Freshdesk alternatives and competitors

We use it for IT service management. We use it for HR service management. We also use it in an operations capacity in combination with some other tools.

We use a combination of Freshdesk, Freshservice, and Freshchat. We use the whole suite. We're the third largest customer of theirs. 

We have the Enterprise plan, and we have its latest version. We are in beta testing for another upgrade that they're doing, but it is still in beta. So, it is not live yet. It is a cloud solution. Freshservice owns everything. We just use it as a cloud platform.

Our SLAs are being met way more consistently. We're seeing that customer issues are getting answered in a timelier manner. Our tech issues are resolved in a more timely manner. We have more access to information with the combination of knowledge, tickets, etc. We have integrated it with Jira. So, I can look and say that I have a ticket, and I need to send something to a developer in Jira. I can just do that with a click from Freshservice, which makes it easy. Configuring it is also super simple.

Its ease of use is fantastic. It is just above and beyond, especially when you compare it to something like Cherwell, Salesforce, or anything like that. It is on its own level. It is so easy to administer. The way everything is organized and the way it builds its own documentation is very good. 

It integrates with a lot of things. If they don't have an integration, once you bring it to them, a lot of times, they get that working in their pipeline. They get integration with different software going. They really are looking to do things a little bit better than others, and it shows how much work they put into the platform.

Sometimes, the billing process is an absolute nightmare. That's really frustrating. If you have a straightforward contract and don't need to make changes, it is fine, but if you need to make any changes, it'll take months.

The other piece is that sometimes, they will push out updates without telling you they're doing updates, or they'll just have it as a notification. If you don't go and actively check, you just won't even know it is pushed out. You have to stay on top of it. You can't pick the version you're on. Everybody is on the same version, which is great and makes being an admin and working on the platform a much more consistent experience. For the most part, it is all pretty much the same.

As compared to the Freshdesk knowledge base, it needs work. You can't save knowledge-based templates, which is a little bit ridiculous. For example, you can't have article templates in there. These are IT people. They're not thinking about formatting. We've got to do that for them.

Some of the ways that tasks are reported on and shown can be better. You can't see tasks in your regular ticket list view. You can't see a combo view of tasks and tickets. It is a little bit difficult to get a solid overview of your list of things to do. You can only see them in separate views, instead of one single view.

There should be the ability to add screenshots into a service request without having to download and attach them because that can be really frustrating for users. You can do that in the incident version, but you can't put a screenshot in a service request, which is frustrating. The users certainly don't want to take a screenshot, save it to their computer, and then attach it just to submit the ticket. They could just print the screen.

I would like to see further integrated analytics, which is something that's on their radar. I would also like them to bring back some of the different metrics that they got rid of. I know that's on their radar too, and they're working on it. The unified bot builder is also on their radar. There is so much stuff that I know is already getting ready for deployment in the next year.

The vendor-provided training material has some room for improvement. We disabled the incidents in our portals, and the customizability of all that has also been awesome, but beyond that, it would be good if I could see how a service request goes from end to end instead of being a whole lot of things.

Their support could also be better. We have had some long-drawn-out and unnecessary experiences because of their support.

I have been using it for about two years. 

The uptime is fantastic. We very rarely have any issues with anything going down. Sometimes, it randomly slips into Arabic, which is weird, but it only happens to one user. So, I don't know what the user is doing. After refresh, it goes away. It might be a user problem.

It is scalable. We're their third largest customer, or we used to be. I don't know if we still are. It works very well for us.

We use it very extensively, and we're looking at expanding to additional teams. We have about 300 users. In this instance, I have 200, and then in another instance, I have 30 right now. I'll have another hundred in the next couple of months. We're bringing all of our dispatch operations into it. It is going to be a big list.

From a scalability perspective, it is really good, but Freshcaller isn't. We can't use their full suite of solutions because even though Freshservice is extremely scalable on its own, when we're looking at upselling to Freshcaller, they just can't support the fact that we do a million minutes a month, which is a lot.

We literally have weekly meetings with them, and for the last two years, we've had some hit-and-miss experiences. The response time is great, but when they reply with a knowledge base article, the way we are into the system, we would've already read that before approaching them. That's why we're asking them. I sometimes get a little bit frustrated about that.

Sometimes, there are some communication issues with their support. I spent a year just being like, "No, we shouldn't be in Freshdesk for this." They were telling my bosses that we should be, and I was like, "I'm telling you that's incorrect. Why are you telling my boss that? You don't even work here?" You don't even go here. What are you doing? They don't even check your circumstances. I am a certified Six Sigma Black Belt. I gave them all of our process maps and everything, and they didn't even read over them. They just kept trying to put us into Freshdesk when Freshservice was a better fit because all we do is move around trucks, trailers, and drive. That's what we do all day long. I would like to know how we would do that without asset management or a portal with forums. They were just constantly trying to get us to implement break fix after break fix after break fix instead of putting us in the right product in the first place. It wasted a year's time and money.

