Does Freshdesk Have a Free Plan in 2026? No, Here Are the Best Free Alternatives

Freshdesk has no free plan in 2026, only a 14-day trial, so the free replacements are Zoho Desk Free Edition for 3 users, Help Scout Free for 5 users, Jira Service Management Free for 3 agents and HubSpot's free service tools for 2 users. Crisp and Chatwoot give 2 chat seats free, Tidio gives 50 billable conversations a month, and Zammad, FreeScout, Chatwoot and osTicket are free to self-host on your own server.

We checked every figure on the vendor's own live pricing page on September 20, 2026 and re-checked the Freshdesk, Help Scout, HubSpot, Chatwoot and Tidio numbers on September 24, 2026. If you're already on Freshdesk and leaving, skip to the migration section. The Zendesk version of this list is our free Zendesk alternatives page.

Does Freshdesk have a free plan in 2026? No, it has a 14-day trial

Three plans, all paid. Freshworks' Freshdesk pricing page shows Growth at $19, Pro at $55 and Enterprise at $89 per agent a month billed annually. The words "free plan" appear nowhere on it. The only free thing on the page is the trial, and the card copy says no credit card is needed to start it.

The URL Freshworks used to publish the free plan on, /freshdesk/free-help-desk-software/, now returns a 404.

The history, for anyone checking their memory: the free tier was generous for years, shrank to a two-agent version, and then closed. r/sysadmin has a thread titled "Freshdesk ticketing no longer free - alternatives?" and r/msp has one titled "FreshDesk 35% price increase", both of which Google ranks on this query alongside this page. We have linked them; Reddit blocks our crawler, so nothing here is quoted from them.

One more number worth knowing before you compare anything: Freshdesk's AI is metered separately. Freddy AI Copilot is $29 an agent a month on top of the seat, and additional AI Agent sessions are $49 per 100 sessions once the one-time allowance of 500 sessions is used. Our Freshdesk pricing explainer works the whole bill through.

How did we check these free plans?

We opened each vendor's own pricing page in a scripted browser on September 20, 2026, read the free column instead of the marketing above it, and screenshotted the plan table. Two pages rewrite their prices by IP address: we read Freshdesk's server-rendered page with JavaScript turned off to get the USD figures, and switched HubSpot's own currency control to USD. Zoho refused both, so this page quotes no USD figure for Zoho's paid tiers. For the self-hosted projects we queried the GitHub API for license, star count and the date of the last commit. We did not build a test account on any of these tools for this page.

Which hosted help desks are free forever?

Zoho Desk: the closest free thing to what Freshdesk used to give away

Free Edition, free forever, three user licenses, confirmed on Zoho's pricing page and repeated in its pricing FAQ. Email ticketing, a help center, a knowledge base and basic workflows are in. Light users, Zoho's cheap read-only internal seats, are not.

It suits teams that ran Freshdesk on two or three agents and email only. It is the wrong fit if support arrives over chat or WhatsApp, because neither is in the free edition. The ceiling is the same shape as the one they just hit, which is worth being honest about: three seats, then a paid plan.

HubSpot Service Hub: two users free, and a CRM underneath

HubSpot's free service tools give you ticketing, a shared inbox and live chat with HubSpot branding, and the card states the cap in plain words: "Free for up to 2 users. No credit card required." Starter is advertised from $7 a seat a month against a struck-through $20, Professional at $90 and Enterprise at $150.

Two costs the cards bury. Professional and Enterprise carry a required one-time onboarding fee of $1,500 and $3,500. And HubSpot's Customer Agent is Professional and above, priced at 50 HubSpot Credits per resolved conversation with credits at $9.00 per 1,000 paid annually, which is roughly $0.45 a resolved conversation on top of the seat.

Help Scout: five users, one inbox, and a contact meter

The free plan is 5 users, 1 Inbox, 1 Docs site, 100 contacts a month and 10 saved replies. That is the most seats anyone gives away here, and it fits teams whose volume is low and whose headcount is not. The contact meter is what you will actually hit: a contact is a person, repeat conversations with the same person count once, and a store doing a few hundred distinct customers a month crosses it long before it runs out of seats.

Standard is $25 a user a month, Plus $45, Pro $75. AI Answers is a separate add-on at $0.75 a resolution with a three-month free trial, so Help Scout has split the AI onto its own meter the same way Freshdesk has.

Jira Service Management: free for three agents, if your requesters already have accounts

Atlassian sells this inside a Service Collection bundle now. The Free column carries Jira Service Management Free and Customer Service Management, three agents, unlimited customers, one site, 2 GB of file storage and 100 emails a day. Rovo Agents and Assets begin at Standard, which is $20 an agent a month.

The email cap is what makes this an internal IT answer. A customer-facing queue will breach it in a week.

