Freshdesk vs Messagely
Freshdesk was founded in 2010 in India by Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy. Girish and Shan registered their company in India, and also incorporated Freshdesk in the US so that they could work with a reputable payment gateway provider. In 2011, the duo officially launched Freshdesk, and in the same year, they won $40,000 at the Microsoft BizSpark Startup challenge and raised $1M worth of funding.
The company raised a second round of funding ($5M) in 2012, and hit its 10,000 customers milestone in 2013. In 2014, Freshdesk became Google Capital’s first foreign investment with a $31M Series D round, and it was then that they moved their headquarters to San Francisco. Freshdesk rebranded to FreshWorks in 2017, and the company surpassed $100M in Annual Recurring Revenue in 2018. Today, FreshWorks has 900+ employees on their payroll, and it’s still going strong.
FreshWorks has achieved great things in the 9 years that they’ve been around, and approximately 80,000+ companies are using Freshdesk and FreshWorks’ other products worldwide. That said, is FreshWorks the golden standard when it comes to customer support software? Or do other tools such as Messagely bring more value to the table? Read on to find out more.
Should you switch from Freshdesk? Factors to consider.
Price
Live chat
Scope of tool
Price
The first thing you’ll want to do when you’re shopping around for a software is to determine your budget. Obviously, you’ll want to look for a tool that’s affordable, and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg. On top of that, it’s also important to ensure that your tool is transparent in its pricing plans. You don’t want to sign on as a paying customer, only to find out there are hidden costs associated with using your tool.
First up, Freshdesk offers five plans in total; their more robust, feature-rich plans include the Estate ($49 per agent per month) and Forest ($109 per agent per month) for plans billed yearly. Note that Freshdesk charges significantly more for plans that are billed monthly ($65 per agent for the Estate plan, and $125 per agent for the Forest plan).
As compared to this, Messagely comes with three different price plans ($29, $49, or $79 per month). Regardless of whether you choose to be billed yearly or monthly, the company doesn’t tack on any extras. Each plan comes with just one seat, but if you want to add more users, you can do this at a discounted rate ($15, $20, or $25 per user per month).
At the basic level, it’s easy to see that Messagely’s price point is lower than that of Freshdesk, but note that the differences in prices are exacerbated if you’re working in a large team. If you have 10 users who require access to your tool, for instance, using Freshdesk will cost you up to $1,250 per month, and using Messagely will set you back by just $304 per month. Here, it’s fairly obvious that Messagely gives you more bang for the buck.
Live chat
If you’re not using live chat, you’re missing out. According to statistics, 77% of customers won’t make a purchase if there’s no live chat, and live chat generates an impressive 48% increase in revenue per chat hour.
Freshdesk users don’t have access to an in-built chat tool, even if they’ve signed up for the highest-tiered Freshdesk plan. That said, they can pay extra for Freshchat, which is Freshworks’ live chat software. Bear in mind that Freshchat doesn’t come cheap – the Enterprise plan is priced at $99 per team member per month, so you’ll effectively double your costs if you purchase Freshdesk, and sign up for Freshchat as well.
Messagely, on the other hand, offers built-in live chat for users across all plans. Want to generate leads and boost your website conversions? You can use Messagely’s live chat tool to drill down to highly specific customer segments, and target website visitors by how many pages they’ve accessed on your website, how long they’ve spent on your website, or their referring source.
Want to improve upon your customer support? 75% of customers are satisfied with their live chat experience (as compared to the 51% and 44% that are satisfied with email and phone support). By using Messagely to offer live chat as a support channel, you can delight your customers, and win them over for life.
Scope of tool
When choosing a tool, would you prefer a tool that does just one thing, or a tool that you can use to meet several business needs? The answer is obvious. It makes more sense to use a single platform to take care of all your customer acquisition, engagement and support needs, rather than relying on several platforms to do the same thing.
Why do we say so? When you use one platform to serve your customers, this means you’re keeping all your data and analytics in one place. You don’t need to worry about whether your data is syncing up properly, and you’ll be able to keep track of your key metrics and optimize your campaigns more easily. Using a single tool also helps you save cost, and minimize the time/effort that you spend on training your employees.
How do Freshdesk and Messagely fare when it comes to scope? While Freshdesk does what it does well, it’s unfortunately limited in scope. You can use Freshdesk to improve what you’re doing in customer support, but beyond that, Freshdesk isn’t engineered to help you acquire new customers, or engage existing ones.
Messagely, on the other hand, is a feature-rich platform that does so much more than Freshdesk. Like Freshdesk, Messagely comes with an omnichannel helpdesk that allows you to support your customers over email, chat, phone, social. But that’s not all – you can also use Messagely to generate new leads and engage your existing customers. For instance, with Messagely, you can upsell customers on free trials and convert them to paid users, trigger personalized messages to re-engage users, and more. Basically, we help you take care of customers throughout their entire lifecycle.
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