14 Best Zendesk Alternatives & Competitors

A customer service department is only as good as its support team members, and these highly-prized employees need to rely on one another. Tools that allow support agents to communicate and collaborate are important aspect of customer service software. There are 3 Basic support plans at $19, $49 and $99 per user per month billed annually, and 5 Suite plans at $49, $79, $99, $150, and $215 per user per month metadialog.com billed annually. Businesses of all sizes can rely on the Zendesk customer service platform and benefit from workflow management, powerful AI tools, robust insights, and more. If that sounds good to you, sign up for a free demo to see our software in action and get started. Intercom’s integration capabilities are limited, and some apps don’t integrate well with third-party customer service technology.

• Whether you’ve just started searching for a customer support tool or have been using one for a while, chances are you know about both Zendesk and Intercom.
• Intercom is more sales-oriented, while Zendesk has everything a customer support representative can dream about.
• Zendesk takes the slight lead here because it offers some advanced help desk features, which Intercom does not.
• As we see, we have some of the backend libraries here, here’s a JavaScript library, mobile libraries, an integration with Segment, which they build right away.
• This becomes the perfect opportunity to personalize the experience, offer assistance to prospects as per their needs, and convert them into customers.
• Behavior-based messaging allows you to customize every last detail of triggers and rules including–which channel sends the message, when it sends, where it sends, and who gets targeted.

Intercom calculates the price based on the number of seats (users) you request. Depending on the seat type (subscription plan), users get access to different features. For example, the Messaging feature is not available in the Support plan, while Articles aren’t available in the Engage and Conver plans.

What tools integrate with Intercom?

Apart from team conversations, it integrates with the ticketing system. Thus, the inbox is used to refer tickets to other agents who can solve them. Therefore, a helpdesk with a good inbox can make your team efficient in solving problems. While administrators can automatically assign tickets to certain agents or teams, they can also manually assign tickets to members of sales or customer service teams. Team inboxes aggregate tickets applicable to the whole team–or a specific department–that any agent can address.

• Crisp’s top features include co-browsing, a CRM, a shared inbox, a chatbot, a ticketing system, and more.
• On Capterra, Intercom has a rating of 4.5 given by 784 reviewers.
• With the Intercom Messenger widget on every article, your customers can instantly connect with an agent if they need further help.
• Freshdesk is a customer service software that helps businesses manage their customer service operations.
• In 2014, they acquired Zopim, a Singapore based live chat company.
• If you wish to strengthen both your sales and customer support teams and enjoy plenty of integrated features, go for Zendesk.

Advanced AI powers Ortto’s next-generation live chat tool, Talk, which lets businesses leverage insights from their customer data platform to provide truly personalized conversations at scale. Unlike existing solutions, with functional data limitations that are more hindrance than help, Talk is built into Ortto’s marketing automation, analytics, and customer data platform. With its intuitive design and comprehensive set of features, Help Scout makes it easy for your team to manage tickets, automate workflows, and provide better customer service in one place. Plus, its pricing plans are flexible and affordable so you can scale up or down as your needs change. Hubspot, of course, has quality in its products, the Service Hub is focused on the entire customer experience similar to how Intercom is but with slightly fewer feature sets.

Zapier Automation Platform

If someone has a question, they wanna talk to someone on the sales team, and then their messages. So when someone becomes a customer or once you have their email address or something else, then you be able to send messages across different channels. They added some support recently, but these two seem to be the major use cases and really what we see them be used for the most. The forever free plan comes with basic features such as a single inbox, file attachments, and can be used to handle upto 100 tickets/month. Zendesk Service offers the right platform for tracking, prioritizing, and solving customer support tickets. Support agents can easily view all ongoing and past conversations in a central location so that communication between your business and customers is fast as well as personal.

If you are currently using Zendesk as your customer support platform, you might be wondering how to switch to Intercom and transfer your existing historical customer data. Migrating from one platform to another can be a complicated and time-consuming process, especially if you have a lot of data and customizations in your Zendesk account. To create help articles, you can choose a template or create one from scratch, customize the template, import files or docs, and publish within minutes. Simply allow customers to find relevant help by themselves and reduce your ticket volume by up to 80%.

