How much does Freshdesk cost?

Checked on October 16, 2026, the Freshdesk pricing page published Growth at $19 per agent per month, Pro at $55 and Enterprise at $89, all billed annually. Freddy AI Copilot adds $29 per agent per month on Pro and Enterprise. The page showed no monthly rates behind its Save 20% toggle.

Is Freshdesk not free anymore?

The pricing page listed no free plan on October 16, 2026. In March 2026 this file recorded a $0 tier for up to two agents, cut from ten agents earlier, and that tier is no longer shown. The only no-cost route now is the 14-day trial, which runs on Enterprise and then suspends the account.

Freshworks owns Freshdesk and sells it alongside Freshservice, its IT service management product. The two live on separate pricing pages with separate rates, which is why a figure quoted for one is never valid for the other. Freshworks publishes both pages publicly, so each can be checked without a sales call.

Is Freshservice the same as Freshdesk?

No. Freshdesk is a customer support help desk: email, shared inbox, portal and knowledge base. Freshservice is the ITSM product, and its own pricing page lists change, problem and release management from Pro at $99 per agent per month. If your tickets come from employees, Freshservice is the correct Freshworks product.

Which is better, Zendesk or Freshdesk?

Freshdesk is the simpler and cheaper of the two to stand up, with published rates from $19 per agent per month. Zendesk is the deeper platform on customization and reporting. ITCommons did not verify Zendesk's current rate in this check, so compare on its own profile rather than on a figure quoted here.

Who are Freshdesk's main competitors?

Zendesk is the usual head-to-head. Help Scout competes for small email-led teams and bills per user from $25 per user per month. Zoho Desk competes on value for teams already in Zoho. For internal IT work the real competitors are Freshservice, InvGate Service Management and Jira Service Management rather than customer support tools.

What are the disadvantages of Freshdesk?

Four stand out in the published pricing. There is no free plan any more, AI assistance is a $29 per agent per month add-on that Growth cannot buy, skill-based routing and audit logs sit at $89, and there is no self-hosted option at any tier. Rates also rose on every tier since March 2026.

Is Freshdesk cloud only?

Yes. Freshdesk runs in a browser on Freshworks infrastructure with no on-premises edition at any published tier, so operating system support means any current browser and nothing installs on an agent or employee machine. A hard data residency or self-hosting requirement rules Freshdesk out rather than costing more.

How do you create a Freshdesk account?

Sign up on the Freshworks site and the account opens on a 14-day trial of the Enterprise plan. Forwarding one support address into the new inbox is the quickest way to get real tickets flowing. Before the trial expires you select and pay for a plan, or the account is suspended.

Is Freshworks better than Zoho?

They answer different budget questions rather than one being better. Freshworks publishes Freshdesk from $19 per agent per month and keeps AI as a paid add-on. Zoho's rate was not verified in this check, so treat any Zoho figure you read here or elsewhere as unconfirmed and price it on Zoho's own page.

Freshdesk pricing, alternatives, and review

The short answer

Buy Freshdesk if a support team of roughly five to a hundred agents works mostly from email, web forms and a help centre, and the reporting you need stops at the custom dashboards Pro provides at $55 per agent per month.

Skip it if AI triage has to sit inside the base rate, or if you need skill-based routing, audit logs or IP allowlisting. Freddy AI Copilot is a separate $29 per agent per month on Pro and Enterprise, Growth cannot buy it, and the governance controls start at $89 per agent per month.

Where Freshdesk fits

Freshdesk is Freshworks' customer support help desk: inbound email, a shared inbox, a branded customer portal and a knowledge base, with dispatch rules and automations on top. It is cloud only and runs in a browser, so there is no endpoint agent to push to staff machines and no operating system requirement beyond a current browser. That is the main reason teams get a working queue in days rather than weeks, and it is why Freshdesk keeps showing up on help desk software shortlists next to products that need a platform administrator.

The tier you land on decides whether that speed holds. Growth at $19 per agent per month carries ticketing, the shared inbox, the portal and knowledge base, roles and permissions, ticket dispatch, automations and standard analytics. What it does not carry, on the page checked on October 16, 2026, is multiple SLA policies, round-robin or load-balanced assignment, custom dashboards, business hours or the multilingual help desk. Teams that run one SLA and one queue are fine on Growth. Teams with a tiered support model are not.

