While our current subscription level has some limitations in terms of reporting, the next level provides more options. Budget constraints currently prevent us from upgrading, but the available reporting features still meet our basic needs. I highly recommend Freshdesk, especially for companies in their early stages. It is user-friendly, easy to configure, and great for those with a moderate volume of customer requests. The cost is reasonable, making it a quick and efficient solution to implement. Overall, I would rate Freshdesk as an eight out of ten.
Karan-Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
A good tool that can be used to capture inbound leads and manage all customer interactions
Sometimes, the solution lags and takes time to update something. If I put a specific tag on an inbound lead, it would take around five minutes for that tag to reflect throughout the solution for all the users. If my colleague and I are using the solution simultaneously and I create a tag for a specific lead, then that tag would not be visible to my colleague for about three to four minutes. Since the solution is great at capturing leads and giving me an overview of all the people interacting with our platform, I would love to see a CRM structure created. We can create a pipeline in the solution itself, and then it can give us that CRM experience.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"Omnichannel is one of the most valuable features of the solution."
"Freshdesk provides a plain vanilla solution, making it user-friendly and less complex."
"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."
"It is quite easy to program custom apps and integrate them."
"Freshdesk's requirement for appending resolution details before allowing ticket closure ensures the automatic creation of a knowledge base."
"It's free of charge for us. For our scale of business, it's very important. We don't have a lot of tickets."
"These features are easy to use, and the filtering is really good, providing a good overview of active tickets and who's working on them."
"The live chat is pretty good because you can create a macro, which is a predefined input we can give customers."
 

Cons

"There are some restrictions where you need automation and sometimes there is just no way to achieve what you need."
"The solution's inbound calls could be improved."
"Having so many tags makes everyday work a lot more complicated, and a lot more time-consuming."
"Technical support is not the best. It could be much, much better and offer better support to users."
"There aren't any features that we want to enhance, but we need to mature in our usage of some of them. I can't say any feature is missing or needs improvement, but a tool's built-in features need to evolve customer feedback. We have a dialogue set up for that kind of feedback."
"Freshdesk's major drawback is its limitation in integrating tools for App Store and Play Store reviews, and social channels like Twitter, which come with additional costs."
"It would be helpful to pull reports or schedule them based on agents, users, ticket numbers, or responses."
"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."
"Sometimes, the solution lags and takes time to update something."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We use a licensing model only so we pay for the number of agents we have configured in the system only."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
25%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Real Estate/Law Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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?
I would like a better integration towards Azure DevOps. The current integration is more complicated and doesn’t work as well. There's not a really good one for Jira, which we are also using.
What is your primary use case for Freshdesk?
I mainly use Freshdesk as a support system for our customers.
What do you like most about Intercom Customer Communications Platform?
The live chat is pretty good because you can create a macro, which is a predefined input we can give customers.
What needs improvement with Intercom Customer Communications Platform?
Sometimes, the solution lags and takes time to update something. If I put a specific tag on an inbound lead, it would take around five minutes for that tag to reflect throughout the solution for al...
What is your primary use case for Intercom Customer Communications Platform?
We use the solution to capture leads and interact with them. Our company manages all the customer interactions through the solution.
 

Comparisons

No data available
 

Also Known As

No data available
Intercom
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Honda, 3M, Hugo Boss, Petronas, Sony Pictures, The Atlantic, goodreads, Clear Channel Radio, Penn University of Pennsylvania, unicef, Kuoni, Movember
Expensift, Moz, Invision, Salesforce, Droplr, Vend, BugHerd, Ghost, Put.io, Codeship
Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, Qualtrics, Salesforce and others in Customer Experience Management. Updated: May 2025.
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