Better Than Freshdesk: Issuetrak is the Best Freshdesk Alternative

Freshdesk offers many of the same features as Issuetrak help desk software. So why should you choose Issuetrak?

Is Freshdesk Enough? Why You’ll End Up Spending More Than You Need To

You can’t just buy Freshdesk. Freshdesk is one of many Freshworks products and is a customer service software (CSS) solution that helps you track, manage and resolve your customers’ complaints. 

While it is an effective tool to improve your CSAT scores, Freshdesk's customer service functionalities alone aren’t enough to address all your help desk needs.

When Do You Need Freshdesk vs. Freshservice? Why Issuetrak Outclasses Both

To manage your customer experience, Freshdesk's cloud-based customer support software gives you:

• Email, phone, social, chat, and messaging channels to handle customer requests
  
  
• A customizable default reporting dashboard
  
  
• Reporting with metrics like ticket volume trends, timesheet summaries, agent and group performance levels, and ticket lifecycle analytics

Freshdesk will handle all your major customer concerns, but it’s not an IT support software tool and therefore not equipped to handle internal or IT help desk issues. In this case, you would have to opt in for Freshservice, Freshworks’ internal IT help desk and service management platform.

In other words, you would have to pay an entirely separate retainer for yet another product in your tech stack. 

Adding Freshservice, you’ll also benefit from an ITIL-aligned setup featuring modules like :

• Incident management
  
  
• Change management
  
  
• Problem management for disruptions
  
  
• Release management to track building and testing new plans in the support lifecycle
  
  
• Self-service
  
  
• Knowledge management
  
  
• Asset management
  
  
• Service-level agreements (SLAs)

As an alternative to Freshdesk, Issuetrak has several features that answer the needs of both an ITSM and a customer service SaaS solution. 

Issuetrak can do a lot of what Freshdesk and Freshservice do combined, making it an all-in-one ticketing tool for a lesser price.

How it works: Our customers can use our software’s visibility controls to provide outward facing customer support as well as ticket tracking to internal departments. Neither Freshdesk’s customer relationship management nor Freshservice’s IT support software tool alone can handle more.

For example: with Issuetrak, a property management company can use a webform for customers to make service requests or complaints. Those requests go into an Issuetrak site, where internal automations assign tasks to responsible parties. 

Other departments use the same site for their own tracking purposes: the finance department uses the same site to track customer payment issues, and the facilities management team tracks assets and repair requests.

Part of Issuetrak’s adaptability is that you can pick and choose the modules and features you need the most at your help desk. 

While Freshworks parses out their service offerings, forcing you to buy multiple products, Issuetrak is an optimal Freshdesk alternative built to handle all help desk operations:

Specific examples of how departments and industries use Issuetrak include:

• School transportation complaint tracking
  
  
• Manufacturing inventory tracking or delivery
  
  
• Health equipment asset tracking
  
  
• HR employee requests or issues
  
  
• Task Management for customer service requests or feedback
  
  
• In-depth progress reporting for the Defense sector
  
  
• IT asset tracking in offices or schools

Freshworks hides behind a big name, but in the words of one frustrated user:

“No matter how many features a company has developed or how advanced its technology has offered, ignoring customers is fatal.”

Downhill Reviews, Buggy Software, and Poor Service 

Freshdesk boasts of its newest FreddyAI capability—not realizing that AI seems to backfire on support. 

The most recent complaints of 2023’s last quarter report slow, unresponsive tech support with limited technical understanding, often using “bot-generated solutions” that conclude its responses with an ironic “please contact support”.

Sadly, these recent reviews are a complete 180 from the stellar feedback of prior years, where Freshdesk support used to receive endless praise. Freshdesk’s decline may in part be due to their spamming efforts towards existing clients.

More than one disgruntled user complained of “receiving frequent calls on promotional offers for Freshdesk products”, which was both disturbing and off putting.

