10 best Freshdesk alternatives in 2026,
ranked by what the move costs.

The best Freshdesk alternatives in 2026 are Outlearn if you want to keep the helpdesk and stop paying for the queue, FreeScout or Chatwoot if you want the same shape for free, Crisp if you want a flat bill, and Help Scout if you want the fairest AI meter published by anyone here. We scored ten of them on six things you can check on each vendor’s own pricing page: whether hiring someone moves the bill, whether a failed AI answer is billed, whether you can work out the price yourself, what the AI can read, what the free tier really is, and what it costs you to switch.

Freshdesk is a real helpdesk with a low entry seat and three paid plans: Growth, Pro and Enterprise. Two things make people look for an alternative. One is that there is no free plan on the pricing page any more, only a 14-day trial of Enterprise. Two is the AI: a Freddy AI Agent session is a 72-hour window rather than an answer, the 500 free sessions are once per account rather than monthly, and Growth can’t buy Copilot at all, so the AI tier is really Pro.

Outlearn is on this list, and it’s at the top. We score full marks on two of the six axes. Before the table, we’ll tell you which two, and Freshdesk’s own score will be in it as well, so you can decide whether it’s worth leaving at all.

$0

free plans on Freshdesk's pricing page today

72 hours

what one Freddy session covers

8 of 10

alternatives mean moving your helpdesk

50.4%

resolved without a human over 90 days

How we judged the ten

Six axes, 0 to 5 each, 30 points. Everything is scored from what the vendor publishes, not from what we think of the product.

Ties break on the seat model, and we will call that a bias. So here it is: we score 5 on the seat model and 5 on the cost of the move and those are the two axes that lead us to finishing first. The other four columns are in the table below, if you weight them differently, just add them up yourself, every number you need is below.

A note on the sixth axis: if you’ve read our Help Scout roundup, the same vendor can score differently there, because the question is asked from where you are standing. FreeScout is a Help Scout-shaped inbox, so it scores 3 if you’re coming from Help Scout and 2 if you’re coming from Freshdesk (same rubric, different starting product).

Scoring notes for the odd cells. Freshdesk takes a 0 on the free tier because its pricing page shows no free plan and the 500 Freddy sessions are once per account. For Zoho Desk, the token meter scores a 4 because 30 million free tokens a month would mean a failed answer costs most teams nothing. For Gorgias, we score it 2 on the meter because a resolved conversation would be billed twice. For Outlearn, we score it 2 because every reply is billed, ours included. FreeScout and Chatwoot both score 2 because neither publishes how much a failed answer costs.

Freshdesk competitors compared

The table below shows what a five-agent team pays per month on the entry plan it actually fits on, excluding AI usage. The last row is Freshdesk. That is the baseline you are leaving.

Read the last two columns together. Eight of the ten mean a migration: a new inbox, a new help centre and your ticket history moved around twice. That is the cost the tables on other Freshdesk alternative pages leave out, and at $19 an agent it is often larger than the saving. The exceptions are Outlearn, which runs in front of the desk you keep, and Intercom’s Fin sold separately, which does the same thing per outcome.

Six of the ten alternatives still bill per person, and so does the one you are leaving.

1. Outlearn

We are first on our own rubric so this is our declaration before anything else: two of the six axes are the ones we built our pricing around, and if you drop them we finish mid-table. What follows is what we do and what we do not do.

What it is. An AI customer service agent that sits in front of the helpdesk you already run and reads your documentation where it lives. This includes the Freshworks knowledge base your team already maintains. It answers customers in chat, email and Slack, and hands over the harder ones to a person with the entire transcript attached.

Best for. Teams whose answers are spread across several systems, who want fewer conversations reaching the desk rather than a different desk.

Pricing as published. Free forever with 100 credits per month. Starter: $99 per month with 2,000 credits. Growth: $199 with 4,500. Scale: $599 with 15,000. No seat charge on any of the plans. Every AI reply costs 1 to 5 credits (depending on the model, one credit on the standard model). With four replies per resolution, Growth covers roughly 1,000 conversations resolved per month. The arithmetic is on our pricing page.

Where it falls short. Two things. 1. Outlearn is not a helpdesk: we don’t have a shared inbox, we don’t have a ticket queue, we don’t assign tickets, so your team will still need somewhere to work. This is the point: that somewhere is the Freshdesk you already pay for. 2. We bill every reply, including the one that misses. Freshdesk’s session covers 72 hours of replies for one charge, and we bill for each of them, so we rate ourselves 2 out of 5 on our own meter axis (level with the lowest meter score on the page). What we can do is price it: on Starter, a credit is about five cents, so a reply that misses costs about a tenth of one Freddy session, and the free plan lets you measure your own miss rate before you pay us anything. Channels are web chat, email, Slack, Teams and Google Chat, no WhatsApp, Instagram, or phone.

