9 Best Freshdesk Alternatives & Competitors in 2024

Before we jump into the alternatives, let's have a quick look at why Freshdesk is a very popular solution for ecommerce customer service.

What is Freshdesk?

Freshdesk (from Freshworks) is a popular name in the customer service industry. Freshworks was named a “visionary” on the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center. It comes with an exhaustive set of features that make it an all-inclusive customer service tool for companies across industries. 

Pros:

• Freshdesk flaunts omnichannel customer service. They integrate with pretty much all the channels through which a customer may contact you. This includes live chat, Apple Business Chat, WhatsApp, email, Facebook, and the likes. 
• Besides the ones already in the Freshworks ecosystem, Freshdesk integrates with over 600 apps. This makes it easier for someone to opt for Freshdesk if they’re already using a product. 
• Their chatbot called Freddy AI lets you deploy intent & behavior-based bots that trigger when it meets the requirements. 
• Freshdesk comes with several in-app collaboration features that make it easy for team members to work together and resolve tickets. 

Cons:

• You need a demo and a few hours to understand how everything works. Freshdesk is not a tool you can set up and start using in minutes.
• It is NOT built for ecommerce brands. Ecommerce brands have specific needs such as deep platform integrations, customer information, modifying order data, and more. 
• They're not exactly affordable, especially if you want to unlock the main features. Their omnichannel helpdesk costs $77/user/month. It’s not a good fit for SME brands who are striving to do their best and need an extensive set of features. 
• Although Freshdesk comes with in-app collaboration features, it’s not very helpful to have a seamless conversation with your teammates. 
• It’s designed more as a ticketing system that treats a customer as a soleless ticket number. This triggers a mentality of “resolving tickets” and not “having a conversation.” 

You may also want to check out how Freshdesk compares to DelightChat.

DelightChat

DelightChat is an ecommerce customer support tool built for SME brands that enables them to deliver out-of-the-box customer service. It’s designed with a conversation-first approach that enables you to manage your store’s support & painlessly resolve customer queries - all from a single screen. 

Pros:

• Omnichannel inbox that helps you manage WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Emails & Live Chat.
• DelightChat enables you to respond to customer queries & collaborate with your team, all from a single screen.
• DelightChat offers great value for money being significantly cheaper than the other options on this list. 
• DelightChat doesn’t penalize you when you add more users to scale up your customer support operations. 
• Most importantly, you can collaborate with your team right within the app itself. There is no need to toggle between tabs, which leads to a loss in productivity & loss of work hours. 

Cons:

• For now, DelightChat only integrates with Shopify that allows it to access your Shopify admin dashboard data. However, it will soon be available for other ecommerce platforms like BigCommerce, WooCommerce & Magento. 

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Zendesk

Zendesk is a multi-billion dollar SaaS company that helps organizations with customer support software. Zendesk comes with an exhaustive list of features, integrates with almost all the apps in your stack, and caters to all types of industries. If you think of customer service software as an industry, Zendesk would be somewhere right at the top. 

Pros:

• Zendesk is said to have one of the best live chat tools available in the market. This chat tool comes with multiple features like behavioral triggers, live visitor tracking, chat ratings, file sending, etc.
• It is equipped with a powerful FAQ building feature where you can store your visitor’s most asked questions and other relevant information about your ecommerce store. 
• Besides that, it has a unified communications interface where you can answer your customer queries natively. Some of the platforms they support include WhatsApp, WeChat & Facebook.

Cons:

• Zendesk is heavy, boring, and not intuitive. It can be really difficult to navigate without a demo from a sales rep. 
• Zendesk is a generic tool. It’s NOT built for ecommerce brands. Ecommerce brands have very specific needs & their customer support requirements are very distinct and different from other industries. 
• It is quite expensive. Their support suite Professional plan costs $89/month/user. 
• You just can’t collaborate with your teammates on Zendesk easily. They have basic collaboration features but that doesn’t facilitate having a seamless conversation.
  

You may also want to check out how Zendesk compares to DelightChat.

Richpanel

Richpanel helps ecommerce businesses to manage their customer service seamlessly. With Richpanel, you can easily track, manage & resolve queries in no time. You can manage all your support channels, viz., live chat, email, WhatsApp, Facebook & Instagram. This saves a lot of time & helps the support reps be more productive. 

