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Freshservice is powerful as an internal ITSM platform, great for employee help-desks. But it isn’t built around MSP billing models, customer support workflows, or the way external customers actually communicate. That’s the real divide here.
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Freshservice is designed on ITIL principles: incidents, problems, changes, and assets. That works inside internal IT departments, not as well when you sell support, charge for time, and manage multi-tenant customers. DeskDay blends service desk, projects, billing, time, QA, analytics, and automation in one place.
Freshservice pricing has four tiers: Starter, Growth, Pro, and Enterprise, with capabilities like advanced automation, analytics, or orchestration only at higher levels. DeskDay has two straightforward plans: a Standard Plan and an Enterprise Plan, with every PSA feature included in both plans except branding, which is available only for Enterprise.
Freshservice AI (Freddy) focuses on ticket classification, canned responses, and self-service deflection. Useful, but mostly admin-side. DeskDay’s Helena AI lives inside the technician workflow: drafting replies, surfacing past tickets and KBs, flagging sentiment, and reducing context switching with no add-ons.
Freshservice assumes portal and email as the primary touchpoints. DeskDay lets customers raise tickets where they prefer: Microsoft Teams, web, mobile, desktop, and email. It will support Slack and SMS soon.
Freshservice becomes expensive as MSPs move to Pro or Enterprise to unlock automation, analytics, and governance features. DeskDay pricing stays flat at $59 per tech, with AI and automation included. Growth doesn’t punish your margins.
Freshservice is powerful, but ITIL-heavy. Configuration, change workflows, and role mapping slow down MSP rollouts. DeskDay is designed for same- or next-day onboarding, with workflows that match how MSP service desks already operate.
DeskDay’s plans give you the core PSA stack out of the box without chasing higher tiers for automation or AI.
DeskDay vs. Freshservice:
MSP PSA: service desk, billing, time, QA, projects, SLA, KB
ITSM core with client mgmt, workflow automation, SLA
Email, web, Teams app, mobile, desktop apps; more coming
Portal + email primary
Visual, MSP workflow builders
Rule automators & workflows baked in
MSP ops dashboards
Curated reporting tied to incident/service metrics
MSP stack friendly (RMMs, billing, docs)
ITSM ecosystem apps
Fast MSP-oriented defaults
ITSM configuration first
MSPs delivering external support
MSPs needing solid ITSM basics