On top of spamming customers and less-than-mediocre support, a consistent stream of bug complaints plague review sites:

• Poor App performance shows frequent glitches and delays in responsiveness
  
  
• Fresh Chat mobile crashes frequently without reason, and neglects to send notifications or an error code to help fix the problem
  
  
• Occasional attachment loss and an inability to search objects in attached files hugely affect ticketing accountability
  
  
• Slow, buggy changes to tickets, such as the need for several page refreshes to change ticket status
  
  
• Poorly functioning Round Robin, Intelligent Ticket Assignment, or Omniroute, adding a lot of emails to an already busy mail queue
  
  
• Wasted time on rectifying formatting issues 
  
  
• Billing changes without notice that remove salient features
  
  
• Billing bugs that require continual engagement with a lackluster customer support team
  
  
• Difficulty integrating Freshdesk with other applications
  
  
• Poor AI suggestions and inaccurate solutions despite countless hours training the system

“Once you use Freshdesk’s product, you realize how flawed and buggy it is. Aside from our user experience being substandard, we ran into formatting issues, billing charges without notice, difficulty integrating, poor AI, terrible customer support in general. In summary, I would avoid Freshdesk. We are a small team with lightweight requirements, and I dread to think what the experience would be like for a larger company.”

Issuetrak does everything in its power to provide its well-earned 99% CSAT rating in real-time. Unlike other help desk software providers, we have a support phone line with calls answered in under 30 seconds, plus email and chat. Not to mention, each of our customers is assigned an Account Manager from the first discovery call to the end of time, ensuring your needs are always tended to.

Moreover, we take customer feedback very seriously. Any form-fills on our Product Feedback form go directly to our Product Owner, who sifts through each bug complaint or product request and timelines the most beneficial updates to our customers.

Rest assured, Issuetrak’s support is incomparable and our customers always feel taken care of.

“Issuetrak customer support is top notch; professional services team and developers are always available to help us and know the system throughout. Our Issuetrak account manager is in regular contact with us to ensure we have everything we need to provide the best service to our customers!” - Director of Operations Jeromy S., Capterra Reviews

Issuetrak’s Features Outperform Freshdesk

Unlimited Free Users, Detailed Reporting, Customization Options

Being required to purchase licenses for every single user is a strain on your budget. Issuetrak’s unlimited FREE users have wide ranging permissions that help address ticket volume and appease employees and customers alike.

“I dislike that the [Freshdesk] platform is dependent on licenses for users.”

Many of our competitors charge you for every fully-permissioned agent—and you may be paying for more than you need. 

And Issuetrak’s agents don’t differ too wildly from our free users—which means you pay less, and you empower unpaid endless users with 50+ ticketing functions that you specify.

SEE: Learn more about agent versus free user permissions here.

Our reporting has improved massively over several releases - and unlike Freshdesk, we don't charge you more for custom reporting. Any clunky reporting functions have been replaced with a smoother, streamlined reporting process [Release 15.7 and 15.9]. What’s more, our dashboard presents more views than ever, helping your agents and managers keep a bird’s eye view on any performance metric [Release 16.3]. 

Freshdesk’s changes to reporting, however, have been reportedly subpar. When Freshdesk discontinued its legacy reports and moved to analytics, users saw a decline in data accuracy. Complicated analytics leaves a sour taste in the mouths of many users who once relied on Freshdesk’s reporting. 

Several reviews complain of rigid limitations to customization Freshdesk for their use, including a general lack of customization to the customer-facing interfaces or disallowing many modifications that would be customizable in other programs. 

For any size organization requiring highly customizable and intricate workflows, “Freshdesk might have limitations in meeting extensive scalability and advanced automation needs”.

Bottom Line

Overall:

• Freshworks parses out customer support and internal help desk, forcing you to buy more than one product to be able to manage both customer and employee requests. 
  
  
• Issuetrak is capable of customer complaint handling and internal help desk ticketing. Rather than buying multiple Freshworks products, choosing to buy Issuetrak on its own would fulfill both customer and employee-facing help desk ticketing requirements.
  
  
• Moreover, Freshdesk has fallen from glory in the last few years, weighed down by its hefty pricing for multiple products, poor support, unresolved bugs, and price limitations on features. 
  
  
• Issuetrak has made great leaps to fill the industry’s gaps—without resorting to spam or overcharging loyal customers. 

We constantly seek to improve our software product and be an excellent vendor to work with. Ready to find out for yourself?