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Freshservice vs HaloITSM (2026)

Comparing Freshservice and HaloITSM? Both are Enterprise, Help Desk & Ticketing and Internal IT & Employee Support tools in the directory, which is why buyers put them on the same shortlist. Below is a side-by-side look at pricing and an estimated monthly bill, channels, compliance claims, and integrations, plus when each is the better fit, so you can pick on the facts rather than either vendor's own sales page.

At a glance

Conversations/mo

% handled by AI

Agent seats

Price it at my volume

Estimates assume 5,000 conversations a month, 60% handled by AI and 10 agent seats, at each vendor's published list price (the cost calculator's model); treat them as a floor, not a quote. Compliance rows are what vendors publicly claim, and “Not verified” means we have not confirmed that fact yet, not that the tool lacks it.

Choose Freshservice or HaloITSM?

About Freshservice

Freshservice is Freshworks' IT service management platform, built on ITIL practice and covering incident management, a service catalog, asset management, low-code orchestration and intelligent routing. The AI layer is Freddy: a Copilot for agents, an Agent Studio for building automations, and Insights for analytics, with one customer reporting that Freddy Insights cut ticket trend analysis from an hour to three minutes. Freshworks says 80 percent of customers go live in under 90 days, and the platform is used to run consolidated service desks well beyond IT.

Its Slack integration is the best documented of any pick on this page, which matters more than marketing claims. The Freddy AI Agent can be added to a public Slack channel or messaged directly. An employee asking for something from the service catalog gets matched on keywords and walked through raising the request; clicking "Raise a ticket", the thumbs-down, or the ticket emoji produces a ticket form pre-filled with context from the conversation. Support engineers use a /freshservice-ticket slash command to log a Slack conversation as a ticket outright. The app's Home tab shows requesters their own tickets and agents the ones assigned to them, and agents can reply, add private notes and update ticket properties without leaving Slack. Wire Freddy to the orchestration engine and it fulfils rather than just files: password resets, adding employees to email distribution lists, granting access to software tools. The same agent runs in Microsoft Teams.

Freshworks launched on October 13, 2010 from a rented meeting room in Chennai, founded by Girish Mathrubootham and Shan Krishnasamy. Freshservice shipped in January 2014 as the internal IT counterpart to Freshdesk, which is why the founding year recorded here is the product's and not the company's, and it reached a million dollars of revenue within ten months. Named customers include RingCentral, McLaren, Databricks, New Balance, Seagate, TaylorMade, Amerisure, Vermeer and Manchester Metropolitan University.

Pricing is public and per agent, billed annually: Starter $19, Growth $49, Pro $99, Enterprise by quote, with a 14-day trial. Budget past the headline, though. Freddy AI Copilot is a $29 per agent per month add-on available on Pro and above, so a realistic AI-enabled seat is $128 and not $19; Enterprise bundles Freddy AI Agent (Classic) and Freddy AI Insights. Choose Freshservice if you want a genuine ITSM system of record with asset management and change control, and a Slack front end that is documented down to the slash command. Skip it if all you want is an answer bot on top of your existing docs, where a lighter tool will cost far less.

Read the full Freshservice listing →  ·  See Freshservice alternatives →

About HaloITSM

HaloITSM is the IT service management product from Halo, formerly NetHelpDesk, and is now sold as part of one Halo platform that also covers enterprise service management, customer service, CRM and managed-services PSA under a single per-agent price. The ITSM side is ITIL-aligned and complete: incident management with a dedicated major incident console, a service catalogue with forms, approvals and automation for access, software, hardware and onboarding requests, change enablement with CAB reviews and risk checks, problem management with known errors, a CMDB with asset discovery, and 1,000+ out-of-the-box reports. Employees reach it through the self-service portal, email, live chat, SMS and social channels, with telephony through integrations such as 3CX.

Halo AI ships in every plan. Conversational agents work two ways: an end-user virtual agent across web chat, Teams, Slack and the portal that triages, logs and guides users before escalating with full context, and a fulfiller agent inside the ticket for your team. Process agents (dispatch, first-line support, major incident, knowledge and change management) act on platform events on a schedule, all within your role-based access controls. Underneath, Halo surfaces matching past tickets and knowledge on every new request, suggests category, priority, team and SLA-breach warnings, and runs unsupervised machine learning to find recurring themes across large ticket volumes. External agents can also be connected with their own permissions.

The commercial model is the unusual part. Halo says it is privately owned and founder-led, and since 13 June 2023 its contracts have promised no mergers, acquisitions or private equity deals for a rolling ten years. It credits unused licence fees back at renewal, gives standard-price customers a compounded 5 percent discount at each ARR milestone it reaches, and offers large organizations unlimited licences with funded implementation for a fixed $1 million a year. After 17 years in Stowmarket, it is moving its global headquarters to the Willis Building in Ipswich during 2026, under CEO Paul Hamilton. Halo was named a Challenger in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for ITSM Platforms, claims 100,000+ users in 75+ countries, and counts McLaren Racing as a technology partner and Sky TV and Cardiff Council among its customers.

Pricing is per agent with every module included; end users and portal visitors are free. The US calculator on the pricing page starts at $99 per agent per month billed annually for up to 24 agents and falls to $85 between 100 and 249 agents. Onboarding packages are required at a bespoke cost, and a 30-day trial with all features needs no credit card. Choose HaloITSM if you want a full ITIL platform without tiered add-ons, and a vendor contractually committed to staying independent. Skip it if you are a small team after a Slack-first AI helpdesk, because you would be paying for, and configuring, a complete ITSM suite.

Read the full HaloITSM listing →  ·  See HaloITSM alternatives →

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