Review of ticketing systems: Zendesk versus Freshdesk

To improve customer service, Icecat is looking into different ticketing systems to replace one of our old open source ticketing systems, Mantis. It is still in use, to manage mostly internal tickets generated by customer registrations, which are assigned to the appropriate country manager as potential leads. A few customer requests are also handled this way. Commercial leads are next transferred and administered in Pipedrive, to track and monitor the sales cycle per country manager and lead.

As a part of the comparison and selection process, I have been testing three different ticketing systems. Two commercial systems – Freshdesk and Zendesk – and one open source software system, namely OsTicket. I have been looking to different aspects like security, ease of use, Pipedrive integration. Below is the overview of the comparison. The main difference is that advanced features, like detailed reporting and customization, are only provided in high price models. Good security is provided by the basic versions of all three compared ticketing systems.

Conclusion: for typical SMEs, Zendesk and Freshdesk are easier to set up, and more user-friendly, than OsTicket. Zendesk seems to be more cost-effective than Freshdesk.

	Freshdesk	Zendesk	OsTicket
Software	Cloud based.	Cloud based.	Open source.
Setup time	Easy to setup, ready to use.	Easy to setup, ready to use.	Manual setup and takes significant amount of time.
Pipedrive integration	Through Fresh sale addon.	Through APIs or through helphouse.io app	Not supported
Security	Https connection, Encryption of content.	Https connection, Encryption of content, 2 factor authentication.	Https connection, Encryption possible but needs to set up manually on the server.
Social media	Can be linked to facebook, twitter.	Can be linked to facebook, twitter.	No social media integration.
Pricing	$19 per agent/month with possibility to have free agents. Additional features can be requested with higher pricing model.	$5 per agent/month. Additional features can be requested with higher pricing model.	Free.
Customization	Basic addition of fields can be set but some features like restricted access to agents is possible from Estate type of subscription. (49$ per agent/month)	Adding additional fields and business rules is possible only from Team type of subscription (19$ per agent/month)	Possibility to add additional type of requests or fields in almost all features.
SLA management	Possible to define single or multiple SLA.	Possible to define single or multiple SLA.	Possible to define single or multiple SLA.
Customer support	Varies from type of request. Sometimes it can take weeks to resolve the issue.	Varies from type of request. Sometimes it can take weeks to resolve the issue.	New features can be requested and added. Time to support can be upto 15 days
Email and mobile integration	Tracking of tickets through email and possibility to connect to mobile app	Tracking of tickets through email and possibility to connect to mobile app	Tracking of tickets through email.
User interface	Good user interface with good navigation between features	Good user interface but takes some time to adjust initially	Old and basic interface with filters
Stats and Reporting	Ticket trend and performance of the agent or team is provided in the dashboard.	In depth data about the type of tickets and filtering is possible in the dashboard.	Overview of tickets and response time can be known per ticket and agent in the dashboard
Multilingual support	Service and support offered in more than 60 languages	Service and support offered in more than 20 language	Language package can be added for more than 40 languages supported
Rating (1/very bad to 5/very good)	4	4	3