Freshservice vs. Jira: 2024 Comparison of Features, Pricing & Integrations

In the post-pandemic world, information technology departments bear a significant portion of the responsibility for ensuring company continuity and development in their organizations. The sad reality is that IT’s typically unstructured, break-fix strategy keeps it locked in firefighting mode—and prevents it from maturing into the strategic partner that the business requires. More than ever, the importance of formal IT Service Management (ITSM) practices cannot be overstated.

These practices provide IT with the tools and processes necessary to transform from a collection of technical experts into a true service-oriented organization, ready to assist organizations in charting a new course in this new normal. With numerous options in the market offering a wide range of verticals and specialties, how do you decide which one offers the best value? What is better than Jira? Does Freshservice provide value to your business? This article takes a deep dive into Freshservice vs. Jira, two of the most popular IT service management software in the market.

Even if they are not IT enterprises, most businesses need a solid technological stack to support their operations. IT service management continues to be one of the most important enterprise strategies for delivering business value to both end-users and employees. And, with 53% of employees anticipated to work in a hybrid setup in the long run, along with 24% working remotely, IT support and service management is more important than ever.

In the wake of the pandemic, enterprises were compelled to concentrate on business value and results through technology, which is what effective service management is all about. Sixty percent of businesses used basic service management elements such as specified procedures and practice capabilities like ITAM, to support the remote workforce.

As a result, the ITSM market is set to experience rapid growth within the next few years. Experts expect the industry to grow to $11.51 billion by 2025. Additionally, they are expecting an annual growth rate of about 17.86%. Moreover, 43% of that growth in value will be from the North American market.

With this in mind, it is important to start investing in a good ITSM solution for your company. Below, we take a look at two of the most popular tools in the industry to help you make an informed decision.

Overview of Freshservice and Jira

Freshservice

Freshservice is a cloud-based IT service management system designed to assist organizations in streamlining their IT-related operations. It corresponds with current support delivery standards, as do most rival services, by putting portions of customer service on autopilot, a simple integrated interface, and agent-side ability to prioritize, manage and drive tickets via specialized workflows. Freshservice emphasizes AI-driven features on top of this to eliminate manual and repetitive work.

Additionally, it houses functionalities that include asset discovery and configuration management database (CMDB), which give a centralized way of managing device settings and other assets. This is in addition to supporting standard ITIL procedures like incident, issue, change, and release management. Freshservice provides bespoke integration, automated processes, smart analytics, partner solutions, and marketplace applications through APIs. The solution also provides user experiences across numerous channels, including Microsoft Teams, Slack, and its native chatbot.

Freshservice

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Jira

Jira Service Management is one of Jira’s sub-products. It uses the same ticket/workflow engine as before, but it adds a service management structure on top of it (service portal, agent queues, SLA engine, self-service capabilities, and agent cost metering) to make it more efficient. By acquiring Opsgenie and Mindville, Atlassian has increased the strength and maturity of its ITSM solution, making it a scalable enterprise-level platform for businesses of all sizes. Using this application, IT and business teams can call on the assistance of any other team, stakeholder, or customer to complete tasks.

The focus is on development processes and integration into a highly flexible model that can accommodate a wide range of use cases. It is a functional extension of Atlassian’s comprehensive DevOps project management service, and it is built on a highly adjustable DIY-based paradigm that allows users to customize it to their own needs.

Comparison of Freshservice vs. Jira

Core Features

Service Desk

Both Freshservice and Jira offer fully-featured service desk tools that will allow your team to handle requests, resolve incidents, and track current tickets. Both solutions emphasize their ability to adapt to the ever-changing IT landscape and accommodate practically any type of business.

Freshservice’s primary capability allows for flexible incident-related communication since the app is multichannel (chat, voice call, email, online portal) and prioritizes and routes communications depending on the significance and severity of the problem. All incidences are stored in a database of existing errors so that agents refer back to them if they occur again. An administrator may also specify predetermined criteria and automate incident tracking, as well as identify critical event situations in which immediate intervention is required.

