Freshdesk vs Zoho Desk, free plans, seats and the AI meter

Zoho Desk’s free edition is the one you can stay on. Zoho marks it Free Forever, with email ticketing for 3 users. Live chat, the knowledge base and the Answer bot all start on Standard, as Zoho’s edition comparison shows. Each paid edition has a 15-day trial with no credit card, and when it ends the account drops back to the free edition rather than stopping.

Freshdesk’s Free Program is free for 6 months for up to 2 agents, with tickets from email and social, automatic ticket dispatch, a knowledge base and ready-made reports. Go past either limit and you need a paid plan. It covers Freshdesk only, not Freshdesk Omni, and Freshdesk’s AI Agent Studio guide lists no complimentary sessions for it. A new sign-up starts on 14 days of Enterprise, and an account that picks no plan by then is suspended.

So three people answering email pay nothing on Zoho Desk for as long as they like. On Freshdesk the third person means a paid plan, and Growth for three comes to $57 a month billed yearly, by our sums, against $21 on Zoho’s Express.

Neither helpdesk puts an AI in your website’s chat on its first paid plan. On Freshdesk, the AI that comes with Growth answers email, and Freshdesk’s help centre keeps the chat AI agent for Freshdesk Omni. Omni’s Growth is $29 an agent a month billed yearly, or $35 monthly, with the same 500 sessions once and $49 for each 100 after.

On Zoho Desk, Standard adds a live chat widget for signed-in customers, at $14 a user a month billed yearly, or $20 monthly, and the Answer bot, which replies to customers from your knowledge base articles. The ASAP widget, the one you embed on a web page or in an app, offers chat with a bot only on Enterprise, Zoho’s pricing page says, and its edition comparison ticks Answer bot in ASAP for Enterprise alone. Enterprise is $40 a user a month billed yearly, or $50 monthly, and it also brings Zoho SalesIQ’s live chat.

For one founder on yearly billing, that’s $29 a month on Freshdesk Omni plus sessions once the free 500 are spent, or $40 a month on Zoho’s Enterprise. If Freshdesk’s AI takes 300 chats a month, each its own session, the free 500 run out in the second month, and after that three packs cost $147 a month on top of the seat. The sums are ours.

Freshdesk suits a team that wants its AI working on email from the first paid plan, with a ceiling on what it spends. Growth’s Freddy AI Agent starts with 500 sessions, and once your sessions are used up it stops until you buy a pack or turn on auto-recharge. Pro adds intelligent routing, several SLA policies and custom dashboards, and a day pass lets an occasional helper in for $2 on Growth. When you want chat and messaging as well, Freshdesk Omni adds them, with the AI answering there too.

Zoho Desk suits a team counting every dollar, or one already on Zoho. Three people can answer email on the free edition with no end date, and Express adds social channels and AI agents for $7 a user a month billed yearly. Its AI costs nothing until your agents pass 30 million tokens a month on Zoho’s standard models, and nothing from Zoho at all on your own key. Standard brings chat for signed-in customers, WhatsApp and the knowledge base, and telephony arrives on Professional.

Either way you’re buying a ticket queue for a team, priced by the person.

Neither helpdesk’s free offer puts an AI in front of your website’s visitors. Zoho’s free edition is email for 3 people, with no chat or Answer bot, and Freshdesk’s Free Program ends after 6 months, with no free AI sessions. On Deacon the free plan is the AI. It answers visitors on your site with 50 answers a month and every feature, needs no card, never expires and deletes nothing when you go quiet.

There’s no knowledge base to write first. Zoho’s Answer bot replies from the articles you write in Zoho Desk, and that knowledge base starts on Standard. Deacon reads what you already have, your website’s main pages, or the whole site on a paid plan, plus PDFs, Word files and any text you paste in. Add one script tag and its website chat widget answers from that in seconds, at any hour and in the visitor’s own language, with no flows to build.

It counts answers, not sessions or tokens. Each reply on your live site is one of the plan’s monthly answers, every plan uses the same model, and Playground chats are never counted, so testing costs nothing, where previewing Freshdesk’s AI spends sessions. Run past a plan’s answers and nothing extra is charged, and no plan moves you up by itself. When the month’s answers are used up, visitors read a short note that Deacon can’t look into it right now and get a box for their email, rather than the silence Freshdesk’s self-service widget falls into once its sessions are spent.

Ask it something your content doesn’t cover and Deacon says it doesn’t know rather than guess, then asks the visitor for an email. Someone who leaves an address or asks for a person shows up in your dashboard at once, and the owners get an email about three minutes later if nobody on the team is in the dashboard. Your reply there appears in their chat, under your first name, while it’s still open. That’s human handoff with no ticket queue behind it.

Then you answer that question once. It waits in Conversations with an Answer this button, and what you write becomes a source Deacon answers from. Save & check asks Deacon again, shows the reply it gives now and lists any other open questions your answer covers. Topics gather similar questions, count the people who asked, and give a topic a type, such as a bug report or a feature ask, when one kind of question leads it. The same script runs your website analytics, with visitors, sources, goals and funnels, on every plan.