Atera vs. Freshservice: A full review for IT decision-makers

The hidden costs of the wrong IT management platform extend far beyond the price tag—lost productivity, security vulnerabilities, and scaling limitations can impact your entire organization. For IT leaders tasked with selecting a platform that will serve as the backbone of their technical operations, understanding the nuanced differences between solutions isn’t just helpful—it’s essential. 

Atera and Freshservice are both leading IT management platforms that share similar features but ultimately serve different use cases. Freshservice is primarily used for service desk management, while Atera offers an all-in-one IT management platform for IT teams.

Even though Atera and Freshservice differ, IT decision-makers often compare them for IT management tasks such as asset management, ticket management, and workflow automation. If you’re looking for information on which platform is right for your IT team, this article is for you. 

Below, we have compared Atera’s and Freshservice’s key features, pricing, user interfaces, and customer reviews to help you make the right choice for your IT team. Let’s begin!

Why should you trust our reviews? 

We don’t just examine the features of Atera and Freshservice; we also consider feedback from our community and insights from reviews on platforms like G2 and TrustRadius. This comprehensive approach helps highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each solution.

Our goal is to keep our content transparent and objective, empowering you to make informed decisions for your business. Your trust in our reviews matters to us because we understand the crucial role that choosing the right IT management platform plays in the success of your IT department.

Atera vs. Freshservice: A brief overview

Let’s start with a brief overview of Atera and Freshservice:

We also looked at G2’s user review comparison of Freshservice vs Atera, which considers factors like ease of use, quality of support, and how well the software meets user requirements.

As you can see below, customers have rated Atera and Freshservice mostly equally, although Atera has an edge in ease of setup and how good a partner the product has been in doing business:

You can access the full G2 comparison here.

Features and capabilities

Let’s start with an important comparison: The features and capabilities of Atera and Freshservice. While the two platform’s features may seem similar at first glance, they differ significantly when you look closer.

Freshservice is mainly focused on the ITSM aspect of IT management, and its main use case is resolving and managing users’ IT issues. Its key features are ticket and knowledge base management, a self-service portal, change management, and asset management.

In comparison, Atera is an all-in-one IT management platform that allows users to monitor and manage their entire IT environment from one platform. 

Atera offers many of the same features as Freshservice, including ticketing, asset management, a self-service portal, and knowledge base management. The key difference is that Atera expands its capabilities to other areas, including RMM, Network Discovery, remote access, Agentic AI, and patch management. Atera’s RMM allows users to monitor and manage their endpoints, such as workstations, servers, and switches, a feature Freshservice lacks.

Atera’s device monitoring page

Another feature that makes Atera stand out is its Agentic AI technology, called Action AI™.

Atera’s AI Copilot (part of Action AI™) is like your personal assistant for IT management, helping to automate tasks like managing tickets, troubleshooting devices, generating scripts, and creating knowledge base articles.

Through Agentic AI, AI Copilot learns about your IT environment in real time and provides actionable insights to questions like “How many devices are running outdated software?” or “Which endpoints are experiencing performance issues?”

Source: Atera

Atera’s AI Copilot assistant isn’t just a tool, it’s your IT partner designed to provide actionable insights, automate repetitive tasks, and deliver better outcomes faster. With it, our enterprise customers like Leeds United have cut their ticket volumes by 25-35%, as end users are empowered to fix issues on their own.

Freshservice has also made some AI advancements to its platform, although these are limited mainly to ticketing, whereas Atera expands them to the entire platform.

User interface and usability

Atera and Freshservice are mainly designed for different purposes within IT management; thereby, their user interfaces and usability also differ.

Here at Atera, our user interface has received a multitude of positive feedback, and managing tasks, such as ticketing, device monitoring, and patch management, is straightforward.

From Atera’s dashboard, you can set up an IT automation profile to automate tasks, such as patch management, software updates, and system reboots.

From the main dashboard view, you can gain insights into the overall health and performance of your IT environment. You can see the ticket and alert status, customer satisfaction, ticket activity, critical and overdue tickets, and more.

For a comparison, here is a look into Freshservice’s admin dashboard:

Freshservice dashboard (via Capterra)

Freshservice’s admin dashboard mainly revolves around its key features, such as ticketing.

While we might be a bit biased, we truly believe that Atera offers more intuitive user interfaces that benefit both IT departments and MSPs. Onboarding new customers to Atera is quick, and you can get up and running within minutes of signing up.

Pricing and value for money

Both Atera and Freshservice charge users based on pay-per-user/technician, where you pay for the amount of technicians using the platform.

Atera is renowned for its transparent pricing plans, which range from $149 to $219 per month for IT departments and from $129 to $209 per month for MSPs. Enterprises can request a custom quotation for more personalized services.

In comparison, Freshservice pricing plans for ITSM range from $25 to $102 per month, and there is an enterprise plan with a custom quotation.

