Freshdesk vs ServiceNow vs TOPdesk comparison

Read 225 ServiceNow reviews

24,579 Views
8,603 Comparison Views

91% willing to recommend

TOPdesk

Read 10 TOPdesk reviews

1,844 Views
1,475 Comparison Views

84% willing to recommend

Freshdesk

TOPdesk

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Freshdesk, ServiceNow, and TOPdesk based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, Atlassian, ManageEngine and others in Help Desk Software.

To learn more, read our detailed Help Desk Software Report (Updated: March 2026).

Help Desk Software

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Helped 885,376 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

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

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 ServiceNow is 12.6%, down from 23.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of TOPdesk is 2.0%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Help Desk Software Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
ServiceNow	12.6%
Freshdesk	3.1%
TOPdesk	2.0%
Other	82.3%

Help Desk Software

Featured Reviews

Gauri Thakur

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.

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MichaelTang1

Manager of Security Engineering & Architecture at a outsourcing company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Seamless data integration and advanced automation improve service delivery efficiency

I think that nothing needs to be improved with the product; you just need the user to commit and spend appropriate time to overcome that learning curve. Once that is done, the product itself is pretty wonderful. I've seen a very nicely built interface with ServiceNow, and I've also seen the ugliest version that feels outdated. ServiceNow does allow that team to exist. They should modernize their fonts and their layout, the UI friendliness. They did introduce AI, chatbots, and AI on the back end, so that's wonderful and extremely useful if you train it. If you don't train it, it's pretty useless. Assessing the impact of ServiceNow's automation on service delivery times is complicated. The engineers who operate on ServiceNow find it isn't straightforward because the data set is accessible by everybody. The problem is that understanding how to manage that data set requires an enormous amount of engineering skill set to run the product. I would not hand the key to the customer; I would highly recommend that ServiceNow take control of that. Instead of offering support for the software, they should offer administrative support for the software. They should provide professional service or some kind of support system that allows us to use their product at a faster pace. I'm sure they offer something, but it's often outrageously expensive, or they rely on another company to resell their product and offer professional service. It makes no sense in my opinion, and they should offer the team at the front to help customize the product to fit each company's needs, as every company has different demands and forms of submitting a request that need adjustment over time.

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Martina Peneva

People Technology Lead at Scandinavian Tobacco Group

Implement service management changes while addressing UI improvements

Topdesk's user interface makes it easy to handle requests and escalate them to other groups or reassign them when working on a single ticket. Additionally, the service management tool in HR allows for a change in delivering services, replacing email communication with ticket raising. The knowledge library enables the local HR to store and share relevant information and frequently asked cases, enhancing collaboration. The ticket system also facilitates escalating cases to other involved departments. IT, HR, and some other teams primarily use this system.

Read full review

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."

"Overall, this is a good and robust solution that offers an extensive number of features that we have not yet used."

"Freshdesk is very easy to use and understand; it has one of the best ticket systems that is easy to understand and provides the best visibility to customers."

"Omnichannel is one of the most valuable features of the solution."

"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."

"Freshdesk saves us a lot of time, and allows us to provide an excellent and efficient customer service."

"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."

"When it is the appropriate solution, Freshdesk is fantastic."

More Freshdesk pros

"There are many expansions available."

"Identifies better ways to license software or eliminate unused software to save money and maintain a choice between buying more licenses or reclaiming licenses to stay within compliance."

"It offers enhanced and efficient communication between the requester and the four pillar EDR through an online chat platform."

"Very easy to implement and to respond to my clients' needs."

"The solution is easy to use, simple to make queries, flexible to configure, integrates well, and supports all of our companies needs."

"We are quite satisfied with the tool."

"Discovery has reduced, on average, the time to build/deploy devices within our environment by one hour. This may not seem like much but it adds up over time. It also reaps additional time savings with its ability to capture changes through subsequent discoveries over the life of the device."

