A practical guide to Freshdesk solution articles in 2025

A great knowledge base can feel like a superpower for your support team. It lets customers help themselves and gives your agents the right answers at their fingertips. In Freshdesk, this all starts with Freshdesk solution articles. But let's be honest, creating and managing them can feel like a full-time job in itself.

This guide is here to break it all down. We'll look at what Freshdesk solution articles actually are, how to manage them with Freshdesk's own tools, and where you might start hitting some walls. Then, we’ll explore how a unified AI platform can help you get past those limitations, turning your knowledge base from a simple library into an engine that actively helps your team.

What are Freshdesk solution articles?

Simply put, Freshdesk solution articles are the individual pages that make up your knowledge base or customer help center. They're your how-to guides, FAQs, policy docs, and troubleshooting tips that both customers and agents rely on.

To keep everything from becoming a huge mess, Freshdesk organizes them into a simple three-level structure:

1. Categories: These are your big-picture topics. Think "Billing," "Getting Started," or "Product Features."

2. Folders: These are sub-topics that live inside a category. Under your "Billing" category, you might have folders for "Subscription Management" and "Payment Methods."

3. Articles: This is the actual content. An article inside the "Subscription Management" folder could be something like "How to upgrade or downgrade your plan."

A look at the Freshdesk knowledge base interface, where users can organize Freshdesk solution articles into categories and folders.

You can make articles public for anyone to see or keep them private for your internal team only. Each article moves from a "Draft" to a "Published" state, and Freshdesk has features to help you manage this workflow. When it’s all working well, this system is your first line of defense, handling common questions so your support team can focus on trickier issues.

Managing your Freshdesk solution articles: The native toolkit

Freshdesk gives you a set of built-in tools to create and manage your solution articles. They get the job done, but it’s worth understanding how they work because it highlights just how much manual effort is needed to keep a knowledge base truly useful.

Creating and organizing Freshdesk solution articles

The process of adding new content is pretty straightforward, but it's a completely manual task. An admin or agent has to spot a common customer question, write up a new article, and then figure out the right category and folder to put it in. This means someone has to be actively organizing everything, making sure each new piece of content is filed correctly so people can actually find it later.

Bulk actions and visibility settings for Freshdesk solution articles

If you have a large knowledge base, Freshdesk’s bulk actions can be a lifesaver. You can select a bunch of articles at once and change their visibility, move them to a new folder, or update their settings. It’s definitely helpful, but it still depends on an admin manually picking out the right articles and applying the changes. It’s a reactive way to manage content that requires constant attention to keep things current.

The role of Freddy AI in creating Freshdesk solution articles

To help speed things along, Freshdesk has Freddy AI, which includes a "Solution Article Generator." You can give it a short summary, and it'll spit out a full article draft. This can cut down on writing time, but it doesn't solve the bigger problem: you still have to figure out what to write about in the first place. The generator is a nice tool for writers, but it isn't a strategic solution for finding and filling knowledge gaps based on what customers are actually saying.

A screenshot of Freshdesk's Freddy AI assisting an agent with Freshdesk solution articles.

The whole workflow tends to look something like this: an agent sees the same question for the tenth time, checks if an article exists, and if not, they have to draft one (maybe with the generator's help). Then they need to file it in the right place and hit publish. It works, but it’s a lot of steps that depend on your team having the time and foresight to keep up with everything.

Limitations of Freshdesk's built-in tools

While Freshdesk provides a decent starting point, sticking only to its built-in knowledge base tools can create some real headaches, especially as your team grows. You often end up with outdated content, frustrated agents, and customers who can't find what they need.

The knowledge silo problem

Let’s face it, your company's knowledge rarely lives in one neat little box. You’ve probably got crucial information scattered across Google Docs, Confluence, Notion, and random Slack threads. Your Freshdesk solution articles exist in their own world, totally cut off from these other sources. This means your agents are constantly jumping between tabs trying to find answers, and your knowledge base ends up being an incomplete picture of the truth.

The "cold start" challenge for AI

Freshdesk's AI features, like the "Solution Article Suggester," sound great on paper, but there's a catch. The suggester, which recommends articles to agents mid-conversation, needs at least 25 solution articles in your knowledge base before it can even start working well. This "cold start" issue is a huge hurdle for new teams or anyone just starting to build out their help center. It's a classic chicken-and-egg problem, you need a full knowledge base for the AI to be helpful.

Manual upkeep and knowledge gaps

Even with an article generator, the job of figuring out what to write about still lands on your team. This is almost always a reactive process. It relies on agents noticing trends and manually pointing out where the knowledge base is lacking. As a result, important information gets missed, and the articles you do have might not even cover your customers' most common problems.

