Freshservice vs Groove vs Jitbit

Freshservice

Freshservice and Groove sit at opposite ends of the help desk market. Freshservice is an ITSM platform for internal IT teams: incidents, a service catalog, asset management with discovery, approvals, and on the Pro plan, problem, change and release management. Employees can raise tickets from Slack or Microsoft Teams, and the visual workflow builder handles onboarding and offboarding flows.

All of that costs real money. Freshservice Pro is $99 per agent per month, about $17,800 over 3 years for 5 agents, with extra charges for assets beyond the first 100 and for the Freddy AI Copilot. For a team that just needs to answer email, that's paying for a lot of machinery you'll never switch on.

Groove

Groove is a simple shared inbox for small customer support teams. Conversations look like regular email to customers, there's a decent knowledge base, a live chat widget, and collision detection so two people don't answer the same message. Setup takes an afternoon, and there's almost nothing to learn.

It's also about a third of the price, roughly $5,200 over 3 years for 5 agents. The trade-off is depth: no SLAs worth the name, limited reporting, no asset tracking and nothing resembling ITIL. Groove is right for a small team supporting customers by email. Freshservice is right for an IT department supporting employees.

Detailed feature comparison

	Freshservice	Groove	Jitbit
	Modern ITSM service desk from Freshworks	A simple app to replace your shared mailbox	Help Desk Software built for email. Trusted by thousands of companies across 50+ countries.
Pricing: 3 years / 5 agents	$17820	$5220	$3897
Pricing: 3 years / 10 agents	$35640	$10440	$8367
Active Directory	✅ SAML SSO with Entra ID / ADFS, plus user sync from AD and Entra ID	❌	✅ Integration via a script for your server or ADFS and SAML
Activity Dashboard	✅ Customizable dashboards with real-time widgets	❌	✅ Live overview dashboard
Asset Management	✅ CMDB with agent-based and cloud discovery; 100 asset units included, more sold in packs	❌	✅ A complete asset management module tightly integrated into the rest of the app
Canned Responses	✅ Canned responses and scenario automations that update several fields at once	✅ Has standard canned replies features	✅ You can also assign canned responses to specific ticket categories if you need to
Community Forums	❌	❌	✅ Ideas Forum comes out of the box
Custom Fields	✅ Custom and dependent fields for tickets, assets and the service catalog	❌	✅ Many custom field types, including dependant fields. Various privacy options.
Custom Statuses	✅ Custom ticket statuses with SLA timer control	❌	✅ Add custom statuses, customize how your customers see them and assign different colors to them
Customer satisfaction survey	✅ Built-in CSAT surveys with reports	❌	✅ Optional CSATs in email notifications and a report
Design Customization	✅ Self-service portal branding and theming; the agent interface is fixed	✅ Can only customize the web widget	✅ Unlimited customization options. Change colors with a live preview, add custom CSS and JS
Email Notification Templates	✅ Editable templates for every notification	❌	✅ You are able to completely change a template for any notification type
Escalation	✅ SLA-based escalations and multi-level reminders	❌	✅ Possible to set up various escalation scenarios via automation
Exchange Integration	✅ Microsoft 365 mailboxes connected via OAuth	❌	✅ Native EWS support instead of IMAP. oAuth support for Office 365
Import and Export	✅ CSV import for assets and users, ticket export to CSV or Excel	✅ Only via API	✅ Import and Export tickets via CSV files
Internationalization	✅ Multilingual UI, portal and knowledge base	❌	✅ Available in 16 different languages
ITIL Compliance	✅ PinkVERIFY-certified ITIL processes; problem, change and release management start at Pro	❌	✅ Support for most ITIL processes
Knowledge Base	✅ Solution articles in the self-service portal, with approval workflows	✅ Good Knowledge Base with basic customization	✅ Customizable Knowledge Base optimized for search engines
Live Chat	❌	✅ Live chat via the widget	✅ A free live chat component in the web widget
Mobile Apps	✅ iOS and Android apps for agents and requesters	❌	✅ iOS and Android
Multi-channel support	✅ Email, portal, phone, Slack and Microsoft Teams	❌	✅ 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	✅ Curated reports and a custom report builder; advanced analytics on higher plans	✅ Some basic reports on tickets and KB	✅ 13 reports with an ability to build your own and to export everything to Excel
REST API	✅ REST API v2 covering tickets, assets, changes and more	✅ You are able to access most features via API	✅ API covers all the app features
Single-Sign-On	✅ SAML 2.0 via the Freshworks organization account, plus Google and Microsoft login	❌	✅ SAML, Google login, Windows-integrated etc.
SLA Management	✅ Multiple SLA policies with business hours per group	❌	✅ Full SLA automation via actions/triggers
Support Widget	✅ Embeddable help widget for raising tickets and searching solutions	✅ Web widget with live chat	✅ Two different versions of a web widget
Third-party Integrations	✅ Freshworks Marketplace with hundreds of apps	✅ Around 20 integrations with the most popular apps	✅ 30 native integrations and 500 more via Zapier
Ticket Collaboration	✅ Agent collision detection, private notes, child tickets and @mentions	❌	✅ See when other techs are viewing tickets in real-time, assign multiple people to a ticket
Workflow Automation	✅ Visual Workflow Automator with approvals, conditions and web requests	❌	✅ 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.