Freshservice vs Zendesk vs Jitbit

Freshservice

Freshservice and Zendesk are each the go-to tool in their own lane: Freshservice for internal IT, Zendesk for customer service. Freshservice gives IT teams a service catalog, asset management with discovery, approval workflows, and on the Pro plan, problem, change and release management. Employees can raise and track tickets from Slack or Microsoft Teams, and the Freddy AI virtual agent can answer common questions before a ticket reaches a technician.

Freshservice Pro is $99 per agent per month, about $17,800 over 3 years for 5 agents. Assets beyond the first 100 units and the Freddy AI Copilot ($29 per agent) cost extra.

Zendesk

Zendesk is the market leader in customer support. Every channel is covered, the automation engine is deep, there are over a thousand marketplace apps, and Zendesk Explore handles advanced analytics. Some companies also use it for internal IT, and it can work for a basic employee help desk.

On the Professional plan Zendesk costs about $8,820 over 3 years for 5 agents, about half of Freshservice Pro. But it has no native asset management, CMDB or change management, and its ITIL support is mostly marketing. If your requesters are customers, Zendesk is the stronger product. If they're employees and you need to track their devices, Freshservice is.

Detailed feature comparison

	Freshservice	Zendesk	Jitbit
	Modern ITSM service desk from Freshworks	The most popular help desk app out there	Help Desk Software built for email. Trusted by thousands of companies across 50+ countries.
Pricing: 3 years / 5 agents	$17820	$8820	$3897
Pricing: 3 years / 10 agents	$35640	$17640	$8367
Active Directory	✅ SAML SSO with Entra ID / ADFS, plus user sync from AD and Entra ID	✅ Active Directory authentication is possible if you install a special script on your server	✅ Integration via a script for your server or ADFS and SAML
Activity Dashboard	✅ Customizable dashboards with real-time widgets	✅ You can put data from some reports into your dashboard	✅ 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	✅ Macros allow you to respond to tickets with a pre-written message.	✅ 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	✅ You can add custom fields and use them with other features such as automation, macros, etc.	✅ 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	✅ Only on Professional plan or higher	✅ Optional CSATs in email notifications and a report
Design Customization	✅ Self-service portal branding and theming; the agent interface is fixed	✅ You can customize the public-facing pages, but not what your employees see	✅ Unlimited customization options. Change colors with a live preview, add custom CSS and JS
Email Notification Templates	✅ Editable templates for every notification	✅ You can fully customize most email templates for notifications that your customers get	✅ You are able to completely change a template for any notification type
Escalation	✅ SLA-based escalations and multi-level reminders	✅ Possible to escalate tickets with workflow automation features	✅ 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	✅ Starting with Professional plan you can export your tickets to an XML file. Import only possible via API.	✅ Import and Export tickets via CSV files
Internationalization	✅ Multilingual UI, portal and knowledge base	✅ UI is not translatable. You can provide content, such as Knowledge Base articles in multiple languages on Professional plan	✅ Available in 16 different languages
ITIL Compliance	✅ PinkVERIFY-certified ITIL processes; problem, change and release management start at Pro	✅ Claims to be designed with ITIL principles in mind	✅ Support for most ITIL processes
Knowledge Base	✅ Solution articles in the self-service portal, with approval workflows	✅ Basic version comes with Professional plan. Full version is only available as a separate add-on	✅ Customizable Knowledge Base optimized for search engines
Live Chat	❌	❌	✅ A free live chat component in the web widget
Mobile Apps	✅ iOS and Android apps for agents and requesters	✅ Offers apps for iOS and Android	✅ iOS and Android
Multi-channel support	✅ Email, portal, phone, Slack and Microsoft Teams	✅ A lot of support channels are built-in in the app: email, Twitter, Facebook, etc.	✅ 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	✅ Reports are only available on Professional plan or higher	✅ 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	✅ Fully featured API on all plans	✅ API covers all the app features
Single-Sign-On	✅ SAML 2.0 via the Freshworks organization account, plus Google and Microsoft login	✅ Most standard SSO options are available	✅ SAML, Google login, Windows-integrated etc.
SLA Management	✅ Multiple SLA policies with business hours per group	✅ SLA features are natively supported in the app	✅ Full SLA automation via actions/triggers
Support Widget	✅ Embeddable help widget for raising tickets and searching solutions	✅ Web widget and Mobile SDK	✅ Two different versions of a web widget
Third-party Integrations	✅ Freshworks Marketplace with hundreds of apps	✅ Hundreds of integrations with all popular apps	✅ 30 native integrations and 500 more via Zapier
Ticket Collaboration	✅ Agent collision detection, private notes, child tickets and @mentions	✅ Light agents, side conversations and CCs and followers	✅ 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	✅ Powerful engine that allows you to automate any business process	✅ 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.