Pro at $55 is where a real support operation sits. It adds the multiple SLA policies, round-robin and load-balanced assignment, intelligent routing, custom real-time dashboards per team or goal, business hours, ticket templates and external collaborators. The step from Growth is $36 per agent per month, close to three times the Growth rate, and the features behind it are operational rather than optional. Budget at Pro and treat Growth as the pilot.

Enterprise at $89 reads as a governance and scale tier rather than a capability one. The page lists audit logs, allowed domains and IP whitelisting, JWT authentication, a sandbox, approval workflow, agent shifts and out-of-office scheduling, a nested knowledge base hierarchy of up to five folders per category, Freddy AI Insights and skill-based assignment. Only skill-based assignment and the approval workflow change how agents work day to day. Without a compliance mandate, the $34 per agent per month over Pro buys headroom you may never use.

Check the entity before the tier. Freshdesk handles tickets from customers; employee tickets, change advisory boards and an asset register belong to Freshservice, which is a separate Freshworks product on a separate pricing page and sits in the service desk software category here. If your tickets come from staff, start with the Freshservice and Freshdesk comparison rather than buying the cheaper of the two by mistake. The Freshdesk pricing page also publishes no rate for Freshworks Omni, the unified cross-channel product: its navigation points at a separate pricing page, so if agents need one conversation thread across chat, phone and social, that page is the one to price.

Freshdesk pricing

Freshdesk publishes list rates, which is less common in this category than it should be. Three per-agent tiers were on the page on October 16, 2026, all quoted billed annually: Growth $19, Pro $55, Enterprise $89. Two things on that page are worth knowing before you compare anything. There was no free plan listed, and the annual toggle carried a Save 20% label without showing the monthly rates behind it. The page metadata still reads that pricing starts at $15, which does not match the $19 shown in the plan card.

What the Freshdesk pricing page publishes

Growth: $19 per agent per month, billed annually. Ticketing, shared inbox, customer portal and knowledge base, dispatch, automations, standard analytics. No multiple SLA policies and no Copilot add-on.
Pro: $55 per agent per month, billed annually. Multiple SLA policies, round-robin and load-balanced assignment, intelligent routing, custom dashboards, business hours, multilingual help desk, external collaborators.
Enterprise: $89 per agent per month, billed annually. Skill-based assignment, approval workflow, audit logs, allowed domains and IP whitelisting, JWT authentication, sandbox, Freddy AI Insights, nested knowledge base folders.
Freddy AI Copilot: $29 per agent per month on top of Pro or Enterprise. The page does not offer it on Growth.
Metered items: 500 Freddy AI Agent sessions included once per account, then $49 per 100 sessions. Day passes $2 on Growth, $7 on Pro, $12 on Enterprise. Connector app tasks $80 per 5,000. MCP actions $15 per 1,000, with 1,200, 6,000 and 12,000 actions a year included by tier.

What the Freshdesk bill does as the team grows

The published rates are linear per agent with no volume break on the page, so the arithmetic is easy and unforgiving. Fifteen agents on Pro at $55 each is $825 a month, or $9,900 a year. Forty agents is $2,200 a month. A hundred agents is $5,500 a month, or $66,000 a year. The same fifteen agents on Growth at $19 is $285 a month, so the Growth to Pro decision is worth $540 a month, or $6,480 a year, at that headcount.

Copilot changes the shape more than the tier choice does. Pro plus Copilot is $84 per agent per month, so twenty agents is $1,680 a month and $20,160 a year, against $13,200 a year for the same team on Pro alone. Note the odd result that falls out of the published rates: Enterprise at $89 is $5 more per agent than Pro plus Copilot at $84, and Copilot is still a $29 add-on at Enterprise. If Copilot is in scope, compare $84 against $118 rather than $55 against $89.

The lines you cannot forecast from headcount are the metered ones. Freddy AI Agent sessions run out after the 500 included once per account and then cost $49 per 100, which tracks ticket volume rather than agents. Connector app tasks at $80 per 5,000 and MCP actions at $15 per 1,000 behave the same way, and both climb when you automate integrations rather than when you hire. Day passes are the one meter that helps: $7 a pass on Pro covers a seasonal agent for a day instead of a licence for a year.

