Pros & Cons
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- Clear user interface
- Full ITSM adherence
- Capable asset, change, and project management tools
- Flexible reports
- Useful AI features
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- Complex feature set
- AI tools cost extra
Freshservice Specs
| Asset Management | |
| Knowledge Base | |
| Live Chat | |
| Self-Service Portal | |
| Support Widget |
Freshservice is a robust IT help desk platform that helps you track and resolve technical issues from your employees. Additionally, as an Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) solution, it encompasses change management, complex problem tracking, and project management. Here, we primarily focus on its ability to manage everyday incidents common within small businesses, a task at which it excels, thanks to its exceptionally clear design and helpful selection of AI and automation tools. It falls just shy of our Editors' Choice winner for the category, HaloITSM, which offers a slightly better user experience and provides greater value if AI features are a priority.
How Does Freshservice Differ From Customer Support Help Desk Software?
Help desk software generally falls into two categories: those that support external customers and those that support internal employees. Freshservice, as mentioned, is part of the second group, and it's a full ITSM solution, meaning you can use it to design and deploy complex IT practices and processes within your business. This type of software also typically includes asset or inventory management tools, too. HaloITSM, Vivantio, and Zendesk for Employee Service are other examples of internal IT help desk solutions. A different Freshworks product, Freshdesk Omni, also allows you to track tickets and resolutions, specifically for external customers. HappyFox Help Desk and Zoho Desk do the same. Both types of help desk software allow you to build knowledge bases to assist your agents and those you serve (external customers or internal employees).
Pricing: Reasonable Rates, But Advanced AI Features Cost Extra
Freshservice is a scalable, subscription-based service that works for small businesses and enterprises alike.
The Starter plan ($19 per agent per month, billed annually) helps you intake tickets from chats, emails, and phone calls. Integrations with Microsoft Teams and Slack allow you to create and update tickets directly from those apps. This tier also allows you to assign tasks within tickets to agents, create knowledge base articles, easily build workflow automations, and set up automated replies for common issues. Freshservice also provides gamification features and basic analytics tools at this level.
The Growth plan ($49 per agent per month, billed annually) includes a comprehensive suite of asset management features, allowing you to automatically track software installations and other assets across your employees. Just note that this tier and the ones above it limit you to a total of 100 assets (paying an extra $125 per month unlocks 500 assets). An asset is one piece of hardware or software. For example, if you track five Microsoft 365 licenses for Microsoft Word, that counts as five assets. This tier also gets you basic ESM (Enterprise Service Management) and IT Operations Management (ITOM) capabilities, business rules, service-level agreement (SLA) management features, and time tracking.
The Pro plan ($99 per agent per month, billed annually) adds a team dashboard, more extensive analytics and reporting features, along with change, problem, project, and workload management. It also expands your available ESM and ITOM features, including those related to onboarding and monitoring uptime. At this level and above, you can pay an extra $29 per agent per month to access Freddy AI Copilot, which can help you craft responses, summarize tickets, surface relevant tickets, and more.
Only the Enterprise plan (custom pricing) includes the Freddy AI Agent (a conversational AI that can perform deep searches for organizational information) and Freddy AI insights (points out root causes of issues, among other things).
Freshservice's plans are a good value. For comparison, Zendesk for Employee Service's base plan ($29 per agent per month) includes basic AI tools to help you tackle support issues. However, its advanced Copilot AI add-on ($50 per month) is substantially more expensive and requires at least its Professional plan ($116 per agent per month, billed annually). HaloITSM puts all of its features into a single pricing plan (around $95 per month).
On the other end of the affordability spectrum, the less advanced Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk is free for up to five agents and offers an extremely affordable premium version ($5 per agent per month, billed annually).
(Note: Spiceworks is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag.com's parent company. For more, see the ethics policy in our Editorial Mission Statement.)
Interface and Ease of Use: Highly intuitive
Although Freshservice is a complex product with numerous features, the basic ticket management interface remains approachable. I didn't encounter any usability issues during testing in a browser and on iOS (an Android app is also available). The setup process is quick, and your main task will be to add the agents who will use the system. To do so, head to the admin settings and click the Add Agents button on the upper right. Then, you can add a profile picture, set their roles and access level, and include any extra notes.
The standard roles for support staff are Agent, Admin, and Admin Agent, but you can customize settings to, for example, grant an agent access to only tickets and analytics. It's also possible to set someone up with a free license if they only need to view tickets. This could be a manager who wants to see the status of tickets but who doesn't actually work on them. That’s helpful if you have a manager who is not acting as an agent but wants to see which tickets are open or unresolved. You can add bulk agents using a CSV file, while you onboard employees as Requestors who can submit tickets but not act as agents.
(Credit: Freshservice/PCMag)The modern Freshservice dashboard is what you first see after logging in. It shows open, overdue, and unresolved tickets in a helpful pie chart, among other things. You can open tickets, access the knowledge base, and view other sections via the left-hand sidebar. The interface effectively uses color to help you identify issues. For example, on the main dashboard, overdue tickets are displayed in bright purple, while low-priority ones appear in green.
