It all started with a customer support experience gone wrong. The Freshdesk story goes all the way back to 2010 when Girish Mathrubootham, then VP of Product Management at Zoho Corp, had some pretty bad experience with the customer service team regarding a broken LED television. Then an article published in the Hacker News caught his attention which said something about Zendesk raising their prices about 60 – 300% and how it raised concerns among the customers who were not so happy about it. He saw a potential to tap into the customer helpdesk realm and with a massive cloud transition already on the horizon, he saw an opportunity to build a helpdesk system that would shake the customer support world. He, along with his good friend and colleague Shan Krishnasamy started “Freshdesk” in 2010.
He started the project with his personal savings, followed by funding from venture capital firms Accel and Tiger Global. The initial funding helped a lot and in 2011, they won the Microsoft BizSpark India Start up challenge. Girish spent the prize money on marketing to garner some quick traction. The event helped them attract a lot of attention, especially among the VCs. In 2014, Freshdesk crossed the 30,000 customer mark and in 2015, they acquired the video chat platform 1CLICK.io, which was their first acquisition since their inception. In 2017, Freshdesk Inc. rebranded to Freshworks Inc., which becomes the parent company offering an entire range of business productivity tools, including Freshdesk, Freshservice, Freshsales, and Freshcaller.
What is Freshdesk?
Freshdesk is a cloud-based ticketing system for customer helpdesk support and solution that helps businesses provide stellar customer support experience. Freshdesk is a SaaS platform with a comprehensive set of features and tools that help customers with their queries in the communication method of their choosing. It is a very well-organized helpdesk system that is built with customer support in mind. It offers everything to deliver exceptional customer support through a centralized platform which sees customer queries as tickets. Teams can track and manage incoming tickets from multiple channels, such as emails, texts, chat, social media and calls, and effectively work to resolve their queries. Teams can also split their tasks with other teams to solve customer queries as fast as possible. Smart automation tools make the job even easier by assigning tasks effectively based on agents’ skills, workload, and availability.
What is Freshservice?
Freshservice is a service desk and IT service management (ITSM) solution that aids businesses in achieving greater efficiencies with smart automation tools and AI. It is a fresh take on IT support built for modern enterprises to manage their service desk efficiently. It is an ITIL aligned service desk solution that works to fulfill the ever expanding customer needs and streamline service management across all areas of business, from HR to legal, IT, security, maintenance, and more. It puts your service desk on the cloud and allows you to access it anytime and from anywhere you want. In general terms, Freshservice is an IT service desk solution, but it can also be used by other internal teams to support employees. Freshservice makes everything easy and effortless by replacing the endless flow of emails, starting from a small request such as ID card replacement to managing big things like organizing a corporate event.
Difference between Freshdesk and Freshservice
Tool
– Freshdesk is a cloud-based ticketing system for customer helpdesk support and solution that helps businesses assist their customers’ queries (tickets) across all communication channels, such as social media, email, phone, messaging and chat. It is a very well-organized helpdesk system that is built with customer support in mind. Freshservice, on the other hand, is an IT service desk solution that aids businesses in achieving greater efficiencies by simplifying and automating their internal IT operations. It is a fresh take on IT support built for modern enterprises to manage their service desk efficiently.
Ease of Use
– As both Freshdesk and Freshservice are part of the same software ecosystem, they are very easy to use. The intuitive and polished interface makes it easy to get started in no time. Freshdesk automatically converts incoming emails, chats, messages, and social media queries into tickets, allowing the agents to manage and resolve tickets through a centralized dashboard. Freshservice with seamless ITIL integration and easy to use interface makes it easy to efficiently manage IT services and operations, with no special training required. You can customize the Freshservice interface to your needs, add your company’s logo, and you’re good to go.
Pricing
– While both Freshservice and Freshdesk are fairly priced with almost similar pricing plans, Freshdesk goes one step ahead with its forever free starter plan that provides support for unlimited number of agents. The premium plans start as low as $15 per agent per month on annual billing and goes up to $99 per month which is an ideal plan for enterprises. Freshservice has no free offering and the basic plan starts with $19 per month on annual billing and goes up to $109 a month for the Enterprise plan. So, Freshdesk has a slight edge over its sibling in terms of pricing.
Freshdesk vs. Freshservice: Comparison Chart
Summary
While both Freshdesk and Freshservice are part of the same software family Freshworks, they are designed to serve different purposes. The former is a customer helpdesk program that helps businesses deliver high-quality customer support through an easy to manage ticketing system, whereas the latter is an all-in-one IT service management solution that aids business streamline service management across all areas of business, from HR to legal, IT, security, maintenance, and more.