Freshdesk → Chatwoot
What it saves, what actually moves, what you rebuild — and the thing that catches people.
What it costs, and what it saves
Freshdesk lists Growth at $19, Pro at $55 and Enterprise at $89 per agent per month, billed annually, as listed on 2026-10-03. Multiple SLA policies start at Pro, and ten agents on Pro is $6,600 a year. Chatwoot Community Edition is $0 to self-host. Its docs give 2 cores and 4 GB RAM as the minimum and 4+ cores with 8 GB for production, which is $24–48 a month on DigitalOcean Basic droplets as listed the same day ($288–576 a year, an estimate that leaves out backups and admin time). There are two catches. SLA policies are only in the self-hosted Enterprise Edition, at $99 per agent per month, which is more than Freshdesk Pro. And Chatwoot documents its Freshdesk importer for paid plans: Cloud lists Startups at $19, Business at $39 and Enterprise at $99 per agent per month, and the page does not state the billing period.
Moves cleanly
Chatwoot's built-in Freshdesk importer shipped in v4.17.0 (released 20 August 2026). It takes your Freshdesk domain and an API key. It imports contacts with phone, email, Freshdesk IDs, custom fields, tags and timestamps, and tickets with their public replies, customer replies and private notes. Tickets arrive as resolved historical conversations in Freshdesk import inboxes, grouped by channel, with their original timestamps. Customers are not notified during the import.
You rebuild
Chatwoot's guide lists what does not transfer: attachment files (a note on each message records how many were skipped), agents, groups, assignments, routing rules, automations, apps, SLAs, widget settings, deleted and spam tickets, and Freshdesk fields that have no Chatwoot equivalent. The importer also does not mention knowledge-base (Solutions) articles. Plan to re-create them as Chatwoot Help Center articles, and rebuild routing with Chatwoot macros and automation rules.
What Freshdesk costs you today
Per-agent/month, billed annually: Growth $19, Pro $55 (most popular), Enterprise $89 (monthly billing runs roughly 20% higher on each tier). There is no permanent free plan any more — the current free offer is $0 for 1-2 agents for 6 months only, after which it converts to a paid tier. Freddy AI Copilot is a separate $29/agent/month add-on (Pro/Enterprise only, assignable per-agent rather than account-wide), and Freddy AI Agent sessions are billed at $49 per 100 sessions after a one-time 500-session trial allowance. Verified directly against freshworks.com/freshdesk/pricing, July 2026.
What actually holds you in
Tickets, contacts, and knowledge-base content live in Freshworks' cloud; CSV and API export exist but there's no one-click path to a self-hosted platform, and automations (scenario rules, dispatch'r, business rules) are Freshdesk-specific and need to be rebuilt elsewhere. Email-based systems like FreeScout tend to migrate the most directly since the underlying model (shared mailbox → conversation) is the same shape.
What you are moving to
Chatwoot unifies live chat, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, SMS, and email into one team inbox, with a Captain AI layer for FAQ-driven auto-replies on paid tiers. Chatwoot ships as an 'open core' project: the community edition (the whole visible codebase outside one folder) is MIT-licensed and free to self-host with no seat limit, while a smaller set of enterprise features (SSO/SAML, agent capacity management, custom branding, SLA policies) live in a separate 'enterprise/' directory under Chatwoot's own proprietary license and require a paid subscription even when self-hosted.
Community edition free to self-host, unlimited agents. Self-hosted paid tiers: Premium Support $19/agent/month (Captain AI, voice, branding, roles/permissions) and Enterprise $99/agent/month (adds SSO/SAML, SLA). Cloud-hosted plans start at $19/agent/month (Startups tier).
Chatwoot strengths
- MIT-licensed core is genuinely open source, not source-available — you can audit, fork, and modify it freely
- Best-in-class channel coverage for chat-first support: WhatsApp, Instagram DM, Telegram, SMS, and live chat widget out of the box, broader than Freshdesk's native channel set on lower tiers
- Very active project (multiple releases a month) with a large community and strong docs
- Self-hosting the community edition is completely free with no agent-count restriction
What you give up
- SSO/SAML, SLA policies, and agent capacity management sit behind a paid license even when self-hosted — not a full feature set for free
- Captain AI (the auto-resolution layer, Chatwoot's rough equivalent of Freddy AI Agent) is a paid add-on, not part of the free community edition
- Less oriented toward classic long-form ticket workflows than Freshdesk or Zammad; strongest for chat-style support
The migration, step by step
- 1Check your ticket count in Freshdesk first. The importer reads the List Tickets API, which Freshdesk caps at 300 pages (30,000 tickets). If you have more, run Freshdesk's Account Export (Admin > Account > Account Details > Export data) and keep the XML as your archive.
- 2Set up Chatwoot: a Cloud paid plan, or a self-hosted install with the data_import feature enabled for the account. Generate the Freshdesk API key from an administrator so the importer can read the full available history.
- 3Re-create agents, teams, inboxes, macros, automation rules and Help Center articles in Chatwoot. Then start the import from Settings > Data and watch its progress there. Only one Freshdesk or Intercom import can run in an account at a time.
- 4Check the result. Spot-check contacts, custom fields and private notes, compare conversation counts with Freshdesk, and list the tickets whose attachments were skipped so agents know where the originals still are.
- 5Run both in parallel for one to two weeks. Connect a Chatwoot email inbox by forwarding or IMAP and have a few agents answer from Chatwoot while Freshdesk stays the primary desk.
- 6Cut over. Point your support address forwarding at Chatwoot, and swap the Freshdesk widget for the Chatwoot widget as close to launch as possible so there is no gap in coverage. Keep Freshdesk until every export is saved.
The gotcha
Long histories stop at 30,000 tickets. Freshdesk's API documentation says List All Tickets returns a maximum of 300 pages (30,000 tickets), and Chatwoot's importer reads that API. When the importer reaches a full 300th page, it imports that page and then marks the import as failed, with a message that the rest of the history needs a Freshdesk Account Export. The importer cannot ingest that export yet. Attachments are not imported at all. An older Freshdesk account can therefore end up with 30,000 tickets in Chatwoot as text only, while the remaining tickets and every file exist only in Freshdesk's XML export. Decide where that archive will live, and how agents will find it, before you cancel Freshdesk.
When to stay on Freshdesk
Stay on Freshdesk if you need multiple SLA policies but would not pay $99 per agent per month for Chatwoot Enterprise Edition. Stay too if your history runs well past 30,000 tickets and agents often open old attachments, or if your process depends on ticket forms and custom ticket fields, because Chatwoot's importer turns tickets into conversations. Staying is also sensible when nobody can run Postgres, Redis and Chatwoot upgrades.
More Layer 5 migrations
Figures verified 2026-07-11 against vendor pricing pages. Prices change and migrations differ by estate — treat the cost delta as a starting model, not a quote. Rankings and recommendations here are merit-only; affiliate income never changes a verdict. See our methodology.