"They have thought through it, and not just the whole domain in the platform but now they have connected it to the business side, the business needs and the processes, the work that people do down to the technology."

More ServiceNow pros

"Its ITSM approach is quite useful."

"When it comes to implementing new features, they listen to what their customers want via a suggestion forum that they have."

"It is an easy-to-use solution."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is the ticketing feature."

"This solution has provided me with a well-defined process and interaction, compared to my previous tool, GLPI."

"Technical support is great and we have not had any issues with them."

"This solution has provided me with a well-defined process and interaction, compared to my previous tool, GLPI."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the incident management module."

More TOPdesk pros

Cons

"The reporting, analysis modules and insights capabilities for this solution could be improved."

"Freshdesk's scalability could be improved for larger businesses across departments."

"Asset management and branding are two areas in the solution that have scope for improvement."

"Freshdesk could improve its capabilities. It's missing the article formatting, and the overall look and feel make it not easy to use. The administration instructions on how to manage the automation, capability, and integration with third parties, such as chat or bots, are very important in these types of solutions."

"There are some restrictions where you need automation and sometimes there is just no way to achieve what you need."

"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."

"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."

"It's a heavy app with lots of APIs, third-party integrations, etc. They should make it lighter."

More Freshdesk cons

"The setup was time-consuming and required a lot of internal resources."

"From an HR standpoint, if users can have a very integrated onboarding or offboarding process between ServiceNow and Workday, then it can give a very good employee experience."

"if I consider from the IT operations management side, ServiceNow is pretty premature on some things, especially the discovery, while the other tools like Micro Focus and BMC Remedy, those that have been in the market for quite some time. ServiceNow is evolving itself in the discovery piece of the future."

"We had ServiceNow’s in-house team for “Quick-Start Implementation”, but it was very basic, and the custom things we asked him to do from scratch were not engineered very thoroughly or using best coding practices."

"Our initial setup was not the best. We had some issues with it with the company that implemented it for us."

"We find it good in general. Obviously, there are areas of improvement for every capability."

"The RPA needs improvement. That's a new area for them that they're just entering into now."

"There's always room for improvement in terms of the ServiceNow UI."

More ServiceNow cons

"In some fields, it's just not good enough."

"The solution's change management could be better."

"This solution is modular so you only buy what you need, but I prefer what some companies are doing where they include everything in the package."

"From a UI perspective, there is room for improvement. It sometimes takes many steps to do something simple, like creating or moving a knowledge item."

"It is time-consuming to add new users."

"If I open a ticket on the infrastructure team, I can't move it to the financial team for them to manage the ticket."

"An operator is also a user but requires creating two different records."

"The solution should be made more user-friendly."

More TOPdesk cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is pretty manageable and acceptable."

"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."

"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."

"It is costly."

"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."

"Freshdesk was the best solution with the best price. It was cost efficient and included all the features that we needed."

More Freshdesk pricing and cost advice

"The price of the solution is comparable to industry standards. For the features that we received, it is reasonable."

"The license model is based on a number of fulfillers (active users who play some role within the ServiceNow functionality). Therefore, you can serve as many end-users as you want, without additional costs."

"We are happy with the pricing."

"The solution is expensive."

"The pricing is on the high side, but if you look at the stability and option to work, it's kind of justified."

"The mandatory minimum is US$ 20,000 for licensing."

"The licensing cost is based on your partnership with ServiceNow and what you have selected for implementation. There is an annual license cost which is calculated based on your number of devices."

"They could be more competitive with their licensing."

More ServiceNow pricing and cost advice

"There are three fee options to choose from for a company and these options compared to market prices are very high. For example, if I use one of the first options for 10 assets, then it costs 20,000 Euros. If you went to competitors, then you pay less."

"Compared to other products in this segment, I think that they are priced well and not too expensive."

"The solution's pricing is reasonable and not expensive."

"TOPdesk's pricing is cheaper than Jira's."

