5 FreshService Alternatives & Competitors for 2025
Published by Ronan McQuillan, Mar 20, 2025FreshService is one of the biggest names in the world of enterprise ITSM software. It’s well-regarded for offering a comprehensive, modern, cloud-based solution for handling service management processes.
But this is a crowded space.
In fact, there are a number of vendors targeting specific corners of the market for service management platforms.
Which of these is right for you can depend on a range of factors, including your budget, user volumes, technical requirements, and the complexity of your service portfolio.
Today, we’re covering everything you need to know. Specifically, we’re going to examine the key decision points here, along with the top vendors that are suitable for a range of scenarios, including:
- What is FreshService
- Why would you look for a FreshService Alternative
- 5 FreshService Alternatives for 2025
By the end, you’ll be better equipped to make the right decision for your specific requirements.
Let’s jump in.
What is FreshService?
Part of the FreshWorks ecosystem, FreshService is an ITSM platform with offerings for SMEs and enterprise organizations alike to handle the full scope of service management processes, including ticketing, request management, asset management, incident management, and more.
It’s offered as a cloud-based, SaaS platform, making it a great fit for teams that want a scalable, modern solution, which is ready to roll out with relatively little configuration.
It also offers a range of features aimed at teams who need to automate and streamline their service delivery processes. This includes workflow automation tools, self-service portals, AI-driven capabilities, and more.
There’s ample scope for configuration, too, alongside extensive native integration options, app plug-ins, and developer tools, making FreshService a strong option for teams that need to add additional functionality to the core ITSM offering.
So…
Why would you look for a FreshService alternative?
With a better grasp of what FreshService offers, we can start to think about some of the key reasons that an alternative platform might be a more suitable solution.
Here are some of the key decision points you’ll need to consider.
Pricing is, of course, one of the biggest factors in any software procurement decision. However, this is often a more difficult comparison than it might first appear. FreshService is priced on a relatively transparent model, with three fixed per agent per month tiers, starting from $19. Custom enterprise licenses are also available. Notably though, feature restrictions are imposed across each of these, so careful analysis will be required to determine whether or not an alternative will be more cost-effective for your specific use case. On the flip side, as a wholly cloud-based platform, FreshService’s pricing is highly predictable since we won’t need to factor in other costs, such as hosting or maintenance. A huge differentiator between ITSM tools is the extent to which they can be customized and configured to match our particular internal workflows. Although, we must, of course, balance this with how easy a particular platform is to implement. FreshService is relatively strong here, but it’s important to understand the type of customization on offer. This largely relies on a no/low-code approach, especially around workflows, automations, and ticket rules. However, some other platforms might be more suitable for more advanced automation use cases or more substantive UI customization. Lastly, FreshService is a closed-source, wholly cloud-based platform. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but many businesses prioritize open-source solutions, especially for internal IT use cases. There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that open-source tools can often be more cost-effective. They’re also more likely to be self-hostable, although many COTS platforms are also available as on-premises solutions. Some teams might also prefer an open-source FreshService alternative for security reasons or to avoid vendor lock-in. Often, this relates to the ability to audit the source code of solutions that interact with mission-critical processes, data, or infrastructure.Pricing
Customization & configuration
Self-hosted & open-source options
5 FreshService alternatives for 2025
Now that we know what we’re looking for, we can check out some of our specific options for FreshService alternatives.
We’ve chosen a range of options from different corners of the market in terms of ideal use cases, pricing, and functionality.
These are:
Here’s a brief summary of how they compare.
 FreshService |  Budibase |  Zendesk |  Jira |  ServiceNow |  Faveo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Platform Type | Service Management | Low-Code | Service Management | Service Management | Service Management | Service Management |
| Pricing Model | Per-agent | Per-user/creator + Creator-only | Per-agent | Per-agent | Custom | Per-agent or Fixed perpetual |
| Cloud | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Self-Hosting | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| SSO | Free | Free | Paid plan | Paid plan | Paid plan | Paid |
| Open-Source | No | Yes | No | No | No | Source code available |
| API | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
1. Budibase
Budibase is the open-source, low-code platform that turns data into action. IT teams in all industries choose our platform to handle internal workflows, across ticketing, request management, asset management, and more.
Features
Budibase is the leading low-code tool for external data connections. We offer direct querying for all sorts of RDMBSs, NoSQL tools, APIs, and spreadsheets alongside our internal, low-code database.
