Zendesk vs Intercom: Which Ticketing Tool is Best for You?

Zendesk is built to grow alongside your business, resulting in less downtime, better cost savings, and the stability needed to provide exceptional customer support. Many customers start using Zendesk as small or mid-sized businesses (SMBs) and continue to use our software as they scale their operations, hire more staff, and serve more customers. Our robust, no-code integrations enable you to adapt our software to new and growing use cases.

MParticle is a Customer Data Platform offering plug-and-play integrations to Zendesk and Intercom, along with over 300 other marketing, analytics, and data warehousing tools. With mParticle, you can connect your Zendesk and Intercom data with other marketing, analytics, and business intelligence platforms without any custom engineering effort. In general, Zendesk offers a wide range of live chat features such as customizable chat widgets, automatic greetings, offline messaging, and chat triggers. In addition to these features, Intercom offers messaging automation and real-time visitor insights. Zendesk takes the slight lead here because it offers some advanced help desk features, which Intercom does not.

In a nutshell, none of the customer support software companies provide decent assistance for users. Intercom live chat is modern, smooth, and has many advanced features that other chat tools don’t. It’s highly customizable, too, so you can adjust it according to your website or product’s style. Their chat widget looks and works great, and they invest a lot of effort to make it a modern, convenient customer communication tool.

This is obviously the lowest tier plan for Zendesk Sell, and as such, is aimed at smaller teams that don’t require a whole lot of functionality. It allows for up to three paid users, offers email integration for seamless workflows, and provides a single custom sales pipeline for your business. Zendesk is a well-known customer service platform for large companies. It enables teams to streamline their interactions with customers and provide high-quality timely support. Help Scout is a customer support helpdesk platform designed to manage and streamline customer communication and interactions.

In this case, we put 13 CRM systems to the test across 84 areas of investigation. As far as return on investment is concerned, CRM can reportedly make you $8.71 for every dollar you spend, so finding the right one can make a big difference. Fortunately, by most accounts, Zendesk is a good option for most businesses, depending on which industry you work in. Given Zendesk’s status as a more expensive CRM, it’s safe to assume that you want to save a bit of money when it comes to subscribing. Fortunately, there are a few tricks that can help you keep costs low while still taking advantage of the top tier Zendesk platform. You can also integrate HubSpot and Userpilot for omnichannel customer engagement and support.

You’ll also be able to communicate with customers via instant messaging apps, like Messenger, WhatsApp, and WeChat. Zendesk pricing plans start at just $19 per user, per month for the Support and Sell platforms, which enable users to utilize sales and customer service features. Zendesk CRM also offers a Suite platform, which starts at $55 per user, per month and bundles assorted Zendesk products together, like Guide, Chat, and Talk. Founded in 2007, Zendesk started off as a ticketing tool for customer support teams. It was later when they started adding all kinds of other tools like when they bought out Zopim live chat and just integrated it with their toolset. Intercom also excels in real-time chat solutions, making it a strong contender for businesses seeking dynamic customer interaction.

What’s worse, Intercom doesn’t offer a free trial to its prospect to help them test the product before onboarding with their services. Instead, they offer a product demo when prospects reach out to learn more about their pricing structure. After this live chat software comparison, you’ll get a better picture of what’s better for your business.

If you don’t see it, just create it

It is tailored for automation and quick access to insights, offering a user-friendly experience. Nevertheless, the platform’s support consistency can be a concern, and the unpredictable pricing structure might lead to increased costs for larger organizations. Unlike Intercom, Zendesk is scalable, intuitively designed for CX, and offers a low total cost of ownership. Zendesk is a highly recommended CRM for customer support, offering a lot of features and plenty of customization options for businesses of all sizes. Zoho Desk is a customer support software that provides many features to streamline ticket management, enhance agent productivity, and improve customer communication.

You can set office hours, live chat with logged-in users via their user profiles, and set up a chatbot. Customization is more nuanced than Zendesk’s, but it’s still really straightforward to implement. You can opt for code via JavaScript or Rails or even integrate directly with the likes of Google Tag Manager, WordPress, or Shopify.

There are even automations to help with things like SLAs, or service level agreements, to do things like send out notifications when headlights are due. Because of the app called Intercom Messenger, one can see that their focus is less on the voice and more on the text. This is fine, as not every customer support team wants to be so available on the phone. Use ticketing systems to manage the influx and provide your customers with timely responses. If you thought Zendesk prices were confusing, let me introduce you to the Intercom charges. It’s virtually impossible to predict what you’ll pay for Intercom at the end of the day.