Which live chat tools still have a free tier?

Crisp: two seats, flat pricing above them

Crisp's Free plan is free forever with 2 seats included and, in the plan card's own words, "No AI credits included". The feature table caps the Free workspace at 100 customer profiles and zero sub-inboxes. An earlier version of this page called it free chat with unlimited conversations; Crisp's live page states no conversation figure for Free at all, so that claim is gone.

What makes Crisp interesting above the free tier is the billing unit. Mini is $45 a month, Essentials $95 and Plus $295 per workspace, not per seat and not per conversation. For a team whose volume grows faster than its headcount, that is the cheapest shape on this page.

Tidio: 50 billable conversations a month, 10 seats

Tidio's Free plan card states it directly: "50 Billable conversations / mo." with 10 seats included, covering live chat, ticketing and email. A separate 100-unique-visitors cap that circulates in roundups is real but belongs to Flows, Tidio's automation builder, not the plan's overall conversation quota. Tidio's FAQ on Flows says "the Free Customer Service plan limits them to interact with only 100 unique visitors per month." Paid plans come with a 7-day free trial, and paid starts at Starter $24.17 a month for 100 billable conversations, Growth from $49.17 at 250, and Plus at $300.

Tidio also sells its Lyro AI agent as a separate product with its own conversation meter, which is the same split Freshdesk uses with Freddy.

Is there a free open-source Freshdesk alternative?

Yes: the license is $0 and the server is yours.

This is where most people asking for a free Freshdesk open-source alternative end up. We checked each project on GitHub on September 20, 2026, because an abandoned self-hosted desk costs more than a paid plan.

Chatwoot: the one that also has a cloud free tier

Chatwoot Cloud's Hacker plan is $0 an agent a month for up to 2 agents, 500 conversations a month, live chat only, and 30 days of data retention. The help center, Captain AI, teams and automation rules are paid. Startups is $19 an agent a month.

Self-hosting removes every one of those caps and adds a server bill instead. Our Chatwoot explainer covers the difference properly.

Zammad: the closest self-hosted shape to Freshdesk

Zammad is the one that feels like a ticketing system: states, SLAs, email, web forms, SMS, chat and Telegram. Self-hosting the AGPL-3.0 release costs nothing. Zammad's hosted plans are Starter v2 at EUR 7 an agent a month billed annually, capped at five agents, Professional v2 at EUR 16 capped at 35, and Plus v2 at EUR 25 with unlimited agents. AI features are optional and billed at EUR 0.03 per AI call.

If you want support on a self-hosted install, Zammad sells that separately from EUR 2,999 a year, which is the honest price of "free with a phone number attached".

FreeScout and osTicket are the lighter options: FreeScout runs on shared hosting and sells paid modules on top of a free core, osTicket has been shipping since before most of this category existed and has announced a 2.0 rewrite on its own homepage. Both are covered in our open-source ticketing guide.

How do you move off Freshdesk without losing anything?

Four things travel and one does not.

• Tickets and contacts travel. Freshdesk's API exports both, and every tool above can import a CSV of contacts. Our walkthrough is in how to export tickets from Freshdesk.
• Knowledge base articles travel, badly. Expect to rewrite the HTML, and expect your article URLs to change, which means redirects if the help center is public and indexed.
• Email forwarding travels, and is the step that breaks. Change the MX or forwarding rule last, after the new desk can receive and reply, because tickets that arrive during the gap are the ones nobody sees.
• Automations do not travel. Every dispatcher, supervisor and scenario rule gets rebuilt by hand. This is the real cost of the migration, and it is the reason teams stay on a paid plan they resent.
• Freddy's trained behavior does not travel. Whatever your AI agent learned to answer is Freshworks-side.

What does a free help desk plan actually cost you?

Free tiers are funnels, and the shape of each funnel tells you where it will pinch.

• Seat caps trigger the upgrade. Two at HubSpot, Crisp and Chatwoot, three at Zoho and Atlassian, five at Help Scout. Hiring is the event that moves you to paid, so the vendor's incentive is a free tier good enough to build a workflow on and small enough that one more hire breaks it.
• Volume meters trigger it earlier and more quietly. 100 contacts a month at Help Scout, 500 conversations at Chatwoot, 50 billable conversations at Tidio, 100 emails a day at Atlassian.
• AI is never in the free tier. Crisp says "No AI credits included". Chatwoot's Captain AI starts on a paid plan. HubSpot's Customer Agent needs Professional. Help Scout charges $0.75 a resolution. If the reason you are leaving Freshdesk is the Freddy meter, note that everyone meters AI, and compare the unit before you compare the presence.
• Retention has a clock. Chatwoot Hacker keeps 30 days of history, which is a migration problem later and a feature gap never.

Which free Freshdesk alternative should you choose?