Divide the all-in annual figure by the tickets you expect to resolve before you compare Freshdesk with anything else. The help desk cost per ticket calculator does that arithmetic, and the deflection savings calculator is the one that tells you whether paying for AI resolution beats writing more knowledge base articles. Then ask Freshworks for the year-two rate in writing: the March 2026 snapshot in this file recorded Growth at $15, Pro at $49, Enterprise at $79 and a free plan for two agents, and all four of those have moved.

Checked October 16, 2026 against the Freshdesk pricing page.

What Freshdesk gives up

The free plan is gone from the pricing page. In March 2026 this file recorded a $0 tier for up to two agents, itself cut down from ten agents before that. On October 16, 2026 the page listed no free plan and no agent limit for one, and the only no-cost path was the 14-day trial, which runs on Enterprise and suspends the account if you do not pick a plan. Evaluations that assumed a permanent free pilot need rebuilding around two weeks.

AI is never in the base rate on the tiers most teams buy. Freddy AI Copilot, the agent-facing drafting and summarising layer, is $29 per agent per month on Pro and Enterprise and is not sold on Growth at all, so the cheapest plan that can have AI assistance costs $84 per agent per month. Freddy AI Agent, the customer-facing resolver, bills per session after the 500 included once per account, so its cost moves with demand and cannot be fixed in a budget line.

The customization ceiling is visible in the published feature matrix. Custom object analysis appears only at Enterprise, and the page describes insight into custom objects rather than creating them. Skill-based assignment, approval workflow and the nested knowledge base hierarchy are Enterprise-only. If your support model needs per-segment ticket forms, multi-brand portals or conditional logic past what the automation builder exposes, you will hit the ceiling at a tier you did not plan to buy.

Governance controls sit at the top. Audit logs, allowed domains, IP whitelisting, JWT authentication and the sandbox are all listed at Enterprise. A regulated team that needs an audit trail is paying $89 per agent per month for ticketing it could otherwise run at $55. There is also no self-hosted option at any tier, so an on-premises requirement rules Freshdesk out rather than costing extra. InvGate Service Management is the product on this shortlist whose own capabilities page says it is available on-premise or as SaaS.

Plan boundaries move. Between the March 2026 check and this one, Growth went from $15 to $19, Pro from $49 to $55, Enterprise from $79 to $89 and the free plan disappeared, while the page metadata still advertises the old $15 entry. That is a procurement risk rather than a complaint: ask whether your tier's feature set and rate are fixed for the contract term, and what the renewal uplift is, before you sign the first year.

How Freshdesk compares

Every figure below was read from the vendor's own pricing page on October 16, 2026, and the rates use different units on purpose: Freshdesk and Freshservice bill per agent per month, Help Scout bills per user per month and InvGate bills per year. Normalise them against your own agent count before treating any of them as cheap. Where a row says the price is not verified here, nobody on this page has checked it this month and the link goes to the product's own profile.

Tool	Best for	Price	Where it breaks
Freshdesk	Customer support teams on email, web forms and a help centre	$19 to $89 per agent per month, billed annually	AI triage, skill-based routing, audit logs and on-premises deployment
Freshservice	Internal IT desks that need incident, change and problem management	Starter $19, Growth $49, Pro $99 per agent per month, billed annually	Enterprise reads Custom, and asset units are priced separately
Help Scout	Small email-led teams that want a shared inbox rather than a ticket queue	Standard $25, Plus $45, Pro $75 per user per month	No native phone channel, and plan user caps of 25 and 50
InvGate Service Management	Mid-market ITSM where on-premise or SaaS has to be a choice	Starter $1,499 a year, Pro $500 per agent per year	Enterprise is quote-only from $12,000 a year
Zendesk	Deeper customization and omnichannel coverage than Freshdesk offers	Not verified here	Check the current rate on its own profile before comparing

How to test Freshdesk in two weeks

The trial gives you 14 days on Enterprise, which is the opposite of helpful: it shows capability you will lose the day you sign at Growth or Pro. Use the two weeks to find out which tier you will end up buying, then price that one.

