HubSpot vs Freshdesk: Which helpdesk is right for you in 2025?

Picking a new helpdesk can feel like you’re being asked to choose a side. Do you go for the all-in-one platform that promises to keep everything and everyone on the same page? Or do you pick the specialized tool that does one thing exceptionally well? That’s the heart of the HubSpot vs Freshdesk debate. They’re both heavyweights in the customer support ring, but they come from completely different corners.

If you’re caught between these two, you’re in good company. The best choice really boils down to how your team works, what tools you’re already using, and where you see your company heading. This guide is here to help you cut through the marketing noise. We’ll lay out a practical comparison of their main features, built-in AI, integrations, and pricing.

We’ll also talk about a third path you might not have considered: picking the helpdesk your team loves for their day-to-day tasks and then layering on a smarter, more flexible AI to do the heavy lifting.

What are HubSpot Service Hub and Freshdesk?

Let’s get the introductions out of the way. While both tools help you manage customer conversations, they have very different origin stories.

HubSpot Service Hub

is the customer service module of the bigger HubSpot CRM platform, which also has hubs for Marketing, Sales, and Operations. Its main draw is the dream of a single, unified view of every customer. The idea is that everything, from the first ad they clicked to their latest support ticket, lives in one place. This makes it a really attractive option for companies that are already drinking the HubSpot Kool-Aid (or plan to). The goal isn’t just closing tickets; it’s understanding how every support interaction fits into the bigger picture.

Freshdesk

, on the other hand, is a purpose-built customer support tool from the Freshworks family of products. It was designed from day one with a single mission: to help support agents solve problems as efficiently as possible. It’s known for having a ton of features focused on agent productivity and handling complex support workflows. If you’re looking for a powerful, standalone helpdesk that can plug into the rest of your tech stack, Freshdesk is usually at the top of the list.

Core helpdesk features: A HubSpot vs Freshdesk comparison

Both platforms have the basics covered, but the way they handle them shows you what they really care about. One is all about a single customer view, while the other is obsessed with deep, support-specific tools.

Ticketing and case management

This is where your agents live and breathe, so it has to feel right.

• HubSpot: The ticketing system is clean and easy to get the hang of. It uses customizable pipelines that will feel familiar if you’ve ever used their sales tools. The real standout feature is how every ticket is automatically linked to a contact in the CRM. This gives agents instant context on a customer’s entire history, sales calls, marketing emails, you name it, without needing to open another tab. The collaboration tools, like shared inboxes and internal notes, are simple and get the job done.

• Freshdesk: This is where Freshdesk’s specialized focus really pays off. It offers more advanced, nitty-gritty ticketing features built for teams handling a high volume of complex requests. You can merge related tickets, split one ticket into multiple smaller tasks for different teams, and even automatically assign tickets based on an agent’s current workload to prevent burnout. Little things like "team huddles" (private notes inside a ticket) show it’s been designed by people who understand the chaos of a busy support queue.

Omnichannel support

Your customers expect to be able to reach you wherever they are. Here’s how the two platforms handle it.

• HubSpot: It covers the main channels you’d expect: email, live chat, Facebook Messenger, and phone support via VoIP. The strength here isn’t the sheer number of channels, but how they all feed into one central HubSpot Conversations inbox. It keeps every chat, email, and call tied to that single customer record.

• Freshdesk: It offers a wider variety of channels out of the box, including popular messaging apps like WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat, and X (formerly Twitter). It’s set up to be a true omnichannel solution, letting you meet customers on their turf. It’s worth pointing out, though, that its phone service, Freshcaller, is usually a paid add-on.

Self-service and knowledge base

Letting customers help themselves is one of the smartest ways to scale your support without hiring an army of agents.

• HubSpot: The knowledge base tool is solid and integrates nicely with its chatbots and ticketing. It’s straightforward to set up, and the analytics give you a good sense of which articles are actually helping people and which ones just lead to more tickets.

• Freshdesk: Freshdesk goes a bit deeper on self-service. On top of a powerful knowledge base, it also lets you build community forums where customers can help each other out. It has more advanced content management features too, like article versioning and approval workflows. It even has a clever "Email-to-KBase" feature that lets an agent turn a detailed reply into a draft for a new knowledge base article, which is a huge time-saver.

A look at native AI and automation

Both HubSpot and Freshdesk are investing heavily in AI, but their built-in tools have the same Achilles’ heel. They are designed to work almost exclusively with the data that lives inside their own platform. This means your AI could be trying to answer questions with one hand tied behind its back.

HubSpot AI vs Freshdesk’s Freddy AI

• HubSpot AI: Formerly known as Breeze Copilot, HubSpot’s AI can do things like summarize long conversations, suggest replies, and help you build simple chatbots. It’s useful for giving agents a starting point for their responses.

  • The Limitation: Its knowledge is stuck within the HubSpot universe. If your technical documentation lives in Confluence, your SOPs are in Google Docs, and your product updates are posted in Notion, HubSpot’s AI is completely blind to them. This leads to half-answers and agents having to hunt for information manually, which kind of defeats the whole point.

• Freshdesk’s Freddy AI: Freddy is a collection of AI tools that includes agent assistance (Freddy Copilot), chatbots (Freddy Self-Service), and analytics (Freddy Insights). It’s pretty good at spotting trends in your helpdesk and suggesting relevant canned responses.