Where it wins. Twenty third-party systems read live and re-read every 30 minutes: Confluence, SharePoint, Google Drive, OneDrive, Box, Dropbox, GitHub and your existing help centre, Freshworks included. Freddy’s published sources are URLs, files, solution articles and custom Q&As, capped at 10 URLs per agent. Every answer carries a sources chip so anyone can open the articles it was written from, and the handoff reuses the open conversation rather than duplicating it. Our published resolution rate is 45.9% of 29,003 conversations all time and 50.4% over the last 90 days, with the denominator on the benchmark page — of the vendors here that advertise a rate, we are the only one we found that prints what it is a share of.

When to choose it. Keep Freshdesk, put an agent in front of it, and see half the queue stop arriving. Our Freshdesk comparison page runs a five-agent team with 1,000 AI conversations a month on both bills, meters and all; ours is $199 on Growth, at four replies a conversation, which is our assumption rather than your data, so run it on your own numbers.

2. FreeScout

What it is. An open source, self-hosted helpdesk: a shared inbox with unlimited agents, tickets and mailboxes, plus email, chat and messaging channels. It describes itself on its own homepage as a free self-hosted Zendesk and Help Scout alternative.

Best for. Teams with someone who can run a PHP application and want the inbox without the invoice.

Pricing as published. The core is free, with unlimited agents, tickets and mailboxes. It is a plain PHP and MySQL application their page says runs on shared hosting. Extras are paid modules in their marketplace, and module prices are not on the homepage. Neither is the cost of the server, which is yours.

Where it falls short. You are the vendor now. You have to update and back it up. You have to provide uptime and the deliverability of your own mail server. The AI is a module that drafts replies, and the homepage says nothing about how it is priced or what it reads. SSO is not stated either. Channels are broad on paper – email, WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook, Slack and live chat – whichever ones you use, you install and maintain them. It is also shaped like Help Scout rather than Freshdesk, a shared inbox rather than a ticket queue with a portal and SLA policies, which is why it scores 2 on the move here.

When to choose it. Your volume is real, your requirements are ordinary, and a few hours of an engineer’s month is cheaper than $19 a seat. If nobody wants to own a server, go straight to Chatwoot’s cloud plan.

3. Crisp

What it is. A messaging suite that includes a shared inbox, live chat, a help centre and AI credits bundled in. This is priced per workspace rather than per agent.

Best for. Small teams who refuse to be billed per person.

Pricing as published. In euros: free forever, Mini €45 a month per workspace, Essentials €95, Plus €295, Enterprise by quote. Monthly prices, no option to pay annually. Mini includes €5 of AI credits, which their page describes as around 90 automated conversations; Plus includes €75, or around 1,350. There is a seat allowance included with each plan (2 on the free plan, 4 on Mini, 10 on Essentials, and 20 or more on Plus) so for a five-person team, you would be billed at the Essentials plan, or €95 per month, not at the Mini plan of €45 per month.

Where it falls short. It is still flat pricing in steps. The AI allowance is quoted in euros and then translated as “around” a conversation count, so you cannot compute your overage exactly. Nothing is published about SSO on any of the tiers, or what happens when the AI fails. Its AI reads Crisp’s own help centre and your website, not the Confluence page where the real answer is.

When to choose it. Your team is under ten people, your AI needs are ordinary and the seat line is what you are escaping. Above that, the plan steps start doing what the seats did.

4. Help Scout

What it is. A simpler helpdesk than Freshdesk: shared inbox, Docs knowledge base, live chat, and an AI layer priced per resolution.

Best for. Teams who want a cleaner desk than Freshdesk and the fairest AI meter on this page.

Pricing as published. Free for up to 5 users with one inbox and one Docs site. Standard is $25 per user a month for up to 25 users, Plus $45 up to 50, Pro $75 with a minimum of ten users. Those are the annual figures, the page’s default state, about 16% below monthly. AI Answers is $0.75 per resolution with a three-month free trial. In their words, a conversation where the customer asks for more help “won’t count as a resolution and you won’t be charged”. You are charged for one conversation, though, no matter how many questions the AI answers.

Where it falls short. The seat line, in two places. Standard is $25 per seat, against Freshdesk’s $19 per seat, so you’re automatically pricing your team up by a third. The Pro plan also has a ten-user minimum, which puts the bill at $750 before the AI has answered anything, which is a strange bill for a team of four with an agent. Its AI reads Help Scout Docs, web sources and instructions you write, and no third-party connectors are listed for it.

