Freshdesk is Freshworks' customer service software: a cloud helpdesk that turns customer emails, chats, social messages and calls into tickets your team can assign, track and resolve, with Freddy AI to answer customers and help agents. It comes in two versions: Freshdesk, for teams that mostly work by email, and Freshdesk Omni, which adds WhatsApp, Instagram and live chat to the same inbox.
Checked on 28 September 2026 against Freshworks' product pages and Freshdesk's help centre, linked below. Many guides online still describe older versions.
In short
- Freshworks launched Freshdesk in Chennai, India, in 2010 and is now headquartered in San Mateo, California.
- If your customers contact you on WhatsApp or Instagram, the product to evaluate is Freshdesk Omni.
- Freddy AI has three parts: an AI Agent that answers customers and can act in systems such as Shopify, a Copilot for human agents, and Insights for managers.
- Your team builds the AI agent's workflows in Freshdesk's AI Agent Studio, starting from templates, with onboarding help from Freshworks.
Freshworks' customer service products
Freshworks sells several products with similar names. These are the ones a customer service team will come across.
| Product | What it is | When it's relevant |
|---|---|---|
| Freshdesk | Email-first helpdesk: tickets, collaboration, automations, knowledge base, reports | Most of your support arrives by email |
| Freshdesk Omni | Freshdesk plus live chat, WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook in one inbox, with AI agents on chat | You support customers on messaging apps |
| Freshchat | Freshworks' messaging and chatbot product, still sold with its own plans | You already run it, or want chat without a helpdesk |
| Freshcaller (also called Freshdesk Contact Center) | Cloud phone system: numbers, IVR, call routing, recording, voice bots | You want your phone line from Freshworks |
| Freddy AI | The AI in these products: AI Agent, Copilot and Insights | Added to Freshdesk, Omni or Freshchat |
| Freshservice | IT and employee service management | Internal IT and HR requests, not customers |
| Freshsales | CRM for sales teams | Your sales pipeline; it integrates with Freshdesk |
Sources: Get started with Freshdesk Omni, Freshdesk vs Freshservice, Freshchat plans, Freshcaller; checked 28 September 2026.
For a consumer brand whose order, delivery and return questions arrive on WhatsApp and Instagram as well as email, that usually means Freshdesk Omni, with Freshcaller or your own phone carrier.
Freshdesk vs Freshdesk Omni
Since December 2025, Freshworks has sold two core products under the Freshdesk name. The difference is mainly channels and AI on chat.
| Freshdesk | Freshdesk Omni | |
|---|---|---|
| Channels | Email, Facebook and a basic web chat | Email, web chat, WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram in one inbox; SMS through a Twilio number |
| Not available (older accounts keep an existing integration) | Your WhatsApp Business number, real-time replies, approved templates | |
| Not available | DMs, story replies and comments as tickets | |
| Web chat | Basic widget with knowledge base and ticket forms | Live chat with topic routing and AI agents |
| Freddy AI Agent | Email AI agent only | Chat and email AI agents |
| Phone | Freshcaller | Freshcaller, or your own carrier on Pro and Enterprise |
Sources: Get started with Freshdesk Omni, SMS in Freshdesk Omni, Omni pricing.
Omni includes everything in Freshdesk, so you don't buy both. It is Freshworks' route to omnichannel customer service: in a trial, test whether a WhatsApp chat, an email and a call about the same order reach your agents as one conversation.
Which Freshdesk are you looking at?
Freshdesk has changed a lot since 2023, which is why descriptions online disagree. When a colleague, a reference customer or a review describes Freshdesk, check which of these they mean.
- Freshdesk from before December 2025. Freshworks scheduled older accounts to move to the current Freshdesk in phases between December 2025 and April 2026, with new SLA, routing and agent-status settings and no price change (Freshdesk: how to upgrade).
- Freshdesk Omnichannel (classic) and Freshdesk Omni 2023. These move to the current Omni through a guided upgrade that Freshworks is rolling out in phases during 2026. Channels have to be reconnected and scheduled automations recreated, and accounts running AI agents or legacy bots aren't yet eligible (Freshdesk: upgrade guide).
- Freshchat. Sold on its own, on a separate platform from the current Omni, with no direct upgrade path: moving means a new Omni account set up from scratch. Its plans are in our Freshchat pricing guide.
- Old plans. Sprout, Blossom, Garden, Estate and Forest are previous Freshdesk plans; today's are Growth, Pro and Enterprise. Older guides also describe a free Freshdesk plan for up to 10 agents. Today Freshdesk's Free Program covers two agents for six months, and it's Freshchat that has a free plan for up to 10 agents.
A guide that says Freshdesk has no Instagram or SMS predates Omni.
What Freshdesk does: the main features
Under the product names, Freshdesk does the jobs of any help desk software.
