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Freshdesk vs Kayako 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
Ranking in Help Desk Software
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Customer Experience Management (5th), Field Service Management (3rd), Knowledge Management Software (5th)
Kayako
Ranking in Help Desk Software
62nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.4
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Shared Inbox (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Help Desk Software category, the mindshare of Freshdesk is 3.1%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Kayako is 0.4%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Help Desk Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Freshdesk3.1%
Kayako0.4%
Other96.5%
Help Desk Software
 

Featured Reviews

Gauri Thakur - PeerSpot reviewer
Director, Portfolio Projects at Microland Limited
Integrated support workflows have provided a unified view but need broader enterprise flexibility
Freshdesk's scalability could be improved for larger businesses across departments. Its intuitive interface is appealing for small to medium-sized businesses. However, when you look at larger enterprise levels, ServiceNow operates more efficiently. This scalability is an area where Freshdesk could expand its offerings. Additionally, I don't have too much hands-on experience with Freshdesk ticket routing. I need to check with the service desk team if they've used it. Similarly, for analytics capability, I haven't explored much on Freshdesk, but I have done it for ServiceNow. I have seen a lot on ServiceNow and the BMC Remedy, so I can speak better for them. I haven't had the chance to look at it so much that I can do a comparison. I haven't had much experience with Freshdesk's reporting. Within its paradigm of customer service management, Freshdesk is quite scalable. But I've said that inter-department and the interoperability is better off in ServiceNow than in Freshdesk.
reviewer1712472 - PeerSpot reviewer
Operations and Support Manager at a consultancy with 501-1,000 employees
Flexible, straightforward implementation, and helpful support
We are in the process of switching from Kayako to ManageEngine Desktop Central. We went through a full review of our service desk processing and one of the solutions we purchased was a ManageEngine Desktop Central. When we were looking at the integrations into the Kayako system and how it works, we found that ManageEngine Desktop Central did very similar things. It had better layers of classification, other templating, and additional features that we did not have with Kayako. Our service manager made the decision to switch at that time. My advice to others wanting to implement Kayako would be for them to plan out their service processes first, prior to trying to implement them in the tool. We made the mistake of jumping in too soon back 10 years ago. I started using it in a way that we could have tooled it in a different way to make it better. We could have had more implementation process information to make sure we received what we wanted to out of the solution. I rate Kayako an eight out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"Freshdesk's requirement for appending resolution details before allowing ticket closure ensures the automatic creation of a knowledge base."
"Through chats we now connect with a bigger audience and satisfaction surveys have allowed us to know clients' points of view in a better way."
"Freshdesk significantly improved our customer issue resolution process. We can now easily record and track all customer requests, ensuring that no tickets are lost."
"When it is the appropriate solution, Freshdesk is fantastic."
"We're able to respond to customer inquiries much faster and with better information."
"Freshdesk has played a huge role in allowing me to deliver solutions to my customers in a fast, timely fashion, which is why it rates high in my books."
"The built-in customer satisfaction surveys made it easy for us to see areas that need improvement, and the ticket automations allows us to set priorities on incoming tickets based on who is submitting it."
"The most valuable feature of Kayako is its flexibility. We can do anything we want with it, which is nice."
"The most valuable feature of Kayako is its flexibility, as we can do anything we want with it, which is nice."
 

Cons

"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."
"The billing issues I have with Freshdesk are in terms of additional users getting subscribed without my intervention."
"I would like a better integration towards Azure DevOps. The current integration is more complicated and doesn’t work as well."
"Technical support is not the best. It could be much, much better and offer better support to users."
"Freshdesk can be improved by addressing the lack of a custom dashboard, which would help design it to the client's requirement, and the API rate limit, which would be best if they provided an option to increase or remove the restriction with an additional fee."
"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."
"They were just constantly trying to get us to implement break fix after break fix after break fix instead of putting us on the right product in the first place. It wasted a year's time and money."
"There are some restrictions where you need automations and sometimes there is just no way to achieve what you need - but this is common with other tools."
"Some of the reporting in Kayako could be improved. It only has two levels of classification and if there were additional levels added for reporting purposes it would be awesome for our environment."
"Some of the reporting in Kayako could be improved. It only has two levels of classification and if there were additional levels added for reporting purposes it would be awesome for our environment."
 

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 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 is costly."
"Freshdesk was the best solution with the best price. It was cost efficient and included all the features that we needed."
"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."
"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."
"Kayako is a highly affordable solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise14
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Freshdesk?
Freshdesk can be improved by addressing the lack of a custom dashboard, which would help design it to the client's requirement, and the API rate limit, which would be best if they provided an optio...
What is your primary use case for Freshdesk?
Our main use case of Freshdesk includes using it as a ticketing platform with live chat and support email for customers to send us tickets. We have agents on Freshdesk monitoring traffic and respon...
What advice do you have for others considering Freshdesk?
My advice to others looking into using Freshdesk is that when customers themselves want to contact a company for an issue, Freshdesk is best at helping them create tickets and reach out to the comp...
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Comparisons

 

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Sample Customers

Honda, 3M, Hugo Boss, Petronas, Sony Pictures, The Atlantic, goodreads, Clear Channel Radio, Penn University of Pennsylvania, unicef, Kuoni, Movember
Toshiba Canada, Disney, Avast, Namecheap, Texas Tech University
Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, Atlassian, ManageEngine and others in Help Desk Software. Updated: March 2026.
885,667 professionals have used our research since 2012.