Pros:

• Richpanel saves you countless hours by bringing the most used support channels onto one dashboard. This includes live chat, email, Facebook, Instagram & WhatsApp. 
• You can eliminate up to 30% repetitive support requests with its self-service feature. It offers a personalized experience where customers can view/track orders, peruse FAQs, and start a new conversation too.
• They integrate with top ecommerce platforms like Shopify, Magento & WooCommerce.
• In Richpanel, you can create self-service workflows to resolve the commonly occurring scenarios for your support.

Cons:

• According to a lot of customers, Richpanel can be quite difficult to navigate. To put it simply, it’s not exactly intuitive. 
• Their pricing starts at $249/mo for just 1000 customer conversations and can work out to be quite expensive.
• Richpanel isn’t built for seamless collaboration with your team. You might still have to use an additional tool to collaborate with your teammates for day-to-day activities. 
• Richpanel caps the number of orders you can process on the platform. In their lowest plan, you can process a maximum of 1000 orders per month.

You may also want to check out how Richpanel compares to DelightChat.

Gorgias

Gorgias is a customer service software designed for ecommerce stores. They integrate with Shopify, BigCommerce & WooCommerce. They have a great integration with Shopify that helps support agents to dole out great customer support seamlessly. 

Pros:

• Gorgias integrates with Shopify like no other. This enables them to pull customer data right into the dashboard. Additionally, it also helps in modifying an order, initiating refunds, and a range of things that you otherwise need to visit the Shopify admin dashboard to execute the same. 
• You can use custom tags and use them to tag conversations for future reference in Gorgias. 
• Gorgias integrates with most of the channels where you can potentially receive a support query like email, Facebook, Instagram, etc.
• You can create highly customized Macros to automate replies to commonly asked questions. 
• Finally, they have intent-detection, which enables you to detect customer intents like shipping, refund, exchange, and many others. You can then set up automatic replies or route the tickets with tags.

Cons:

• Gorgias is not very easy to use. There’s a steep learning curve to draw value out of the product properly.
• It’s super expensive. The plan with all the features costs $750/month with a cap of 6000 tickets/month.
• Collaboration is not easy on Gorgias. It’s difficult to handover a conversation to a different support rep or ask someone for help when you need it. You might end up using another internal chat tool to collaborate within your team. 
• A lot of customers say that Gorgias is more of a ticketing system than a conversation tool. In 2021, store owners love to converse with their customers as opposed to treating them like a lifeless ticket. 

You may also want to check out how Gorgias compares to DelightChat.

Reamaze

Reamaze is a brilliant helpdesk software for ecommerce brands. It’s said to be the closest competitor to players like DelightChat, Gorgias, and Richpanel. It helps your team resolve customer queries seamlessly. The live chat from Reamaze is one of its main features.

Pros:

• Reamaze is known for its live chat feature owing to its customizable chat experience and instant ‘check order status’ bot. It also boasts other functionalities like FAQ-search, status page (you’ll know if your order’s delayed), pre-built bots, and more. 
• Their chatbot feature, Cues, can help you trigger messages based on URL/UTM, time on site, Shopify activities, etc. This equips you to personalize your customer’s experience at a deeper level. 
• You can see the users that are currently interacting with your site through their live dashboard. Armed with this, you can try and send a personalized message to generate a sale or simply help them better. 
• It’s also one of those tools that integrate with almost all ecommerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, WordPress, Magento, and the likes. It’s also good with GDPR compliance that gives you peace of mind while selling in the European market. 

Cons:

• The collaboration functionality within Reamaze isn’t exactly user-friendly. To manage customer support seamlessly, you might need to collaborate on a completely different tool like Slack or WhatsApp by sharing screenshots from Reamaze.
• Reamaze charges on a “per user, per month” model. This can turn out to be expensive when your support tickets grow, and you’d need to add more reps to the team.
• It’s more geared towards resolving tickets than having a conversation with a customer and building a relationship. 

You may also want to check out how Reamaze compares to DelightChat.

Help Scout

Help Scout is a clutter-free customer service software that helps companies have meaningful conversations with customers. It’s another easy one-size-fits-all solution that matches your expectations when it comes to managing customer service. It has all the features you need to greatly enhance your productivity and save you countless business hours.

Pros:

• Help Scout offers a shared inbox. This feature lets you group email inboxes by teams, functions, etc. For example, you can have the customer support inbox shared across five team members and the Operations inbox with two team members accessing it. 
• They also come with a ‘knowledge-base’ feature and a doc site that hosts all the FAQs which can be referred to by your customers.
• You can send intent & behavior-driven messages with its in-app messaging feature whenever someone’s on the website and meet the conditions.
• It integrates with a host of tools, including Shopify. 
• Last but not least, Help Scout’s reporting feature is top-notch. Track SLAs, number of conversations, happiness score, and the whole shebang. 

