A complete guide to Freshdesk bots: Features, pricing, and limitations

Let's be real, the pressure to "get on the AI train" in customer support is intense. Every team is scrambling to manage a flood of tickets without their agents burning out or their budget evaporating. If you're running your support on Freshdesk, you've definitely seen Freddy AI pop up, promising instant answers and deflected tickets.

But we've all been burned by tech promises before, right? It’s easy to pour money into a bot that just ends up giving weird answers, annoying customers, and somehow making more work for your human agents. It's the classic "garbage in, garbage out" problem.

This guide is an honest, no-fluff look at Freshdesk bots. We’ll break down what they are, what they can actually do, how to set them up, what they cost, and, most importantly, where they fall short. By the end, you'll have a clear picture to help you decide if it's the right move for your team.

What are Freshdesk bots? (Freddy AI explained)

When you hear the term Freshdesk bots, you're really hearing about Freddy AI. That's Freshdesk's in-house AI engine. It isn't just one thing; it's a suite of AI tools that are baked into the Freshworks platform. You can think of it as the brains behind the automation.

For support teams, this boils down to two key parts:

• Freddy AI Agent: This is the bot that talks to your customers. It sits in your chat widget, working around the clock to answer common questions. The main goal is to point people to your help articles so they can solve their own problems without needing to talk to a person.

• Freddy AI Copilot / Assist Bot: This one is for your internal team. It acts as a sidekick for your human agents inside Freshdesk, suggesting replies and summarizing long ticket histories to help them work a bit faster.

The idea behind both is simple: automate the easy, repetitive questions so your team can spend their time on the tricky problems that need a human brain. It's all about making things run a little smoother and letting customers help themselves when they can.

A screenshot of the Freshdesk Freddy AI Copilot assisting a human agent. This illustrates the agent-facing features of Freshdesk bots.

Key features and capabilities of Freshdesk bots

So, what can Freddy AI actually do right out of the box? Freshworks focuses on a few core capabilities for its bot platform.

No-code conversational flow builder

Freshdesk gives you a visual, drag-and-drop tool to map out conversations for your chatbot. The goal is to let anyone on your team build simple, rule-based chats without needing to know how to code. For basic stuff, like guiding a user to a password reset article, it works well enough.

The trouble starts when you try to do anything more complicated. Building out workflows with many different steps can quickly turn into a tangled web of boxes and arrows that's a nightmare to manage or update.

A screenshot of Freshdesk's no-code conversational flow builder, which allows users to create rule-based Freshdesk bots visually.

Intent detection and omnichannel deployment

Freddy AI uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to guess what a customer is asking for, even if they don't use the exact words from your knowledge base. You can also put these bots on different channels like your website, WhatsApp, or Facebook Messenger, which is nice for keeping the experience consistent.

But here’s the thing: a bot's ability to understand intent is only as good as the information it has. If your knowledge base is out of date or just doesn't have an article that matches what a customer is asking, the bot will be stumped, no matter how fancy its NLP is.

Agent-facing assistance with Freshdesk bots

The Assist Bot (or Copilot) is designed to give your agents a hand. It can suggest replies pulled from your help articles, which can be genuinely useful for training new team members and making sure everyone is giving the same answers to common questions.

While getting suggestions from a knowledge base is a good start, it's only part of the story. A tool like eesel AI takes this a step further by drafting replies based on thousands of your team's actual past support tickets. This means the AI learns your team's unique voice and mimics the real solutions that have worked before, not just the formal language in a help doc.

A screenshot showing eesel AI's Copilot drafting a reply within Freshdesk, showcasing an alternative to Freshdesk bots for agent assistance.

Setting up and training Freshdesk bots: The reality

Anyone who has dabbled with AI knows that a bot is only as good as its training data. This is where the "garbage in, garbage out" rule really kicks in, and it's a big hurdle for teams using built-in help desk AI like Freddy.

The heavy reliance on a perfect knowledge base

Freshdesk bots learn almost exclusively from your official help articles and FAQs. In theory, that sounds fine. But in reality, whose knowledge base is ever truly complete? If your documentation has gaps, is outdated, or doesn't cover a customer's specific issue, the bot is set up to fail. It will either give a wrong answer, make something up (what the pros call a "hallucination"), or just punt the ticket to a human, which defeats the whole point.

And that’s the core problem, isn't it? The best, most useful knowledge your team has is usually buried in past support tickets and Slack threads, not sitting perfectly polished in a help article.