• You ran Freshdesk on two or three agents, email only. Zoho Desk Free Edition. Closest fit, fewest surprises.
• You want support attached to a CRM you will grow into. HubSpot Service Hub free tools, and budget for the $1,500 onboarding fee if Professional is where you are heading.
• You have five people and one queue. Help Scout Free, and watch the contacts meter rather than the seat count.
• Your requesters are colleagues. Jira Service Management Free, if you already run Atlassian.
• Chat is the channel that matters. Crisp if you want flat per-workspace pricing later; Chatwoot if you want the option to self-host the same product.
• You have a server and someone who likes running one. Zammad for ticketing, FreeScout for a shared inbox, Chatwoot for chat.
• You need more than five agents and cannot self-host. None of these is free at that size. Price Freshdesk Growth at $19 against Zendesk Support Team at $19 and Chatwoot Startups at $19, and pick on features instead of on the word free.

Where does an AI agent layer like Macha fit?

Macha is not on this list, and the reason is worth saying plainly: it is not free, and it is not a help desk. It is an AI agent layer that runs on top of the help desk you already have, Freshdesk included, and the integrations page lists the others. If you are picking a first free desk, this is not your decision yet.

It fits a different reader: a team staying on Freshdesk whose actual complaint is the AI meter rather than the seat price. Macha prices on monthly ticket volume, from $299 a month for 750 tickets, about $0.40 a ticket at every tier, where one ticket is one thread with one person however many replies it takes, and setup and monitoring are done by the Macha team. The trial is $50 of free usage with no credit card. Compare it against $49 per 100 Freddy sessions on the same volume and the comparison becomes arithmetic. Details on the Macha on Freshdesk page and pricing.

Frequently asked questions

Does Freshdesk have a free tier in 2026? No. Its pricing page lists Growth $19, Pro $55 and Enterprise $89 per agent a month billed annually, plus a 14-day trial. The old free-plan page at /freshdesk/free-help-desk-software/ returns a 404, checked September 20, 2026.

Why did Freshdesk discontinue its free plan? Freshworks has not published a reason we can cite. What the pricing page shows is a product where AI is now the upsell: Freddy AI Agent sessions are included once at 500 and then billed at $49 per 100, and Freddy AI Copilot is $29 an agent a month. A free tier that cannot be metered fits that model poorly.

What is the best free alternative to Freshdesk? Zoho Desk's Free Edition for three users, because it is the closest match to the email-first desk most people were running on Freshdesk's old free plan. Help Scout Free if you need five seats. Jira Service Management if your requests are internal.

Is there an open-source alternative to Freshdesk? Yes. Zammad is the closest in shape, FreeScout the easiest to host, Chatwoot the most active project by a wide margin at 37,000 GitHub stars, and osTicket the oldest. All four are free to self-host under their own licenses.

Which free help desk gives the most agents? Help Scout at five users, among hosted tools. Self-hosted Zammad, FreeScout, Chatwoot and osTicket are uncapped, because nobody is counting seats on your own server.

How much does Freshdesk cost now? Growth $19, Pro $55 and Enterprise $89 per agent a month billed annually, before AI. Freddy AI Copilot adds $29 an agent a month, extra Freddy AI Agent sessions are $49 per 100, and a day pass runs $2 to $12 depending on the plan. All read from the pricing page on September 20, 2026.

Can I move my Freshdesk tickets to a free tool? Tickets and contacts export through the Freshdesk API and import into every tool listed here. Knowledge base articles usually need reformatting, and none of your dispatcher or supervisor rules transfer. Budget the rebuild time, not the export time.

Is Tidio free up to 50 conversations a month? Yes. Tidio's Free plan card states "50 Billable conversations / mo." with 10 seats included. There is a separate 100-unique-visitors-a-month cap, but it applies only to Flows, Tidio's automation builder, not to the plan's overall conversation allowance.

Do any of these free plans include an AI agent? No. Crisp's free card says "No AI credits included", Chatwoot's Captain AI starts on Startups, HubSpot's Customer Agent requires Professional at 50 credits per resolved conversation, and Help Scout's AI Answers is $0.75 a resolution after a three-month trial. Free gets you the inbox.

Sources:

• Freshdesk pricing (checked September 20, 2026; the old free-plan URL returns 404)
• Zoho Desk pricing, HubSpot Service Hub pricing, Help Scout pricing, Jira Service Management pricing
• Crisp pricing, Chatwoot pricing, Tidio pricing, Zammad pricing
• GitHub, checked September 20, 2026: Chatwoot, Zammad, FreeScout, osTicket
• Community threads reached through search: r/sysadmin, Freshdesk ticketing no longer free, r/msp, FreshDesk 35% price increase, r/selfhosted, self-hosted alternatives to Freshdesk