Alternatives to Freshworks
Freshworks CRM alternatives: the suite is several bills.
Freshworks CRM is the old name of Freshsales, the sales CRM in the Freshworks suite. It is sold per user in three tiers. Sequences, scoring and territories sit on Pro. Forecasting and custom modules sit on Enterprise. The help desk, the chat and the marketing are separate products. Spodus is five products on one record and one bill.
CRM
Contacts, pipeline, follow-ups
Finance
Estimates, invoices, payments
HR
Org chart, time off, reviews
Support
Tickets, SLAs, portal
Inbox
Channels and direct messages
What actually pushes people off Freshworks.
The CRM is fine. The way the suite is sold is the problem.
The good parts of the CRM are a tier up
Freshsales is sold in three tiers, per user. Contact scoring, sales sequences and territory management arrive on Pro. Forecasting, custom modules and the audit log arrive on Enterprise. So the Freshsales CRM a small team can justify is the one without the sequences that carried the demo.
The suite is a set of separate products
Freshworks sells the CRM, the help desk, the chat, the IT desk and the marketing as separate products, each with its own per-user plans. Deciding to answer support tickets properly is a second product with its own tiers, and the customer in Freshdesk is a copy of the one in Freshsales, kept in step by an integration.
The bot is metered and the extras cost per user
The Freddy AI Agent comes with an allowance of sessions, and sessions beyond it are bought in blocks, so a busy month is a larger bill. Branded documents are a per-user add-on. The seat you compared is the floor, not the price.
What a Spodus seat is instead.
One CRM with the help desk, the invoice and the people records already in it.
Nothing in the CRM is a tier
Pipelines, deals, contacts, companies, custom objects, custom fields, dashboards and automations are in every plan. What a higher plan adds is storage, workspaces, a larger automation allowance and admin controls. There is no plan where the pipeline gets a feature it did not have.
The help desk is the same product
Tickets with SLAs, a knowledge base, public forms and a customer portal sit on the same customer record as the deal. There is no second product to buy and no integration to keep two copies of a customer in step, because there is one copy.
Nothing metered, nothing sold on top
There is no session allowance and no add-on of any kind. Invoicing with tax rates and recurring schedules, people records with time off and an org chart, and a team chat are all in the seat. The only thing counted is people who sign in.
What you would be giving up.
Freshworks has breadth that Spodus does not, and it starts inside the CRM. Freshsales has a built-in phone, email sequences, chat on the contact, contact scoring and territory management. Spodus has none of those: no dialer, no email sequences, no chat widget and no scoring. Around the CRM, the suite adds Freshdesk with omnichannel support and bots, Freshchat, Freshmarketer for campaigns and journeys, and Freshservice for IT. Spodus has a help desk for email and portal tickets and no marketing product at all. If your sales team calls and sequences from the CRM, or marketing runs journeys from the same suite, stay on Freshworks. Spodus fits the team of two to twenty that works a pipeline by hand and wants the invoice, the ticket and the people records on the same customer.
Side by side.
| Spodus | Freshworks | |
|---|---|---|
| Sequences, scoring and territories | None | Pro and above |
| Built-in phone and chat | ||
| Email campaigns and journeys | Freshmarketer, separate product | |
| Forecasting and custom modules | Weighted pipeline, custom objects on every plan | Enterprise |
| Bot sessions metered | Nothing metered | |
| Help desk on the same record | Freshdesk, separate product | |
| Invoicing, tax rates and recurring schedules | ||
| HR, time off and org chart | ||
| Customer portal at no seat cost | In Freshdesk, not the CRM |
Freshworks's pricing structure above was read from their own pricing page on 11 September 2026; check it for current rates, which we deliberately do not quote here. Spodus is priced per seat on both Growth and Business, with no seat minimum. Customers in the support portal are free.
Contacts, accounts and deals by CSV.
Freshsales exports contacts, accounts and deals to CSV, and Spodus imports each with a column mapping step and duplicate detection. There is no Freshworks preset, so you point each column at a field yourself on the Map step; custom fields become custom fields and stages are mapped onto yours. Freshdesk contacts import the same way and arrive as one record rather than two. What does not come across: sequences, scoring, call logs, chat history and anything in Freshmarketer. Rebuild the workflows you use, which is usually a shorter list than the one you have.
Questions, answered.
Is Freshworks CRM the same as Freshsales?
Does Spodus have a dialer or email sequences?
Do we need Freshdesk as well?
Can we import from Freshsales and Freshdesk?
Thinking about the rest of the stack?
The same honest read on the other tools teams try to leave.
