Freshdesk Custom Reports & Analytics Explained

Curated reports vs custom reports

Freshdesk Analytics splits into two worlds, and knowing which one you're in saves a lot of confusion. Curated reports are the pre-built ones — Agent Performance, SLA, Backlogs, Ticket Lifecycle, Support Overview and more — that Freshworks maintains for you. Custom reports are the blank canvases you build yourself, widget by widget.

The dividing line is plan-gated. Per Freshworks' Analytics features for each plan documentation, the Free plan gives you curated reports with search only — you can look but not save. Growth adds the ability to save and clone. And custom report creation arrives only from the Pro plan onward, alongside scheduling and export. So if the "New Report" button feels missing, it's usually because the account is on Growth or below.

One practical consequence: you cannot add new widgets to a curated report directly. If a curated report is almost right but missing a chart, the move is to clone it into a custom report and edit the copy. That clone-then-customise pattern is how most teams get started without building from zero.

What a custom report is made of

A custom report in Freshdesk is a canvas you fill with widgets. Per the Custom Reporting – Basics documentation, there are four widget types you drag onto that canvas:

• Chart — the workhorse: a visualization (bar, line, pie, and so on) driven by the metrics you choose.
• Interactive Filter — a control on the report itself that lets a viewer slice the data live (e.g. by group or date) without editing the report.
• Text — a heading, note, or bit of context so a report reads as a narrative, not a wall of charts.
• Image — a logo or reference image, mostly for reports you'll export and share.

You can add up to 36 widgets to a single report canvas, and the newer builder lets you resize each widget from any edge rather than only the bottom-right corner. That's enough room for a genuinely dense operational dashboard — though past a dozen or so widgets, most teams find a second, focused report reads better than one sprawling page.

Building a chart widget from scratch

Here's the end-to-end flow for the widget you'll build most often — a chart driven by your own metric. Per Freshworks' Build your own chart widgets in Analytics guide:

1. From the Analytics homepage, click New Report. Give it a title, set visibility (private to you, or shared), and click Create.
2. On the canvas, choose Chart from the widget options (you can also start from a chart template if one is close to what you need).
3. Pick the module — the data source, such as Tickets — that the widget draws from.
4. In the configuration pane on the right, enter your metric (what you're counting or measuring) and, where relevant, a group-by dimension (what you're splitting it across).
5. Apply any filters to narrow the rows — a priority, a group, a date range.
6. Click Apply, then Save. Usefully, a saved widget becomes a reusable template: it shows up under the Existing section of the widget library so you can drop the same chart into other reports without rebuilding it.

That reuse is the quiet productivity win. Build "tickets resolved within SLA, by group" once, and it's a one-drag addition to every future report.

A plain-English metrics glossary

Half the battle with custom reports is knowing what each metric actually means before you chart it. The common ones:

• First response time — how long from ticket creation until an agent's first reply. The headline "are we fast?" number.
• Resolution time — how long from creation until the ticket is resolved. Often reported as an average and as a median (the median is usually the more honest figure, since one nightmare ticket can drag the average).
• First contact resolution (FCR) — the share of tickets solved in a single reply, no back-and-forth. A proxy for answer quality.
• Tickets created / received — raw inbound volume, usually charted over time to spot spikes and seasonality.
• Backlog / unresolved tickets — the open pile at a point in time. Rising backlog with flat volume means throughput is slipping.
• SLA % achieved — the share of tickets that hit their response or resolution target. Ties your analytics straight back to your SLA policies.
• Reassignments / reopens — how often tickets bounce between agents or get reopened after being marked resolved. High numbers hint at routing or root-cause problems.
• CSAT — customer satisfaction from survey responses, typically the percentage of positive ratings.

A gentle warning on time-based metrics: whether they count around the clock or only during your working calendar depends on your business-hours setup, which is a frequent source of "these numbers look wrong" confusion — see Freshdesk business hours explained if a metric is reading oddly.

Scheduling, exporting, and sharing

A report nobody opens is wasted work, so the last mile is delivery. From the Pro plan onward, you can schedule a custom report to email itself out on a cadence. Per the Can I schedule a report in Analytics? documentation, you open the custom report, click the Export icon at the top right, choose Schedule Report, then set the cadence, delivery time, subject line, and recipient email addresses.

Two honest caveats worth flagging up front:

1. Curated reports cannot be scheduled — only custom reports can. If you want a weekly SLA email, clone the curated SLA report into a custom one first.
2. Scheduling and export both sit behind Pro/Enterprise. On Growth and below you can view and save, but not schedule or export.

The honest limits — where native analytics runs out of road

Freshdesk Analytics is a capable, self-serve BI tool for support data, and for most teams it answers the operational questions well. But it's worth being clear-eyed about the edges.

It's plan-gated in ways that bite. Custom reports, scheduling, and export are Pro-and-above features — a Growth-plan team is limited to curated reports plus save/clone. And per the Analytics usage limits documentation, non-Pro/Enterprise plans are capped to a two-year reporting window, while Pro and Enterprise get unlimited history. (Freshworks also moved, from 31 May 2026, to require every report to carry a defined date range — a good habit to adopt regardless.)

It reports on Freshdesk data only. If a chunk of your customer story lives in Shopify orders, a billing system, or a product database, the native analytics can't join to it. You export to a spreadsheet or a warehouse and stitch it together yourself.

And most importantly, it's descriptive, not active. A custom report can tell you the backlog grew 18% and first-response time slipped on Tuesdays — but it doesn't touch the backlog. Every insight still lands on a human who has to go and do the work the chart is quietly recommending. The report measures the problem; it doesn't move the needle on it.

That last gap is where an AI agent layer fits — and it's worth understanding the build-versus-buy shape of that category before reaching for one. Macha is one such layer: it runs on top of the Freshdesk you already use as a native connector — it does not replace your help desk or its analytics. You connect Macha to Freshdesk with your subdomain and API key, and it reads and writes the same tickets your reports are counting: drafting or posting grounded replies, triaging by intent, and looking up order or account status through a custom tool that turns a REST API into something an agent can call. The clean division of labour is to keep Freshdesk Analytics as your system of record for what happened, and layer an agent on top to act on it — which is the practical route to automating Freshdesk with AI so that the metrics you track actually improve. (Macha's connector is for Freshdesk specifically — not Freshchat, Freshservice, or Freshcaller. Credits are consumed per AI action, not per resolution — see the pricing breakdown.)

FAQ

Where do I build custom reports in Freshdesk? In Freshdesk Analytics. From the Analytics homepage click New Report, give it a title and visibility, click Create, then drag widgets (Chart, Interactive Filter, Text, Image) onto the canvas and configure each one's metrics on the right-hand pane.

What plan do I need for custom reports? Custom report creation is available from the Pro plan onward. The Free plan offers curated reports with search only; Growth adds save and clone. Scheduling and export are also Pro/Enterprise features.

What's the difference between curated and custom reports? Curated reports are pre-built and maintained by Freshworks (SLA, Backlogs, Agent Performance, and so on). Custom reports are built by you from a blank canvas. You can't add widgets to a curated report directly — clone it into a custom report and edit the copy.

How many widgets can a Freshdesk report hold? You can add up to 36 widgets to a single report canvas, and each widget can be resized from any edge. Saved widgets become reusable templates under the Existing section of the widget library.

Can I schedule a Freshdesk report to email automatically? Yes, on Pro and Enterprise. Open a custom report, click the Export icon, choose Schedule Report, and set the cadence, time, subject, and recipients. Note that curated reports cannot be scheduled — only custom ones.

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