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About Freshdesk Portal

The Freshdesk portal enables you to effortlessly create and deploy unique portals on the fly. When you sign up for a Freshdesk account, you will automatically get a default portal corresponding to your primary product. 

Additionally, you can set up individual Portals for your specific Products, tailoring your customers’ self-service experience.


A few terminologies to know:

  • Agent Portal: The Freshdesk agent interface you see when you log in to your account. On the agent portal, you can respond to incoming tickets, set up Knowledge Base articles, analyze reports, and do more. If you are an Administrator, you can also manage additional settings, add support agents and pay for your Freshdesk account.
  • Customer Portal: This is the portal you can set up for your customers and enable complete self-service support. You can set up a customer portal that includes:
    • Branded customer-facing support portal, where customers can raise and track support tickets
    • Knowledge Base with solution articles and FAQs
    • Community for customer collaboration

Note: Your customers can also access your customer portal using a custom URL that matches your domain like support.yourcompany.com.


Features of Freshdesk portal

With advanced agent permissions and granular capabilities like multiple theme management and out-of-the-box WCAG theme, the portals enable better manageability, accessibility, and effortless customization.


Here are a few features of the portal:

  • Centralized portal management: Set up unique portals for different products/services/brands and manage them from one place. You can customize the branding, sections, and behavior on each portal.
  • Multi-theme management: Allows customers to import and manage up to 10 custom themes for each portal.
  • Out-of-the-box WCAG theme: The WCAG theme helps Portal visitors with better accessibility.
    Note: Marina is the native WCAG theme for the Freshdesk Customer Portal that works out of the box. The Marina theme passes WCAG 2.0 AA standards.
  • Collision detection to avoid conflicts: Prevent multiple admins from simultaneously editing the Portal customizations on the code editor.
  • Pre-defined placeholders for a faster and error-free coding experience. Learn more. 
  • Advanced agent permissions: Offers special permissions for developers with restricted Freshdesk access to manage only portal customizations.
  • Multiple ticket forms: Easily manage different types of tickets.
  • Advanced ticket filters: Provides more refined ticket sorting options.
  • Portal-specific tickets display: Shows tickets relevant to a specific portal.
  • Count agent views for articles: Tracks article popularity on the customer portal.
  • CAPTCHA: Easily configure CAPTCHA.

Access and manage your portal

To access your default portal:

  1. Log in to your account as an admin.
  2. Go to Admin > Channels > Portals. Here you can see your default portal.
  3. You can see the portal name, associated product, portal URL, and the status of the portal. The primary portal is always enabled and cannot be changed. 
  4. To edit and customize your portal, click on the Edit icon.
    You can customize the following:
    • Portal Settings: Change your portal name, URL, language, and more. For more details, see Configure Portal Settings.
    • Manage Sections: Manage the different sections of your portal. For example, you can decide what you want to add to your ticket forms or who can access your Knowledge Base and Community. For details, see Manage Portal Sections.
    • Appearance: Customize the look and feel of your portal, edit themes, and do more. For details, see Customize Portal Appearance.

Customize portal accessibility

  1. To customize the accessibility of your portal, click Access Control on the portal list page.
    • Allow users to sign-up on the portal: Enable this option to store the information of the user raising a ticket, you can have new users sign up from your public portal.
    • Allow users to sign in using: Allow customers to log into Freshdesk with their Google or Facebook credentials. This will speed up the sign-in process for your customers and let you track who logs in. 
  2. Once you make the changes, click Save.

Set up a new portal

When you sign up for a Freshdesk account, you will automatically get a default portal corresponding to your primary product. Additionally, you can set up individual Portals for your specific Products, tailoring your customers’ self-service experience.


Before you begin:

  • Ensure that you have set up a product before creating a portal. A portal is always associated with the product. 
  • You can create multiple products and associate a portal for each product.
    Note: Multi-product portal management is available from the Pro plan.


To create a new portal:

  1. Log in to your account as an admin.
  2. Go to Admin > Channels > Portals > new portal.
  3.  Click Start Setup. You will be redirected to the setup page.
  4. The portal setup includes the following steps or tabs. You can customize the following:
    1. Portal Settings: Change your portal name, URL, language, and more. For more details, see Configure Portal Settings.
    2. Manage Sections: Manage the different sections of your portal. For example, you can decide what you want to add to your ticket forms or who can access your Knowledge Base and Community. For details, see Manage Portal Sections.
    3. Appearance: Customize the look and feel of your portal, edit themes, and do more. For details, see Customize Portal Appearance.
Note: If you already use multiple portals with customized themes, you can reuse the same code while creating new portals. Download your existing theme, redo the customization, and import the theme again. For details, see Import Themes.

Learn more