Freshdesk vs. Zendesk: Which should you use? [2026]

As your business grows, customer support gets harder. It's far easier to drop the ball when you're juggling multiple support channels, handling high volumes of customer requests, and doing it all while training a growing customer service team.

But customers don't care about your scaling challenges; if they have a bad experience, they won't hesitate to leave a negative review.

Good customer service software prevents that from happening. I tested Zendesk and Freshdesk, two of the most popular platforms on the market, to see how they stack up.

Table of contents:

• Zendesk vs. Freshdesk at a glance

• Zendesk is more unified; Freshdesk is a suite of connected apps

• Zendesk's help desk features are more polished

• Freshdesk's AI is easier to launch; Zendesk's AI is more in-depth

• Freshdesk is cheaper and offers a limited free plan

• Both platforms have excellent integrations, including with Zapier

• Freshdesk vs. Zendesk: Which should you use?

Zendesk vs. Freshdesk at a glance 

Zendesk and Freshdesk are both customer support platforms that have been supercharged with AI capabilities. Freshdesk is more affordable and makes it easier to get started, while Zendesk tends to be better for larger teams and has more in-depth features and customization options. 

Here's a handy table that highlights some of the major points of comparison between Freshdesk and Zendesk, but keep reading for a deeper dive.

Before diving in, a quick note: I was testing Freshdesk Omni, which technically includes multiple Freshworks products (more on that below)—it's the product that's most on par with the Zendesk for service offering.

Zendesk is a more unified platform; Freshdesk is a suite of connected apps

Zendesk offers a single platform with a fairly straightforward experience. You just choose a plan with the features you need: entry-level plans offer essential help desk support features, while pricier plans add live chat, voice, and advanced features like approval workflows. There's also a range of add-ons for things like quality assurance, workforce management, and advanced data privacy.

Once you log in to Zendesk, everything feels cohesive. Zendesk Support—the interface where agents spend most of their time—processes formal support requests, live chat messages, and voice conversations. Every interaction is displayed in the same format: a ticket. If you want to make or receive phone calls, you can do so from right within the same interface.

Freshdesk is less cohesive. It's one part of the broader Freshworks family of products, which also includes Freshsales, Freshmarketer, Freshservice (for IT teams), Freshchat, and Freshcaller. You can use Freshdesk Omni as a customer service "command center" to unite Freshdesk, Freshchat, and Freshcaller, and while these products integrate fairly well, they still feel like different apps and open in separate tabs.

In practice, this means that agents using Freshdesk Omni can end up doing a fair amount of context switching. Freshchat allows users to manage live chats from all sorts of channels, from Instagram to web chat, but it lives in a separate interface than formal tickets.

You can convert a chat into a ticket, but once you do, you need to jump from Freshchat to Freshdesk to take further action on it.

Depending on your workflow, you might be able to find some advantages to this bifurcation of chats and tickets. If your frontline agents handle lightweight support via chat and escalate to more experienced reps via tickets, for example, it's not a bad setup.

But the fact that these products are integrated, but not truly unified, presents challenges. Here's the biggest: when I searched for customer names in Freshdesk, only the ones I converted into tickets gave full context. If I chatted with customers in Freshchat but didn't convert the conversation into a ticket for follow-up, Freshdesk's search only showed basic contact information and none of the conversational context. This lack of unified search means you may end up doing separate searches across both Freshdesk and Freshchat to find the context you need.

Zendesk's help desk features are more polished

Zendesk has a neat feature called "Side conversations," which allows you to discuss a ticket with other team members via email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, or another child ticket (i.e., a ticket created from a side conversation) right from Zendesk. All side conversations appear directly within the ticket as a comment but remain hidden from the customer. 

What's especially useful is that with Zendesk, you can conduct multiple side conversations on multiple channels. For example, you can start one side conversation that emails a vendor to double-check product specs, and another that pings a colleague on Slack or Microsoft Teams to double-check your return policy. In both cases, the response automatically funnels into the ticket to maintain full context. 

