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LiveAgent Vs Freshdesk Comparison: Which One Is the Best for You

Last Updated: March 2024

LiveAgent vs Freshdesk

If you’re looking for the right customer service solution for your company, choosing between these two platforms can be difficult

Well, we’ve got you covered. In this guide, let’s compare two of the most popular customer service solutions available in the market and see which one is better for your business: Freshdesk or LiveAgent.

We’ll compare them overall while also focusing on their specific features to determine which one is a better fit for your company.

Live Chat (Final Winner: Both) 

Web Widget (Winner: LiveAgent)

Give customers access to your customer support team by embedding a customized widget onto your website.

  • LiveAgent includes the ability to design your own chat button that can be placed anywhere on your website. It comes with unlimited chat buttons from the Ticket+Chat plan.
  • Freshdesk also includes a widget that allows visitors to have a real-time conversation with your representatives.
Winner: LiveAgent
Livechat Customization (Winner: Both)

Customize your chat widget’s design, appearance, and messaging options to provide a personalized chat experience across platforms while also matching the look and tone of your brand.

  • LiveAgent lets you choose the button’s position, colors, animation, hover effect, mobile options, and Z index.
  • With Freshdesk, you can easily customize your omnichannel chat widget to match the look and feel of your brand. 
Winner: Both
Canned Responses (Winner: Freshdesk)

This allows you to provide quick, consistent responses to common questions by creating pre-formatted responses.

  • LiveAgent enables your team to quickly respond to common requests with a standard response.(Not included in Free plan)
  • With Freshdesk, your agents can build predefined reply templates that they can send with a single click.
Winner: Freshdesk
Proactive Chat Invitations (Winner: Both)
  • LiveAgent allows you to reach out and offer help to customers that are currently browsing your website. 
  • Freshdesk also allows you to initiate conversations with visitors based on their website activities or the information they share with you.
Winner: Both
Chat Contact Form (Winner: LiveAgent)

Customers can use this feature to send an offline message via the chat widget. The offline message is then saved in your chat history, with a copy sent to the agent.

  • LiveAgent offers two different types of contact forms: a contact form using a button or an In-page contact form.
  • Freshdesk provides pre-chat forms, which allow you to collect information from your visitors before the chat begins.
Winner: LiveAgent

Helpdesk Features (Final Winner: Freshdesk) 

Multi-Channel Inbox (Winner: LiveAgent)

To manage customer communication at scale, organize customer questions from multiple channels, in a shared inbox that your entire team can access.

  • LiveAgent comes with a unified inbox that allows you to access all of your messages from a single location. It can even be used for multi-brand support.
  • Freshdesk acts as a single point of contact for all customer inquiries. However, this is not included in the Free Plan. 
Winner: LiveAgent
Ticketing System (Winner: Freshdesk)

The helpdesk includes a system for managing, assigning, and prioritizing customer inquiries. This enables your agents to engage customers through various channels and easily convert queries into tickets.

  • LiveAgent includes a centralized platform for capturing, organizing, and managing customer service requests. It also comes with a built-in CRM.
  • Freshdesk‘s ticketing system can convert customer issues from any channel into tickets. The platform even comes with AI-powered ticketing.
Winner: Freshdesk
Email Support (Winner: Freshdesk)
  • With LiveAgent, you can connect your own/company email accounts and store all of your business emails as tickets. It even offers free email templates for marketing, sales, live chat, and customer service.
  • You can use your own email servers for sending and receiving emails through Freshdesk, in addition to setting up your support mailbox via email forwarding.
Winner: Freshdesk
Voice Channel (Winner: Freshdesk)
  • LiveAgent includes Call Center Support for receiving or making a large number of calls. However, this is only included in the All-Inclusive pricing plan. 
  • Freshdesk also lets you set up your virtual call center from within the platform. It even auto-assigns calls to your agents based on their available bandwidth.
Winner: Freshdesk
Video Call (Winner: LiveAgent)

Your agents can start an immediate video call while conversing with customers. This makes it possible to provide real-time advice, informational sessions, tailored shopping experiences, etc.

  • LiveAgent’s video call is entirely browser-based, with no need for a third-party application.
  • Freshdesk, unfortunately, does not natively come with this feature. 
Winner: LiveAgent
Agent Collision Detection (Winner: Freshdesk)

The collision detection feature prevents multiple agents from working on the same ticket at the same time. This allows you to save time while also better organizing the workflow of your team.

  • LiveAgent prevents multiple agents from working on the same ticket by displaying who is viewing a ticket and who is responding to it
  • In addition to Collision detection, Freshdesk includes a Traffic Cop feature to prevent duplicate replies or replies that do not take recent developments into account. 
Winner: Freshdesk
Queue Management (Winner: Both)

This feature allows you to avoid an overload of customer inquiries and improve wait time. 

  • LiveAgent comes with features like max queue length and Chat/Call queue indicator.
  • Freshdesk includes dynamic queue prioritization, allowing you to assign tickets based on various conditions.
Winner: Both
3rd Party Integrations (Winner: Both)
  • Both LiveAgent and Freshdesk allow you to integrate the helpdesks directly into your website, as well as a large number of third-party stores and apps.
Winner: Both
Message Sneak-Peeks (Winner: LiveAgent)

Previewing customer messages can help your agents prepare their responses faster or conduct quick research on topics and customers.