When to choose it. You want to replace the desk, you’re under 25 people, and the AI meter matters more than the seat price. Our Help Scout comparison has the side by side.

5. Chatwoot

What it is. An open-source customer conversation platform (shared inbox, live chat, help centre and an AI assistant called Captain) that is available as a cloud plan or self-hosted.

Best for. Teams who want open source with a managed option they can move to later.

Pricing as published. The Hacker plan is free for 2 agents and 500 conversations a month (live chat only), with 30-day retention. Startups is $19 per agent per month billed annually, with unlimited conversations, all channels and 300 Captain credits. Business is $39 with voice, teams and automations. Enterprise is $99 with SSO and audit logs. Extra Captain credits are $20 per 1,000. There is a 15-day trial. The community edition can be self-hosted for free.

Where it falls short. The cloud plans are per agent, so once you stop self-hosting the seat line is back at exactly Freshdesk’s $19. SSO is only on the $99 plan, where Freshdesk puts SAML on all three of its paid plans. What Captain reads and whether a failed answer consumes a credit are not on the pricing page.

When to choose it. You want FreeScout’s economics with somewhere to land if self-hosting stops being fun.

6. Intercom (Fin)

What it is. A customer platform with an AI agent, Fin, priced per outcome — and, unusually, sold on its own as well.

Best for. Teams who want outcome pricing with the rate printed on the page.

Pricing as published. Essential is $29 per seat a month annually. Advanced is $85. Expert is $132. Fin is from $0.99 per outcome, where an outcome is a customer confirming the issue is resolved, not asking for more help, or Fin completing a workflow including a handoff. Fin is not billed when a customer asks for a human. There is a 14-day trial with no card, and Fin is included in it. Their page also sells Fin as a standalone agent, in their words for use “with your current helpdesk”, with no seats required.

Where it falls short. It is the most expensive entry seat here: five agents on Essential is $145 before Fin has said anything, against $95 on Freshdesk Growth. The $0.99 is more of a floor than a price. SSO is on Expert at $132 a seat. And the interesting part, the standalone Fin, has no published list of connectors, so what it reads beyond the help centre is a question for their sales team.

When to choose it. It’s the one shape on this page that competes with ours. Our Intercom comparison prices both at 1,000 resolutions. If you want an agent sitting in front of the desk you keep, and you prefer a per-outcome meter to a flat plan, that’s the one.

7. Zoho Desk

What it is. A full helpdesk — tickets, queues, assignment, SLAs — with an AI layer metered in tokens and a large free allowance.

Best for. Teams moving off Freshdesk to spend less, without giving up a ticketing system.

Pricing as published. Express: $7 per user per month, billed annually. Standard: $14 per user (caps at five users). Professional: $23 per user. Enterprise: $40 per user. There is a free plan for up to 3 users. Express gives up to 30 million free AI tokens a month; generative AI is otherwise bring-your-own-key. Five agents on Express is $35, the cheapest paid seats in this comparison and about a third the price of Freshdesk Growth.

Where it falls short. The pricing page picks a currency from where you are, so the figure you see may not be the dollar one. Ours come from Zoho’s own price file. Tokens are not a natural unit of reference for a buyer (who knows how many tokens a support conversation costs?). Nothing is published about SSO, or about what the AI does when it fails, and the AI reads the Zoho knowledge base and little else they document.

When to choose it. Price is your constraint, you want the same shape of product, and you are willing to do the discovery yourself. Our Zoho Desk comparison runs the numbers at higher volume.

8. Zendesk

What it is. The incumbent helpdesk, with AI agents priced per automated resolution.

Best for. Large teams whose requirements list only the incumbent satisfies.

Pricing as published. Support Team is $19 per agent a month, billed annually (the same as Freshdesk Growth). Suite Team, the cheapest plan with AI agents, is $55, and Suite Professional is $115; Suite Enterprise is a sales call. Automated resolutions are $1.50 on a commitment or $2.00 pay as you go, and since May 2026, only a verified resolution will be billed (in their words, you only pay for requests “successfully resolved by the AI agent”). Team plans receive a $2 per agent monthly allowance that does not roll over. 14-day trial, no free plan.

Where it falls short. The move gets you the same price for the seat and a bigger platform, not a smaller bill: five agents with AI costs $275 on Suite Team, compared with $95 on Freshdesk Growth. Freshdesk’s session covers a 72-hour window where a Zendesk resolution is a single outcome. And its AI rate sits in the plan data on the page rather than on the rendered page, which costs it a transparency point.

When to choose it. You need the biggest integration catalogue in the field and you’re able to sign an annual commitment. Our Zendesk comparison is the longer version.

9. Gorgias

What it is. An ecommerce helpdesk with a bundled AI agent wired into Shopify orders, refunds and subscriptions.

