Are you looking for the best Freshdesk alternatives & competitors to provide better support to your customers?
Freshdesk is one of the leading customer support SaaS platforms that businesses rely on to communicate with their customers. No matter how good Freshdesk might be, it has some drawbacks that some other platforms have managed to address. If you are finding Freshdesk expensive or lacking some features that could be key to your customer support service, there are several alternatives that you can consider.
In this article, we shall discuss the best 5 Freshdesk alternatives that you can choose from if Freshdesk is expensive or doesn’t meet the needs of your business.
Now, let’s look at the top 5 Freshdesk alternatives that address some of these Cons.
Best Freshdesk Alternatives
Here is the summary of the most popular Freshdesk alternatives you should seriously consider:
Without wasting more time, let’s take a deep dive into the list to learn more about the Freshdesk competitors:
List of Best Freshdesk Alternatives
1. LiveAgent
LiveAgent is a reliable customer support platform that 21,000 customer support agents use to stay in touch with their customers. The cheapest package that goes for $15/agent/month might be similarly priced as Freshdesk, but it offers more features, hence giving you more value for money. LiveAgent can be integrated into more than 142 platforms, including WordPress, Slack, Shopify, Mailchimp, Magento, Pipedrive, etc.
Features That Make Live Agent A Great Freshdesk Alternative:
- Universal Inbox: This is the smartest inbox that brings all messages together from the different accounts into one place. So, you don’t need to switch between different windows, you can access all your messages from one place.
- Smart ticketing: LiveAgent will automatically sort all your communications into tickets and arrange them in whatever order you like.
- Responsibility Assignment: You can assign the various tickets to different agents based on their skill set and experience.
- Rules: With this feature, you can automate your workflow through time, action, and SLA rules
- Internal tickets: You can make internal notes for your coworkers inside a particular ticket.
- Departments: This feature enables you to create departments and distribute agents and tickets into departments
- Time tracking: Enables you to track your agents’ work time per ticket to assess their productivity and effectiveness.
- Email templates: You can configure email templates for your customers and agents, so you don’t have to create every email from scratch. All these preconfigured emails are sent to your agent or customers when certain conditions are met.
LiveAgent Pricing Packages
LiveAgent has three pricing packages, and each of them comes with a 14-day trial. They also have a free package with minimal features, but you can use it to assess the reliability of this platform. The image below shows their pricing packages;
- Ticket: $15/agent/month
- Tickey+Chat: $29/agent/month
- All-inclusion: $39/agent/month
2. LiveChat
LiveChat is another customer support cloud platform that businesses can use if Freshdesk doesn’t fit within their needs and budget. It has robust chat and customer engagement solutions that businesses can use to stay in close contact with their customers. LiveChat also has reporting and data analytics tools that will help you track your customer support performance over time.
Features That Make LiveChat A Great Freshdesk Alternative:
- It has several chatting tools including, Message sneak-peek, Canned responses, Chat tags, Rich messages, File sharing, Chat archives, Notifications, Chat transfer, and Chat ratings.
- There are various customer engagement tools including Targeted messages, Messaging mode, Eye-catchers, Chat buttons, URL rules, Ticket form, Chat routing, Chat history, Chat transcripts, etc to enhance your customers support experience.
- It offers various customization options to change the look and feel of the chat widget as per your website theme and provide support to your customers in more than 45+ languages.
- There are various reports and analytics tools including Data summary, Chat reports, Data export, Agent reports, Ticket reports, Customer reports, Ecommerce reports, etc. All the reports will help you to track your agent’s activity and help you to improve your customer support service.
LiveChat Pricing Packages
Before switching to paid subscription, you can test LiveChat for 14-days for free.
Livechat has three pricing options that include:
- Starter at $16/month/agent
- Team at $30/month/agent
- Business at $50/month/agent
- Enterprise (custom quote) – You need to contact them for pricing details.
The image below shows the features for each of these pricing packages.
3. Zendesk
Zendesk is a customer service platform and a great Freshdesk alternative that helps businesses to provide support to their customers. It is centered around enhancing productivity, processes, and pipeline visibility for sales teams. It has a straightforward user interface that makes it easy for sales agents to get started and stay on top of their game while interacting with potential customers.
Features That Make Zendesk A Great Freshdesk Alternative:
- Sales email intelligent features include; email tracking, smart email notifications, email automation, activity reporting, and mobile CRM.
- Native dialer features include; click to call, recording every call, sending a text, scripts, notes, and call analytics to give you all the call metrics within a specific period.
- Ability to integrate with lots of other web-based platforms
- Zendesk also has sales prospecting features that will enable you to increase conversions, enhance productivity, and discover new opportunities.
Zendesk Pricing Package
Zendesk has three main pricing packages that include
- Suite Team at $49/month/agent
- Suite Growth at $79/month/agent
- Suite Professional at $99/month/agent
Each of these packages comes with a free trial that you can use to gauge the quality of service. Check out the image below for more details about the features included in each package.
Zendesk small pricing packages (small businesses)
Zendesk also has plans for enterprises, and these costs up to $215/month/agent. The images below show all the details about the features offered for each plan.
Zendesk small pricing packages (Enterprise level businesses)
4. Helpdesk
Helpdesk is another customer support option you can choose if Freshdesk doesn’t meet your requirements. This platform is centered around optimizing email management to improve your customer support agents’ response rate and productivity. Helpdesk can be integrated with several other web platforms that include; Live chat, Shopify, Zapier, HubSpot, GitHub, etc.
Features That Make Helpdesk A Great Freshdesk Alternative:
- Ticket management features include; filtering tickets, tags and bringing all the tickets from various platforms into one place.
- Collaboration tools that include; private notes and multiple mailboxes plus the Roles and teams features
- Automation features include; canned responses, automated assignments, new ticket notifications, and automated workflows.
- Analytics tools include; ticket satisfaction, first response time, and new tickets heatmap.
Helpdesk Pricing Package
Helpdesk has three pricing options that include; Starter at $4/month/agent, Team at $19/month/agent, and Enterprise (custom quote). Below are the details of the features offered per package;
5. Helpscout
Helpscout is also a customer support cloud platform that can be used as the perfect replacement for Freshdesk if you want to get some extra features that Freshdesk doesn’t offer. This tool is used by over 12,000 businesses in 140 countries. The first package for Help Scout is a little more expensive than Freshdesk ($20 vs. $15). However, it offers a lot more features than Freshdesk.
Features That Make Help Scout A Great Freshdesk Alternative:
- Shared inbox: Brings all your messages in one place
- Knowledge base: Offers instant answers for customers
- Messages: Provides proactive (automated) responses to customers
- Live chat features that you can integrate into your website
- Integration functionality: You can integrate Helpscout into many other platforms that include; HubSpot, Jira, and Salesforce.
Help Scout Pricing Packages
Helpscout has three pricing packages that include; Standard at $20/month/agent, Plus $35/month/agent, and Company packages (custom quote). The image below shows the details of the features you will get for each of these plans.
Conclusion: Best Freshdesk Alternative
Yes, Freshdesk is a very powerful CRM platform, but you may have to choose one of the five alternatives we have shared if you want features like more advanced automation tools at friendly rates. You will also get more useful features like Custom Reports and Dashboards on other platforms at much more friendly prices; Freshdesk offers these to only the highest-priced plans.
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