The truth is, your most valuable source of knowledge is your history of resolved tickets. But Freshdesk doesn't offer a built-in, automated way to dig through those conversations and suggest new article drafts. This is where a more connected solution like eesel AI can make a huge difference. It's built to break down these silos and automate the whole knowledge discovery process. By connecting to all your tools, including Freshdesk, it acts like a single, smart brain for your entire support operation.

Supercharging Freshdesk solution articles with a unified AI platform

Instead of ripping out your helpdesk and starting over, the right AI platform should make what you already have better. eesel AI works as an intelligent layer that plugs into Freshdesk and all your other knowledge sources. It’s designed to solve the core problems of native tools and turn your knowledge base into something that works for you, not against you.

Unify all your knowledge, instantly

First things first: break down those silos. eesel AI integrates directly with Freshdesk, but it also connects to the places your team is already sharing information, like Confluence, Google Docs, and Slack. Even better, it can train on your historical Freshdesk tickets from day one. This completely gets rid of the "cold start" problem. The AI learns your brand voice and common customer solutions right away, without needing you to have 25, 50, or 100 articles already written.

eesel AI's Copilot drafting a reply within Freshdesk, demonstrating how it unifies knowledge beyond just Freshdesk solution articles.

Automate Freshdesk solution articles creation, intelligently

eesel AI flips knowledge creation on its head, moving it from reactive to proactive. Its AI Agent analyzes your successfully resolved tickets and automatically generates new draft solution articles based on real customer problems. This doesn't just save a ton of time on manual writing; it makes sure your knowledge base is always focused on what your customers are actually asking about. It finds the gaps for you, so your team can focus on reviewing and publishing.

Go beyond Freshdesk solution articles with a fully controllable AI agent

While Freshdesk's AI can suggest articles, eesel's AI Agent can actually use them, along with all your other connected knowledge, to resolve tickets on its own. You get fine-grained control to decide exactly which types of tickets the AI should handle. You can start small and then let it take on more as you get comfortable. You can even give it custom actions, allowing it to do things like look up order information or update ticket fields, making it a true member of your team.

Test with confidence before you go live

Nervous about letting an AI talk to your customers? That's completely understandable. eesel AI's simulation mode lets you test your setup on thousands of your own historical tickets. You can see exactly how the AI would have responded, get accurate predictions on resolution rates, and tweak its behavior in a safe environment before you turn it on for live customers.

Feature	Freshdesk Freddy AI	eesel AI
Knowledge Sources	Limited to Freshdesk solution articles.	Unifies Freshdesk, past tickets, Confluence, Google Docs, Slack, and more.
AI Training	Requires a minimum of 25 articles for suggestions to work.	Learns from historical tickets instantly, no minimum required.
Content Creation	Manually-prompted article generator.	Proactively generates draft articles from resolved tickets.
Automation Control	Basic rules for suggesting articles or routing.	Granular control to automate specific ticket types; includes custom actions.
Pre-launch Testing	No comprehensive simulation environment.	Powerful simulation mode to test on past tickets and forecast performance.

Freshdesk AI pricing

Of course, we have to talk about cost. Freshdesk's pricing for its Freddy AI features can be a bit complex, as they're mostly sold as add-ons to the main plans.

Here's a quick look at their plans (billed annually):

• Growth: $15/agent/month

• Pro: $49/agent/month

• Enterprise: $79/agent/month

But the key AI features usually come with an extra price tag:

• Freddy AI Copilot (which includes the Article Generator): This costs an additional $29/agent/month on top of a Pro or Enterprise plan.

• Freddy AI Agent (for automated resolutions): This starts at $100 per 1,000 sessions, with a session being a single interaction. This usage-based model can get pricey fast, especially when you're busy.

A transparent alternative: eesel AI pricing

eesel AI's pricing is designed to be more predictable. Instead of charging you per agent for AI features or per resolution, plans are based on a flat monthly fee that includes a set number of AI interactions (an interaction is one AI reply or action).

Plan	Price (Billed Annually)	AI Interactions/mo
Team	$239/month	Up to 1,000
Business	$639/month	Up to 3,000

This approach means your costs don't unexpectedly spike as you add more agents or your ticket volume increases. All the main products, like the AI Agent, Copilot, and Triage, are included, so you get a complete toolkit without worrying about hidden fees.

Build Freshdesk solution articles that work for you

At the end of the day, Freshdesk solution articles are the foundation of your customer self-service. The native tools are fine for getting started, but they can quickly leave your team buried in manual work and trying to manage knowledge that’s spread all over the place. The built-in AI is a step in the right direction, but it's ultimately limited by the information it can see inside Freshdesk.

By adding a unified AI platform like eesel AI on top of your helpdesk, you can break down those walls. You can connect all your knowledge sources, automate article creation based on what your customers actually need, and deploy a controllable AI agent that starts helping out from day one.

Ready to see how you can give your Freshdesk knowledge base a serious boost? Get started with eesel AI for free.