Freshworks is the software company; Freshdesk is its customer service help desk. Freshdesk pricing starts at $19 per agent per month on Growth, then $55 on Pro and $89 on Enterprise, billed annually, as of October 2026. Freshdesk Omni adds WhatsApp, Instagram, advanced chat and phone through Freshcaller. Freshchat is the messaging product, and Freshservice serves IT teams, not customers.
This hub is for the store owner or support lead who runs Freshdesk, or is weighing it. It maps the Freshworks family, sets out the plans, answers the two questions people mix up most (Freshservice and CRM) and points to the guide for each deeper question. Everything about Freshworks below is as of October 2026.
What is Freshworks, and which products does it make?
Freshworks is a business software company that describes itself as a provider of AI-first service software. It makes five products a store may meet: Freshdesk for customer service, Freshdesk Omni as its omnichannel edition, Freshchat for messaging, Freshservice for IT service management and Freshsales as its CRM. Freddy AI runs across them.
Freshworks says on its About page that it is “trusted by 74,000+ businesses worldwide”, and its Freshdesk page puts Freshdesk at 50,000+ of them. Both are vendor-stated. Freshdesk vs Freshworks is therefore a product against its maker, not two rival tools.
| Product | What it is | Who uses it | For a store |
|---|---|---|---|
| Freshdesk | The customer service help desk: ticketing, shared inbox, portal and knowledge base | Support teams answering customers | Your ticket queue for email, the help centre, Facebook and a basic web chat |
| Freshdesk Omni | The omnichannel edition of Freshdesk, with every message as a ticket in one inbox | Support teams on chat, WhatsApp, Instagram and phone | When customers write on more than email |
| Freshchat | Freshworks’ “AI-powered omnichannel messaging platform” for live chat, messaging and bots | Teams that mainly chat | A chat-first setup, with an upgrade path to Omni |
| Freshservice | An “AI-powered ITSM platform”, built on ITIL practices | IT teams serving employees | Rarely needed for customer support |
| Freshsales | An “AI-powered sales CRM” | Sales teams | Only if you run a sales pipeline next to support |
Sources: Freshworks’ About page, Freshservice page, Freshchat page and Freshsales page.
Which Freshdesk guide answers your question?
Start from the question in front of you. The table groups our Freshdesk guides by what you are trying to do: understand an edition, compare Freshdesk with something else, or see how Engaige connects. Each row says what the guide answers.
| Group | Guide | What it answers |
|---|---|---|
| Understand the editions | Freshdesk Omni | What the omnichannel edition adds, which channels it covers, how one agent workspace works and how it compares with Freshchat |
| Understand ticketing | Freshdesk tickets | How a Freshdesk ticket is created, what it holds, how it moves from Open to Closed and where the order sits |
| Understand ticketing | Ticketing basics | How a help desk ticketing system works, for any tool, Freshdesk included |
| Understand the AI | Freshchat AI | What Freddy AI Agent, the Freshchat and Freshdesk chatbot, does, how it works and what its sessions cost |
| Compare and decide | Freshdesk alternatives | Which help desks and AI agents teams weigh when Freshdesk or Freddy AI no longer fits |
| Compare and decide | Zendesk comparison | How the two help desks compare for an online store, side by side |
| Connect Engaige | Freshdesk integration | How Engaige plugs into the Freshdesk you already run |
For a smaller team still choosing a help desk, our small-business guide covers the wider field.
Freshdesk pricing: what do the plans cost in 2026?
Freshdesk pricing is per agent per month: Growth at $19, Pro at $55 and Enterprise at $89, all billed annually, according to Freshworks as of October 2026. Freshdesk Omni costs more because it adds channels: $29, $79 and $119 for the same three tiers, per its Omni pricing. Every plan includes Freddy AI Agent sessions, and some add-ons cost extra.
| Product | Entry plan | Middle plan | Top plan | Free trial |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Freshdesk | Growth, $19 | Pro, $55 | Enterprise, $89 | 14 days of Enterprise |
| Freshdesk Omni | Growth, $29 | Pro, $79 | Enterprise, $119 | 14 days of Enterprise |
| Freshservice | Starter, $19 (Growth $49) | Pro, $99 | Enterprise, custom | 14 days |
Prices per agent per month, billed annually, from Freshworks’ Freshdesk pricing, Omni pricing and Freshservice pricing pages, fetched 16 October 2026. The pages show a monthly toggle but list no monthly prices.