Tickets. Every email, chat or message becomes a ticket in one inbox. Agents set its status and priority, reply from one editor whatever the channel, add private notes, @mention colleagues and open side threads with other teams, with an SLA timer on each ticket. Our guide to what a ticketing system is covers the model.
Automations and routing. Rules run when a ticket is created (for example, send every ticket with "refund" in the subject to the refunds team), when it's updated (reopen it when there's a new reply), or hourly (close resolved tickets after 48 hours without a reply) (Freshdesk: automation rules). Omni adds Quick Automations, which act within 30 seconds on live conversations. The Omniroute engine assigns tickets by agent availability and workload, with skill-based routing on Enterprise, and SLA policies can differ by priority, channel or customer type. Our guide to help desk automation covers what to automate first.
Knowledge base. Articles in categories and folders, in several languages, power a branded help centre and customer portal where customers find answers and raise tickets: Freshdesk's route to web self-service. Community forums and approval before publishing are available too (Freshworks: features). The same articles feed the AI agent.
Reports. Dashboards track ticket volume, response and resolution times, satisfaction and agent performance, and Omni compares them across channels.
Integrations. The Freshworks Marketplace lists more than 1,000 apps, including Shopify, Salesforce, Slack and Jira (Freshworks: integrations). The Shopify app shows a customer's orders and shipping details beside the ticket, and lets agents issue a full or partial refund, or cancel an order that hasn't shipped, without leaving Freshdesk (Shopify app).
Freddy AI: AI Agent, Copilot and Insights
Freddy is Freshworks' AI. In Freshdesk it has three parts, each for a different person.
| For | What it does | |
|---|---|---|
| Freddy AI Agent | Customers | Answers and resolves requests on chat and email from your knowledge and workflows; hands over to a human agent when it can't |
| Freddy AI Copilot | Human agents | Drafts and rewrites replies, summarises tickets, suggests articles and ticket fields, reads sentiment, translates live in 60+ languages |
| Freddy AI Insights | Managers | Flags spikes and drops in helpdesk metrics with likely causes; in beta, answers questions about your data in plain language |
Sources: Overview of Freddy AI, Freddy AI Copilot, Proactive Insights.
How the AI agent works. You build AI agents in AI Agent Studio: chat agents for WhatsApp, web chat, Instagram and Messenger (Omni only), and email agents (AI Agent Studio). Each answers from sources you approve, such as help articles and files, and runs workflows made of six blocks: a trigger, a question to the customer, a condition, an API call to another system, a reply, and a handover to human agents. Freshworks calls these agentic workflows (see agentic AI for customer service). Freshdesk offers pre-built workflows for requests such as order status and refunds, and connectors for Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, Stripe, Razorpay, Shiprocket, DHL and others (Freshdesk: workflows).
Actions. In Freshdesk's own example, a workflow fetches an order, checks whether it has shipped and, if not, starts a refund (API actions). In chat, a workflow can ask the customer to confirm first. Email agents skip that step, so Freshdesk advises putting safeguards for high-impact actions in the systems being called, and testing refunds and cancellations against a sandbox, because test calls can change real orders.
We built Flowcall's AI Agent to keep those safeguards in the workflow: your rules decide what it may do, and required checks, eligibility conditions and approvals must pass before a refund, cancellation or replacement happens. The same workflow runs on email as on WhatsApp, so an emailed request meets the same rules.
Handover. When the AI agent hands a ticket over, resolves it or times out, automations can assign it to the right group, send a separate satisfaction survey, or pass the chat to an agent after too many back-and-forth messages (AI agent behaviour).
Worked example: one WhatsApp cancellation in Freshdesk Omni
A customer messages a Shopify brand on WhatsApp: "Please cancel order 4512, I ordered the wrong size." Here is what the brand would set up in Freshdesk Omni to handle it.
- Channel. Connect the WhatsApp Business number. The message arrives as a ticket.
- AI agent. Map a chat AI agent to WhatsApp, with the cancellation policy among its knowledge sources.
- Workflow. Start from a pre-built order workflow or build one: ask for the order number, fetch the order from Shopify, and branch on its status. Shipped: hand over to the orders team. Not shipped: ask the customer to confirm, cancel and refund, and reply with the amount.
- Test. Test each API action against a staging store and preview the workflow before publishing.
- Handover. Add a rule that assigns handed-over tickets to the orders team. The agent sees the chat and, in the Shopify widget, the order's status, and can refund from there.
- Email. If the customer also emails, an email AI agent can answer, but without the confirmation step, so any cancellation it can trigger needs its own check in the system it calls.
Every step is documented and available today. The work is in steps 2 to 6, kept current as policies change and repeated for each request type (returns, exchanges, address changes, delivery complaints). In Freshdesk that work sits with your team. Freshworks includes free AI onboarding, which it describes as hands-on guidance to set up and optimise the AI (Freshdesk).
