Used For

• +**Spending 20 hours/week sorting support emails manually** → Everything lands in one shared inbox, gets auto-routed to the right person, cuts handling time by 70%
• +**IT changes cause surprise outages because nobody knows what breaks what** → Asset tracking maps all your stuff so you see "changing this server will break these 12 apps"
• +**Sales reps losing deals in email chaos** → Pipeline view tracks every conversation, automated follow-ups, AI scores which leads are actually worth your time
• +No-code automation builder - set up approval workflows and ticket routing without bothering your developers

Best For

• >Your support tickets are chaos across Gmail, Slack, and three other places
• >You're paying Zendesk enterprise prices for a 50-person team
• >IT changes keep breaking things and nobody knows what's connected to what

Not For

• -Teams under 10 people — you'll hit the free tier limits fast and the paid jump is steep
• -Enterprise companies needing deep customization — this is built for simplicity, not flexibility
• -Solo consultants — you're paying for multi-agent features you'll never use

Pairs With

• *Slack (where tickets come in and your team gets notifications about urgent stuff)
• *Google Workspace (for email integration and document sharing in tickets)
• *Zapier (to connect Freshworks to the 47 other tools it doesn't integrate with natively)
• *Salesforce (if you outgrow Freshsales but want to keep using Freshdesk for support)
• *Jira (where dev tickets go when support realizes it's actually a bug, not user error)

The Catch

• !The AI (Freddy) gets ticket categories wrong about 20% of the time, so you'll spend extra time fixing its mistakes
• !Asset tracking costs extra once you hit 100 devices — that $200/month surprise adds up fast
• !Mobile app is slow (2-3 seconds to load tickets) so don't count on quick responses from your phone

Bottom Line

Zendesk for teams that can't afford Zendesk, plus IT management thrown in.