Sold as half a product, and it says so itself

Freshchat is described by Freshworks as an AI powered omnichannel messaging platform offering live chat and chatbot solutions for smarter conversational support. Its own page frames the coverage as messaging, live chat, even email and voice, and says you can create and deploy AI driven bot experiences across your website, native app and messaging channels. It is the conversation product, not the ticket product.

The free tier is unusually generous for this market and is the reason this page exists at all. Freshchat publishes a plan at $0 for up to 10 agents, including a chat widget on web and mobile apps, a shared inbox and a connected email address, with 100 campaign contacts per account per month. Ten people answering chat for nothing is more than most small teams need, and it should be exhausted before anybody is paid.

Above it the plans are per agent and billed annually: Growth at $19 an agent a month, Pro at $49 and Enterprise at $79, with Growth adding social messengers, SMS, WhatsApp, Line and Google Business Messages, and Pro adding multilingual support. Note that these are not the same figures as the Freshdesk plans compared elsewhere on this site, even where the tier names match. On signing up you get access to the Enterprise plan for 14 days.

The AI is bought separately in the usual Freshworks shape. Freddy AI Agent lists the first 500 sessions included and $49 per 100 sessions after that, and Freddy AI Copilot, which helps your staff rather than your customers, is $29 an agent a month. What the pricing page does not show is any free Freddy AI Agent session allowance against the free plan, so the free tier appears to be humans only. Everything above is what Freshworks published on the checked date, and it moves, so read their pricing page and ours before planning around it.

Written to be used rather than to be waved at. If any of these describe you, this is the wrong product and the rest of the page will not change that.

• Ten agents at zero is the honest headline and it beats every paid tier on this list for a team that needs people in the widget. If your problem is that nobody is watching the chat and you have staff who could, take the free plan and stop reading. Nothing here puts a human in a conversation at any price.
• You want messaging channels, and Freshchat is sold as the messaging product specifically. Social messengers, SMS, WhatsApp, Line and Google Business Messages are listed from Growth upward. Askably answers on your own website and nowhere else.
• You are already inside Freshworks, or you expect to be. The upgrade path to Freshdesk Omni for ticketing and knowledge bases is a real one, and staying inside a suite you already run is usually worth more than any feature argument on this page.
• You want your visitors reached inside a mobile app. Freshchat lists a chat widget on web and mobile apps, and bot experiences deployable to a native app. There is no mobile software development kit here and no app surface of any kind.
• Your AI volume fits inside 500 sessions. That allowance is included rather than sold, so a quiet site pays nothing extra for the AI at all, and a flat monthly fee would be a bill you did not need to open.

• You do not have to buy the other half to have something for the assistant to read. Point it at the pages and files you already have. Freshchat's own page routes you to Freshdesk Omni for knowledge bases, which means grounding the bot properly is a second purchase there and none here.
• Agents are not the unit, because there are no agents. $0, $29, $99 and $299 a month flat. Five people on Freshchat Growth is $95 a month billed annually before any AI session is counted, and the count starts at 501.
• Sources are shown, not implied. Numbered references under each reply point at the passages behind it, so anyone can check what the assistant said against what your material actually says.
• The refusal has a floor you set. Below your match threshold the request never reaches the model and the visitor receives your own wording, and you also control the caution level, the reply length and how many passages are retrieved.
• Our name is off the widget on every paid tier at no extra charge, and appearance goes down to custom CSS, with the launcher in a closed shadow root and the panel in its own frame so it cannot inherit or break your page styles.

Read off their own site on that date, quoted narrowly. Prices and packaging in this category change often, so treat this as a snapshot and check both before you decide.

Listing this is more useful than filling it in. Every line here is something that was not clearly published, or was behind a sign-up.

• No free Freddy AI Agent session allowance appeared against the free plan, so whether the AI is available at all at $0 was not readable from the pricing page.
• The page carried an annual and a monthly toggle but rendered only the annual figures, so no month to month price is quoted above.
• What a Freshchat bot is grounded in was not stated on the product or pricing pages read, and the Freddy AI Agent page did not resolve.
• Whether Freshworks branding can be removed from the Freshchat widget, and on which tier, was not addressed on any page read.

How is this different from the Freshdesk comparison on this site?

Different product, different price list. Freshdesk is the ticketing product and its plan figures are not the ones above, even where the tier names match. Freshchat is the messaging product, it has a free tier for up to ten agents, and it sends you to Freshdesk Omni when you want a knowledge base.

Do I need a knowledge base before this works?

No, and that is the point of the comparison. It indexes documents you upload or crawls your own site following your sitemap. If your policies already exist as pages, that is the entire setup.

Can it answer on WhatsApp or in my mobile app?

No. Your website only. No WhatsApp, no SMS, no social messengers, no voice and no mobile software development kit at any tier.

How do sessions and replies compare?

They are different units and dividing one into the other is a mistake. A session is a window of interaction counted on their side. A reply here is one answer returned to one visitor. Compare the definitions before comparing $49 per 100 with $29 for 1,000.