Lumo or Freshsales: two products or one

Freshworks makes a family of business products. Freshsales is the sales CRM, Freshdesk the helpdesk, and there are products for marketing, chat and IT service. Freshsales is a mature sales CRM with a pipeline, contact management, built-in calling and email, sequences and an AI layer called Freddy. There are mobile apps and a marketplace with integrations to many other tools.

If you want sales and support together, at Freshworks you usually buy two products that talk to each other. That works, and for many teams it is exactly right. They do remain two products with their own screens, settings and administration. An account manager who wants to know whether a complaint is open for his customer looks in a second environment, or relies on an integration somebody has to maintain.

Picture this. A customer is unhappy about a delivery. Support knows, because the ticket has been open for three days. The account manager does not, and that same afternoon sends an email about an expansion. Nobody did anything wrong. The information simply lives in two places.

Lumo puts the two in one database. A ticket sits on the same organization record as the deal. The customer health score, a number from 0 to 100 built from ticket signals over the last 90 days, sits next to the pipeline. The customer portal, the knowledge base and live chat belong to the same system. A chat visitor who leaves an email address becomes a person, a lead and an activity right away.

On the other side, Lumo has no built-in calling. Numbers are plain call links, without call logging or recording. And the AI assistant works differently from what you may be used to. It is off by default, works with the user's permissions and asks for approval before it does anything outward.

Lumo is made by Sales Surge, the agency behind more than 150 CRM implementations and a Pipedrive Platinum Partner. We built it for B2B teams that see sales and service as one customer relationship. Below we walk through the differences theme by theme, and we say plainly where Freshsales is stronger.

On the deal board the two are close. Both have pipelines with stages, a board and a list, and a place for the next step. Freshsales puts a lot of weight on activity: calling, email and sequences that walk reps through a series of touchpoints.

Lumo puts the weight on value and movement in the pipeline. Per stage you see the number of deals, the value and the weighted value, and each stage has a win probability and a setting for after how many days a deal starts to rot. Every stage change is stored with its duration, so you can later report how long deals sit in Proposal. On a deal you add products with quantity, price, discount and billing frequency, from one time to yearly. The deal value is the sum of those lines.

The Today page puts tasks, leads to follow up, stalled deals and tickets close to breaching their SLA on one screen. That last part only works because the helpdesk lives in the same product.

Helpdesk and customer view

This is the biggest difference. In Lumo, tickets come in through a mailbox, the customer portal or a chat you escalate to a ticket. Per priority you set first-response and resolution targets, with business hours and holidays. At 75 percent of the time a warning appears. After solving, a satisfaction survey goes to the customer through a signed link.

Because all that sits on the same organization record as the deals, an account manager preparing a renewal sees right away that two tickets are open and the health score has dropped. Freshworks can do this too, through the integration between Freshsales and Freshdesk. The difference is that in Lumo there is nothing to connect or maintain.

Email, calendar and calling

Freshsales has built-in calling, and that is a real difference. Lumo does not. Phone numbers are call links that open your own phone or calling software, with no call log and no recording. You record a call as an activity with a note.

Gmail and Google Calendar sync two ways in Lumo today. Only mail with known contacts is stored, and your mail is private by default. The Outlook and Microsoft 365 integration is planned. If you work in Outlook, you use your personal BCC address today: put it in Bcc or forward a message to it, and it lands on the right person, organization and deal. Every other part of Lumo is independent of your mail client. Read more about email in the CRM.

AI: Freddy and the assistant

Freddy is woven through the Freshworks products. The Lumo AI assistant is a chat in the app with 52 tools. It searches, creates records, builds segments and reports and can prepare campaigns. Anything irreversible or outward waits for a click on Approve and run. It runs with your role and permissions, is off per workspace until an admin switches it on, and every action is logged. By default it runs on Google Gemini.

At Freshworks, marketing is its own product. In Lumo you build a campaign in four steps: name and sender, recipients, template and timing. Recipients come from a segment of saved filters, with a preview of who is excluded and why. Explicit consent is on by default and is checked again at the moment of sending. Someone who unsubscribes is unsubscribed for the whole workspace. Templates are HTML, there is no drag and drop editor. Read more about campaigns.

In Lumo you create quotes from the products on the deal. They are numbered per year, like OFF-2026-0001, and go out through your Gmail with a signing link. The customer signs with a typed name and a six digit code sent by email. The signed PDF gets an evidence page. Quotes and the signing page are in Dutch only, and it is not a qualified electronic signature.

Switching from Freshsales has no wizard. Lumo has an import wizard for Pipedrive and no import from other CRMs or from CSV. Sales Surge moves your Freshsales and Freshdesk data by hand and sets up the pipelines and fields. See our migration service.

Freshsales does several things Lumo does not. It helps to know them up front:

• built-in calling with call logging and recording from the CRM
• a mobile app for reps who are on the road a lot
• sequences that walk reps through a series of touchpoints
• a marketplace with many ready-made integrations
• an interface in many more languages than Dutch and English

The first point weighs most. If your sales run on the phone and you want every call logged automatically, Lumo does not do that today. What you can do is record a call as an activity with a note and schedule the follow-up straight away. That is manual work, and we say so.

If you have used Freshdesk for years and your support people are happy with it, that is also a good reason to stay with Freshworks. The gain with Lumo is one customer view. If that is not a problem for you today, the gain counts for less.