The system is equipped with a sophisticated, integrated artificial intelligence (AI) technology that can detect and locate negative trends and underlying issues. It can also automatically correlate incidences with these patterns and problems. With this approach, incidents may be reported to the appropriate persons or organizations, who can then conduct an investigation to determine the core causes of the issue and implement repair measures.

Automatic integration with Opsgenie is included with Jira Service Management Cloud. It serves as a middleware between incident management solutions like monitoring (hardware and software), logs, tickets, and chat tools. And it adds very comprehensive features that are connected to ITIL-approved setups, issue classes, processes, and templates that Jira currently provides. Additional features include the ability to create intelligent, detailed timetables for worldwide teams. Using the technology, incidents may be tracked automatically via a workflow or communication protocol that you build up and refine over time.

Aside from incident management, both solutions provide advanced features for problem management, change management, release management, configuration management, knowledge management, and more. These will help you accommodate most, if not all, IT issues and requests.

Freshservice comes with a problem management feature to handle requests, incidents, and more.

Asset Management

While both Jira and Freshservice provide asset management, their approach to these tools is slightly different from each other. Jira makes use of a flexible and open data structure that enables teams to manage any kind of asset with relative ease. You can monitor ownership and life cycles more effectively, which helps you save money and time. It includes asset monitoring for inventory management, asset discovery, and asset reviews. It is also simple to import asset information from a variety of file kinds and integrate the data with other third-party tools and applications.

On the other hand, Freshservice comes with an entire suite of asset management tools built on top of an integrated CMDB. Using the real-time connectors with discovery solutions, identity providers, and endpoint management tools, you can create a multi-source configuration management database for all of your hardware, software, and SaaS assets. Additionally, you can take advantage of a single, unified platform to manage your asset’s lifetime to improve IT governance with a closely integrated service delivery engine. This allows you to decrease IT expenses by increasing the life of your assets via preventative maintenance.

Your team can automate all repetitive operations by reducing tedious, manual procedures throughout your assets’ lifespan by automating and conducting actions directly on the tools you use in conjunction with the orchestration center. In addition, it includes asset analytics, which allows them to make educated choices by monitoring an asset’s lifespan and estimating IT expenditures by keeping on top of purchases, contracts, and SaaS spending, among other things.

Service Level Management

In our Freshservice vs. Jira comparison of SLA management, the former provides more features than the latter. If you want to keep track of deadlines based on elapsed time or request types, you can create as many SLA policies as you need in Jira. If you prioritize requests, your team can address them more quickly. You can also utilize automatic escalation procedures to inform the appropriate team members and avoid service level agreements being broken.

Freshservice provides the same basic functionalities and more. You can automate the management of SLA violations and the escalation of tickets, as well as the sending of alerts about SLA violations by pre-defining automation rules that correspond to your ticket priorities. This gives insights into your service delivery by tracking your performance against SLAs. Your support teams that operate in separate time zones or during different business hours may create service level objectives based on the location of their respective business centers. The platform enables you to quickly allocate varied hours to the appropriate groups and even adjust their calendars in accordance with the global holiday list, ensuring that support desk activities run smoothly at all times.

Employee-Facing Interface

Freshservice and Jira both feature agent and customer portals that are simple yet elegant. These systems enable self-service while also providing insights into pending and prior tickets, as well as agent/customer conversations, among other benefits.

Freshservice’s customer and agent portal experience is described as being on “autopilot.” Customers may, of course, submit tickets, track their progress, seek services, or search through a library of best practices to discover the answers to their queries and concerns. Users may minimize agent workload by utilizing the new global search feature to seek solutions from the knowledge base, articles from the service catalog, and even tickets they’ve already raised in the past.