"The cost of the solution on a yearly basis is $20,000. Technical support is not extra. It's included in the yearly cost. Updates are also included. The solution is good at keeping its product up to date."

"The solution is inexpensive compared to competitors."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

University

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

Government

Educational Organization

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

10%

Construction Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	24
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	14

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	55
Midsize Enterprise	35
Large Enterprise	168

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	7

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 re...

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 custome...

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 i...

Which solution is better for developing non-ITSM applications: OutSystems or Service Now?

The short answer is that OutSystems is far better for 2 main reasons. Firstly, with Service Now you are locked into t...

Would you choose ServiceNow over Microsoft PowerApps?

Hi Netanya, I will choose ServiceNow because ServiceNow is a very good tool compared to Microsoft PowerApp. Because ...

What do you like most about ServiceNow?

The solution has a user-friendly interface.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for TOPdesk?

The solution's pricing is reasonable and not expensive.

What needs improvement with TOPdesk?

From a UI perspective, there is room for improvement, as some tasks like creating or moving a knowledge item within t...

What is your primary use case for TOPdesk?

I use Topdesk to change the way we deliver our services in HR to the business. Instead of writing an email to a parti...

JIRA Service Management vs Freshdesk

Comparisons

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Compared 8% of the time

ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus vs Freshdesk

Compared 5% of the time

Zoho Desk vs Freshdesk

Compared 4% of the time

BoldDesk vs Freshdesk

Compared 3% of the time

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BMC Helix ITSM vs ServiceNow

Compared 5% of the time

IBM Maximo vs ServiceNow

Compared 5% of the time

Zendesk vs ServiceNow

Compared 4% of the time

JIRA Service Management vs ServiceNow

Compared 4% of the time

Microsoft Dynamics CRM vs ServiceNow

Compared 3% of the time

More ServiceNow Competitors

JIRA Service Management vs TOPdesk

Compared 10% of the time

GLPI by Teclib vs TOPdesk

Compared 6% of the time

Zendesk vs TOPdesk

Compared 6% of the time

ProProfs Help Desk vs TOPdesk

Compared 5% of the time

LiveChat vs TOPdesk

Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

Freshdesk

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Help Desk Software

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Overview

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.”

Freshworks

ServiceNow is a cloud-based task-management platform that specializes in IT operations management (ITOM), IT services management (ITSM), and IT business management (ITBM). ServiceNow allows users to manage their teams, projects, and customer interactions using a variety of different plugins and apps with which it easily integrates.

ServiceNow offers prebuilt applications to support any process, as well as a framework and tools that allow you to build your own.

ServiceNow’s service management solutions include change, request, incident, problem, and cost management, as well as HR, IT, field service, and facilities management solutions. They also cover business management solutions such as vendor performance management, financial management, performance analytics and project portfolio suite, as well as governance, risk, and compliance.

“The Smarter Way to Workflow”

ServiceNow’s activities, processes, and tasks are overseen as part of a comprehensive managed workflow that supports such features as real-time collaboration, communication, and resource sharing. ServiceNow’s suite of products allow for operation using serverless computing, and include the categories of Business Apps, Customer Service, HR, IT, and Security.

ServiceNow can be used to support most workflows because of the wide range of tools it offers. These include on-suite ticketing tools, predictive modeling to manage workflows, and benchmarking for the tracking of progress. ServiceNow can assist with artificial intelligence and machine learning processes and can be used to organize the cases of a help/service desk as well as for instance management and problem management. It also smoothly integrates with many legacy systems.

ServiceNow offers service management software for industries including:

Cloud services
Education
Financial services
Government
Healthcare
Manufacturing
Telecommunications

Reviews from Real Users

PeerSpot users prefer ServiceNow to its competitors because of its scalability, stability, and ease of use. It helps everyone in the company to be on the same page by creating a single source of record across all departments. One user stated that “I’ve definitely used over 20 project management solutions, but they can't be compared with ServiceNow.” Another said that “ServiceNow is an industry leader in multiple areas and provides an excellent ROI.”