Freshservice appears more affordable than Atera on the surface, but there are some key differences.

Both Atera and Freshservice offer integrations with remote support software, but only Atera offers remote access as part of its standard plans. In addition, Atera’s standard plans include RMM, PSA, Network Discovery, asset management, and patch management, most of which Freshservice lacks.

Freshservice offers many of its features, such as asset management, as add-ons, which also increase the overall cost.

Customer support and community

Both Atera and Freshservice offer live chat and email support to their customers. A small difference is that Atera offers 24/7 support, while Freshservice offers 24/5 support.

Both Atera and Freshservice also have extensive knowledge bases and active IT communities, which allow users to get help on their own and troubleshoot problems with other IT professionals.

The question is though, how do customers see the support levels of both platforms?

Many Atera customers say that the 24/7 live chat support is one of the best parts of the platform. One Reddit user stated, “Support is the best part. I’m chatting to someone on the platform in under a minute.”

Atera users are actively part of the product development process and can leave and vote on new features on the Features board.

Freshservice’s 24/5 technical support is mostly well received, although some users have shared criticism of it. For instance, one user in the Reddit threat below mentions receiving great customer service, while another user mentions poor support:

Security and compliance

As an IT decision-maker, you’re probably concerned about the security and compliance of Atera and Freshservice since security is one of your core responsibilities.

As part of its ITSM offerings, Freshservice provides role-based access control, encryption, multi-factor authentication, and audit logs to help users secure their information.

At Atera, security is our top priority, so security is at the center of everything we do, which is why it is integral to our products and features. We are HIPAA compliant, SOC 2 certified, and more! 

With smart logging and reporting and strict adherence to industry standards, we ensure our customers’ organizations are protected from malicious third parties.

In addition, Atera offers plenty of cybersecurity integrations with tools such as ThreatDown, Ironscales, ESET, Emsisoft, Bitdefender, Cynet, and Acronis, to further strengthen your security.

Performance and reliability

Performance and reliability are keys to effective IT operations. That’s why we at Atera continually work to ensure that our performance and reliability scores remain high and that downtime is minimized.

If you ever do run into problems using Atera, you can rest assured that you will always get the right help, thanks to our 24/7 live chat support. You’ll also see our commitment to expanding our support offerings through our digital resources including our blog, knowledge base, and an active community. You can always count on us.

User feedback and reviews

Both Atera and Freshservice have received strong reviews from customers on platforms like G2, Capterra, and Reddit. On G2, Atera currently has 800+ reviews rated 4.6 out of 5.0, while Freshservice has 1,000+ reviews rated 4.6 out of 5.0.

Both platforms are strongly rated by customers but for different reasons.

Atera customers appreciate the platform’s all-in-one capabilities, built-in AI and automation, strong customer support, and pay-per-technician pricing.

One Capterra user said, “What makes Atera stand out from the rest is the collation of some of the most important IT functions under a single, intuitive interface that is easy to implement.”

Atera review via Capterra

Another G2 user appreciated Atera’s automation capabilities, saying, “Now I can schedule updates, reboots, and even disk cleanup without having to do it manually, saving me time.”

Atera’s AI helps users automate tasks like ticketing and device troubleshooting. One Capterra user said, “Atera is helping us solve tickets in a very short space of time using their Copilot in the PSA, which analyses a ticket, suggests solutions, and helps respond professionally.”

Atera review via Capterra

Freshservice’s positive reviews mainly relate to the product’s ITSM capabilities. One Capterra user said, “Overall it meets our requirements in IT, security, and accounting team.”

In addition to Freshservice ITSM, another area where they have received positive feedback is Freshservice’s ticketing system.

In addition to the positive feedback, MSPs and IT teams have criticized Freshservice for lacking a proper RMM and PSA.

One Reddit user said, “Freshservice is a pleasant ticketing system to use but isn’t really a PSA tool. We currently use it but are a far smaller MSP than you, and it is showing its cracks easily.”

Freshservice review via Reddit

Future-proof your IT with Atera’s Agentic AI IT management platform

In 2024, Agentic AI was integrated into only 1% of enterprise software applications, but Gartner expects it to reach 33% by 2028. In the IT management space, Atera is at the forefront of infusing Agentic AI technology into its offerings, being the first platform to do so to assist enterprises in maximizing IT efficiency.

With a deep foundation in Agentic AI, Atera offers a digital workforce of AI agents that proactively and autonomously support your entire IT operation. Atera’s all-in-one IT management platform consolidates RMM, helpdesk, ticketing, and automation, empowering IT teams and MSPs to efficiently manage and protect infrastructure, automate tasks, and boost service quality by reducing downtime and improving SLAs. If you’re looking to future-proof your IT operations with industry-leading Agentic AI technology, Atera is arguably the best (and the only) choice. To get started, contact our sales team for a custom demo or sign up for Atera’s 30-day free trial to try it yourself!