Cons:

• While Help Scout is an awesome software, it’s not built for ecommerce. It lacks the features and the design that’s meant for ecommerce stores. Plus, its Shopify integration isn’t really up to the mark.
• It’s much easier to manage all your customer queries across different channels on one screen. But that’s not the case with Help Scout. You need to navigate around to find stuff to make it work. 
• Help Scout’s basic plan starts at $25/user/month, which can quickly become EXPENSIVE if you have a large support team of 10+ agents.
• You can’t add more than one store to the same account if you run multiple ecommerce stores. It’s not ideal to constantly be logging in and out of different accounts. 

You may also want to check out how Help Scout compares to DelightChat.

Front

Front is a customer communication software built to help teams easily communicate with their customers while combining emails, apps, and team members into a single view. It’s more of a horizontal tool that can be used for a multitude of purposes, one of which happens to be ecommerce customer support. With Front, you can serve your customers across multiple platforms, viz. email, calls, SMS, Live Chat Facebook & WhatsApp. 

Pros:

• Front is a shared inbox that allows you & your team to get better visibility into all the customer email accounts from one screen.
• You can seamlessly collaborate within the app - tag team members to certain tickets, assign tickets, snooze/close tickets, etc.
• Front integrates with most top business software that you’ll use in your daily workflow. 

Cons:

• Front is neither a full-fledged customer support tool, nor is it built for ecommerce. This is a big disadvantage since ecommerce store owners have a specific set of requirements that can’t be met using this tool.
• A lot of times, emails that are being archived, sent, or deleted aren’t being synced correctly with Gmail. 
• The notifications system on Front isn’t the best. It is very easy for emails to get lost between emails from technical support and emails from the company.
• It takes a lot of time to set up as the settings aren’t intuitive enough. 
• The plan with the bare minimum features is $24/user/month, but since you need to sign-up with at least two users (licenses), it’s $48/month. This can quickly get costly as you scale up your support team.

You may also want to check out how Front compares to DelightChat.

Kustomer

Kustomer is a great customer service software that helps ecommerce stores manage conversations with their customers. This customer service CRM platform is ideal for managing high volumes of support.  It comes with a wide range of features making it a handy customer service tool for companies across industries. 

Pros:

• Kustomer enables you & your team to monitor conversations from live chat, messenger, emails, and social media from one screen.
• You can use notes and mentions to invite other agents to a conversation allowing your team to work collaboratively. 
• Moreover, you can use their AI, Kustomer IQ, to automate rules, route conversations, and send automated responses to your most asked questions. 
• Kustomer has integrations with pretty much all top business software that you’ll be using from day to day. 

Cons:

• Kustomer is not a tool built specifically for ecommerce. This means the specific set of requirements for an ecommerce store owner will likely not be met by using this tool.
• The layout can be quite intimidating and confusing for first-time users. You’ll need to go through a steep learning curve to generate value from the product. 
• Kustomer’s standard plan starts from $39/per user/month. Moreover, their pricing plans are set for a minimum of 8 seats which means the cost can be extremely prohibitive. 

You may also want to check out how Kustomer compares to DelightChat.

Tidio

Tidio is a great customer service tool to help ecommerce companies have better conversations with their customers. You can use Tidio to connect with your customers and solve their queries in a timely and efficient manner. It’s equipped with the features to help your agents manage customer support better.

Pros:

• Tidio enables you & your team to monitor conversations from live chat, messenger, and emails from one screen.
• Tidio’s live chat allows you to connect with visitors in real-time through customizable widgets.
• You can also automate the most frequently asked questions by your customers helping your agents save time.
• Tidio has integrations with most top business software that you’ll be using in your daily workflow. 

Cons:

• Tidio is not a tool keeping ONLY ecommerce store owners in mind. This means your specific set of requirements can’t be met by using this tool.
• You can’t manage customer conversations from Whatsapp, Instagram, and Twitter using Tidio. 
• You can’t view messages from multiple properties on one Tidio tab, this could be extremely inconvenient if you’re managing multiple ecommerce stores. 
• Tidio’s ‘Communicator plan’ starts from $18/month but with an additional fee required for every additional user, this could work out to be quite expensive.

You may also want to check out how Tidio compares to DelightChat.

Well, those are the main competitors of Freshdesk. And we hope this comparison helps you in your search for the right ecommerce support software. Each one is unique and has different features that can map to different use-cases.  So as an ecommerce business owner we hope you've found the best fit for your store.