A look at the Freshdesk knowledge base interface, highlighting the reliance of Freshdesk bots on well-maintained help articles.

The challenge of testing and validating

How can you be sure your bot is ready to talk to real customers? With Freshdesk, it's tough to know until you just turn it on and hope for the best. Without a good way to test it, you're essentially flying blind. You risk launching a bot that frustrates people, gives bad advice, and chips away at your company's reputation. One bad bot interaction can be enough to lose a customer.

This is a huge difference compared to the simulation mode you get with a tool like eesel AI. eesel lets you test its AI on thousands of your own past tickets in a safe environment. You can see exactly how it would have responded to real customer problems, get a solid forecast on how many tickets it will resolve, and find knowledge gaps before any customer interacts with it. It’s about being confident in your launch, not just crossing your fingers.

The simulation mode in eesel AI, which allows teams to test their AI against past tickets before launching, a contrast to the testing limitations of Freshdesk bots.

The hidden complexity of configuration

Even though Freshworks advertises a "no-code" builder, getting a bot to work well is rarely a one-click affair. If you look at their support docs, you'll see there’s a lot to it. You have to set up tons of different rules, flows, and conditions.

It's also surprisingly easy to mess up.

Some users have found that one wrong setting can turn a helpful bot into a ticket-creation machine, flooding your human agents with even more work instead of reducing it.

Reddit

For a much simpler setup, eesel AI is designed to be straightforward. You can connect your Freshdesk account and other knowledge sources like Confluence or Google Docs in a few minutes. You can have a smart, context-aware AI running without needing a developer or spending weeks on training.

Freshdesk bots pricing explained

Figuring out what Freshdesk's AI actually costs can feel like trying to solve a puzzle. It’s not bundled into their main plans. Instead, you have to piece together different add-ons, which makes guessing your final bill a real headache.

Here's a simplified look at the moving parts:

This pricing structure creates a few problems:

• Unpredictable Costs: Paying "per session" for the AI Agent means your bill is tied directly to how many people contact you. If you have a busy month or a product bug causes a spike in tickets, your AI bill could jump without warning.

• Per-Agent Scaling: The Copilot fee grows with your team. As you hire more agents, your bill gets bigger, even if the tool isn't providing proportionally more value.

• It's Complicated: Juggling base plan fees, add-ons, and session packs is an administrative burden that most support managers would rather not deal with.

A better alternative to Freshdesk bots

For teams that want the benefits of AI without being locked into a single, closed-off system, there's a better way to think about it. The goal shouldn't just be to have a chatbot; it should be to have a smart one that genuinely helps people.

The knowledge limitation of Freshdesk bots: Unify all your knowledge

The biggest weakness of Freshdesk bots is that they are stuck inside Freshdesk. Their knowledge is limited to what's in your official solution articles. But we all know a company's real knowledge is scattered all over the place.

eesel AI is designed from the ground up to connect all the places your team already works. It learns from your past Freshdesk tickets, but it can also pull knowledge from Confluence, Google Docs, Notion, Slack, and dozens of other apps. This creates a much smarter AI that has the full picture it needs to give accurate answers.

An infographic showing how eesel AI unifies knowledge from various sources, a key advantage over the siloed approach of Freshdesk bots.

Get total control and a truly self-serve experience

eesel AI gives you a workflow engine that you can fully customize. You get to decide exactly which kinds of tickets you want to automate. You can start small, automating just one or two simple topics, and have the AI pass everything else to a human. You can also set up custom actions, like telling the bot to look up an order status in Shopify or check a user's account details in your own database.

Best of all, you can do it all yourself. You can sign up, connect your tools, set up your AI, and launch it without having to sit through a sales demo or talk to anyone. It just works.

Here’s a quick comparison:

Making the right choice for your support automation

While Freshdesk bots offer a built-in way to get started with automation, they come with some serious trade-offs in terms of knowledge sources, testing, and pricing. If you're just looking to tick the "we have AI" box, it might be enough.

But real success with support automation comes from a tool that is flexible, learns from all your team's real-world knowledge, and lets you start small and grow with confidence. It’s about finding a solution that fits with how your team already works, not one that locks you in.

Ready to see what powerful, accurate automation could look like for your team? Connect your Freshdesk account to eesel AI and see how our AI performs on your real ticket history in just a few minutes.