Forward one real support address into Freshdesk on day one and let genuine tickets land. Email ingestion is the fastest part of the setup, and a queue full of your own traffic is the only honest test of the automations.
Build the SLA model you run in production. If it needs more than one policy, you are on Pro at $55 per agent per month, because multiple SLA policies are not listed on Growth. Settle that before any budget conversation.
Configure the assignment you want. Round-robin and load-balanced assignment are Pro features and skill-based assignment is Enterprise-only, so build the routing first and read the tier off the result rather than the other way round.
Build the three dashboards your lead asks for every month. Growth carries standard analytics and real-time dashboards; the custom per-team and per-goal dashboards start at Pro. Decide whether an export to a spreadsheet is acceptable at $19 or worth $55.
Spend some of the 500 included Freddy AI Agent sessions deliberately, on your worst repetitive ticket type, and count how many resolve without an agent. That number against $49 per 100 sessions is the whole AI business case.
Before the 14 days expire, ask Freshworks in writing for the monthly rate behind the Save 20% toggle, the year-two renewal rate and whether Copilot pricing is fixed for the term. The page does not publish the first of those.

Frequently asked questions about Freshdesk

How much does Freshdesk cost?: Checked on October 16, 2026, the Freshdesk pricing page published Growth at $19 per agent per month, Pro at $55 and Enterprise at $89, all billed annually. Freddy AI Copilot adds $29 per agent per month on Pro and Enterprise. The page showed no monthly rates behind its Save 20% toggle.
Is Freshdesk not free anymore?: The pricing page listed no free plan on October 16, 2026. In March 2026 this file recorded a $0 tier for up to two agents, cut from ten agents earlier, and that tier is no longer shown. The only no-cost route now is the 14-day trial, which runs on Enterprise and then suspends the account.
Who owns Freshdesk?: Freshworks owns Freshdesk and sells it alongside Freshservice, its IT service management product. The two live on separate pricing pages with separate rates, which is why a figure quoted for one is never valid for the other. Freshworks publishes both pages publicly, so each can be checked without a sales call.
Is Freshservice the same as Freshdesk?: No. Freshdesk is a customer support help desk: email, shared inbox, portal and knowledge base. Freshservice is the ITSM product, and its own pricing page lists change, problem and release management from Pro at $99 per agent per month. If your tickets come from employees, Freshservice is the correct Freshworks product.
Which is better, Zendesk or Freshdesk?: Freshdesk is the simpler and cheaper of the two to stand up, with published rates from $19 per agent per month. Zendesk is the deeper platform on customization and reporting. ITCommons did not verify Zendesk's current rate in this check, so compare on its own profile rather than on a figure quoted here.
Who are Freshdesk's main competitors?: Zendesk is the usual head-to-head. Help Scout competes for small email-led teams and bills per user from $25 per user per month. Zoho Desk competes on value for teams already in Zoho. For internal IT work the real competitors are Freshservice, InvGate Service Management and Jira Service Management rather than customer support tools.
What are the disadvantages of Freshdesk?: Four stand out in the published pricing. There is no free plan any more, AI assistance is a $29 per agent per month add-on that Growth cannot buy, skill-based routing and audit logs sit at $89, and there is no self-hosted option at any tier. Rates also rose on every tier since March 2026.
Is Freshdesk cloud only?: Yes. Freshdesk runs in a browser on Freshworks infrastructure with no on-premises edition at any published tier, so operating system support means any current browser and nothing installs on an agent or employee machine. A hard data residency or self-hosting requirement rules Freshdesk out rather than costing more.
How do you create a Freshdesk account?: Sign up on the Freshworks site and the account opens on a 14-day trial of the Enterprise plan. Forwarding one support address into the new inbox is the quickest way to get real tickets flowing. Before the trial expires you select and pay for a plan, or the account is suspended.
Is Freshworks better than Zoho?: They answer different budget questions rather than one being better. Freshworks publishes Freshdesk from $19 per agent per month and keeps AI as a paid add-on. Zoho's rate was not verified in this check, so treat any Zoho figure you read here or elsewhere as unconfirmed and price it on Zoho's own page.