What changes between tiers matters more than the step in price. Growth covers ticketing, the shared inbox, the portal and knowledge base. Pro adds a multilingual help desk, custom dashboards, intelligent routing and multiple SLA policies. Enterprise adds skill-based routing, a sandbox and audit logs. For a store, the jump to Pro usually comes when you sell in more than one language or need separate SLAs per queue.
Is there a Freshdesk free plan?
No free plan is listed on the pricing page as of October 2026. When you sign up, Freshworks says you “instantly get access to our Enterprise plan for 14 days”; after that you pick a paid plan, or the account is suspended. For a store, 14 days is enough to connect your shop and run a week of real tickets.
Freshdesk vs Freshservice: what is the difference?
Freshdesk is for your customers; Freshservice is for your own employees. Freshdesk turns customer emails, chats and messages into tickets for a support team. Freshservice is Freshworks’ IT service management product, where staff log laptop, access and software requests with the IT team. A store’s support team almost always needs Freshdesk, not Freshservice.
| Freshdesk | Freshservice | |
|---|---|---|
| Who raises the ticket | Customers | Employees |
| What it manages | Orders, returns, product questions and complaints | IT incidents, service requests, assets and changes |
| Framework | Customer service ticketing and SLAs | ITIL-based IT service management |
| Vendor-stated base | 50,000+ businesses | 20,000+ businesses |
| Entry price | $19 per agent per month | $19 per agent per month (Starter) |
Sources: Freshworks’ Freshdesk page, Freshservice page and pricing pages, as of October 2026.
The two share a maker and Freddy AI, so the names cause confusion. If you run a webshop, the question to ask is who writes in. When it is shoppers, it is a Freshdesk question.
Is Freshdesk a CRM?
Freshdesk is not a CRM. It keeps contacts and companies so an agent sees who wrote and their ticket history, but it has no sales pipeline. Freshworks’ CRM is Freshsales, which it calls an “AI-powered sales CRM”. The two connect through an integration that syncs contacts and shows tickets on the CRM record.
Freshworks’ integration guide describes a two-way or one-way contact and account sync that “happens every 15 mins”, with Freshdesk tickets listed on the related Freshsales records. The same article notes the older marketplace app has been replaced by a sync under admin settings.
For most stores, the customer record that matters is the order in your shop, not a CRM entry. A support answer about a late parcel or a refund needs the order, the carrier status and your return policy, and those live in your store platform.
What does Freddy AI add to Freshdesk?
Freddy AI is Freshworks’ built-in AI, added to its products over three years. Freddy Self Service launched in June 2023, Freddy AI Agent was announced as its successor on 23 October 2024, and a Skills Library with pre-built Shopify and Stripe skills followed in June 2025. Every Freshdesk plan includes Freddy AI Agent sessions. On plain Freshdesk that is the Email AI Agent, while AI Agent Studio chat agents come with Omni.
Give it fair credit: Freddy AI Agent takes actions, such as order tracking or refunds, through skills you enable or build in AI Agent Studio. Its Freshdesk page claims “up to 80%” resolution, while its 2024 release reported an average of 45% of customer support requests resolved autonomously. Its June 2025 launch post introduced the Skills Library. All vendor-stated.
Freshworks says Freddy “self-improves”, but its pages do not describe the mechanism, as of October 2026. Our Freshchat AI guide covers Freddy AI Agent in depth. If the difference between a chatbot and an AI agent is new to you, our chatbot comparison sets it out.
Where does Engaige fit?
Engaige (that’s us) is the e-commerce-native AI support agent that plugs into the Freshdesk you already run, actually resolves across your stack and keeps improving itself. Freshdesk stays your help desk; Engaige replaces the AI layer on your tickets. Keep your helpdesk. Replace the AI. Behind the agent is Engaige AI, which learns from your conversations and inputs, configures your support agent and shows which policies it used.