Here's what it looks like when you use Zendesk to send a side conversation to colleagues in Slack:

Freshdesk now offers Threads, a built-in side conversations tool that wisely copies many of these features. However, you're limited to tagging colleagues within Freshdesk or emailing external vendors. Without a Slack or Microsoft Teams integration, it's harder to get quick input from colleagues, especially if they're part of a non-customer service team and Freshdesk isn't their main work interface. 

Another limitation is that you can only create one thread per ticket with Freshdesk, which means your thread can quickly get unwieldy if you need input from multiple sources.

Zendesk also offers a more diverse set of help desk views and filters, including the ability to create detailed custom views for your tickets based on a wide range of conditions, groupings, and ordering options. You can choose up to 15 columns to display based on the information that's most relevant for each view.

In Freshdesk, the ticket dashboard filters are functional but less customizable. You can sort and filter tickets through a dozen or so metrics, based on what's most important to your task (agent, status, response due by, and so on). 

Freshdesk's AI is easier to launch; Zendesk's AI is more in-depth

Customer service teams have been among the earliest adopters of AI. Salesforce, for example, recently announced that 85% of its customer service inquiries are now resolved by AI agents. But what does that actually look like inside platforms like Freshdesk and Zendesk?

Both apps now have:

• AI agents that can resolve customer problems independently

• AI copilots that help human agents by providing suggested replies and gauging customer sentiment

• AI insights that detect trends in customer service data

Let's start with Freshdesk, which makes it easier to get started with AI. You can launch prebuilt "Vertical Agents" for categories like eCommerce and fintech, though you're still responsible for uploading knowledge sources and customizing other aspects of your agent's behavior. There's also a library of prebuilt workflows: if you want your AI agent to be able to cancel subscriptions via Stripe or refund a payment in Shopify, you can add it to your agent with one click.

Zendesk's agent-building process is more manual. However, you can go deeper than you can in Freshdesk, particularly if you upgrade to Zendesk's "Advanced" AI agents add-on, which offers zero-training AI agents and hybrid flows that combine AI with scripted sequences.

Both Freshdesk and Zendesk also offer AI copilot features that support human agents by gauging sentiment, identifying relevant solution articles, and suggesting replies. Here's what that looks like in Freshdesk.

For any AI copilot to be truly useful, you need a robust knowledge base so that content suggestions pull directly from your company policies, product data, and past tickets. 

Zendesk has an edge here: you can use AI to generate your knowledge base by pulling in information from your website and describing the most common issues customers need help with.

Once you've done that, your AI copilot will reference the knowledge base and provide suggestions to human agents as they review tickets.

This is far better than the old days of mechanically building rule-based chatbots and scripting answers that map to specific questions. Still, it's not perfect. AI copilots from both Zendesk and Freshdesk tend not to provide a suggestion at all if they can't source an answer from the knowledge base that fits the query with 100% relevance. While this conservative approach is generally a good thing because your agent is less likely to generate AI hallucinations, it also means you might get fewer AI suggestions than you expect. There's ultimately no way around the need to diligently build a massive knowledge base that covers every angle of every query.

Fortunately, AI also makes it easier to figure out where the gaps in your support structure are. Zendesk's Admin Copilot, an admin version of its agent-focused AI Copilot, automatically generates insights based on your account activity and offers concrete suggestions to improve performance (like "review the return policy procedure").

Freshdesk's AI insights work similarly, making it simple to ask questions about your account's performance conversationally.

Finally, there's one product category that Zendesk offers and Freshdesk doesn't: AI voice agents. According to Zendesk, its voice AI agents can resolve around 50% of customer interactions; the rest can be transferred to human agents, where Zendesk voice copilot provides live support suggestions.

