Works for small companies

My company first implemented Freshdesk before I was brought on, but from what I heard, implementation was easy and didn't require Freshdesk customer support. I implemented several additional customizations, such as automation and custom objects, and there was generally enough Freshdesk support documentation for me to figure things out. Freshdesk support and sales were generally helpful with troubleshooting and exploring features available on higher plans, but I felt that my company's specific needs were sometimes deprioritized.

Freshdesk does the job for smaller organizations, particularly if they only need a ticketing system. Freshdesk's other features, like user forums and knowledgebase management, are lacking. For example, the knowledgebase article editor is cumbersome, and article organization options are limited. It's also difficult to restrict portal access to certain types of users, so Freshdesk works better for public-facing information. The features, such as custom objects, that Freshdesk includes to supposedly make it a pseudo-CRM do not work well in practice. Finally, there are numerous obvious API endpoints that don't exist.

My company that used Freshdesk was acquired by another company that uses Salesforce, so our only reason to keep Freshdesk would be records, but migrating the tickets, notes, and company details from Freshdesk to Salesforce was straightforward enough. Had the acquisition not occurred, we would have renewed Freshdesk because the cost of switching would've been too great in terms of price, time, and sunk cost (our Freshdesk customizations would not port over well).

Freshdesk heavily advertises theme customization, but this is limited in practice without costly third-party development services. There's a neat automation feature, but it only provides a few common use cases with limited support for webhooks and API calls. Speaking of the API, it lacks several obvious endpoints, and the documentation is minimal.

Support genuinely tries to be helpful 99 percent of the time. Positives include bug fixes in response to my tickets (although one such bug fix didn't end up working) and hours-long response time as opposed to days. It's easy for support agents to troubleshoot in your Freshdesk instance. Ticket submission is simple via email and chat. Chat responses are fast, including escalations to the appropriate parties. Negatives include the occasional language barrier, and fragmented ownership of tickets. Often, when I submitted another ticket related to a previous one, a different agent picked up the new ticket with no knowledge of my previous issue.

Freshdesk is generally intuitive to use, but some features are clunky, such as the knowledgebase article editor, especially the HTML editor. Some features are glaringly missing, like using the same editor for canned responses as for knowledge articles, and embedding video files in knowledge articles.

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.

There were a couple of hours-long total outages during business hours that significantly impacted our customers' and distributors' experience. Besides that, intermittent slowness or temporary non-functionality of specific features was common.

Freshdesk is pretty slow but not unusably so. Integration with other systems doesn't noticeably hamper performance.

Ease of integration varies depending on the system.

Sales and success were proactive to make sure we were satisfied with the product, even if many of these emails were automated. They were especially persistent about complimentary implementation assistance and training. When we considered upgrading our plan, sales was very enthusiastic and available to answer our questions. However, there was an occasional language barrier, and pitching irrelevant features was often prioritized over my company's specific needs.

Support and success seem genuinely helpful, and most of our issues were addressed in a timely manner. However, support was a bit disconnected; agents seemed to lack knowledge of my previous related tickets. It seemed that there was poor communication among support agents on their end, so I often had to rehash previous issues to provide context.

I did not professional services from Freshdesk, but sales was persistent in suggesting them.

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.