Browsing tickets is no challenge, with an overflow menu in the upper left allowing you to filter by those that are assigned or unresolved. Elsewhere in the interface, you can delve into the more complex aspects of Freshservice, including all open incidents, asset tracking, change management requests, reported IT incidents, and projects, complete with a comprehensive task timeline. Zendesk for Employee Service lets you filter tickers in one fewer click, but its interface is less cohesive overall.
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Freshservice offers its customers support through chat, email, a knowledge base, phone, and self-service tickets. Email support is available 24/7, while chat and phone support are available 24/5 for agents and 24/7 for admins. All of the support options are available at every pricing level. That said, I would have liked the chatbot to connect me with an agent more quickly in testing, rather than direct me to various knowledge base articles. Nonetheless, the resolution to an issue I had about running Freshservice in a Linux browser was simple.
Ticket Management: Easier Than Expected
Freshservice makes it easy to find and triage tickets. The main interface enables you to quickly view all unresolved tickets, presented in a clear and uncluttered list. It's simple to search for tickets, browse open issues or those that are urgent, and triage incidents based on several factors. For example, you can review all high-risk tickets or those that have fallen outside your company's service level agreement (SLA) for response time.
(Credit: Freshservice/PCMag)I enjoyed working with Freshservices' workflow automation system because of its flexibility and power. You can create a workflow to monitor, for example, all tickets that involve an outage or expense. This tool also works with change management processes. For instance, you can configure a workflow so that it proceeds only after an internal approval for a software change.
Creating, assigning, and managing tickets are all major strengths of Freshservice. To create a ticket, simply enter the basic information about the incident, the employee, and any applicable priority levels. This works flawlessly and requires no extra technical expertise in testing. The process with Zendesk for Employee Service is similar.
In Freshservice, a ticket shows all conversations with an employee on the left and the ticket properties on the right. You can easily reassign, escalate, and downgrade tickets. Fields are customizable, and you can easily access the requester's full contact information. However, I would like a more intuitive way to review a list of all employees; you can update their details through the admin portal.
AI features, if your tier supports them, are extremely helpful. For example, you can quickly reply to a support issue using a canned response by clicking on “Reply Using AI” and selecting the appropriate option. You can also get AI-generated summaries of support issues and ask the AI to show you similar tickets. When I tried the latter in testing, I quickly realized just how many tickets in my sample set were related to browser issues. You can use that information to more effectively target issues in your knowledge base. As mentioned, if you want to take advantage of Freddy AI Agent's abilities to resolve tickets automatically and discuss issues in a conversational interface, you must pay for the Enterprise plan.
Asset, Change, and Project Management: Full-Featured
Freshservice offers extensive asset management features, but only at the Growth level and above. It provides you with the tools to track assets, such as employee-assigned hardware and software, run an asset tracking audit, and even implement a barcode and QR scanning system. Change management—the process of tracking software changes and approvals—is included with the Pro plan at no additional charge. These features are designed to help you assess the potential impact of a change on your business, and they are both useful and intuitive. For example, if an app developer decides to add a new feature, the change management system can let everyone know and help them better track any related bugs, costs, or training needs.
(Credit: Freshservice/PCMag)You also need at least the Pro plan if you want to manage projects. Freshservice offers templates to help you initiate new projects, review tasks and schedules, and generate related reports. Zendesk for Employee Service doesn't offer project management features.
Reporting and Exporting Data: Effective Tools
Freshservice excels at reporting and analytics. For the basics, you can review agent reports that display all resolved tickets, SLA adherence, and responsiveness over time. Beyond that, you can also generate analytics for onboarding and offboarding employees, employee satisfaction reports, and see all ticket resolutions.
You can customize reports by, for example, removing the agent response time variable and adding a different one, all using a simple drag-and-drop interface. I like that you can customize reports to display only the information you care about, such as SLA adherence for agents or data from specific departments. You can also export PDF versions of the reports. An AI Agent report, available at the Pro level and above, is highly useful because it can reveal key insights, such as whether an agent is deflecting and reassigning tickets too often.
(Credit: Freshservice/PCMag)One advantage that Zendesk for Employee Service offers here is the ability of its AI to generate reports based on natural language. Freshservice can ultimately achieve the same result, but it may require more effort.
Integrations: Extensive and Powerful
Freshservice offers over 1,200 add-ons in its app Marketplace, which is easily accessible in the upper right corner of the main interface. These span the communication, CRM (such as HubSpot and Microsoft Dynamics), HR, and payment processing categories, among many others. Most integrations are free to install and use, although some require an additional cost. As mentioned, the integrations with Microsoft Teams and Slack are especially valuable if your company uses those messaging apps. Zendesk for Employee Service offers a comparable number of integration options. HaloITSM trails both, but it supports the popular apps you are likely to need.
Administration and Security: Complex, But Clearly Organized
Freshservice's admin functions can seem overwhelming at first, but they are presented in a logical way. Even if you don't have vast technical knowledge of help desk systems, you won't have any trouble drilling down into the settings you want. For example, you can click on Roles, and then specify whether agents can be involved in change management processes. Zendesk Employee Service uses a separate admin portal for configuring settings, which isn't as well-organized.
(Credit: Freshservice/PCMag)Freshservice's privacy policy is clear and up-to-date. The product supports multi-factor authentication for added security.