Freshdesk is cheaper and offers a limited free plan

As a rule, I love transparent pricing, and I don't like talking to sales reps. But the two hours I spent attempting to untangle the pricing of these two platforms almost broke me: Freshdesk and Zendesk differ substantially in which features they bundle and which are separate add-ons. It's complicated, and there are lots of edge cases. If you're trying to figure out which app truly offers more value for your specific use case, this is one of those occasions where a sales rep might truly provide some sanity. (Or just describe your specific use case to your favorite LLM and upload each pricing URL.)

With that caveat out of the way, Freshdesk is often the cheaper option.

• If you need a barebones help desk with ticketing features and no AI agents, Freshdesk's Growth plan is $23/agent/month, while Zendesk's Support Team plan is $25/agent/month. (Freshdesk also offers a free version of this plan that covers 1-2 agents for six months.)

• If you want to add AI agents, Freshdesk Omni's Growth plan costs $35/agent/month while Zendesk's Suite Team plan costs $69/agent/month. (Though Freshdesk's plan doesn't include email AI agents and Zendesk's does.)

• If you want an AI Copilot that helps your human agents provide better support, it's bundled into Freshdesk Omni's $95/agent/month Pro plan, or you can add it to any plan for $29/agent/month. With Zendesk, you'd need a $50/agent/month Copilot add-on and a standard plan, which adds up to at least $119/agent/month. It's also nice that Freshdesk allows you to add Copilot licenses only for the agents that need it, while with Zendesk you have to add it for your entire team.

Where Zendesk is most competitive pricing-wise is if you need to bundle a help desk and ticketing, live chat and multichannel messaging, and voice features.

• If you need a comprehensive customer service product suite, Zendesk is sometimes cheaper. Zendesk Suite Professional gives you a help desk, live chat and multichannel messaging, and voice features for $149/agent/month (though if you need full contact center capabilities, that's an extra $50/agent/month add-on). With Freshdesk Omni, an equivalent set of features would require the $95/agent/month Omni Pro plan, $23-$59/month for Freshchat to add live chat and multichannel messaging, and $18-$47/month for Freshcaller to add phone calls (but not voice AI).

Finally, one more thing to consider is that AI agents cost more as you scale. With Freshworks, the first 500 sessions are included and you'll pay $49 for each additional 100 sessions. Zendesk meters usage based on the number of customer service issues its AI resolves for customers. You get 5 resolutions/agent/month on the Team plan and 10 resolutions/agent/month on the Professional plan; additional resolutions cost $2 each.

Both platforms have excellent integrations, including with Zapier 

Whichever customer service software you choose, you'll want it to play well with the rest of your tech stack. You shouldn't have trouble with either platform on this front: Freshdesk connects with 1,200+ apps natively, while Zendesk connects with 2,000+.

And using Zapier, you can automate your team's processes by connecting Freshdesk and Zendesk to 8,000+ more apps. That way, you can automatically keep your team in the loop with notifications, add new tickets to your project management tool, create tickets from forms, and anything else you can think of.

Learn more about how to automate Freshdesk and how to automate Zendesk, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

Freshdesk vs. Zendesk: Which should you use? 

Freshdesk offers a limited free plan, is slightly cheaper, and has a "build your own package" vibe that's great for companies that are scaling or just getting started with customer service. If you're ok with having a few core features scattered between tabs and different apps, it can be a solid option for the long run. And its Freddy AI feature set has plenty of tools to solve daily issues, so your agents will never wonder what to do.

Zendesk is a better fit for larger companies with complex customer service needs. Its AI features focus on optimization and automated ticket resolution, helping you increase support quality without increasing your headcount. Zendesk's AI insights, advanced help desk features, and unified help desk interface will all be welcome features for your team.

Related reading:

• The best live chat apps for customer support

• The best customer service software

• How automation can help your customer support team

• The best Zendesk alternatives

This article was originally published in December 2018 by Jeremy Moser and has also had contributions from Jessica Lau. The most recent update was in February 2026.