Freshdesk vs Helpscout vs Jitbit

Freshdesk

You know how it goes when you’re juggling tickets and trying to keep everyone on the same page. Freshdesk feels less like a rigid tool and more like that helpful teammate who sticks around after hours. It centers around a clean ticket view, so you can see who’s asking for help, what they need, and how it’s being handled, all in one place. The real win comes from how it handles everyday chaos—people pinging in from email, chat, or a quick form, and the system magically pulling it into one thread you can follow without losing track of priorities.

If you’re in a corporate-ish setup, Active Directory makes life easier by letting you map people to their accounts without retyping everyone’s name all day. The Support Widget sits on your site and gives customers a simple way to start a conversation, which then lands neatly in the backlog for someone to pick up. On the tech side, Third-party Integrations feel seamless rather than clunky, and Multi-channel support means you’re not juggling separate logs for chat, email, and social—it's all threaded together so you can respond in context, not guesswork. It’s not flashy, just practical enough to feel like a natural part of the workflow.

Helpscout

You know that moment when you finally find a help desk tool that doesn’t fight you every step of the way? Helpscout fits into the daily grind without making a circus out of it. It plays nice with your existing setup, pulling in user data from Active Directory so tickets feel personal even when they’re being handled by a whole team. The UI is straightforward enough that new teammates aren’t wasting cycles figuring out where things live, which means less time chasing things down and more time helping people.

Behind the scenes, it keeps the workflow moving without you having to babysit it. Workflow Automation handles repetitive tasks so you don’t have to click the same buttons over and over, and you can tune it so alerts, assignments, and escalations land in the right hands at the right time. There are solid options for Import and Export, which comes in handy when you’re migrating data or sharing a snapshot with teammates or leadership. On the customer side, a built-in satisfaction survey gives you a quick pulse check after an interaction, so you can see where things stand without digging through raw logs. It’s a calm, predictable toolset for sweaty days at the help desk.

	Freshdesk	Helpscout	Jitbit
	Fully featured help desk app	A simple help desk focused on email.	Help Desk Software built for email. Trusted by thousands of companies across 50 + countries.
Pricing: 3 years / 5 agents	$17820	$6300	$3897
Pricing: 3 years / 10 agents	$35640	$12600	$8367
Active Directory	✅ Possible to authenticate users via SAML	✅ Only Azure AD is supported	✅ Integration via a script for your server or ADFS and SAML
Activity Dashboard	✅ Dashboard offers an overview of your KPIs	❌	✅ Live overview dashboard
Asset Management	❌	❌	✅ A complete asset management module tightly integrated into the rest of the app
Canned Responses	✅ Insert pre-formatted replies in responses	✅ They are called Saved Replies. You can insert them in ticket replies	✅ You can also assign canned responses to specific ticket categories if you need to
Community Forums	✅ Built-in forums on Garden plan or higher	❌	✅ Ideas Forum comes out of the box
Custom Fields	✅ Multiple types of custom fields, including dependant custom fields with various permission settings	✅ Up to ten custom fields per mailbox	✅ Many custom field types, including dependant fields. Various privacy options.
Custom Statuses	✅ You can easily add custom statuses in addition to the built-in ones	❌	✅ Add custom statuses, customize how your customers see them and assign different colors to them
Customer satisfaction survey	✅ CSATs are a part of Garden plan or higher	✅ Comes with CSATs and a Happiness report	✅ Optional CSATs in email notifications and a report
Design Customization	✅ Complete customization of public facing pages	✅ Customize Knowledge Base with externally hosted CSS files	✅ Unlimited customization options. Change colors with a live preview, add custom CSS and JS
Email Notification Templates	❌	❌	✅ You are able to completely change a template for any notification type
Escalation	✅ Possible to set up with automation features	❌	✅ Possible to set up various escalation scenarios via automation
Exchange Integration	❌	❌	✅ Native EWS support instead of IMAP. oAuth support for Office 365
Import and Export	✅ Export tickets to CSV or Excel. Import via API.	✅ Can be done via API	✅ Import and Export tickets via CSV files
Internationalization	❌	✅ You can manually translate some parts of the app	✅ Available in 16 different languages
ITIL Compliance	❌	❌	✅ Support for most ITIL processes
Knowledge Base	✅ Customizable knowledge base is a part on every plan	✅ It's called Docs and it is highly customizable	✅ Customizable Knowledge Base optimized for search engines
Live Chat	❌	❌	✅ A free live chat component in the web widget
Mobile Apps	✅ iOS and Android	✅ iOS and Android	✅ iOS and Android
Multi-channel support	✅ Email, social, web and phone	❌	✅ Possible to add unlimited channels via integrations and API
On-premise Version	❌	❌	✅ A full on-premises version that runs on Windows Server
Reports and Analytics	✅ A lot of reports and analytics tools	✅ Most must-have reports are included	✅ 13 reports with an ability to build your own and to export everything to Excel
REST API	✅ Well documented APIs for every app feature	✅ Sparate APIs for KB and tickets	✅ API covers all the app features
Single-Sign-On	✅ SAML protocol is supported	✅ Separate add-on for $5 per user per month	✅ SAML, Google login, Windows-integrated etc.
SLA Management	✅ Allows you to define SLA policies for various ticket priorities	❌	✅ Full SLA automation via actions/triggers
Support Widget	✅ Comes with a widget for your site	❌	✅ Two different versions of a web widget
Third-party Integrations	✅ Has an app marketplace where you can get integrations as add-ons	✅ 80+ apps	✅ 30 native integrations and 500 more via Zapier
Ticket Collaboration	✅ Nested and linked tickets, shared ownership, field teams	❌	✅ See when other techs are viewing tickets in real-time, assign multiple people to a ticket
Workflow Automation	✅ Rich automation features	✅ Very basic automation features are available	✅ Automation Rules are very powerful and can go beyond simple if-this-then-that logic

Looking for help desk software? Check out Jitbit. We offer a fully-featured app at a very affordable price. It comes with all the must have features like knowledge base, two-way email integration (including native Exchange and Office 365 support), automation, hundreds of integrations with third-party apps and much more. Available both as a hosted "SaaS" version and an on-premises version you can install on your own server.