Engaige works on your existing Freshdesk tickets. The action happens in the connected system first, for example a refund in Shopify, and then Engaige replies and closes the ticket inside Freshdesk. It covers where-is-my-order questions, refunds and returns, cancellations and address changes, subscription changes and product advice. Our Freshdesk integration page shows how it connects, with no migration.
The answers come from the store. On Shopify, Engaige combines live Admin API data, pricing across markets and SKUs, inventory, orders and customers, with the marketing content from your storefront, deeper than tools that only scrape. It also works with WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce and custom platforms, with 50+ native integrations whose actions you enable rather than assemble.
You go live in Agent Assist in hours. Engaige AI compares what your team said with what the agent suggested, learns from the difference, and improves itself, under your supervision: you approve the changes. Then you switch ticket types to autonomous one at a time; most brands are autonomous in about a week, and Engaige automates up to 90% of supported tickets. Autonomous from day one is also supported.
It keeps learning once autonomous, from emerging trends and from the tickets it hands back to your team. There are no decision trees and no prompt engineers, and you can test every policy in the Playground before it goes live, including real past tickets you paste in.
Control and visibility stay with you. You decide per step whether the agent acts on its own or drafts for your team, and you can set thresholds, such as sending refunds above a certain amount to a person first. Open any conversation and you see the full reasoning behind every answer and action; when the agent hands a ticket over, it leaves a summary of its reasoning as an internal note.
The results show at scale. At Otrium, 60% of 120,000 annual tickets are resolved end to end.
With Engaige, we are able to automatically resolve 60% of the 120,000 support tickets that we receive annually.
At MR MARVIS, a Shopify Plus brand, Engaige handles over 120,000 questions a year and resolves over 60% of the conversations it’s involved in. For the most common store question, see the order tracking use case.
Engaige is e-commerce-specialised, not a generic horizontal tool. It is text-first by design: email, chat, WhatsApp, SMS and social DMs, no voice AI. A live call gives an AI seconds to reason; text gives it time to read the order, check your policy and act. If phone is a big share of your mix, a voice specialist is the honest answer. Pricing is a flat monthly fee tied to your ticket volume, predictable as you scale.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between Freshworks and Freshdesk?
Freshworks is the company and Freshdesk is its customer service help desk. Freshworks also makes Freshdesk Omni, Freshchat, Freshservice and Freshsales. The product table sets out what each one does.
How much does Freshdesk cost?
Growth is $19, Pro $55 and Enterprise $89 per agent per month, billed annually, as of October 2026, per the pricing page. Freshdesk Omni costs $29, $79 and $119 for the same tiers, per Omni pricing.
Does Freshdesk have a free plan?
No free plan is listed on the pricing page as of October 2026. New accounts get a 14-day trial of the Enterprise plan, then choose a paid plan.
Should an online store use Freshdesk or Freshservice?
Freshdesk. It handles questions from customers, such as orders and returns. Freshservice handles IT requests from your own employees.
Is Freshdesk a CRM?
No. Freshdesk keeps contacts and companies for support, while Freshsales is Freshworks’ CRM. An integration syncs contacts between them every 15 minutes.
Does Freshdesk include AI?
Yes. Every Freshdesk plan includes Freddy AI Agent sessions: the Email AI Agent on plain Freshdesk, with AI Agent Studio chat agents on Omni, and Freddy AI Agent takes actions through skills. Freshworks claims “up to 80%” resolution; its 2024 beta average was 45%.
Can I keep Freshdesk and add Engaige?
Yes. Freshdesk stays your help desk and Engaige replaces the AI on your tickets. It reads the live order, takes the action in the connected system, then replies and closes the ticket in Freshdesk, with no migration.
How does Engaige improve on Freshdesk tickets?
In Agent Assist, Engaige AI compares what your team sent with what the agent suggested and proposes changes to its policies. You approve what goes live, then switch ticket types to autonomous one at a time.
