Freshworks 360 VS Zendesk

Freshdesk and Zendesk are the two leading Customer support software available in the market. Both are equally popular, but still there are certain areas in which Zendesk stands apart.

Zendesk offers more customization and branding options than Freshdesk. Its benchmarking tools help you identify bottlenecks in your process. But, on the other hand, Freshdesk comes with better agent collaboration functionalities. In fact, to increase your internal team’s productivity levels, Freshdesk offers gamification options.

So, check out which customer support platform is better for your business requirements.

Freshdesk vs Zendesk: Features Comparison

Freshdesk is comparatively new in the market and is just getting started with its features. Compared to Zendesk, Freshdesk offers fewer features. Zendesk includes many advanced modules to improve your customer service, sales, marketplace, and more. For instance, Zendesk comes with better automation functionalities than Freshdesk like pre-defined replies, automated reminders, etc. In fact, even in terms of creating a flow of conversation with customers, Zendesk’s bot is better than Freshdesk.

Let’s check out how individual features work in both the software.

• Agent Collaboration: Freshdesk offers more functionalities in terms of agent collaboration. It allows your agents to conduct team huddles that help them discuss important tickets with other experts in the company. In fact, it also allows more than one agent to work on a ticket with shared ownership, whereas Zendesk only allows agents to include followers and CCs in a ticket.
• Bot: Zendesk’s AI-powered bot is better than Freshdesk as it also gives article recommendations to customers along with canned responses. Many Zendesk alternatives offer similar AI-based bot for recommendations. Whereas, Freshdesk only gives answers to customers’ queries.
• Arcade: Freshdesk offers a unique gamification feature, an arcade that helps in increasing your agent’s productivity. In this, the manager sets a few goals and defines rewards for achieving each goal. Gamification turns work into games, and employees are motivated towards getting rewards and performing better.
• Benchmark Tool: Benchmark tool is exclusively offered by Zendesk that helps organizations measure their customer service performance. This tool helps you measure your performance on metrics like the time taken for the first reply, customer satisfaction, and new ticket volume. This helps you identify the bottlenecks and improve your process to provide ultimate customer satisfaction.
• Automation: In terms of automation, both Freshdesk and Zendesk are quite similar. For example, with both the customer support software, users get reminders when a ticket is due for a long time or send an automated email to the customer for ticket number.

Freshdesk vs Zendesk: Ticket Management

Freshdesk’s ticket management is better than Zendesk when it comes to managing customer tickets. It comes with features like thank you detector, setting ticket deadlines for response, automated ticket field suggester, and more.

However, Zendesk has an edge when it comes to generating tickets from multiple platforms and sending personalized responses.

Tickets from Multiple Channels: The common platforms from where both Zendesk and Freshdesk fetch queries include chat, email, social media, mobile SDK, and website. However, in addition to these platforms, Zendesk can also generate query tickets from voice solutions. Zendesk users can directly connect with customers through a cloud-based voice solution. Voice technology comes with other functionalities like call routing & queuing, monitoring, voicemails, etc.

Predefined Replies: Both customer support solutions allow you to send predefined replies to common questions. However, Zendesk is better as it personalizes the replies by adding customers’ names, surnames, and other details.

Final Verdict: Freshdesk is better than Zendesk when it comes to managing multiple tickets, but Zendesk is better when you want to generate tickets from multiple platforms.

Freshdesk vs Zendesk: Customization & Branding

In terms of customization, Zendesk is better than Freshdesk, as in Zendesk’s enterprise plan users can completely remove its branding from support widgets and agent workspaces. This further helps in giving a customized look and feel to your platform. In addition to branding, Zendesk also supports customization of automated responses.

Freshdesk vs Zendesk: Knowledge Bases & Self-Service

Both these software solutions support customer self service.

Zendesk offers public knowledge base that includes guides, blogs, and FAQs. Along with this it also provides a free Knowledge Capture application where users can search for answers without raising a ticket and waiting for the resolution. This acts like a self-help service to them.

Similarly, with Freshdesk, users get a public knowledge base as well as a private knowledge base. This is a common feature offered by many Freshdesk alternatives. The private knowledge base helps an organization’s internal team to access guides and different training & support materials.

Final Verdict: Freshdesk is better as it provides a private knowledge base that can be used to train internal employees.

Freshdesk vs Zendesk: Reporting & Analytics

Zendesk’s reporting and analytics tools are better than Freshdesk as some users have found the reporting feature to be a bit complicated. In fact, the reporting tools are also limited in Freshdesk’s free plan. But in the paid plans, users get decent reporting functionalities like the generation of custom reports, customer satisfaction reports, report scheduling, and more.

But undoubtedly, we can say that Zendesk offers more reporting options as compared to Freshdesk. These majorly include reports for activity tracking, goals tracking, sales forecasting, and custom reports with more filters, metrics, and charts.

Final Verdict: Zendesk’s reporting capabilities are better and more advanced than Freshdesk with filters, metrics, and charts.

Freshdesk vs Zendesk: Integrations

Zendesk offers 1000+ integration options which are way more than the 300+ integrations offered by Freshdesk. However, Freshdesk is continuously adding more platforms for integration like CSS Softphone, SMS marketing, ticket management apps, and more.

In the case of Zendesk, users can integrate pre-built apps available on their marketplace itself. In fact, they can even choose to build their own apps using Zendesk’s developer API functionality and then integrate them.

Final Verdict: Zendesk offers more pre-built and custom integration options as compared to Freshdesk.

Freshdesk vs Zendesk: Pricing

Freshdesk is more budget-friendly for beginners than Zendesk, as it offers a free plan for up to 10 agents. In the free plan, Freshdesk comes with multiple functionalities including ticket dispatch, ticket trend report, knowledge base, team collaboration, social & email integration, 24*7 email support, and more.

When it comes to paid plans, Freshdesk is cheaper than Zendesk. Freshdesk’s pricing starts from ₹999 per month, whereas Zendesk’s pricing starts from ₹1572.60 per month. Even for paid plans, Freshdesk offers 21-day free trial, but Zendesk only offers a 14-day trial period.

However, if we see the pricing-to-features ratio, Zendesk is comparatively better than Freshdesk, as its basic paid plan also offers conversation routing, 1000+ integrations, standard file storage, automated answers powered by AI, and more.

Final Verdict: If you have a small team and you are on a tight budget, you must go ahead with Freshdesk. However, if you want feature-rich customer service software, you should opt for Zendesk.

Freshdesk vs Zendesk: Techjockey’s Verdict

After an in-depth comparison of Freshdesk and Zendesk, we can say that both tools have their own strengths and limitations. However, if you are a small team, and want specific features, you should go with Freshdesk as it comes with a free forever plan. But if you are looking for a more customized solution in terms of reporting, branding, and integration, you can choose Zendesk. It offers a good pricing-to-feature ratio.