Freshdesk vs. Salesforce Experience Cloud

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Freshdesk
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer service software that helps businesses of all sizes to deliver customer support. Freshdesk converts requests coming in via email, web, phone, chat, and social into tickets, and unifies ticket resolution across channels. Additionally, Freshdesk lets the user automate workflows, provide self-service, manage SLAs, and measure metrics, to stay on top of customer support. Freshdesk also offers out-of-the-box features like an AI-powered support chatbot,…
$0
Up to 2 agents
Salesforce Experience Cloud
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement (formerly Salesforce Experience Cloud or Salesforce Community Cloud) is an online forum powered by Salesforce that enables businesses to connect with their employees, customers, partner organizations, and prospects. Designed to help facilitate communication and information sharing, customers can ask questions and request help, administrators can integrate data from third-party apps, and employees can collaborate across projects and…N/A
Pricing
FreshdeskSalesforce Experience Cloud
Editions & Modules
Free
$0
Up to 2 agents
Growth
$15
per month (billed annually) per agent
Pro
$49
per month (billed annually) per agent
Enterprise
$79
per month (billed annually) per agent
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
FreshdeskSalesforce Experience Cloud
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
FreshdeskSalesforce Experience Cloud
Considered Both Products
Freshdesk
Chose Freshdesk
The decision was made before my time. I want to move to another platform ASAP.
Chose Freshdesk
Easier to use and easier to transfer within departments and users. Better user interface. Freshdesk has a better and easier format to train clients and employees how to use. You can create individual private and public canned responses to make communicating to clients quicker …
Salesforce Experience Cloud
Chose Salesforce Experience Cloud
Overall, Salesforce is the most effective solution since it is part of an integrated stack to house and activate CRM audiences within an email, but also expand upon it via the DMP. This can allow for cross channel reach and exposure frequency measurement. If we were to partner …
Features
FreshdeskSalesforce Experience Cloud
Incident and problem management
Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Product A and Product B
Freshdesk
8.5
174 Ratings
6% above category average
Salesforce Experience Cloud
-
Ratings
Organize and prioritize service tickets9.1170 Ratings00 Ratings
Expert directory8.0115 Ratings00 Ratings
Subscription-based notifications8.43 Ratings00 Ratings
ITSM collaboration and documentation7.64 Ratings00 Ratings
Ticket creation and submission8.9170 Ratings00 Ratings
Ticket response9.2170 Ratings00 Ratings
Self Help Community
Comparison of Self Help Community features of Product A and Product B
Freshdesk
8.0
156 Ratings
2% above category average
Salesforce Experience Cloud
-
Ratings
External knowledge base8.2142 Ratings00 Ratings
Internal knowledge base7.9145 Ratings00 Ratings
Multi-Channel Help
Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of Product A and Product B
Freshdesk
8.3
165 Ratings
6% above category average
Salesforce Experience Cloud
-
Ratings
Customer portal7.9141 Ratings00 Ratings
IVR8.251 Ratings00 Ratings
Social integration8.287 Ratings00 Ratings
Email support9.3164 Ratings00 Ratings
Help Desk CRM integration7.9101 Ratings00 Ratings
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Freshdesk
-
Ratings
Salesforce Experience Cloud
10.0
1 Ratings
20% above category average
Role-based user permissions00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
Freshdesk
-
Ratings
Salesforce Experience Cloud
10.0
1 Ratings
18% above category average
API00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Web Content Creation
Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Product A and Product B
Freshdesk
-
Ratings
Salesforce Experience Cloud
9.3
1 Ratings
20% above category average
WYSIWYG editor00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Admin section00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Page templates00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Library of website themes00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Publishing workflow00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Form generator00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Web Content Management
Comparison of Web Content Management features of Product A and Product B
Freshdesk
-
Ratings
Salesforce Experience Cloud
8.6
1 Ratings
18% above category average
Content taxonomy00 Ratings9.01 Ratings
SEO support00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Bulk management00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Community / comment management00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Results and Analysis
Comparison of Results and Analysis features of Product A and Product B
Freshdesk
-
Ratings
Salesforce Experience Cloud
8.0
1 Ratings
7% below category average
Conversion tracking00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Test reporting00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Funnel Analysis00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
User Segmentation00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Digital Experience Platform
Comparison of Digital Experience Platform features of Product A and Product B
Freshdesk
-
Ratings
Salesforce Experience Cloud
10.0
1 Ratings
8% above category average
