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Freshdesk vs Intercom Customer Communications Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
41
Ranking in other categories
Customer Experience Management (5th), Field Service Management (3rd), Help Desk Software (6th), Knowledge Management Software (5th)
Intercom Customer Communica...
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
CRM Customer Engagement Centers (8th), CRM (22nd), Social CRM (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Customer Relationship Management solutions, they serve different purposes. Freshdesk is designed for Customer Experience Management and holds a mindshare of 1.9%, down 5.5% compared to last year.
Intercom Customer Communications Platform, on the other hand, focuses on CRM Customer Engagement Centers, holds 3.5% mindshare, up 0.5% since last year.
Customer Experience Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Freshdesk1.9%
Genesys Cloud CX3.6%
Qualtrics XM Platform3.3%
Other91.2%
Customer Experience Management
CRM Customer Engagement Centers Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Intercom Customer Communications Platform3.5%
Microsoft Dynamics CRM13.0%
Salesforce Service Cloud10.6%
Other72.9%
CRM Customer Engagement Centers
 

Featured Reviews

AK
Senior Quality Automation Engineer at BMC Software, Inc.
Streamlined ticket workflows have improved response times and collaboration across teams
Although Freshdesk has many advantages and is a strong tool overall, there are a few areas where it can be improved. One is customization limitations; dashboards and workflows could be more flexible. The other is reporting capabilities; advanced analytics and deeper insights could be enhanced. Performance with large volumes can occasionally be impacted, especially when handling high ticket volumes or multiple integrations. API limitations, such as rate limits, can be restrictive for organizations, and the pricing structure means that some advanced features are only available in higher tier plans, which can increase costs. In Freshdesk, improving user interface responsiveness in certain modules and providing more flexibility in automation workflows would further enhance the overall experience. More out-of-the-box integrations and easier configurations for complex use cases would also be beneficial, especially for larger teams.
Esse Wognin - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Partner & Support Analyst at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
AI support has transformed customer loyalty and has maintained high satisfaction levels
I would recommend that Intercom Customer Communications Platform increase its database capacity to manage more than 1,000 partners, considering that each partner can send approximately 10 requests daily. When partner numbers exceed 1,000, we sometimes experience complications in quickly processing all the queries we receive. I believe Intercom Customer Communications Platform could perform better for larger companies like mine to coordinate and manage all our partners across the world.The second suggestion concerns the complexity of pricing. Intercom Customer Communications Platform has very complex pricing structures. While this was not a real issue for my company, as someone interested in entrepreneurship and starting a business, Intercom Customer Communications Platform is very costly for startups and people wanting to launch businesses. If Intercom Customer Communications Platform reviews its pricing and creates plans specifically for startups, I am certain they would reach a much larger market. The integration of Intercom Customer Communications Platform is great because we have more than 100 integration options available. When it comes to user interface, it is more intuitive but somewhat difficult. When I started my job without prior CRM knowledge, it took me approximately two weeks to understand the platform and use it at full capacity. I believe they could improve the user interface by collaborating with users and gathering suggestions. I am very happy to provide this feedback to Intercom Customer Communications Platform and work with them on the user experience side to ensure the app is ready to use for people without customer management experience. I will give eight out of 10 for integrations and six out of 10 for user interface.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It is quite easy to program custom apps and integrate them."
"The most valuable features of Freshdesk that I have found useful are the quick and automated customer handling that uses AI and self-service options along with collaboration tools, which I plug into Slack, allowing my developer team to know directly what errors come from the main core of our website."
"Freshdesk has significantly improved our response and resolution times by streamlining ticket management and automating routine tasks, helping our team handle a higher volume of requests more efficiently while increasing visibility, accountability, and overall customer satisfaction."
"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 built-in customer satisfaction surveys made it easy for us to see areas that need improvement, and the ticket automations allows us to set priorities on incoming tickets based on who is submitting it."
"The UI is easy to use."
"While using Freshdesk for their ticket management solution for reaching out to the end users, we are transferring a large part of that to the central team which is operating through ServiceNow, so everything which is flowing there ultimately flows into ServiceNow to give a 360-degree view of how well the support is running."
"Freshdesk has played a huge role in allowing me to deliver solutions to my customers in a fast, timely fashion, which is why it rates high in my books."
"With Zendesk, we have much more signals that we could use to understand better our client patterns."
"Intercom Customer Communications Platform has played a key role in customer loyalty, trust building, and market reach."
"The live chat is pretty good because you can create a macro, which is a predefined input we can give customers."
"The feature we appreciate most about the Intercom Customer Communications Platform is the messenger functionality, allowing users to have conversations without entering their details repeatedly."
 

Cons

"There are some restrictions where you need automation and sometimes there is just no way to achieve what you need."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Asset management and branding are two areas in the solution that have scope for improvement."
"Technical support is not the best. It could be much, much better and offer better support to users."
"Localization needs to be implemented. No option for other languages at this point in the knowledge bases."
"The billing issues I have with Freshdesk are in terms of additional users getting subscribed without my intervention."
"Intercom Customer Communications Platform has very complex pricing structures and is very costly for startups and people wanting to launch businesses."
"The problem with Intercom Customer Communications Platform was a little bit of the implementation. It was complicated to use to actually get the automations and everything."
"It would be beneficial if there was a way to train the AI to better understand customer language."
"Sometimes, the solution lags and takes time to update something."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"The pricing is pretty manageable and acceptable."
"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."
"Freshdesk was the best solution with the best price. It was cost efficient and included all the features that we needed."
"We use a licensing model only so we pay for the number of agents we have configured in the system only."
"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."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
10%
University
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Marketing Services Firm
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise14
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Freshdesk?
Freshdesk can be improved by addressing the lack of a custom dashboard, which would help design it to the client's requirement, and the API rate limit, which would be best if they provided an optio...
What is your primary use case for Freshdesk?
Our main use case of Freshdesk includes using it as a ticketing platform with live chat and support email for customers to send us tickets. We have agents on Freshdesk monitoring traffic and respon...
What advice do you have for others considering Freshdesk?
My advice to others looking into using Freshdesk is that when customers themselves want to contact a company for an issue, Freshdesk is best at helping them create tickets and reach out to the comp...
What needs improvement with Intercom Customer Communications Platform?
We did not explore them. The problem with Intercom Customer Communications Platform was a little bit of the implementation. It was complicated to use to actually get the automations and everything....
What is your primary use case for Intercom Customer Communications Platform?
Intercom Customer Communications Platform is for monitoring and visualizing data. Basically, it is used to know exactly what is happening. We monitor the software via logs, and whatever errors appe...
What advice do you have for others considering Intercom Customer Communications Platform?
Since I was not part of the pricing discussion, I am not completely sure about the conditions that we had at the moment, so I could not tell you exactly. My overall review rating for Intercom Custo...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Intercom
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Honda, 3M, Hugo Boss, Petronas, Sony Pictures, The Atlantic, goodreads, Clear Channel Radio, Penn University of Pennsylvania, unicef, Kuoni, Movember
Expensift, Moz, Invision, Salesforce, Droplr, Vend, BugHerd, Ghost, Put.io, Codeship
Find out what your peers are saying about Salesforce, Genesys, Qualtrics and others in Customer Experience Management. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.