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Freshdesk vs ServiceNow comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Freshdesk
Ranking in Help Desk Software
8th
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
Customer Experience Management (5th), Field Service Management (3rd), Knowledge Management Software (4th)
ServiceNow
Ranking in Help Desk Software
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
214
Ranking in other categories
IT Asset Management (1st), IT Service Management (ITSM) (1st), Rapid Application Development Software (4th), No-Code Development Platforms (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Help Desk Software category, the mindshare of Freshdesk is 4.0%, down from 4.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow is 25.3%, down from 26.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Help Desk Software
 

Featured Reviews

Alexey Timchenko - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 26, 2024
Incredibly user-friendly, flexible, and affordable
Automation and ticket routing rules in Freshdesk save us daily by streamlining routine tasks. We use reports to identify issues, allocate resources, and continuously improve our processes. It is a vital part of our daily operations, helping us stay proactive and efficient in handling various types of tickets. The reporting and analytics tools in Freshdesk are effective for measuring customer service performance. While our current subscription level has some limitations in terms of reporting, the next level provides more options. Budget constraints currently prevent us from upgrading, but the available reporting features still meet our basic needs. I highly recommend Freshdesk, especially for companies in their early stages. It is user-friendly, easy to configure, and great for those with a moderate volume of customer requests. The cost is reasonable, making it a quick and efficient solution to implement. Overall, I would rate Freshdesk as an eight out of ten.
Fabio QUINTANILHA - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 29, 2024
A stable and scalable solution that has excellent features and is useful for collecting data and building KPIs
I use the solution to collect data to build KPIs. We promote and foster the usage of workflows in the company We use the data to compare and review situations, propose improvements, and promote action items. SPM and ITSM features are the most helpful. The product’s standard user experience is…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It is very easy to make reports."
"The UI is easy to use."
"Technical support is outstanding."
"The most valuable features of Freshdesk are the automation of tickets to assign them to different agents, and the managing of documents is easy."
"It is quite easy to program custom apps and integrate them."
"Freshdesk significantly improved our customer issue resolution process. We can now easily record and track all customer requests, ensuring that no tickets are lost."
"The feature that I have found most valuable is the way that it connects to various folders especially because we use it as a CRM tool. We can connect it with our phones and our chat, and also with the API and have it as an email service. Freshdesk just makes our life easier."
"The user experience on the platform itself is fantastic. The UI is clean and uncluttered, so it's easy to find any information about your customer or the issue at hand. You can find out the person responsible for that particular issue, what the problem is, who the stakeholders are, and how to resolve it. There are lots of tools that will help you do that as well."
"The feature that I have found most valuable from ServiceNow is the ability to assign sub-tasks to different teams, including problem tickets and the regular and chain tasks."
"Your time-to-market, or TTM, becomes faster when you use ServiceNow. Even individuals that are not tech savvy can quickly change processes and workflows in it. This can make the organization as a whole more agile."
"Very easy to implement and to respond to my clients' needs."
"We have found change management and CMDB to be very useful."
"For change management, I find the CAB workbench very useful. I haven't seen any other solution that has a CAB workbench or advanced automated solutions for a change advisory board. ServiceNow also has the Workflow Engine which works very well and is very intuitive."
"I find the incident management part to be the most valuable. That's how the service desk tracks tickets."
"The Workflow feature is the most valuable."
"We have found the service easy to use, although, we have ended up customising a lot of parameters."
 

