A practical guide to the Freshdesk Knowledge Base API

Let’s be honest, managing a knowledge base can feel like a full-time job on its own. You're constantly updating articles, shuffling content around, and just hoping your team and customers can find what they need. Using an API to help with this sounds promising, right? It can let you automate content workflows and connect your knowledge base to other tools.

This guide is your practical look at the Freshdesk Knowledge Base API. We’ll cover its main functions, check out a few real-world uses, and, just as importantly, talk about its limitations. You'll see why leaning on the API alone for modern support automation might not get you where you want to go, and how purpose-built AI tools can offer a much smoother path.

What is the Freshdesk Knowledge Base API?

First, let's clear up what an API is. A REST API (Application Programming Interface) is basically a set of rules that lets different software programs talk to each other. Think of it as a universal translator for your tech stack. Freshdesk offers a Knowledge Base API specifically for managing its "Solutions" section, that’s all the articles, folders, and categories that make up your help center.

Freshdesk has had a couple of API versions, but this guide focuses on API v2, which is what everyone is using now. It’s built for one main purpose: content management. It lets you create, read, update, and delete your knowledge base content using code. It's a tool for organizing your library of information, not for powering a smart chatbot or handling real-time conversations on its own.

Core capabilities of the Freshdesk Knowledge Base API

The API gives you a decent amount of control over the content in your Freshdesk knowledge base. It all boils down to a few key functions.

Managing solution articles, folders, and categories

At its core, the API lets you perform what developers call CRUD operations (Create, Read, Update, Delete) on your content. In simple terms, this means you can build your own little scripts or internal tools to manage articles without having to log into the Freshdesk interface every time. For instance, you could write a script to upload a batch of articles from a Google Doc or add a new disclaimer to hundreds of articles at once.

The same goes for the structure of your knowledge base. You can programmatically create, rename, or delete the folders and categories that keep your articles organized. This can be a lifesaver for big content clean-ups or migrations.

Searching for knowledge base articles

Freshdesk gives you a search endpoint (/api/v2/search/solutions) that lets you look up articles using a keyword. This is pretty useful if you want to build a custom search bar on your website or integrate help content into another app.

But it has its quirks. A known issue, often discussed by folks in the Freshworks developer community, is that the search API sometimes returns draft articles right alongside the published ones. This means you have to add an extra bit of code to filter out the unpublished stuff. It’s a bit of an annoying workaround, but it’s what you have to do.

Here’s a quick rundown of the main endpoints you'd use:

Action	Endpoint	Method	Description
List Articles in a Folder	/api/v2/solutions/folders/[id]/articles	GET	Pulls all articles from a specific folder.
Create Article	/api/v2/solutions/folders/[id]/articles	POST	Makes a new article in a chosen folder.
Update Article	/api/v2/solutions/articles/[id]	PUT	Edits the content or status of an article.
Delete Article	/api/v2/solutions/articles/[id]	DELETE	Removes a specific solution article.
Search Articles	/api/v2/search/solutions?term=[keyword]	GET	Searches for articles that contain a keyword.

Common use cases and critical limitations of the Freshdesk Knowledge Base API

While the API is fine for certain jobs, its cracks start to show when you try to build modern, automated support systems. Let's look at where it works well and where it just doesn’t.

What the Freshdesk Knowledge Base API is good for: Syncing content from another source

A classic use for the API is keeping documentation in sync. Say your official technical docs live in a separate system. You could write a script that runs every night, grabs the latest articles, and uses the Freshdesk API to create or update them in your "Solutions" section. This makes sure your customer-facing help center always has the latest info.

Where the Freshdesk Knowledge Base API gets tricky: The polling problem

This is where you might run into some headaches. Imagine you want to kick off an action the very second an article is updated in Freshdesk. The best way to do this would be with a webhook, an instant, automated ping from Freshdesk to your system saying, "Hey, something just changed!"

Unfortunately, as confirmed in their own developer community, Freshdesk doesn't have webhooks for knowledge base events. This forces you into a much clunkier method: polling.

Polling is like having your system constantly ask the Freshdesk API, "Anything new yet? How about now? Now?" every few minutes. It's slow, creates a ton of pointless API traffic, and makes your whole setup more complicated. You’re always playing catch-up because you only find out about changes after your last check.

In contrast, a modern platform like eesel AI connects directly to your knowledge sources for instant, automatic syncing. There’s no need for slow, repetitive polling because the system is designed to be in sync from the get-go.

Another big Freshdesk Knowledge Base API limitation: It only knows about Freshdesk

The Freshdesk Knowledge Base API only sees what's inside the Freshdesk knowledge base. But your company's real knowledge isn't just in one place. It’s spread all over the place, in Confluence, Google Docs, Slack threads, and maybe most importantly, in thousands of past support tickets.