Best for. Shopify stores whose support is mostly tasks rather than questions.

Pricing as published. Priced per ticket, never per agent. In August 2026 the cards read: Starter $40 a month for 50 tickets, Basic $77 for 300, Pro $471 for 2,000, Advanced $1,227 for 5,000, annual, with the AI agent bundled in. Their pricing page no longer prints those numbers – today it says only that it scales from 50 to 5,000 tickets a month and that you pay when the AI resolves a conversation – so treat the figures as August’s and ask them for today’s.

Where it falls short. The meter. In their own documentation, you are charged a ticket fee plus an automation fee when the AI answers and does not hand over the conversation, and only the ticket fee when it does. Success costs two units, failure one: the only meter on this page where the good outcome is the expensive one. A ticket with any outbound message is billable. Nothing is published about SSO or trial length. It is shaped for Shopify, so a Freshdesk queue that is not ecommerce does not fit.

When to choose it. You sell on Shopify and the AI needs to act rather than answer. Model the double meter at your real resolution rate first. Our Gorgias comparison does it at 1,000.

10. Front

What it is. A shared inbox with four separately priced AI add-ons.

Best for. Teams whose blocker is a security questionnaire rather than a bill.

Pricing as published. Starter is $25 per seat a month on annual billing, up to ten seats; Professional $65 up to fifty; Enterprise $105. The toggle publishes monthly too, at $35 and $85. Autopilot starts at $0.05 per conversation, Copilot and Smart QA are $20 a seat each, and Smart CSAT is $10. SSO and SCIM are on Professional. Fourteen-day trial, no free plan.

Where it falls short. The seat cliff. Starter caps at 10 seats according to Front’s own words, so hiring person eleven moves everyone to $65 — a jump Freshdesk does not have. Autopilot charges per conversation, so you can still get billed for an answer that failed to help. There is no information about what happens when the AI gives up. Four AI meters is a lot of arithmetic for a buyer who just wants one number.

When to choose it. The inbox is what you want, and SSO on a plan you can buy with a card is what unblocks you. Our Front comparison has the details.

Free and open-source options

This is the sub-intent that ranks: the second result on the Freshdesk alternatives search is a forum thread asking for self-hosted options, and Freshdesk itself doesn’t show a free plan any more. Six out of eleven products here are offering something free and two are open source.

Zendesk, Intercom, Front and Gorgias don’t offer a free plan either. If free is the requirement then the honest shortlist is two open source inboxes you host yourself and four free tiers small enough to be a trial with no clock on it. FreeScout and Chatwoot are engineering cost, not seats. If you have the engineer, that is a good trade; if you do not, it’s the same bill in a different currency.

Freshdesk vs Zendesk

They are the two mainstream ticket queues in this comparison. They are closer than the search volume alone would suggest. The entry seat costs the same on both, annually. The difference is where the AI lives. Freddy sessions are available on any plan at Freshdesk while Copilot is reserved for Pro. At Zendesk, the AI agents start on Suite Team, one tier above the entry seat. A Freshdesk session lasts for 72 hours regardless of what happens; Zendesk bills only for a verified resolution. Neither has a free plan. Zendesk’s integration catalogue is bigger and its bill is bigger, too. We are writing that comparison properly as its own post; until then, the closer read of each is on our Zendesk comparison and Freshdesk comparison.

How to choose

• Leaving because of the AI meter. Help Scout, which does not bill escalations, or an agent in front of the desk you keep. Ask every vendor, us included, the one question: is a failed answer billed?
• Leaving because of the price. Zoho Desk at $7 a seat, Crisp at a flat workspace fee, or FreeScout and Chatwoot self-hosted at nothing but hosting.
• Leaving because there is no free plan. FreeScout, Chatwoot, Zoho Desk, Crisp, Help Scout or our free tier. The other four offer a trial and nothing else.
• Not leaving at all. Keep Freshdesk and put an agent in front of it. Eight of the ten alternatives cost you a migration; two do not.
• Leaving for scale. Zendesk or Intercom, with an annual commitment and a bigger bill.
• Leaving for Shopify. Gorgias, once you have modelled its double meter.

Keep the desk you have. Put an agent that reads your docs in front of it, and watch half the queue stop arriving. See how Outlearn works with Freshdesk, or read the ranked roundup of twelve AI agents.

Prices and quotes were read on the vendors’ own pricing pages: Freshdesk, Zendesk, Intercom, Front, Crisp and Gorgias on 9 September 2026; Help Scout, Chatwoot, FreeScout and Outlearn on 7 September 2026; Zoho Desk between 7 and 9 August 2026. Scores are our editorial judgement using the rubric above. Nothing here is a third-party rating.