Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Freshdesk
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer service software that helps businesses of all sizes to deliver customer support. Freshdesk converts requests coming in via email, web, phone, chat, and social into tickets, and unifies ticket resolution across channels. Additionally, Freshdesk lets the user automate workflows, provide self-service, manage SLAs, and measure metrics, to stay on top of customer support. Freshdesk also offers out-of-the-box features like an AI-powered support chatbot,…
$0
Up to 2 agents
Meltwater
Score 7.1 out of 10
N/A
Meltwater Media Intelligence platform is a set of public relations software tools for media monitoring, social media monitoring, and collecting brand insights. The four areas of functionality are Monitor, Analyze, Distribute, and Engage. (Note that this product combines features from the vendor Meltwater's former Buzz, Press, and News products.)N/A
Pricing
FreshdeskMeltwater
Editions & Modules
Free
$0
Up to 2 agents
Growth
$15
per month (billed annually) per agent
Pro
$49
per month (billed annually) per agent
Enterprise
$79
per month (billed annually) per agent
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
FreshdeskMeltwater
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Features
FreshdeskMeltwater
Incident and problem management
Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Product A and Product B
Freshdesk
8.5
174 Ratings
6% above category average
Meltwater
-
Ratings
Organize and prioritize service tickets9.0170 Ratings00 Ratings
Expert directory8.1115 Ratings00 Ratings
Subscription-based notifications8.43 Ratings00 Ratings
ITSM collaboration and documentation7.64 Ratings00 Ratings
Ticket creation and submission8.8170 Ratings00 Ratings
Ticket response8.9170 Ratings00 Ratings
Self Help Community
Comparison of Self Help Community features of Product A and Product B
Freshdesk
8.1
156 Ratings
4% above category average
Meltwater
-
Ratings
External knowledge base8.3142 Ratings00 Ratings
Internal knowledge base7.9145 Ratings00 Ratings
Multi-Channel Help
Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of Product A and Product B
Freshdesk
8.4
165 Ratings
8% above category average
Meltwater
-
Ratings
Customer portal8.1141 Ratings00 Ratings
IVR8.451 Ratings00 Ratings
Social integration8.287 Ratings00 Ratings
Email support9.1164 Ratings00 Ratings
Help Desk CRM integration8.3101 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
FreshdeskMeltwater
Small Businesses
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Newswire
Newswire
Score 8.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Newswire
Newswire
Score 8.3 out of 10
Enterprises
Front
Front
Score 8.8 out of 10
Cision Communications Cloud
Cision Communications Cloud
Score 6.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
FreshdeskMeltwater
Likelihood to Recommend
8.7
(241 ratings)
6.2
(73 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.4
(21 ratings)
8.0
(9 ratings)
Usability
8.8
(41 ratings)
9.0
(4 ratings)
Availability
5.7
(5 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
6.3
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.1
(39 ratings)
7.5
(28 ratings)
In-Person Training
8.2
(1 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Online Training
8.1
(2 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.6
(171 ratings)
6.1
(2 ratings)
Configurability
5.4
(6 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
6.9
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
7.6
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
6.4
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Professional Services
6.4
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
7.0
(4 ratings)
1.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
6.9
(4 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
FreshdeskMeltwater
Likelihood to Recommend
Freshworks Inc
Freshdesk is really good for start-up companies that want to update their current system or buy a new one. It is the best option possible when it comes to having a structure, following up, and making a better strategy because you can always see what your team is doing, and you have some great reports to help you.
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Meltwater
Meltwater is well-suited for agencies that have an engagement team who is looking to service a variety of client needs such as social media reporting, public relations outreach, and community management. If you're looking to have a platform serve just one need, you can still use Meltwater but will get more bang for your buck if you are needing a variety of tools.
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Pros
Freshworks Inc
  • The price is great for small startups just large enough to need a support ticketing system.
  • This may seem minor, but many tools don't have this: the ability to link a contact to multiple companies/accounts.
  • Agent collision detection is great for making sure agents don't duplicate each others' work!
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Meltwater
  • Media research - you can search for relevant publications and journalists to add to your media list.
  • Earned media coverage - you can search for coverage of your brand and find news stories that also include data that may be useful (how many people did the story reach for example).
  • Building media lists - if you have no current existing list, you can build and export one in Excel for example.
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Cons
Freshworks Inc
  • Data Security.
  • SLA Policies where it is not customer / contract driven but agents / groups driven.
  • Audit Trail is not available in Pro version makes the tool adoption difficult from compliance perspective.
  • Chat Bot and Fresh Chat Services has greater potential to explode, but the pricing model tagged to chat bot sessions .are illogical as it limits the ability to use the fresh chat feature
  • Agent Logon Screen use earlier version of Captcha as it is annoying for the agents to login. Very frustrating experience.
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Meltwater
  • The dashboards are not user-friendly, customizable (color, font size, etc.), or worthy of presenting to a client. All of the insights from a dashboard get pulled from the platform and placed into a more client-friendly presentation.
  • Paywalls for certain publications connected to who-knows-what. DowJones racket limits media monitoring capabilities and results in manual searches for a growing number of publications.
  • TVeyes, the broadcast monitoring arm of the media monitoring capabilities, just needs TLC and to become more client-facing. Currently, the links produced to share clips look sketchy, and they have a relatively short shelf life.