This creates a huge knowledge silo. An AI bot you build on the Freshdesk API alone can't tap into all that other information unless you build and maintain separate, complicated integrations for every single one.

This infographic shows how a modern AI platform connects scattered knowledge from sources like Slack, Confluence, and Google Docs, which isn't possible with the Freshdesk Knowledge Base API alone.

This is exactly the kind of problem eesel AI was designed to fix. It connects all those different sources instantly, giving its AI agents a complete picture right out of the box. Instead of being limited to just your official help articles, it learns from everything.

Powering automation with an AI layer beyond the Freshdesk Knowledge Base API

Managing your content with an API is one thing, but actually using that content for smart automation is a whole different ballgame. The API is just the plumbing; you still need an engine to make sense of the information and do something useful with it.

It takes more than Freshdesk Knowledge Base API access to get answers

Just because you can access your knowledge base with an API doesn't mean you have an AI. If you wanted to build your own solution, you'd still need to develop, train, and maintain a separate AI model. That model would have to learn how to understand what customers are asking, find the right information in your articles, and put together a helpful response. It’s a huge project that requires a ton of specialized expertise and ongoing work.

The limits of the Freshdesk Knowledge Base API for actually automating support

The whole point of a knowledge base is to help customers, but the API itself can't do that. It just hands over the raw text.

This is where a ready-made solution like eesel AI's AI Agent makes a difference. It plugs right into Freshdesk, and instead of just reading your official knowledge base, it also learns from your past ticket conversations to solve issues on its own. What might take a team of developers months to build from scratch, you can get running in minutes. On top of that, eesel AI's AI Copilot can draft accurate replies for your human agents, something that's just not possible to build using only the API.

Unlike the Freshdesk Knowledge Base API, an AI Copilot can draft responses for agents by using the knowledge from the help center and past tickets.

Finding out what to write next: A gap in the Freshdesk Knowledge Base API

One of the toughest parts of knowledge management is figuring out what new articles to create. Your customers are telling you what they need to know every single day in their support tickets, but the API can't help you spot those gaps.

This is another area where a true AI platform pulls ahead. eesel AI analyzes your support conversations and can automatically suggest draft articles based on tickets that were successfully resolved. This helps your team easily find and fill content gaps with information you already know is helpful.

This screenshot shows an AI platform's analytics identifying knowledge gaps from support conversations, a feature not available through the Freshdesk Knowledge Base API.

Freshdesk pricing and Freshdesk Knowledge Base API access

The good news is that Freshdesk includes API access on all its plans. However, how well your custom integration works will depend a lot on your plan's rate limits.

Rate limits are just the number of API calls your system can make to Freshdesk per minute. If you go over the limit, your requests get temporarily blocked, which can break your integration. For a system that depends on constant polling, you can hit these limits faster than you’d think.

Here’s a simple look at the API rate limits for Freshdesk's plans:

Plan	Rate Limit/minute
Growth	200
Pro	400
Enterprise	700

For all the details on features and pricing, you can check out the official Freshdesk pricing page.

Beyond the Freshdesk Knowledge Base API: A better way to use your Freshdesk knowledge

Trying to build automation using only the Freshdesk API comes with a few major challenges: it's slow because it relies on polling, it's stuck looking only at the Freshdesk knowledge base, and it takes a lot of developer time to build and maintain any kind of AI bot.

A dedicated AI platform like eesel AI is built to get around these problems. Instead of you having to build all the connections between your tools, eesel AI already has them.

Here’s a quick comparison:

Feature	Custom Build with Freshdesk API	eesel AI Platform
Setup Time	Weeks or months of development	Live in a few minutes
Knowledge Sources	Freshdesk KB only	Connects 100+ sources instantly
Content Updates	Slow, manual polling required	Automatic, real-time sync
AI Smarts	You have to build your own model	Pre-built, learns from past tickets
Maintenance	Constant developer work	Fully managed for you

Move beyond the Freshdesk Knowledge Base API to real automation

The Freshdesk Knowledge Base API is a decent tool for what it was made for: managing content with code. It gives you a way to script updates and sync articles. But when you need the kind of smart, real-time, and connected automation that modern support teams depend on, it just doesn't cut it.

The reality is that an API is a building block, not a complete solution. Platforms like eesel AI handle all the messy integration and intelligence work for you, so your team can focus on giving great support instead of getting stuck managing APIs and custom code.

Ready to see what your knowledge base is truly capable of? Try eesel AI for free and see how fast you can automate your Freshdesk support.