Zendesk vs. Freshdesk: A comparison for 2025
A Nucleus study found that users favor Zendesk vs. Freshdesk for its ease of use, scalability, advanced analytics, and attentive support. Compare Zendesk and Freshdesk across these capabilities and more.
Zendesk vs. Freshdesk: How to choose
Companies are under tremendous pressure to offer more value to their customers faster while keeping costs low. Unlike Freshdesk, Zendesk empowers support teams with an intuitive interface, resulting in quick, real-time responses to meet customer and business needs. Our advanced AI tools are pre-trained and purpose-built for the customer experience (CX), so you don't need to do the heavy lifting, enabling you to accomplish more at a lower operational cost.
While Freshworks offers multiple products across various areas, Zendesk exclusively focuses on a human-centered customer experience. CX best practices are embedded in our solutions to guide effective strategies and maximize your overall value. Our commitment to your success and product scalability means a seamless transition as your operations and customer base expand, lowering your total cost of ownership.
According to a Nucleus study, users making the transition from Freshworks to Zendesk experienced benefits including a:
- 42% decrease in time to first response
- 27% decrease in average handle time
- 15% increase in admin productivity
- 5% increase in customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores
Whether you’re choosing a customer service solution for the first time or ready to progress beyond Freshdesk's capabilities, Zendesk has the tools and industry-leading expertise to help you master the customer experience while keeping costs low.
More in this guide:
- At-a-glance comparison: Zendesk vs. Freshdesk
- Zendesk vs. Freshdesk: Features and capabilities comparison
- Freshdesk vs. Zendesk: Which one gets you a better ROI?
- Pricing plans: Zendesk vs. Freshdesk
- What customers are saying about using Zendesk vs. Freshdesk
- Frequently asked questions
- Ready to try Zendesk?
At-a-glance comparison: Zendesk vs. Freshdesk
Use this overview of Zendesk and Freshdesk to get a quick peek at each customer service software’s functionality.
|
What you need to deliver the best CX |
Zendesk |
Freshdesk |
|
Ease of use |
✓ |
Disjointed experience |
|
Real-time speed |
✓ |
Slow at scale |
|
Service expertise |
✓ |
Broad focus |
|
Scalability |
✓ |
Limited |
|
Partnership |
✓ |
Lack of support |
|
Low total cost of ownership |
Low |
May entail higher costs as you scale |
|
Team productivity |
Intelligent WFM and QA solutions |
Lacks native intelligent WFM and QA solutions |
|
AI purpose-built for service |
✓ |
Generic and unproven |
Zendesk vs. Freshdesk: Features and capabilities comparison
Let’s dive into the features of Freshdesk vs. Zendesk to see how each provider approaches customer service.
AI purpose-built for service
|
As more businesses adopt AI to guide decision-making, the data model must align with real business operations. CX is no exception—AI models purpose-built for customer service consistently deliver better outcomes at scale. Zendesk AI is trained on more than 18 billion real support interactions, delivering highly accurate responses, intelligent automation, and continuous improvement from day one. Businesses get powerful AI across the entire Zendesk ecosystem—agentic AI agents, generative search, intelligent workflows, proactive agent assistance, and AI-powered analytics—without needing technical expertise or a lengthy setup. Freshdesk offers AI features that are generally easy to implement. However, their AI is generic, underdeveloped, and limited to small parts of the product and disconnected from the broader platform. It lacks the maturity and depth to support modern CX needs at scale. |
Find out how Zendesk AI can save you time and money. |
Intuitive design
Learn more about the Zendesk Agent Workspace. |
By cutting out the clutter, you can optimize agent performance and unlock massive productivity. Zendesk is thoughtfully designed for CX teams, providing an intuitive Agent Workspace that centralizes all support channels and integrates with your entire tech stack. This saves agents from needing to toggle between different interfaces and equips them with complete customer context to provide personalized experiences. Meanwhile, you can customize workflows to fit your unique needs perfectly. On the other hand, Freshdesk offers different interfaces for each channel, such as chat, phone, and ticketing. As a result, the user experience may be unintuitive. It can be confusing when doing more complicated tasks, which is one of the reasons why Wyze, a smart home technology company, switched from Freshdesk to Zendesk. Agents needed multiple browser tabs open, but couldn’t see the ticket numbers, and they had to refresh the page constantly to see updates. |
Real-time speed
|