I brought a guy onto the call. He said the same thing to them in a guy's voice, and then they were like, "Oh, we get it now." I sent them a PowerPoint, and I said the exact same thing in email all the time. The guy was like, "I literally just said exactly what you said in the exact same words and with the same cadence." They just wanted to hear the guy say it. I said, "Are you kidding me?" And then they asked if he was my boss. He was not. I was training him. That was my one really bad experience because it went on for a full year, but it has been resolved now. Everything is good now, but I was deeply frustrated at the time. I would rate them a three out of five. That was a really long drawn-out experience, and it was so unnecessary.

Neutral

For IT specifically, we used Cherwell. Operations were working out of email, and HR was also working out of email. Cherwell is just a nightmare to work with. It is a nightmare to administer. We were able to stand up and migrate away from them so quickly and easily. It might have cost a little bit more the way that we did it, but it was completely worth it. Our reporting looks better, and our analytics looks better. Everything is drastically improved.

I run two instances of it, and I deployed both. It just depends on the needs of the business. If you need a lot of custom development, then you do, but if you don't, then you don't. It depends on the level of complexity that you have for your buildout such as:

• How many workflows do you need?
• How many admins do you have?
• How many people do you have? 

Because of the size and scope of our group, it took longer. We spent six months on it. Migration from Cherwell for IT and then for operations is an ongoing thing.

It was implemented in-house. There are three of us who work on this and the intranet full-time. It is a combo role, and then I have two people on my team. They just added intranet to my role. So, it takes three of us just to make sure that we can support because we have so many different types of teams, but a smaller team wouldn't need as many. 

We deployed IT into Freshservice about eight months ago, and we reorged IT three times since then. It is a little bit difficult to quantify right now because the teams have been moving so much, but I do know that our teams are way happier with it.

We see that the metrics are getting better. Cherwell metrics were just so bad that even our baseline was so off. We had people who just wouldn't ever close tickets. I found tickets that were three years old in VIP status in Cherwell. It was just that they would just get lost in there. Now, we actually have visibility into that.

There are some additional costs but not that many. For example, we have unlimited assets, which is something for which we pay extra. We also paid for additional orchestration. I would rate it a three out of five in terms of pricing. They are right in the middle.

We went through ServiceNow. We went through Cherwell and then landed on Freshservice. They might have vetted other options, but that was before my time.

I would advise bringing somebody in who knows the product, at least as a part-time consultant. That's because a lot of times, they'll sell it as like, "Oh yeah, sure, just have your director of operations set it up." In some of the instances where I've done consulting work. it didn't work the way it should because one step was missed. It is very fixable, but that's also why it was not working. If you don't have someone who can dedicate time to learning how the workflows work and how to make things talk to each other within it, it can be frustrating.

I would rate it an eight out of ten. It is so much better by leaps and bounds than everything else that I've worked with.

The solution is mainly used as a ticketing system with clients as well and between users, similar to Asana, which is kind of new in our company. Before that, we used to send tickets to other departments for certain cases and stuff like that, so we had a ticketing system with clients, communication with clients, and between other departments and that's largely how it was used.

The most valuable aspect is transparency. Everybody can see everything, including all of the tickets, even from different departments. It doesn't have many tags. It is not as time-consuming as Freshdesk, for example, is. There was literally just one link and you click on that link and the ticket is basically assigned to your name. That's pretty easy. There is a drop-down menu from where you just choose, let's say, the name under whom you want to assign the ticket, and then the ticket will be assigned and the person notified. 

When I first started, I was added as an employee, not as an administrator, and the access for an employee would allow you to see all of the tickets from all of the departments. You could assign tickets to different departments and you could actually remove tags if you needed to. After a while, we started having new hires and they were also added as employees. Their access was meant as employees. Then, Zendesk changed their terms and conditions, their licenses, and what those licenses actually have, including what type of access they offered and employees couldn't, for example, see all of the tickets from all of the departments. They couldn't really move, add tags, assign tickets to different departments, et cetera, however, even though they have the exact same access as I do. The features were limited, even though they had the same access as we did.

Since those features were now added into administrator access and you couldn't give administrative access to new hires, you can also see a lot more information for reports and stuff like that. This is basically none of their business, so this is why we changed to Freshdesk.

I've used Zendesk since 2018 as I also used it in my previous company for two years and then at my current company as well. I would say I'd use it for maybe three or four years. It's likely been three and a half years.

We rarely had issues with Zendesk. Even the workflow rarely gave us issues. Sometimes, from time to time, due to the fact that we receive a lot of different notifications, Zendesk would recognize it as spam, so we would receive a lot of our own important tickets in spam, so we had to remove it from spam and move it to the inbox. This was the only issue. However, this is what every email address does anyway when you send a lot of tickets from the same project.

The scalability was good. We had a lot of tickets and never had an issue.