  • LiveAgent includes a real-time typing view that allows your agents to preview the text that a customer is typing at the time.
  • Freshdesk, unfortunately, does not natively come with this feature.  
Winner: LiveAgent

Social Media (Final Winner: Freshdesk)

Facebook Integration (Winner: Both)
  • Both LiveAgent and Freshdesk convert the messages received on your Facebook Messenger to tickets. Your agents can easily view and reply to the messages through the dashboard without switching tabs. (Additional monthly feature fee)
Winner: Both
Instagram Integration (Winner: LiveAgent)
  • Both LiveAgent and Freshdesk allow your agents to easily view and reply to Instagram messages through the dashboard without switching tabs. However, Freshdesk does not integrate with Instagram natively. (Additional monthly feature fee)
Winner: LiveAgent
WhatsApp Integration (Winner: Freshdesk)
  • Unfortunately, LiveAgent does not integrate with WhatsApp natively.
  •  Freshdesk offers native WhatsApp integration.
Winner: Freshdesk
Twitter Integration (Winner: Freshdesk)

Conveniently convert tweets and mentions into tickets. 

  • LiveAgent offers native Twitter integration. This is only available in Ticket+Chat and All-Inclusive plans. (Additional monthly feature fee)
  • Freshdesk offers native Twitter integration with all its plans. 
Winner: Freshdesk

Self Service (Final Winner: LiveAgent)

Knowledge base (Winner: Both)

Convert your most frequently asked support questions into a knowledge base of help articles, allowing customers to help themselves. 

  • LiveAgent also allows you to add knowledge base articles, forums, or feedback boards. It even includes search widgets that can be placed anywhere on your knowledge base pages.
  • Freshdesk lets you publish knowledge base portals for different products, in multiple languages.
Winner: Both
Customer Portal (Winner: LiveAgent)

A portal where customers can view and respond to conversations across email, chat, social messaging and SMS.

  • LiveAgent’s customer portal lets your customers login and view their whole ticket history in the portal. (Included in Ticket, Ticket+Chat, All-Inclusive plans)
  • Freshdesk also lets you set up a portal to browse through your Knowledge Base, engage on your Forums, and raise and track their tickets.
Winner: LiveAgent
Community/Forum (Winner: LiveAgent)

A Community or Forum enables customers to interact and help each other by answering questions and sharing best practices.

  • LiveAgent allows you to create 2 kinds of forums; internal and public. (Included in Free, Ticket, Ticket+Chat, All-Inclusive plans)
  • Freshdesk also allows you to create a community so that your customers can interact with one another. (Included in Pro, Enterprise plans)
Winner:  LiveAgent

Automation (Final Winner: Freshdesk)

Chatbots (Winner: Freshdesk)

The helpdesk allows you to deploy custom chatbots. With conversational assistants, you can collect relevant customer information, increase agent productivity, and streamline the support experience. 

  • Unfortunately, LiveAgent does not come with native chatbots.
  • Freshdesk‘s AI system interacts with customers via any channel 24/7 and delivers a relevant answer from the knowledge base.
Winner: Freshdesk
Auto-assign Tickets (Winner: LiveAgent)
  • LiveAgent allows you to use a set of automated ticket distribution rules such as round-robin, ring to all, random assignment, or max utilization. (Included in Ticket, Ticket+Chat, All-Inclusive plans)
  • Tickets in Freshdesk can be assigned based on an agent’s skill, workload, or distributed equally amongst your team. (Included in Pro, Enterprise plans)
Winner: LiveAgent
Automated Workflows (Winner: Both)

Set up automation workflows for system actions that are automatically executed if predefined conditions are met.

  • Both LiveAgent and Freshdesk lets you set up a trigger and an action, and when the trigger conditions are met, the action is executed. 
Winner: Both
Ticket Monitoring (Winner: Freshdesk)
  • LiveAgent allows you to set up automation rules. However, it doesn’t offer native ticket monitoring/ scanning. 
  • Freshdesk increases efficiency by automatically scanning all of your tickets every hour to see if an update or alert is required. (Included in Growth, Pro, and Enterprise plans)
Winner: Freshdesk
Intent Detection (Winner: Freshdesk)

Automatically detect, and route bot conversations based on customer input. With this feature, you can now create automated workflows to handle specific customer intents. 

  • LiveAgent does not come with this feature. 
  • Freshdesk enables your self-service bot to understand your customers’ intent during a conversation
Winner: Freshdesk

Reports (Final Winner: Freshdesk)

Performance Reports (Winner: LiveAgent)

These reports help businesses monitor the status of their support agents/teams.

  • LiveAgent’s performance report contains the total number of opened chats, resolved tickets, calls, and more. 
  • With Freshdesk, you get insights into the amount of time taken by each agent to resolve a ticket.
Winner: LiveAgent
Customer portal (Winner: Freshdesk)

The customer portal reports give you the analytics that help you monitor the views of your knowledge base or guide. It also informs you whether people found your articles useful or not.

  • LiveAgent, unfortunately, does not come with this feature.
  • You can integrate Freshdesk with Google Analytics to get a quick idea of what customers are looking for in your support portal.
Winner: Freshdesk
Bot Reports (Winner: Freshdesk)

The bot reports help you monitor the performance of the automated bots in your helpdesk. 

  • LiveAgent, unfortunately, does not come with this feature. 
  • Freshdesk comes with Bot Performance reports.  
Winner: Freshdesk
Customer Reports (Winner: Both)
  • Both LiveAgent and Freshdesk Analytics allows you to customize and build custom reports based on your requirements with minimal effort and no coding. 
Winner: Both

Bottom Line:

So, LiveAgent and Freshdesk. With the above factors compared, which tool do you think is the right one for your company?

We hope this guide cleared up some questions and made it easier to choose a platform. 

If you want to make it easier for customers to contact your service team while also empowering your support reps to provide the best service possible, Saufter could be the platform for you. It is a multi-channel customer service help desk designed for small businesses and enterprise teams. The platform is designed to be cost-effective, easy to set up, and most agents can get started on Saufter with little to no training.

So, what are you waiting for?

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