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Likelihood to Renew
Freshworks Inc
We are extremely happy with Freshdesk and can foresee using it for the next year. We might only consider using a different platform if our average daily ticket volume reaches four digits and its AI isn’t enough to handle our needs by then. While we haven’t tested this yet, we have read reviews that it’s AI capabilities are lacking
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Meltwater
Meltwater works well for our organization and has allowed us to meet our internal goals. We are always open to new products and services that may be able to provide similar or better features; however, our experience has been that many of Meltwater's competitors are not up to the task.
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Usability
Freshworks Inc
I gave it a rating of 9 out of 10 because they delivered on everything we asked them to do. Easy to setup, easy to deploy to end users, easy to customize, easy to enter tickets and so much more. Our experience with their support is top notch! After opening a ticket for support they call use back within 10 minutes every time!
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Meltwater
Once you get some basic training it's pretty easy to use. I would like to see training manuals, or instructional videos to help me explore features I'm not currently using.
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Reliability and Availability
Freshworks Inc
I have encountered a lot of errors in the Freshdesk, however, they tend to resolve it on priority or at least they will share the timeline by when this can be resolved. Most of the time the issue has been from the other partner's end. They take time to resolve their vendor issues and they don't have any timelines in case of developed app errors.
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Meltwater
No answers on this topic
Performance
Freshworks Inc
The reports take a lot of time to download if the time period is large. Also, the tickets take their sweet time to open and load. It is not fast as Zendesk. Only 30 tickets are visible in a single go and there isn't any option to select all. If we need to change the pages and dashboards it takes a lot of time to open.
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Meltwater
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Freshworks Inc
The main thing about Freshdesk user service is that once a request has been made for information about a feature of the platform, the support team responds to tickets quickly, within a day of writing and submitting them, with information that is concise enough so that there is no need to ask for help on the same topic again.
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Meltwater
Our account rep at Meltwater went dark for a long time. Then, a couple of weeks ago, our new account manager reached out to set up a meeting. Apparently, they had a big shakeup in the company, and there were some personnel changes. Our new account rep was great in discussing the platform's capabilities that were available to us and even offered to schedule a follow-up meeting with his technical team to introduce our new social media team members to the platform and how it could help them with their jobs.
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In-Person Training
Freshworks Inc
In-person training is provided to all the agents and it is very easy to learn the basics of the Freshdesk interface. Solving tickets via dashboards, replying to the guest queries in bulk via Freshdesk. The training which is a bit hard is creating the logic according to the ticket flow and intergeration.
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Meltwater
Again, really in-depth and helpful for a program that is really easy to use.
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Online Training
Freshworks Inc
This tool is no doubt easy to learn but in-person training is a lot better than online training. It takes time to grasp things in the online training, however, in pandemic we have done all the training online. Apart from a bit more time we haven't faced any issues with online training.
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Meltwater
Walked step by step through program. Very informative on a program that doesn't require much training.
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Implementation Rating
Freshworks Inc
Most important, Freshdesk is a user- friendly platform which directly supports interfaces and navigates user to start. Helps to provide multiple and complex documentation and troubleshooting. It provides build templates for different workflows and processes also refuces effort and time to implement and perform corporate tasks and complete the execution
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Meltwater
You are only allowed 15 users, so make sure you've identified who will have access to use the tool.
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Alternatives Considered
Freshworks Inc
AI-powered automation, with its ability to integrate multiple communication channels—such as email, chat, and phone—into a single platform, helps us resolve common issues more quickly, reducing response times and allowing agents to focus on more complex inquiries. Their 24/7 customer support is highly responsive, and they proactively engage with clients through regular reviews to ensure alignment with business goals.
Read full review
Meltwater
I was looking for a full-service option. I did some research. What really sold me was the presentation. They offered products that were helpful, and I wasn’t even aware of them. It is more expensive than the other products that are out there, but you get more. The other companies are good, but Meltwater Media Intelligence is more full service.
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Freshworks Inc
I was not very involved with the purchase/contract (my company purchased Fresjdesk before I was brought on), but I will say that pricing per agent made it difficult to grow our support team. Additionally, we were kind of disappointed after our upgrade because it didn't solve our pain points as much as we expected.
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Meltwater
No answers on this topic
Scalability
Freshworks Inc
My company had Freshdesk agents from support and success. It's generally difficult to customize permissions for different agent "roles." We were a fully distributed company, so "multiple sites" doesn't apply to us. We found Freshdesk features lacking as we grew our customer base, and adding agents wasn't easy because price steeply increases with number of agents.
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Meltwater
No answers on this topic
Professional Services
Freshworks Inc
- good customer support
- personal contact
- usage limited to basic product features, individually designed solutions seem unlikely
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Meltwater
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Freshworks Inc
  • Increased response times - Client Success maintains at 98% SLA for resolution
  • Categorization of feedback and issues - custom ticket fields make it easier for us to review why clients contact us on a high level
  • Standardization of internal procedures via templates, canned responses and automations
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Meltwater
  • As a PR firm, we rely on the media databases that [Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform] supplies to deliver the media exposure that they expect from us.
  • We utilize their tracking of media hits for our overall reporting to our clients.
  • Both of these are advantageous in helping us to not only keep our existing clients happy but also to gain new clients (and, in turn - revenue), as well.
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ScreenShots