Need to understand suitable approach for our product requirement

[Sushant]

Hi Team,
We are trying to Integrate our application (RingCentral app) with Freshdesk.
There are 2 approaches (as per the Freshdesk documentation) which we evaluated and below are the outcomes

1. Approach - 1 : Embed our application in Freshdesk and use the FDK to interact.
   Below are the challenges that we are facing during integration -

• Our app runs on node v20 and the FDK is supported with node v18 as per the documentation (Freshworks Developer Docs | App development process)

• We plan to keep our app in the global section but for any sort of interaction with the tickets or profile we need to have a script running in that page and which can pass on the information to the global app. (Correct me if my understanding is wrong)

2. Approach - 2 : Use the developer rest APIs to interact with the application ( Freshdesk).
   Below are the challenges that we see while integration using API -

• For any interaction with Freshdesk using the rest API , an API_KEY is required. This API_KEY cannot be generated using code as per my understanding and is present as part of the user profile settings. In order to use the Rest APIs in the subsequent calls the user need to provide this API_KEY to the calling app ,in our case it would be the customer care agent (which is very unreasonable and also is a security concern).

Upon further research we decided to go ahead with the 1st approach (Embedded) but before we proceed we want to get some more information from Freshdesk team

1. Are the APIs available to developers for integration without a paid version ?
2. If we go ahead with the paid version which one should we go for from a development point of view (which would serve our purpose)
3. Could you please specify the name of the license that we should opt in for.
   cc : @Shivani @Raviraj

[Raviraj (Raviraj Subramanian)]

HI @Sushant,

I hope I have added enough information about your two approaches in your other forum topics. If there are any further doubts, please ask here or in those topics.

Here’s the response to your questions:

1. Yes, all the APIs are available in the free trial account provided for app development purposes. Refer to this article for instructions on how to get a free trial account for development.
2. No need to purchase Freshdesk products for app development. We currently provide a sponsored free trial account for 90 days. Upon expiration, the trial can be extended again for app development and maintenance purposes.
3. Not applicable based on the response for question #2.

[Sushant]

Thank you @Raviraj for the response. I see that the free trial is only for 14 days and that is what we have been using for now, and we did not know about the extending the trial period.

@Keshav_mittal can we explore the development account for our development purpose ?