In Flowcall, that work sits with Flowcall's team as part of a managed implementation. The team configures the workflows and the integrations they need for your products, policies and edge cases, tests each workflow against simulated customer conversations before it goes live, and updates them as QA findings and policy changes come in. Your team sets the policies and can see, in any conversation, which workflow ran, what data it used and which action it tried.
Who Freshdesk suits
Freshworks describes Freshdesk as a good fit for small and midsize businesses and simple enough not to need consultants (What is Freshdesk?). It suits:
- teams that want a self-serve helpdesk with published prices;
- teams with an admin who can build and maintain rules, AI agent workflows and API actions;
- companies on other Freshworks products, or that want phone and helpdesk from one vendor;
- teams that need SMS, community forums or a public help centre.
For a consumer brand with high order, delivery and return volume, the demo questions below matter more than the feature list. If you're still shortlisting, see our comparison of ecommerce help desk software and our guide to Freshdesk alternatives.
Freshdesk plans and pricing
Both products have Growth, Pro and Enterprise plans, priced per agent per month; on 27 September 2026 they started at $19 (Freshdesk) and $29 (Omni), billed annually. Every account starts with a 14-day trial, and Freshdesk, but not Omni, has a Free Program for up to two agents for six months. AI agent sessions beyond a one-time 500, Copilot seats, WhatsApp messages and phone cost extra. If the session balance runs out, the AI agent stops replying and chats pass to your human agents (AI Agent Studio). Our Freshdesk pricing guide has the plan tables, add-ons and a worked monthly bill.
Questions to ask in a Freshdesk demo
- Would we be on Freshdesk or Omni, and is our existing account (if any) on the current version?
- Which of our five most common requests do pre-built workflows cover, and which would we build?
- Who builds and tests the API actions for our store, payment gateway and courier?
- Without a confirmation step on email, how do we stop an email AI agent refunding an order outside our policy?
- If a customer messages on WhatsApp and then emails about the same order, does the agent see one ticket or two?
- Which of the features we've seen are in the plan we'd buy, and which are add-ons?
Where Flowcall fits
Flowcall is an AI customer service platform for consumer brands with high support volume on WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, email, live chat and phone. Its AI Agent resolves order, delivery, return and refund requests end to end, following your own procedures and completing the work in Shopify and your other systems, and it also answers product questions and recommends products. Its AI Helpdesk is where your team handles everything else.
Teams comparing it with Freshdesk usually take one of two routes:
- Replace Freshdesk. Move your channels and agents to Flowcall. Flowcall's team can migrate agreed, mapped ticket and conversation history where Freshdesk's exports allow it.
- Run it alongside Freshdesk. Keep Freshdesk as your helpdesk and add Flowcall's AI Agent on the channels you choose. It resolves what it can and creates or updates the Freshdesk ticket, with a summary, for everything it hands to your team. Flowcall's AI Quality Assurance can also review the conversations your team handles in Freshdesk, such as the emails they answer.
If SMS, a public help centre or a built-in phone line from one vendor matters most, Freshdesk has them. For the full side-by-side, see Flowcall vs Freshdesk. To see how Flowcall handles a returns workflow, book a demo. Qualifying brands get a free proof of concept on the service problem they most need solved, built with their team and tested before anything goes live.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Freshdesk used for?
Customer service teams use Freshdesk to handle requests from email, chat, social media, WhatsApp and phone as tickets: assigning them, tracking them against SLAs, answering them with Freddy AI's help and reporting on the results. It also runs a knowledge base and help centre for self-service.
Is Freshdesk a CRM?
No. Freshdesk is a helpdesk for customer service. Freshworks' CRM is a separate product, Freshsales, which can be integrated with Freshdesk.
Is Freshdesk free?
Not permanently. Every account starts with a 14-day trial, and Freshdesk (not Omni) has a Free Program for up to two agents for six months. Freshchat, a separate product, has a free plan for up to 10 agents.
Is Freshdesk safe?
Freshworks encrypts data at rest (AES-256) and in transit (TLS 1.2), and says independent auditors check it for ISO 27001 and SOC 2 at least once a year (Freshworks: security, trust). Freshdesk supports single sign-on, role-based access, audit logs and IP allowlisting. For Freddy AI, Freshworks documents content filtering, detection of personal data and an option to opt out of AI model training.
Which is better, Zendesk or Freshdesk?
It depends on your channels, your volume and how much of the setup your team wants to own. We compare them in Freshdesk vs Zendesk.
Is Freshdesk an Indian company?
Freshdesk is made by Freshworks, which launched it in Chennai, India, in 2010 and adopted the Freshworks name in 2017. Freshworks is headquartered in San Mateo, California, and listed on Nasdaq.
What is the difference between Freshdesk and Freshservice?
Freshdesk is for customer service: requests from your customers. Freshservice is Freshworks' IT and employee service product, for internal requests such as IT incidents and HR. See helpdesk vs service desk for the general difference.
