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Freshdesk vs ServiceNow comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 1, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Freshdesk
Ranking in Help Desk Software
9th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
29
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
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
216
Ranking in other categories
IT Asset Management (1st), IT Service Management (ITSM) (1st), Rapid Application Development Software (2nd), No-Code Development Platforms (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Help Desk Software category, the mindshare of Freshdesk is 3.7%, down from 4.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ServiceNow is 25.3%, down from 26.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Help Desk Software
 

Featured Reviews

Alexey Timchenko - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Somnath Kand - PeerSpot reviewer
Custom integration and reporting lead to efficient ticket management
There is a need for bug or error tracking in ServiceNow. Although there are child incidents or tickets, tracking primary issues or bugs within enhancements is not present. The reporting features in the new portal could be more user-friendly. While it provides options to minimize chart and image sizes, actual implementation doesn't always reflect these changes.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"It generated reports for us, which helped us identify the status of requests and the aging of requests."
"It is very easy to make reports."
"Technical support is outstanding."
"Freshdesk provides a plain vanilla solution, making it user-friendly and less complex."
"The most valuable features of Freshdesk are the automation of tickets to assign them to different agents, and the managing of documents is easy."
"Freshdesk has allowed us to measure and track the response and resolution time of tickets which has been reduced from seven to eight hours down to 30 minutes to one hour."
"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."
"It has an excellent capability to integrate different access points."
"For the nuts and bolts running of an IT organization, I can't really say there's anything lacking feature-wise."
"It has more extensive features as compared to the other competitors."
"We have found change management and CMDB to be very useful."
"The solution is easy to use, simple to make queries, flexible to configure, integrates well, and supports all of our companies needs."
"What I like the most is the functionality, it's features are rich, and there is a high degree of compliance with IT standards."
"Primarily, we use it for incident management and change across the landscape. It is the virtual repository for our incident management processes. It gives us visibility about what's happening from the change management perspective across our CABs, including our enterprise CABs."
"ServiceNow is an industry leader in multiple areas and provides an excellent ROI."
 

Cons

"Freshdesk's major drawback is its limitation in integrating tools for App Store and Play Store reviews, and social channels like Twitter, which come with additional costs."
"The reporting, analysis modules and insights capabilities for this solution could be improved."
"Having so many tags makes everyday work a lot more complicated, and a lot more time-consuming."
"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."
"I would like to see improvements in the account management aspect, having a customer portal for better visibility into my subscription, invoices, and trouble tickets."
"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."
"Technical support is not the best. It could be much, much better and offer better support to users."
"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."
"Where it could be improved is Discovery. This may sound odd since I just praised the value of ServiceNow Discovery, but improvements to its automatic detection, the breadth of devices, and the depth of devices covered, as well as keeping up with new technologies, are all essential."
"HR Service Management is one module that needs a lot of improvement because it's a pretty new module. It was introduced in the last two years. It's becoming more mature day by day, but there is a lot of scope for improvement in that module."
"The RPA needs improvement. That's a new area for them that they're just entering into now."
"There are a few things that it needs to improve, like automation of most things out-of-the-box. For example, when it comes to cloud management, we are still going with manual intervention. Instead of that, if we had an out-of-the-box feature available, that would be great."
"The contract module is quite rudimentary and doesn't support contract line items."
"The solution could improve by being more stable."
"Performance could be improved."
"It's a little expensive compared to other tools."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is pretty manageable and acceptable."
"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."
"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."
"The price could be better, but it's okay. Compared to ServiceNow and JIRA, Freshworks offers a competitive price. There are also additional licensing costs because you need Microsoft Outlook. Each new email account costs around $15 to $19."
"We use a licensing model only so we pay for the number of agents we have configured in the system only."
"It is costly."
"Freshdesk was the best solution with the best price. It was cost efficient and included all the features that we needed."
"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."
"We know that ServiceNow is not cheap, it's more expensive than other solutions. But we are trying to increase our ability to handle tickets so that the cost per ticket is less."
"It is very expensive because it is a big organization. You have to pay for additional things."
"Some time ago it was expensive, but large companies have special contracts. It's enterprise prices, and we're talking about millions per year."
"I have found the solution very expensive."
"The price is okay for us. It's reasonable."
"The licensing cost is based on your partnership with ServiceNow and what you have selected for implementation. There is an annual license cost which is calculated based on your number of devices."
"I would say it is moderately expensive, ranging from six to seven on a scale of ten."
"The pricing is on the high side, but if you look at the stability and option to work, it's kind of justified."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
22%
Retailer
6%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Educational Organization
27%
Computer Software Company
10%
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?
Freshdesk's major drawback is its limitation in integrating tools for App Store and Play Store reviews, and social channels like Twitter, which come with additional costs. Despite having third-part...
What is your primary use case for Freshdesk?
The customer's primary use case for Freshdesk is handling emails and social media queries. It is mostly used for managing transactional queries such as deposits and withdrawals. Our support team is...
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: January 2025.
831,020 professionals have used our research since 2012.