Freshdesk vs Zammad

Freshdesk

Multiple SLA policies and intelligent routing sit in Pro, skill-based routing and audit logs arrive with Enterprise, and the archiving lifecycle is documented down to the 120-day rule for closed tickets, which is a real status model rather than a labelled mailbox. What I can't find is the hundredth-reply machinery: no public information on breach warnings, escalation chains, macros, business-hours SLAs, or how deep ticket search actually goes.

Zammad

States, assignment, escalations, macros, templates, automation rules and SLAs with reporting are all on the page — but SLAs only start at Professional, and nowhere does the evidence say one word about search across ticket bodies, which is the first thing I judge. No merge/split, no business-hours policies, no per-agent resolution reporting either.

Freshdesk

Email and the customer portal live in one product with one history, and WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are both documented, but as bot channels on a separate self-service platform that hands conversations over to Freshdesk through APIs, with phone calls in yet another product. I found no public information showing those channels landing in one queue with one history, so mid-issue channel switching still costs the customer a repeat.

Zammad

Email, web form, SMS, chat, Telegram, Facebook and WhatsApp are listed per tier plus a telephony integration, and the evidence promises all communication in one structured ticket view with history — that's genuinely one queue. Docked because call logging, messenger consent handling and a requester-visible portal for their own tickets are all unevidenced, and chat/Telegram only start at Professional while messengers wait for Plus.

Freshdesk

The deflection half is genuinely evidenced: intents with variants map to answers or flows, yes/no feedback is captured, the questions view counts how often each intent fired and how helpful it was, and unmapped questions get tagged for coverage work. The article half is a single bundled knowledge-base mention — I found no public information on editorial workflow, versioning, review dates, or suggestions to agents mid-reply.

Zammad

A help centre and a knowledge base — multilingual from Plus upward — positioned explicitly for customers solving issues 'without opening a ticket'. But there's no evidence of article suggestions before submission or while answering, no review dates, no versioning, and no deflection reporting: deflection here is a claim, not a number the team can act on.

Freshdesk

Roles and permissions ship from the bottom tier up, archived tickets can be permanently and irreversibly deleted, a sub-processor list is published, and Enterprise adds audit logs. But I found no public information on a signable DPA, a stated retention period for a requester's data, attachment handling, or a documented access or erasure path — and the privacy notice's description of sharing email addresses and identifiers with social advertising platforms is an uneasy read next to a ticket archive.

Zammad

GDPR rights including deletion and portability are published, individual roles and permissions exist, and the archive sits in an ISO27001-certified German data centre with 2FA and SSL — but that's vendor posture plus coarse roles. No published DPA, no stated retention period for the ticket archive, no audit log of who opened which ticket, and nothing on attachment handling or redaction.

Freshdesk

There is a marketplace for first- and third-party apps, pre-built connectors metered by the task, and a properly documented outbound API library with methods, authorisation headers, sample test runs and multipart file payloads. That library only speaks JSON and times out after 10 seconds, and I found no public information on named CRM or shop integrations, an inbound helpdesk API with documented rate limits, webhooks for core ticket events, or SCIM provisioning.

Zammad

Open APIs and 'ready-to-use integrations', but the only names on the evidence are GitHub/GitLab and Grafana/Elasticsearch — no CRM, no shop, no order management, no webhooks, SSO, SCIM or documented rate limits anywhere. Being open source with the code freely available softens the blow since I could build it myself, but inspectable is not documented.

Freshdesk

The contracting default is a Delaware company, the notice leans on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, and processing is stated for the United States, the UK and the EEA wherever its third parties sit; I found no public information confirming where the hosted ticket archive itself lives, and the bot service's data centres named in the docs include the US, India and Australia. EU entities in Germany, France and the Netherlands and a published sub-processor list keep this off the floor, but we found no public information showing EU hosting as standard.

Zammad

Zammad GmbH at Marienstraße 18 Berlin, commercial register Charlottenburg HRB 163946 B, made and hosted in Germany in an ISO27001 data centre, with a self-hosted option for buyers who want the archive on their own iron — that's a chain I could defend to a customer. It falls short of 8 because no data-centre provider is named and there's no published subprocessor list for the product itself; the only subprocessors disclosed are website analytics (Matomo, Moosend), not the service chain.

Freshdesk

One pricing page gives me €17, €52 and €84 /agent/month billed annually, day passes at €2/€7/€12, and metered add-ons priced by the hundred sessions, thousand actions or five thousand tasks, so the agent count plus AI usage is computable from public pages. The chat product the WhatsApp deployment depends on and the telephony product are separately priced with no figures captured here, and I found no public information on VAT treatment or minimum term.

Zammad

I can compute the invoice from public pages: €7/€16/€25 per agent per month, agent caps of 5/35/unlimited, channels mapped to tiers, storage and attachment limits, support hours, even the metered AI fee of €0.03 per call, with VAT treatment stated. What keeps it under 8 is that billing period detail and minimum term aren't stated, and a 50-agent team needing WhatsApp is silently forced to the top tier by the cap alone.