Once you’ve connected your data, you can create custom views, assign role permissions, and autogenerate fully functional app UIs. Budibase offers exceptional design customization for building professional front-ends with minimal custom code.
Our platform is the perfect solution for streamlining ITSM workflows. Our automation builder offers a comprehensive library of triggers and configurable, chainable actions, complete with branching and looping logic, alongside a range of third-party integrations.
Start building with our free ticketing system template
Sign up nowUse cases
Budibase is fully optimized for IT teams that need to ship professional workflow tools at pace. With custom RBAC, autogenerated UIs, and extensive data support, it’s the smart choice for building all kinds of approval, request management, and ticketing apps.
Our users choose Budibase to handle use cases where security is a top priority. With optional self-hosting, free SSO, and a range of other tools, there’s never been a better way to ensure your users have access to the exact data they need.
We’ve also recently released a range of AI capabilities, including custom LLM configs and Budibase AI (Cloud), opening the door to handling all kinds of advanced use cases without sacrificing the security of your data.
Pricing
Budibase offers scalable pricing for IT teams of all sizes. You can build as many apps as you want for free, for up to five users in the cloud or twenty users if you self-host. Our free tier also includes unlimited data connections.
Paid plans start from $5 per month for end users and $50 for app creators, as well as introducing reusable code snippets, custom branding, synchronous automations, and app backup and restore.
We offer creator-only pricing for enterprises with air-gapped deployments, enforceable SSO, and other security tools, making Budibase hugely cost-effective for rolling out to large volumes of users.
2. Zendesk
Zendesk is one of FreshService’s most direct competitors, offering a cloud-based solution for handling customer support interactions, including within internal IT teams.
You might also like our round-up of the top Zendesk alternatives .
Pros
One of Zendesk’s biggest strengths is offering a unified, omni-channel ticketing, support, and helpdesk solution right out of the box. This includes support for email, Slack, and other channels in a modern, user-friendly platform.
More recently, Zendesk has established itself as a powerful platform for AI-assisted support interactions. This includes AI-powered chatbots, self-service portals, workflow automations, and suggestions for service agents.
Zendesk also offers an extensive marketplace of third-party app plugins and themes, along with comprehensive developer tools for creating our own, making it a good choice for extensibility.
Cons
Compared to other FreshService alternatives, one important potential downside of Zendesk is that it’s generally customer-support orientated, rather than focusing on ITSM/ITIL. So, it can lack certain capabilities, such as a native CMDB.
We can get around this using integration options, but the cost of additional tools will need to be factored in, meaning that we might want to look elsewhere if our service portfolio is heavy on asset management or configuration management.
Additionally, some important features, such as multiple ticket forms and customer self-service portals, are restricted to costlier enterprise pricing tiers, which could make Zendesk less attractive for smaller teams with complex IT support workflows.
Pricing
Generally speaking, Zendesk is a relatively affordable platform, that could be attractive to several different kinds of organizations, with paid plans starting from just $19 per agent per month.
Zendesk’s more affordable pricing tiers offer impressive capabilities for managing multi-channel interactions, but we’ll need a more expensive license for most ITSM tasks. For example, skill-based routing is limited to the Professional tier.
However, some more advanced features are available as paid add-ons across the tiers, including additional security tools and workforce management capabilities.
3. Jira Service Management
Jira Service Management is, undoubtedly, one of the most ubiquitous names in the ITSM space. It offers a comprehensive platform that’s optimized for a range of support, IT operations, and service management use cases.
Take a look at our guide to the top Jira Service Management alternatives .
Pros
Jira is a hugely popular platform, thanks in large part to its balance of powerful out-of-the-box capabilities and extensive customization options. It offers ITSM-specific templates alongside a range of no/low-code tools for creating custom automations and workflows.
JSM integrates seamlessly with the wider Atlassian ecosystem, including BitBucket and Confluence, meaning we can effectively set up solutions for more technical service management workflows, including DevOps, development, and CI/CD tasks.
Additionally, Jira is a great choice for larger teams, offering a highly performant platform, along with strong capabilities for multi-departmental support workflows, across IT, HR, and other internal service departments.
Cons
One important potential downside of JSM as a FreshService alternative is that it’s a somewhat more complex platform, with some users reporting that there’s a steeper learning curve to configuring and maintaining workflows than some more simple tools.