Campaign management00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Cloud enablement00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Content aggregation00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Content classification00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Multi-channel content personalization00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Customer data analytics00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
DXP Third-Party Integrations00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Multi-website management00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Digital asset management00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Editorial workflows and task management00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Best Alternatives
FreshdeskSalesforce Experience Cloud
Small Businesses
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Bloomreach - The Agentic Platform for Personalization
Bloomreach - The Agentic Platform for Personalization
Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
RWS Tridion Sites
RWS Tridion Sites
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
SysAid
SysAid
Score 9.0 out of 10
RWS Tridion Sites
RWS Tridion Sites
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
FreshdeskSalesforce Experience Cloud
Likelihood to Recommend
8.7
(241 ratings)
10.0
(52 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
7.8
(21 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(41 ratings)
9.4
(4 ratings)
Availability
4.6
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
5.5
(5 ratings)
9.1
(5 ratings)
Support Rating
7.6
(39 ratings)
7.7
(17 ratings)
In-Person Training
8.2
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
8.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.7
(171 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
5.3
(6 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
6.4
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
7.6
(5 ratings)
9.4
(4 ratings)
Product Scalability
5.5
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Professional Services
6.4
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
6.8
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
6.8
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
FreshdeskSalesforce Experience Cloud
Likelihood to Recommend
Freshworks Inc
I recommend Freshdesk for people who need to handle a large volume of inquiries through tickets and follow-ups. This platform provides tools that will improve problem-solving efficiency, ensuring customers are satisfied with the speed with which their issues are resolved. Overall, it will optimize customer service support operations and the resolution of their problems.
Read full review
Salesforce
Salesforce Experience Cloud is well-suited for organizations that have clients who periodically or routinely need to access historical data or documents. The product also offers an exceptionally effective tool to engage with customers around support/service issues and the entire Case management functionality built into the Salesforce platform. The product might be less well-suited in environments where there is exceptionally high staff turnover within customer accounts, or where there is a substantial lack of very basic computer skills.
Read full review
Pros
Freshworks Inc
  • The price is great for small startups just large enough to need a support ticketing system.
  • This may seem minor, but many tools don't have this: the ability to link a contact to multiple companies/accounts.
  • Agent collision detection is great for making sure agents don't duplicate each others' work!
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Salesforce
  • Complete integration with the Salesforce ecosystem. Data displayed in your Community portal reflects records from a Sales Cloud organization
  • Highly customizable. A Community Cloud portal can be totally customized both visually and with different funcionalities with little to no coding skills required
Read full review
Cons
Freshworks Inc
  • Data Security.
  • SLA Policies where it is not customer / contract driven but agents / groups driven.
  • Audit Trail is not available in Pro version makes the tool adoption difficult from compliance perspective.
  • Chat Bot and Fresh Chat Services has greater potential to explode, but the pricing model tagged to chat bot sessions .are illogical as it limits the ability to use the fresh chat feature
  • Agent Logon Screen use earlier version of Captcha as it is annoying for the agents to login. Very frustrating experience.
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Salesforce
  • The documentation for implementing Experience Cloud can be a bit confusing as their rebranding hasn't made it's way into all articles, resulting in different terminology being used to refer to the same thing
  • Some things are not as intuitive regarding their customizability, so there's a bit of a learning curve (i.e. Lightning apps can't be used to customize layouts in Experience Cloud)
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Likelihood to Renew
Freshworks Inc
We are extremely happy with Freshdesk and can foresee using it for the next year. We might only consider using a different platform if our average daily ticket volume reaches four digits and its AI isn’t enough to handle our needs by then. While we haven’t tested this yet, we have read reviews that it’s AI capabilities are lacking
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Salesforce
No answers on this topic
Usability
Freshworks Inc
I gave it a rating of 9 out of 10 because they delivered on everything we asked them to do. Easy to setup, easy to deploy to end users, easy to customize, easy to enter tickets and so much more. Our experience with their support is top notch! After opening a ticket for support they call use back within 10 minutes every time!
