The free plan has gone

This is the thing to know, and almost every published round-up still has it wrong.

Freshdesk built its reputation on a free tier that covered a small team on email tickets. On its pricing page as of 14 September 2026, that plan is not there. The page shows Growth at $19 per agent a month and Pro at $55, both billed annually, with AI agent sessions and day passes as paid add-ons on top.

Those are the same two numbers Zendesk charges for Support Team and Suite Team. So the historic pitch, that Freshdesk was the cheaper one, no longer holds at the entry level.

If you came here because you were on the free plan and it ended, the two open-source options below are the direct replacements, and neither has an agent cap.

Freshdesk alternatives compared

Cheapest paid tier and what the free tier really allows, checked against each vendor’s own page on 14 September 2026.

Where the cheap options actually are now

With Freshdesk and Zendesk both starting at $19, the genuinely cheap end of this category has moved.

Self-hosted and free. FreeScout gives you unlimited agents and tickets for the price of PHP hosting. osTicket does the same with a more formal ticketing model. Neither has a per-agent charge, which is the line that grows fastest as a team scales.

Priced per workspace, not per agent. Crisp charges for the workspace rather than each person in it, which suits a five-person company where everyone occasionally answers support.

Priced by volume. Gorgias charges by monthly tickets. If you are a seasonal business, this is structurally better than per-agent billing, because a Christmas hire does not add a line item.

The question worth asking is which of those three shapes matches how your team grows. Per-agent pricing is the worst fit for a small team where support is everyone’s occasional job.

What you give up by leaving

Freshdesk earns its price in three places, and it is worth checking whether you use them.

Freddy AI. The AI agent handles first-line queries, with the first 500 sessions included on Growth and more sold in blocks. If a meaningful share of your tickets are repeat questions, that deflection has real value and only Tidio and Crisp among the options here do something comparable.

Out-of-the-box reporting. The analytics work without configuration. FreeScout and osTicket will need you to build or buy reporting.

The Freshworks suite. If you also use Freshservice or Freshsales, the shared customer record disappears when you leave.

If none of those three describe you, you were paying for a platform and using an inbox.

Migrating a helpdesk without losing history

Support history is harder to move than any other kind of business data, because it is threaded conversations with attachments rather than rows.

Freshdesk exports tickets, contacts and companies as CSV, and its API returns full conversation threads if someone writes a script. Attachments, private notes, satisfaction ratings and automation rules generally do not transfer.

The approach that works: migrate open tickets properly, archive closed tickets as a stored export rather than importing them, export your knowledge base articles separately because they carry search traffic, and rebuild automations by hand. Run both systems in parallel for a fortnight with new tickets going to the new one.

If you are considering Zendesk rather than a cheaper tool, our Zendesk alternatives guide covers that field from the other direction.

How we test and price these tools

Every price here was read from the vendor’s own pricing page in a browser on 14 September 2026, not copied from another round-up. That check is how we found that Freshdesk’s free plan is no longer listed, which most published guides have not caught up with.

For helpdesks we compare the tier that includes the channels you will actually use rather than the cheapest one on the page, and we note how each tool is priced: per agent, per workspace, or per ticket. That structure matters more than the number, because it decides what happens when your team grows.

For self-hosted options we state that the cost is hosting plus maintenance rather than zero. We read current Reddit threads for each tool, so the views here are from this year. No vendor pays for a place on this list.