Jira Service Management’s portal is meant to provide you with information and alternatives immediately after you interact with the search bar. It is up to you and your IT staff to decide how services, alerts, and resources are organized and presented. The value of having a Confluence knowledge base is instantly apparent to customers that interact with the portal (search recommendations, inline suggestions in the ticket, and so on). Ticket deflection allows employees to devote their time and attention to more vital activities. In addition, self-service effectiveness indicators and reports are included, allowing teams to assess how successful the knowledge-based articles are at assisting users in finding answers to their concerns.

Jira makes it easy for employees to manage and process tickets with an intuitive interface.

Reporting and Analytics

Any IT service management platform is not without its reporting and analytics features. Both Freshservice and Jira provide features so you can easily access key information and insights through customizable visuals.

Freshservice includes a native Analytics module (Basic and Pro) that helps you and your team delve deep into your data and produce actionable insights. You can choose what metrics to track and how to present them without ever touching a single line of code. Freshservice Analytics makes it easy to produce curated reports, filter information, configure metrics, and more. Freshworks’ Freddy AI also integrates nicely with Freshservice. This means you can directly ask the AI for metrics and other information using simple language. This prevents you from wasting your time digging through charts and graphs just to find key information.

On the other hand, Jira leverages Atlassian’s analytics platform. It also comes with no-code/low-code dashboard editors, so you can assess priorities, monitor progress, and identify issues. Atlassian’s unified data lake connects Jira with the rest of its sister products. This means you can create data models and deeper insights using your entire organization’s wealth of information.

Integrations

Freshservice is often straightforward in terms of integrating with your current software architecture. Native connections with well-known platforms like Salesforce, Google Apps, MailChimp, and many more are included in the extensive range of available options. In addition, it offers plug-ins for more than 30 major providers in the SaaS sector, including MuleSoft, Zapier, and Microsoft Flow, which allow users to connect to hundreds of other applications.

If you don’t want to use Freshworks’ plug-ins, the app provides a comprehensive REST API. To expand or integrate Freshservice data and functionality into other third-party applications, or even unique applications, developers may create their own integration code. Because REST is extensively used across a broad range of integrated applications, developers should have minimal difficulty working on such projects.

Similarly, Jira Service Management offers a plethora of customization possibilities as well. You have integrations with all of Atlassian’s key products right out of the box (Jira Software, Bitbucket, Confluence, and more). In addition, there are about 1,000 Jira Service Management add-ons available in the Atlassian Marketplace, which include workflow extensions, rich filters, and prominent industry applications such as GitLab, SharePoint, and Xray, among others. The Cloud REST APIs provided by Jira is also available to you. These APIs are intended for developers who want to combine Jira Service Management with other apps to automate their workflows and business processes.

Freshservice marketplace features some of the most popular business applications.

Pricing

Both services provide numerous packages and trial periods. Freshservice provides a 14-day trial period, while Jira Service Management only allows for a seven-day trial period. However, it should be noted that Jira provides a free plan that supports a maximum of three agents and limited features.

Freshservice offers four levels of service, each with a different set of features: Starter, Growth, Pro, and Enterprise. On top of that, you can choose from add-ons such as Orchestration Transaction Pack, Assets Pack, Virtual Agent Suggestion Pack, and more. These are available in various price tiers as well. Furthermore, Freshservice offers Day Passes which are extra support whenever you have a spike in service demands. This is perfect when you have an upcoming product launch and more.

Meanwhile, Standard and Premium versions of Jira Service Management are available in the cloud, with the most notable differences being that Premium includes Premium Support, Asset & Configuration Management (Insight), full automation, and full incident management (Opsgenie), and unlimited storage, among other features. Standard versions of Jira Service Management do not include Premium Support. Additionally, its Enterprise package is available to global businesses.

Freshservice offers four pricing tiers for different types and sizes of teams.

Ease of Use

Unlike most legacy IT service management systems, Freshservice and Jira employ modern best practices in user interface and experience. The interface of the tools of both platforms feature a simple and elegant design. As a result, agents and customers alike can find key information easier and much quicker without a steep learning curve.