We had 20 to 25 people using the solution. We had departments like customer support and operations on it. 

We've never directly dealt with technical support. Another department was responsible for support items.

We have implemented Asana recently and use it in a similar fashion. I've also used Freshdesk which had too much tagging and was too time-consuming.

If I could compare Zendesk support with other ticketing systems, like Asana or Freshdesk, Zendesk and Freshdesk are very similar as opposed to Asana. Asana is just for if you are creating tasks. Here, you actually send an email in Zendesk or Freshdesk. I feel like that's the main difference when it comes to Freshdesk and Zendesk. It's much more transparent, and it's very organized. With Freshdesk at the moment is not really automatic in terms of translations. You have to write everything in English and if you want to translate it to Spanish, then you have to copy and paste it to a different tab, and then from there, you have to translate it and then add it. With Zendesk, everything is transparent. As soon as you click send, the text is going to go translated.

I'd recommend the solution to others.

Users can create their own tags, and they have their own views which are very nicely organized so they can see what is happening at any given time. Users can see if somebody else is doing the same ticket or if somebody else is looking at the same ticket. If you click on a client's email, you can see all of the tickets, and all of the correspondence that you have with that email address. There are maybe three or four different statuses that a ticket can have so that it is not confusing. It's pretty straightforward, very transparent, neat-looking, and very well organized.

I would rate it ten out of ten.

Our company uses the solution as our in-house ticketing tool, for level one and level two automations, and for our help desk. 

The implementation is very straightforward for our technical team.

The solution is interactive and flexible so engineers find it much easier to work with than other tools.

The adaptability and end user training are very easy. 

A 360-degree view of the asset life cycle should be integrated with the service desk to provide better understanding and asset management.

I have been using the solution for ten years. 

The solution is very stable and do not have stability issues when applying upgrades or bug fixes. 

The stability is rated a nine out of ten. 

The solution is scalable and we've never had any issues. The solution is mostly for medium-sized or enterprise-level companies. You can easily scale from 100 users to 1,000+ users. The licensing makes scaling easy. 

The scalability is rated a nine out of ten. 

If you have any issues with implementation, support is available to help. Technical support is rated a nine out of ten. 

Positive

The setup and implementation are very straightforward. We've never faced any issues with implementations or operability. 

A service desk technician with two or three years of experience will have no issues with setup or a vanilla installation. There is documentation for everything on the internet so there aren't any challenges. 

The solution offers both on-premises and cloud versions. On-premises has some limitations on the AI side. If you go with cloud-based, then you get many more features and cognitive support. 

We implement and manage the solution for customers. 

The price is much better than other products so pricing is rated an eight out of ten. 

Initially, we also used the solution for our service desk and managed users. There was some constraint on pricing and the solution didn't offer AI support, so we moved to Symphony Summit AI. Comparatively, both tools are now at the same level with little difference. 

Summit has to be installed on-premises or on Azure only. It is also very expensive, particularly for the AI part. You need a bunch of licenses on the asset and technician fronts. 

The solution can be installed anywhere including AWS or Google cloud. It is just a matter of spinning up a VM to have it installed. The solution keeps evolving and provides much more than what most SMB customers require. 

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

We are using Ivanti Service Desk for service requests, incident management, change management, IT discovery, and asset discovery.

The most valuable features of the Ivanti Service Desk are service requests and incident management.

Ivanti Service Desk could improve the GUI because it is not as good as other solutions, such as BMC or ServiceNow. If Ivanti Service Desk works on the GUI and makes it more user-friendly, and its content more attractive it might help the solution in the long run.

I have been using Ivanti Service Desk for approximately six months.

The stability of the Ivanti Service Desk depends on our server connectivity and the availability of our server. If we have good a good environment then the solution can be very stable.

We have approximately 4,000 users using this solution in my organization.

We use the Ivanti Service Desk on a daily basis, for logging our tickets, new user joining, and many service requests are being completed.

I have not contacted technical support.

I previously used ManageEngine. I switched because the Ivanti Service Desk has a lot of integrations and connectors which are beneficial. There are a lot of minute details where Ivanti Service Desk has an advantage over ManageEngine. For example, in ManageEngine ITSM we cannot integrate it with Oracle ERP. However, in Ivanti Service Desk we can integrate it with ERP solutions to fit in the user details, and other required objects we want. That's one of the biggest differentiators. Additionally, Ivanti Service Desk gives a lot of customization while in ManageEngine a lot of elements are hardcoded. We cannot customize it up to the minute level.

The initial setup of the Ivanti Service Desk was straightforward.

We have two people who do the maintenance and support this solution.

I have been evaluating Freshdesk.

I rate Ivanti Service Desk an eight out of ten.

Ivanti Service Desk gives all the functionality we need. This is why I gave it eight. I subtracted two points for poor user-friendliness. The GUI is not user-friendly. When compared to BMC or ServiceNow, they can improve a lot on the GUI.