Chatbot Reviews, Community & News

Freshchat Review - Summary

What is Freshchat?

Freshchat is an omnichannel, AI-driven, self-service chatbot solution for customer service that has solutions for both small business and enterprise clients.

Freshchat however, is a compartmentalized product, meaning it’s only useful to companies already using, or planning to use Freshworks for their help desk, online sales, marketing automation, and other business systems.

This, unfortunately, means that you won’t only have limited flexibility in your tech stack, but you’ll be spending at least three times what you see listed for Freshchat’s pricing alone.

Unless you plan on using Freshworks for all of your online marketing, support, and sales, we highly recommend taking a look at other, more flexible customer support chatbots that provide the same functionality as Freshchat, or more, at a lower price point.

Channels: Web chat, messenger applications

Pricing - Freshchat:

Overall Rating - Freshchat:

What You’ll Learn
Freshchat Features
Integrations and API
Freshchat Pricing
Pros and Cons - Freshchat
Freshchat Review - Final Analysis
Freshchat Competitors and Alternatives
Frequently Asked Questions

Freshchat Features

  • Chat widget: The Freshchat chat window is in the middle of the pack as far as the best live chat software tools go. It does provide options for sending and receiving attachments and emojis but doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of its competitors.
  • Teams: The Freshchat Groups feature allows you to organize team members into groups like Support, Product Managers, or Sales. Conversations can then be assigned to groups.
  • Routing: Conversation routing can be automated in Freshchat, where you can assign conversations to individual team members or groups based on rules that you need to define. Freshchat conversation routing requires upgrading to its 2nd highest priced plan, the Estate plan.
Freshchat Review - Chat Widget
  • Office Hours: Set your office hours and messages for website visitors based on what time of day they initiate a conversation, and whether that time is inside or outside of your office hours. This feature requires upgrading to Freshchat’s Blossom plan or higher.
  • Email inbox: Freshchat doesn't provide an email inbox. Instead you’ll need to purchase additional software (Freshdesk) from Freshworks. When you have the integration built with Freskdesk, you’ll have its email inbox functionality.
  • User dashboard: Freshcat’s advanced dashboard provides a real-time view of conversation trends, productivity metrics, and team member performance. It also comes with user event timelines, user info, and user social media profiles. The advanced dashboard feature is available from the Estate plan and up.
  • Reporting: Freshchat reports are used to analyze your team's performance via metrics such as CSAT (customer satisfaction). Its reports also track resolution by tags ('labels'). This feature is available in the Blossom plan and up, however, it also requires Freshworks helpdesk software, Freshdesk, which is more expensive than Freshchat. See the Freshchat Pricing section below for more details.
  • Custom bots: With Freshchat custom bots, you can build your own chatbot for customer acquisition and delight. However, you only get 1 custom bot in the Garden plan, and then unlimited custom bots from the Estate plan and higher.
  • Freddy Answer Bot: The Freddy Answer Bot is a new feature from Freshchat where you can send automated answers to customer questions.
Freshchat review - Freshchat Answer Bot
  • In-app messages: Freshchat's in-app messages let you engage with targeted groups of users and send promotional messaging to those groups. In-app messaging is used for onboarding, support, and proactive messages. This feature is supported from the Garden plan and higher.
  • Multilingual: If you upgrade to the Estate plan, AND are using Freshworks customer support software, you can support messenger FAQs and message channels in 33 different languages.
  • Mobile apps: Freshchat has mobile apps for iOS and Android.
  • Triggers: Chats can be triggered using the Campaigns feature if you upgrade to the Blossom plan. However, in the Blossom plan, you’re limited to 1 triggered message. If you upgrade beyond the Blossom plan, you’ll have unlimited triggered messages.
Freshchat review - Freshchat mobile app

Freshchat Integrations

Freshchat has a limited number of integrations. This is due to Freshworks push to have you use its Freshdesk and Freshsales software, in addition to Freshchat. Below you’ll find all of Freshchat’s available integrations.

Freshchat review - Freshchat integrations

Freshchat API and SDK

Freshchat has a developer community to help build additional tools. Its web SDK allows you to customize and enable a custom Freshchat widget for your end-users, and the Freshchat API has a comprehensive set f conversation APIs to integrate with other bot service providers.