Zendesk vs Intercom vs ProProfs: Type of Users

Intercom, I’ll say, has probably one of the most extensive documentations I’ve seen. You have, also the app store component here, where they have a lot of different app integrations. That’s something that Zendesk has a little bit, CustomerIO has a little bit, but Intercom really has the most integrations. So if you want to do a quick integration with something like Slack, you’ll say to send messages into a Slack channel, that’ll be quite easy to do. They support email, they support, just jump here into the messages product.

LiveAgent is often referred to as the best Zendesk alternative for cost value. This platform acts as a help desk tool capable of receiving and managing client requests from various channels. For example, LiveAgent allows users to communicate via email, social media, telephone, or live chat. Many users agree that LiveAgent strikes a great balance between a simple interface and a feature-rich ticketing system. Choosing the right customer service platform for your business is crucial to ensure efficient communication and support for your clients. The decision should be based on your specific use case, team size, budget, and desired features.

Is HubSpot better than Zendesk?

According to its website, Drift’s main goal is revenue acceleration. With Drift, your live chat isn’t limited to support, making this your tool of choice if flexibility is something you’re looking for. Access a shared workspace, a shared inbox that can track SMS, calls and email, knowledge base management, automation, reporting, and more with Zendesk. One key aspect of good customer support is offering a self-service option, such as a knowledge base or forum. Zendesk stands out as a champion of customer support due to its easy-to-use work-frame, many useful add-ons, and features in all tiers. Therefore, to gauge if your chosen help desk is effective or not, you use analytics.

Let it be custom properties, custom surveys, or custom reports; you can shape everything according to your team’s and customers’ needs. Along with customer management, Salesforce Service Cloud presents 2,500+ collaboration tools within its system, making it one of the most advanced tools in terms of integrations. Talk is built into the Ortto marketing and customer data platform, so your team has all the data they need at their fingertips to provide personalized, relevant responses, faster than ever before. It’s a pretty okay ticketing system starting at the price point of $29/mo for one agent with no collaboration features. The only advantage it has over other Zendesk alternatives in this article is that it can be self-hosted. They have advanced compliance levels like HIPAA for serious B2C clients like doctors but no SLAs and priority levels for B2B clients.

Zendesk vs. Freshdesk: Integrations

In terms of usability, ProProfs Help Desk has been diligently designed to meet the needs of customer service teams of any size, business. Right from small startups to large enterprises, all businesses can manage their ticketing needs and stay available to their customers 24×7. With Zendesk, businesses can build a dedicated help center and a community forum to encourage customers to resolve issues at their own pace- while reducing the ticket volume. Moreover, agents can collaborate with other members or teams and get real-time updates about who is viewing a ticket at any given moment. These products are able to integrate with each other, which offers customers more personalized customer experiences.

You can add agents, create teams, and set agent roles & permissions to decide their level of access to the tool. Automated ticket routing ensures that all tickets have an owner and are shared with the most capable agents. You can also choose their Round-robin ticket assignment feature to equally distribute tickets among your agents. Moreover, you can keep your dashboard tidy with ticket organization features such as ticket prioritization, labels, and filters.

Switch channels seamlessly for a truly holistic experience

If you have been wondering which to choose Intercom or Zendesk, the good news is you aren’t alone. That’s true, businesses vary by industry, size, purposes, the software they need, a budget for that software, and the list can go on. Intercom’s role-based permissions allow administrators full control over each department’s and agent’s capabilities, and access to channels and information.

In this detailed comparison, we’ll explore the features and characteristics of Intercom and Zendesk, highlighting each of their unique capabilities, so you can identify the right solution for your needs. Use ticketing systems to manage the influx and provide your customers with timely responses. Intercom’s solution offers several use cases, meaning the product’s investments and success resources have a broad focus. But this also means the customer experience ROI tends to be lower than what it would be if you went with a best-in-class solution like Zendesk. Intercom also has an omnichannel customer service solution, but it’s fairly limited, with no native voice capabilities and minimal voice integrations.

Intercom Agent Dashboard

The trigger feature reduces cart abandonment and increases conversions. It plans on using this funding to research machine learning technology instead of just lining their own pockets. In the duel between Zendesk vs Intercom, it seems that Zendesk chat rises slightly above Intercom. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Zendesk chat is right for your business. HelpCrunch is another alternative to consider, especially because it offers free migration from Intercom, making onboarding a breeze. Sure, Intercom allows you to create articles and deliver a bot that answers customer questions with specific articles and resolves issues faster.