Additionally, many of the benefits of JSM stem from its integration with the wider Atlassian ecosystem, but this may be of less relevance to smaller organizations or IT teams that are already using alternative solutions for these tasks.
While Jira can be self-hosted, we’ll need a separate Data Center license for this, which is realistically priced more for enterprises, so we might want to look elsewhere for an affordable on-prem solution.
Pricing
Jira Service Management offers some of the most flexible pricing of the platform’s we’ve seen so far. There’s a usable free tier, offering core ticketing, self-service, and service management capabilities for up to three agents.
Paid plans are available from around $19 per agent per month, although we’d need a Premium license at around $50 for the full suite of ITSM tools, including asset, incident, and change management, as well as advanced features like virtual agents.
Custom enterprise pricing removes automation limits and introduces self-hosting and cross-product analytics across the Atlassian ecosystem.
4. ServiceNow
ServiceNow is a hugely popular service management platform, especially within large enterprises and other teams with large service portfolios. It’s even used by the majority of Fortune 500 companies.
You might also like our round-up of the top ServiceNow alternatives .
Pros
ServiceNow offers highly advanced, customizable solutions for ITSM, ESM, CSM, HR, ITOps, and more in a modular platform. This provides extensive capabilities for organizations to manage a wide range of processes in a single, unified platform.
A huge part of ServiceNow’s popularity stems from its advanced configuration and customization options. It offers a range of no/low-code and traditional development tools for creating automations, UIs, natural language processing, and more.
ServiceNow is also a clear leader in AI capabilities, including tools for creating virtual agents and chatbots, identifying automation opportunities, and predicting future service management needs.
Cons
Again, ServiceNow’s biggest potential drawbacks relate to its complexity and the scope of what’s possible. This comes at a price, and it may be overkill for many smaller organizations, with other tools potentially being more suitable for their needs.
ServiceNow also has a reputation for requiring more up-front work and expertise to configure and roll out. This may also be beyond the means of smaller teams with less IT resources.
As such, while it’s undoubtedly a great offering for large organizations or more complex use cases, more user-friendly or streamlined tools might be preferable for basic ticketing and service management workflows.
Pricing
ServiceNow’s pricing isn’t publicly available. Instead, licenses are offered on a custom basis, factoring in user volumes, specific functionality, and other requirements.
It can also be purchased directly or via a third-party contractor, consultant, or reseller, although these may come with additional costs.
It’s worth noting that, as ServiceNow may require additional resources to implement, the direct costs of this, along with the impact on your solution’s time-to-value, may also need to be taken into account.
5. Faveo
Lastly, we have Faveo. This is a slightly different proposition to the other FreshService alternatives we’ve seen so far, offering an affordable, source-code-available solution for managing ITSM portfolios.
Pros
Faveo could be a very attractive option for teams that need a user-friendly, cost-effective solution for handling core ITIL processes right out of the box. This includes a CMDB and working incident, asset, and release management workflows.
It’s particularly well-optimized for change management use cases, including functionality for CAB, change listening, and custom change request management workflows.
On top of this, there are native tools for important IT support tasks, including remote desktop, patch management, and remote command.
Cons
One key downside of Faveo is that it lacks some of the more sophisticated capabilities of more sophisticated platforms. It’s possible to automate workflows, but this primarily means triggering sets of actions on conditions rather than allowing more complex logic.
Basic design customization is possible using theming and admin settings, whereas other FreshService alternatives have more comprehensive no/low-code interface editors.
Some users also report that Faveo can present performance issues when dealing with large volumes of requests.
Pricing
Faveo’s pricing model is generally affordable but somewhat more complex than some of the other platforms we’ve seen. The Service Desk platform is available as a cloud-based solution for $27.65 per agent per month.
The self-hosted platform can be used for free for up to two agents, with most functionality available.
Beyond this, we have the choice of either perpetual licenses with their own user limits, starting from around $1800, or recurring licenses from $153.93 for five users.
Turn data into action with Budibase
Budibase is the fast, easy way to build secure IT workflow apps. With extensive data connections, autogenerated UIs, powerful automations, and optional self-hosting, it’s the ideal solution for all kinds of ticketing, request management, and inventory use cases.
Check out our features overview to learn more.