Cons

"The solution's inbound calls could be improved."
"If Freshdesk had forms in it so that I could go to the portal and fill out a service request, that would improve it immensely and make it more valuable for enterprise customers, but that's not a current functionality. You can't have a certain catalog of any type. You can't be like, "Hey, I want to just go submit a ticket," and then type in. You can't prompt them to ask anything. It is just a blank form."
"There aren't any features that we want to enhance, but we need to mature in our usage of some of them. I can't say any feature is missing or needs improvement, but a tool's built-in features need to evolve customer feedback. We have a dialogue set up for that kind of feedback."
"There are a few things we have asked for, like a forward button. When a ticket comes in, we forward it, but it doesn't sync up with the forward. That is the one they have to rework. The other is when we forward the ticket, it doesn't go all, or certain things don't go with it. We have told them about it, and they are working on it. It would be better if they gave us a more standard reporting template. Although they already have some, many aren't usable. It would be easier if we had more templates to work with."
"For integrations, we need to write code that communicates with their system in order to enable certain functionality in the system. This is a lot of work for their customers."
"While it's good for a small number of tickets, definitely in the future, we will require something more powerful."
"It would be helpful to pull reports or schedule them based on agents, users, ticket numbers, or responses."
"Freshdesk could improve its capabilities. It's missing the article formatting, and the overall look and feel make it not easy to use. The administration instructions on how to manage the automation, capability, and integration with third parties, such as chat or bots, are very important in these types of solutions."
"The technical support SLA can be improved because sometimes they take a long time to answer our queries."
"Vulnerability management could be improved. Also, integration with tools such as Microsoft Defender ATP needs improvement."
"We find it good in general. Obviously, there are areas of improvement for every capability. As they evolve more, if they keep on adding more intelligence into the capabilities, it will improve. The improvement areas are more integration across the landscape and more intelligence for the overall capability of the solution."
"The major area for improvement for our needs would be monitoring the metrics of the times to acknowledge and resolve issues and escalations."
"The level of complexity and the level of discovery are the two areas that can be improved. Its UI needs to evolve. They focus a lot on cool colors and other little things, which don't bring value in terms of functionality. They need to focus less on presentation and more on the functionality within the UI. Its discovery mechanism should be improved. There is a component in ServiceNow that discovers the assets, but it doesn't do an immediate discovery, and there is a lag. If I want to open a ticket for a laptop or an asset, that asset needs to exist within ServiceNow for me to be able to say that I need to have its disk space or memory increased. It is referred to as a CI or configuration item in ServiceNow. Sometimes, ServiceNow doesn't discover these items, and as a result, I cannot open a ticket and tag that system or asset. If a system was introduced to the environment last week and it is still not listed, it becomes a problem. I will either have to wait or manually enter that system or asset. So, if I have a laptop with only 8 GB of memory and I want to request 16 GB of memory, I won't be able to do that in ServiceNow because my system or asset hasn't been discovered yet. Discovery is not immediate, and there is a lag."
"The RPA needs improvement. That's a new area for them that they're just entering into now."
"The scalability needs improvement."
"The setup was time-consuming and required a lot of internal resources."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is pretty manageable and acceptable."
"We pay approximately $70 per agent to use Freshdesk. We have 10 agents, which is approximately $700 or $800 per month. It is a fixed license, there are not any additional fees."
"We use a combination of Freshdesk, Freshservice, and Freshchat. We use the whole suite. Weirdly enough, we pay more for Freshdesk than we do for Freshservice. I would rate it a three out of five in terms of pricing. You can get different bundles, and you can always move to different plans that are standard. Freshservice can go anywhere from $19 up to $120 per agent, per month. There is such a wide range, and it is very customizable to your needs."
"It is costly."
"The best system plan is enterprise. It costs basically 79 Euros per agent per month when it's billed annually and 95 Euros per agent per month when it's billed monthly."
"We use a licensing model only so we pay for the number of agents we have configured in the system only."
"Freshdesk was the best solution with the best price. It was cost efficient and included all the features that we needed."
"It was definitely not expensive. It was two grand or maybe three grand total for a year. It has just straight and simple standard licensing fees. There is no additional fee."
"There is an annual subscription to use this solution."
"I rate the solution's pricing a six out of ten. The pricing for ServiceNow is based on a SaaS platform with annual contracts. However, it may not offer much flexibility for adjusting usage in the short term."
"The licensing expenses are excessively high."
"In Tunisia, the companies find the licensing costs to be expensive."
"Isn't pricing always too much? We really do chafe at the ITIL licensing. ITOM is also pretty expensive."
"I have found the solution very expensive."
"The pricing is on the high side, but if you look at the stability and option to work, it's kind of justified."
"The price of this solution is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
25%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Educational Organization
25%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Freshdesk?
Freshdesk significantly improved our customer issue resolution process. We can now easily record and track all customer requests, ensuring that no tickets are lost.
What needs improvement with Freshdesk?
The solution's inbound calls could be improved.
What is your primary use case for Freshdesk?
I use Freshdesk to manage IT support tickets for our team of 15 IT professionals across multiple countries. It has been effective in ticket management, and we find the price-to-functionality ratio ...
Which solution is better for developing non-ITSM applications: OutSystems or Service Now?
The short answer is that OutSystems is far better for 2 main reasons. Firstly, with Service Now you are locked into that platform for good. The business model is to lock in and then keep pumping th...
Would you choose ServiceNow over Microsoft PowerApps?
Hi Netanya, I will choose ServiceNow because ServiceNow is a very good tool compared to Microsoft PowerApp. Because ServiceNow has a very strong module (Performance Analysis) reporting which will ...
What do you like most about ServiceNow?
The solution has a user-friendly interface.
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Honda, 3M, Hugo Boss, Petronas, Sony Pictures, The Atlantic, goodreads, Clear Channel Radio, Penn University of Pennsylvania, unicef, Kuoni, Movember
AAA, AstraZeneca, Becton, Dickinson and Company, Broadcom, Christus Health, Epicor, Equinix, GE Capital, Intuit, KPMG, Loyola Marymount University, OshKosh, Quantas, RedHat, Royal Bank of Scotland, Swiss Re, U.S. Department of Energy, Safeway, Yale University, and Zillow    
Find out what your peers are saying about Freshdesk vs. ServiceNow and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
815,854 professionals have used our research since 2012.