  • The Limitation: Just like HubSpot, Freddy AI is trapped inside the Freshworks ecosystem. It’s great at remembering past tickets but has no idea what’s happening in the rest of your company’s knowledge sources. If a customer asks about a feature that was detailed in a recent product update doc, Freddy is going to draw a blank.

The third option: A universal AI layer

This is where you can get the best of both worlds without making a tough compromise. Instead of relying on a walled-off native AI, you can connect a dedicated AI platform to whichever helpdesk you choose. This is exactly why we built eesel AI. Our platform was created to fix the "siloed knowledge" problem that trips up so many built-in AI tools.

• Bring all your knowledge together: With one click, eesel AI connects to helpdesks like Freshdesk and HubSpot. But it doesn’t stop there. It also plugs into all the other places your team stores information, Confluence, Google Docs, Notion, you name it. This gives your AI the full picture, allowing it to provide accurate, complete answers that native tools just can’t match.

With eesel AI, you can connect all your company's knowledge sources, not just your helpdesk, to provide complete and accurate answers.

• Go live in minutes, with full control: Native AI tools can be rigid and take forever to set up. eesel AI is built to be self-serve. You can connect your helpdesk, run a simulation on thousands of your past tickets to see exactly how it will perform, and then decide precisely which kinds of tickets you want to automate. You can start small with the easy, repetitive questions and expand from there as you get more comfortable. It’s a no-risk way to roll out automation you can actually trust.

Ecosystem and integrations

How a helpdesk fits in with the rest of your tools is a huge piece of the puzzle.

• HubSpot’s walled garden: HubSpot’s biggest trump card is how seamlessly it integrates with its own Sales, Marketing, and CMS Hubs. If your whole company runs on HubSpot, you get a powerful, unified system where information flows smoothly between teams. Its app marketplace has over 1,400 integrations, but the real magic is designed to happen inside its own ecosystem.

• Freshdesk’s open approach: Freshdesk is built to be the support hub in a "best-of-breed" tech stack, where you pick the best tool for each specific job. It’s designed to play nicely with others. With over 1,000 apps in its marketplace, it connects easily with popular CRMs like Salesforce, project management tools, and e-commerce platforms. This gives you the freedom to build your ideal toolkit without being locked into one vendor.

• The eesel AI angle: An AI platform like eesel AI is designed for either philosophy. Whether you’re all-in on HubSpot’s unified platform or you’ve pieced together a custom stack with Freshdesk at the center, eesel AI plugs right in, pulls all your scattered knowledge together, and powers your automation.

HubSpot vs Freshdesk: Pricing explained

Pricing for these tools can get complicated, and the price on the box doesn’t always tell the full story. Here’s a breakdown of their plans and some of the costs that aren’t always obvious.

HubSpot Service Hub pricing

Plan	Price (per seat/month)	Key Features	Hidden Costs
Free Tools	$0	Basic ticketing, live chat (up to 5 users)	–
Starter	~$20	Simple automation, conversation routing	–
Professional	~$100	Help desk automation, knowledge base, surveys	Requires a 5-seat minimum ($500/mo) plus a mandatory ~$1,500 onboarding fee.
Enterprise	~$130	Custom objects, field-level permissions	Requires a 10-seat minimum ($1,300/mo) plus a mandatory ~$3,500 onboarding fee.

Freshdesk pricing

Plan	Price (per agent/month, billed annually)	Key Features	Hidden Costs
Free	$0	Basic ticketing, knowledge base (up to 10 agents)	–
Growth	$15	Automation, SLA management, collision detection	–
Pro	$49	Custom roles, multiple products/languages	–
Enterprise	$79	AI-powered features, advanced controls	Many of the advanced AI tools (Freddy Self-Service, Freddy Copilot) and phone capabilities (Freshcaller) cost extra.

Pro Tip: It’s worth comparing these models with eesel AI’s pricing. Our plans are transparent and based on the number of AI interactions, not how many tickets it resolves. This means you won’t get a surprise bill after a busy month, and your costs scale predictably as you grow.

This 2025 comparison video breaks down which helpdesk might be the best fit for your team's needs.

HubSpot vs Freshdesk: Which one should you choose?

Alright, after all that, what’s the final call?

Choose HubSpot if:

Your company is already running on the HubSpot ecosystem for sales and marketing (or you’re about to be). The power of having a single view of the customer on one platform is its greatest strength, and that’s hard to beat if you’re committed to that all-in-one approach.

Choose Freshdesk if:

You need a powerful, dedicated helpdesk with deep, support-focused features. If you want the flexibility to build your own tech stack with the best tools for each job, Freshdesk is the more open and often more capable choice for pure customer support.

But here’s my final piece of advice: the most important job of your helpdesk is to organize conversations and make your agents’ lives less stressful. Pick the platform with the workflow and interface your team genuinely prefers using every day.

Then, instead of settling for its limited, siloed built-in AI, you can plug in a specialized tool like eesel AI to handle automation using knowledge from your entire company.

Get the best of both worlds with eesel AI

You don’t have to choose between a helpdesk your team loves and an AI that actually works. With eesel AI, you can pick the best platform for your agents and layer on a powerful AI that gets up and running in minutes, learns from all your scattered docs, and puts you in complete control of your automation strategy.

Start your free eesel AI trial or book a demo.