Zendesk is the only CX software that offers everything businesses need to meet and stay ahead of increasing customer expectations. From AI agents to performance data and workforce management metrics, Zendesk equips teams with the tools they need to move at the speed of their business and customers. In contrast, Freshdesk offers basic analytics functionalities, which can limit your ability to satisfy customer needs and implement changes at the speed the business requires. For example, it doesn’t offer native intelligent WFM or QA solutions to address resource management or conversation quality. This leaves leaders with manual, time-consuming tasks and customers with inconsistent experiences. |
Take action with real-time reporting insights. |
Service expertise
Discover how Zendesk CX experts support businesses. |
With constantly evolving customer expectations, businesses need a provider with specialized CX expertise to ensure they’re adopting best practices to increase customer satisfaction, retention, and profitability. Zendesk exclusively focuses on customer service, empowering more than 160,000 businesses to deliver great CX at scale and earning the number one spot for best customer service product from G2. We treat our customers as partners and give them the tools and support they need to succeed, providing ongoing training and a team of experts to help you realize the full ROI of your investment. Freshworks is deprioritizing customer service by focusing on employee service. With fewer resources behind their CX product, the result is stalled innovation, poor support, and a platform that’s no longer evolving to meet modern customer needs. |
Scalability
|
With support teams needing to do more with less, their software should promote growth, not stifle it. Zendesk can support businesses of all industries and sizes, from startups to enterprises, and offers the flexibility to absorb new teams, divisions, and global bases. Our solution provides everything a service team needs—including tools to personalize conversations, omnichannel case management, AI-powered workflows, advanced reporting, and robust integrations—all housed under one roof. Freshdesk may be suitable for basic ticketing use cases. However, companies might outgrow Freshdesk due to its disconnected agent interface, reporting limitations, and unreliable integrations. This may result in switching costs that drive up your total cost of ownership. |
Choose from over 1,800 pre-built apps and integrations in the Zendesk Marketplace. |
Freshdesk vs. Zendesk: Which one gets you a better ROI?
Every business prioritizes cost reduction, so it's crucial to understand the total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI) for any technology solution, not just the license price. Freshdesk's limited scalability adds costs for growing businesses and reduces their overall ROI.
Conversely, choosing Zendesk helps make budgeting simple and predictable with transparent licensing and implementation fees. This frees you up to focus on what matters most—helping your customers. On average, customers receive payback in only two months, according to the Total Economic Impact study by Forrester Consulting. All of these factors contribute to an exceptional return on investment.
Pricing plans: Zendesk vs. Freshdesk
It’s not just your return on investment that’s better off with Zendesk—the initial investment with Zendesk is less, too, especially considering the hidden costs of Freshdesk. This includes add-ons for reporting and automation features, custom objects, and integrations, as well as challenges with scaling. Take a look at pricing plans and how they compare:
|
Zendesk |
Freshdesk |
|
|
|
*Plans are billed annually. |
What customers are saying about using Zendesk vs. Freshdesk
Don’t just take our word for it: Hear Zendesk reviews from brands that made the switch.
Wyze Labs
“For a company that really strives to have a high response rate within minutes, not being able to see customer replies quickly was always a struggle using Freshdesk.”
—Chuck Courtney, support manager at Wyze
Showpo
“When we were on Freshdesk, an agent would have eight, nine, 10 different tabs open—DHL, Australia Post, Magento, all these different tabs.”
—Paul Waddy, head of operations at Showpo
HeliosX
“he way we could just create flows and automations was so much easier than it would have been through Freshdesk… I wanted to get the system up and running quickly, and Zendesk was the better tool for being able to make changes at speed. We completed the migration, including setting up automations, triggers, macros, multiple views, and adding content to the help center in about three weeks.”
—Fabrice Dowling, global head of customer care at HeliosX
Frequently asked questions
Ready to try Zendesk?
Join the leading brands that chose Zendesk over Freshdesk. Our scalability, intuitive design, and service expertise can make your dollar go further so you can improve CX to maximize its potential for your customers. See for yourself and sign up for a free trial.
Zendesk vs. the rest: Compare the software
Learn more about Zendesk and how it stacks up against the competition.