The style and feel of Freshservice’s portal are clean, and are intended to make customers’ or agents’ pathways to seeking answers or submitting service requests as easy as possible. However, it is mostly driven by search (where recommendations emerge), with cards underneath it that might direct you to what you are looking for.

Jira has a slightly more limited UI customization since Atlassian believes in the design of the portal with the user’s intentions in mind. You have complete control over the title, the style, and feel of the banner, as well as the placement of your corporate logo. It is up to you and your IT staff to decide how services, alerts, and resources are organized and presented as well.

Jira features a modern design that makes it easy to see important information on the platform.

Getting Started

As with any advanced business tools, Freshservice and Jira require at least an intermediate user to fully maximize their potential. These vendors offer support through different channels, such as email, chat, and phone. Additionally, they provide a wealth of knowledge and documentation to guide users in getting started with their platforms. They come with well-organized knowledge bases with powerful search functions, so you can easily find what you need.

While Freshservice is part of the Freshworks family of products (and works well with their other solutions), it can be considered a standalone application. As such, it is easy to get started with Freshservice without worrying about other products or integration. The vendor provides a nice, easy-to-follow onboarding flow. It gives users both the big-picture view and the step-by-step stages on how to get started with Freshservice. As such, it is relatively much faster to get started with the platform.

On the other hand, Jira Service Management is closely integrated with the rest of the Atlassian solutions. While many of its features are also standalone, some of its services are provided by the other Atlassian apps. For example, growing IT service teams will eventually have to learn how to use Opsgenie or Atlassian Cloud at some point. As a result, Jira has a relatively long training period. However, the company provides plenty of support and guidance through various channels and content.

Freshservice makes it easy to get started with its onboarding flow.

Use Cases

While both platforms offer flexibility to accommodate most types of organizations, the Freshservice vs. Jira use cases have specific distinctions. Freshservice is ideal for teams that are already scaling up but do not yet have the time or budget for large enterprise IT service management solutions. The centralized admin panel is simple to use and includes all of the essential features of an ITIL-compliant service management system. Similarly, the easy onboarding and integrations make setup a breeze. However, the slightly higher price point may put it outside of a small team’s budget.

On the other hand, Jira is great for huge organizations that are already serving a large customer base. With its close integration with the rest of Atlassian products, the platform performs well in large-scale projects, multinational clients, and mission-focused services. While its price point is relatively lower, the steep learning curve required to fully get onboard may intimidate teams that simply do not have enough time.

Jira can be used for large projects or an entire business operation of a national organization.

Freshservice vs. Jira: Comparison Table

Freshservice vs. Jira—Which Is Better?

Jira is indeed a powerful IT service management software. It comes with numerous features that help an established team provide better IT support, from help desk tools to analytics. Additionally, it integrates with other Atlassian products, which means if you are already using their products, then choosing Jira is a no-brainer. However, fast-moving teams that do not rely on the Atlassian tech stack may find Jira Service Management intimidating. It has a steeper learning curve as your team will need to learn other Atlassian services as well.

On the other hand, Freshservice is designed to work for both growing and agile teams. Its flexibility means your team can use as many (or as few) features as you want without having to learn other systems. It works with the rest of the Freshworks family of software, so you can run your entire business with their solution. However, Freshservice is also powerful on its own, so you can get started right away with its seamless onboarding process. On top of that, Freshworks offers 24/7 email support and 25/5 phone support for all plans, as well as Day Passes when you need extra support.

At the end of the day, the better platform will depend on your business’ needs. As such, it is important to know what your requirements are and find out which features you will need in order to determine which of the two products are ideal for your operations.

By Jenny Chang

Jenny Chang is a senior writer specializing in SaaS and B2B software solutions. Her decision to focus on these two industries was spurred by their explosive growth in the last decade, much of it she attributes to the emergence of disruptive technologies and the quick adoption by businesses that were quick to recognize their values to their organizations. She has covered all the major developments in SaaS and B2B software solutions, from the introduction of massive ERPs to small business platforms to help startups on their way to success.