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Salesforce
Usability is pretty streamlined, especially if you're familiar with other Salesforce products, but even if not, take it from me, as I just entered the technological space about two years ago, that this product is pretty simple to learn. You don't have to jump in with your head underwater. Small wins and learnings along the way are what foster long-term understandings and enable your evolution alongside the product. I definitely recommend Salesforce Trailhead along with it
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Reliability and Availability
Freshworks Inc
I have encountered a lot of errors in the Freshdesk, however, they tend to resolve it on priority or at least they will share the timeline by when this can be resolved. Most of the time the issue has been from the other partner's end. They take time to resolve their vendor issues and they don't have any timelines in case of developed app errors.
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Salesforce
No answers on this topic
Performance
Freshworks Inc
The reports take a lot of time to download if the time period is large. Also, the tickets take their sweet time to open and load. It is not fast as Zendesk. Only 30 tickets are visible in a single go and there isn't any option to select all. If we need to change the pages and dashboards it takes a lot of time to open.
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Salesforce
It's delivered on our original requirements and we've found ways to grow its usage. We continue to build on our original success and we can report our data out to leadership to show a true return on investment which is great for growing support and expanding uses for the system.
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Support Rating
Freshworks Inc
The main thing about Freshdesk user service is that once a request has been made for information about a feature of the platform, the support team responds to tickets quickly, within a day of writing and submitting them, with information that is concise enough so that there is no need to ask for help on the same topic again.
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Salesforce
We have weekly calls with our Salesforce reps. They bring new ideas to the table and help with taxonomy builds. They have also answered many questions and connected us to the right people for us to grow our knowledge and utilization of the platform. They are a good partner overall in comparison.
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In-Person Training
Freshworks Inc
Support Team's knowledge and understood the company's requirement, and always shared the insight of the usage of the tool to it s full potential, moreover the team checks periodically to check if we using the tool right and if we are facing any kind of challenges. Also they would update us on new features that can make the work easy.
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Salesforce
No answers on this topic
Online Training
Freshworks Inc
Video tutorials, questions answers round before and after testing and Fresh desk team would always share best practices on the needs. Furthermore would periodically check if we are able to work smoothly. Would send alerts to known any issues, send recommendation on new features. Freshdesk team always available when we need certain advise.
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Salesforce
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Freshworks Inc
Our team easily implemented Freshdesk, and as soon as we started, we were pros with it. In a matter of days, we had integrated signatures and canned responses. The biggest problem was the Help Center part, but after some time, that was also integrated. We did not know some features when we started, but that is normal.
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Salesforce
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Freshworks Inc
Freshdesk has a more modern and intuitive user interface, while Help Scout's interface is simpler and more minimalist.In case of features, Freshdesk offers a wider range of features, includes omnichannel support, AI powered automations, and advanced analytics. Help Scout is more focused on providing a simple and efficient ticketing system.
Read full review
Salesforce
I have used Datatel/Colleague/Recruiter before. There were issues because only one person at the institution was able to have the student's record open at a time. This was problematic when collaboration between departments was necessary especially in the case of admissions, financial aid, and registration. We also had to do our work and then log out before asking a questions of another department. Sometimes simultaneous use was necessary. However, this was years ago and they may have since updated the program.
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Freshworks Inc
I was not very involved with the purchase/contract (my company purchased Fresjdesk before I was brought on), but I will say that pricing per agent made it difficult to grow our support team. Additionally, we were kind of disappointed after our upgrade because it didn't solve our pain points as much as we expected.
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Salesforce
No answers on this topic
Scalability
Freshworks Inc
My company had Freshdesk agents from support and success. It's generally difficult to customize permissions for different agent "roles." We were a fully distributed company, so "multiple sites" doesn't apply to us. We found Freshdesk features lacking as we grew our customer base, and adding agents wasn't easy because price steeply increases with number of agents.
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Salesforce
No answers on this topic
Professional Services
Freshworks Inc
Very professional, they would always ask for the steps followed and where we went wrong, they would politely share the video recording to review in case any other team member faces the same issue
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Salesforce
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Freshworks Inc
  • Increased response times - Client Success maintains at 98% SLA for resolution
  • Categorization of feedback and issues - custom ticket fields make it easier for us to review why clients contact us on a high level
  • Standardization of internal procedures via templates, canned responses and automations
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Salesforce
  • Improved online admission application completion rates from mid-60%s to mid-80%s.
  • Positive user experience from start-to-finish to leverage one data system for all prospective student data
  • Fewer data integrations transforming and loading sensitive student data by leveraging Salesforce Community Cloud to access already existing data
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ScreenShots