Freshchat Pros and Cons

Pros - Freshchat

  • Automate acquisitions with sales and support bots.
  • Omnichannel options: Freshchat can be used on WhatsApp for Business, Apple Business Chat, LINE, Facebook Messenger, web chat, and mobile applications.
  • Machine learning automation: Using machine learning, Freshchat is able to deliver instant responses with intent-based answers and follow-ups.
  • Streamline customer conversations in one place.
  • Team collaboration tools: Freshchat has an array of team collaboration tools. There’s Team Huddle, Shared Ownership, Linked Tickets, Parent-Child Ticketing

Cons - Freshchat

  • Complete loss of tech stack flexibility: The most noteworthy con of using Freshchat is that you’ll be 100% locked-in to using multiple other business systems of Freshworks. Once you make that decision, it’s going to be nearly impossible to change it.
  • Limited number of integrations: Loses usefulness without integrations with Freshworks products Freshdesk and Freshsales.
  • Bugs and ongoing client issues: Hard to transfer chats and poor timely notifications have been reported as issues. Multiple users have reported a 10 second lag time from trying to start a chat with a visitor, to the chatbox actually appearing in front of the visitor.
  • Overall quality: Freshchat is not of the same quality as Freshworks other tools, such as Freshdesk.

Freshchat Pricing

Freshdesk has five pricing tiers, starting with a free plan. The issue with Freshchat, however, is that you’ll need to also use Freshdesk and Freshsales to get the functionality you desire.

Freshchat has a free plan to get an idea of what the platform looks like, but it won’t provide you with enough power for a sales or support team. After the free plan, pricing starts at $19 per agent / per month and then goes all the way up to $99 per agent / per month, which is their Enterprise level pricing. The amount of features and additional Freshworks software needed is what will move you and your team into higher pricing tiers.

Freshchat review - Freshchat pricing

As we mention throughout this Freshchat review, the only way to make use of Freshchat is by integrating two of Freshworks other tools, Freshdesk and Freshsales. Let’s first take a look at the pricing of Freshdesk.

Freshchat review - Freshdesk pricing

To build the integration you’ll need the Estate plan or higher, which is $65 per month, per agent. As you can see, we’re quickly doubling our originally envisioned price per month.

Now let’s move onto Freshsales, where again you’ll need the Estate plan, which is $65 per month, per user.

Freshchat review - Freshsales pricing

If we add up the costs of Freshchat’s most popular plan, along with the Freshdesk and Freshsales integrations any serious business would require to get all the functionality needed, we come to a much more expensive product.

Let’s pretend we have even a small sales team of 10 agents and do the math on that: ($49 x 10) + ($65 x 10) + ($49 x 10) = $1,630 per month.

Although that’s not quite as expensive as some other popular customer support chatbot platforms, it isn’t cheap by any means, and you’ve also severely limited the flexibility of your tech stack, which is costly in and of itself.

Freshchat Review - Final Analysis

The biggest obstacle to us recommending you use Freshchat as your chatbot is that it means we’re also recommending that you use multiple Freshworks tools, which severely damages the flexibility of your tech stack.

If you love Freshworks suite of tools, there are some really positive things to say about Freshchat. You can use the bot on multiple platforms (not just your website), it has an upgrade to utilize AI-powered chatbots, and the price point for a chatbot, sales, and support platform isn’t too high to consider.

Bottom line, we highly recommend taking a look at other omnichannel chatbots that will provide you with greater functionality and features, as well as far more flexibility in your tech stack, while also delivering all the sales enablement, customer support, and marketing tools you need.

Freshchat Competitors and Alternatives

At Chatbots.org, we’ve reviewed and ranked hundreds of chatbots and chat platforms. We also rank these chatbots by category.

Here’s how Freshchat stacks up against the competition (#1 being the best) in the “Best Chatbot” categories the platform qualified for:

 

Live Chat Software

Freshchat: #15 out of 23.

Read More >>

Chatbots for Sales

Freshchat: #19 out of 25.

Read More >>

Customer Service Chatbot

Freshchat: #2 out of 29.

Read More >>

Freshchat Frequently Asked Questions

Zendesk is a helpdesk platform that has multiple other add-on products, very similar to Freshworks. Both of these platforms are hard to change out of, as well as difficult if not impossible to integrate with all your favorite tools. Instead, we suggest you take a look at other customer support chatbot platforms that outperform the chatbots of Zendesk Chat and Freshchat, as well as provide you the flexibility to integrate your chatbot with all the best tools in your tech stack.

Freshdesk is not a classic CRM, such as Salesforce. Instead, Freshdesk can be considered a “customer service CRM” which could extend the capabilities of your actual CRM software.

Freshdesk is a helpdesk software made by Freshworks. Freshdesk is Freshworks most popular product and is required to be purchased along with Freshchat to get full and useful functionality from your chatbot.

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