With this kind of organization, you will not only find your favorite apps but also discover new ones to meet your needs. There are many powerful integrations included, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Slack, and Zapier. By the end of the article, you’ll not only know all of the main differences between Zendesk and Intercom, but you’ll know which is the right tool for you. If you thought Zendesk’s pricing was confusing, let me introduce you to Intercom’s pricing. It’s virtually impossible to predict what you’re going to pay for Intercom at end of the day. It’s highly customizable, so you can adjust it according to your website or product’s style.

Plus, it offers multilingual support, so if you’re an international business, this plan is an absolute must. Twilio offers several solutions for managing different aspects of customer support and communication. It stands out for its customer data management tools that allow businesses to leverage customer information to build stronger relationships. HappyFox is a cloud-based customer support software that offers helpdesk and ticket support solutions to businesses of all sizes. These products range from customer communication tools to a fully-fledged CRM.

Zendesk has over 150,000 customer accounts from 160 countries and territories. They have offices all around the world including countries such as Mexico City, Tokyo, New York, Paris, Singapore, São Paulo, London, and Dublin. In Chat GPT this article, we’ll compare Zendesk vs Intercom to find out which is the right customer support tool for you. Say what you will, but Intercom’s design and overall user experience are leaving all its competitors far behind.

All interactions with customers be it via phone, chat, email, social media, or any other channel are landing in one dashboard, where your agents can solve them fast and efficiently. There’s a plethora of features to help bigger teams collaborate more effectively — like private notes or real-time view of who’s handling a given ticket at the moment, etc. However, if you are looking for a robust messaging solution with customer support features, go for Intercom. Its intuitive messenger can help your business boost engagement and improve sales and marketing efforts. Intercom stands out here due to its ability  to tailor sales workflows.

Welcome to another blog post that helps you gauge which live chat solution is compatible with your customer support needs. And in this post, we will analyze two popular names in the SaaS industry – Intercom & Zendesk. Although it can be pricey, Zendesk’s platform is a very robust one, with powerful reporting and insight tools, a large number of integrations, and excellent scalability features. You can publish your knowledge base articles and divide them by categories and also integrate them with your messenger to accelerate the whole chat experience. Also, their in-app messenger is worth a separate mention as it’s one of their distinctive tools (especially since Zendesk doesn’t really have one). With Intercom you can send targeted email, push, and in-app messages which can be based on the most relevant time or behavior triggers.

• You don’t have to pay per contact on your database, and you there are many free features you can use.
• One place Intercom really shines as a standalone CRM is its data utility.
• Since Zendesk has many features, it takes a while to learn how to use the options you’ll be needing.
• In today’s environment, where customer expectations are constantly evolving, choosing the right ticketing tool that aligns with your business needs is crucial.

Their reports are attractive, dynamic, and integrated right out of the box. You can even finagle some forecasting by sourcing every agent’s assigned leads. Keeping this general theme in mind, I’ll dive deeper into how each software’s features compare, so you can decide which use case might best fit your needs. Pendo has two paid plans and one free version that is limited to 500 MAUs which makes it accessible to startups but difficult to scale in the long run.

Overall, I actually liked Zendesk’s user experience better than Intercom’s in terms of its messaging dashboard. Intercom has a dark mode that I think many people will appreciate, and I wouldn’t say it’s lacking in any way. But I like that Zendesk just feels slightly cleaner, has easy online/away toggling, more visual customer journey notes, and a handy widget for exploring the knowledge base on the fly. I tested both options (using Zendesk’s Suite Professional trial and Intercom’s Support trial) and found clearly defined differences between the two. Here’s what you need to know about Zendesk vs. Intercom as customer support and relationship management tools.

However, the Intercom app store is far more intuitive and is much easier to navigate. It not only shows you all of the apps you can use, but it also divides these into topics and categories. Finally, you’ll have to choose your reporting preferences including details about what you’ll be tracking and how often you want to be reported of changes. In terms of pricing, Intercom is considered one of the hardest on your pocket. Zendesk can be more flexible and predictable in this area as you can buy different tools separately (or even use their limited versions for free). Though Intercom chat window says that their team typically replies in a few hours, I received the answer in a couple of minutes.

Zendesk Guide, Chat and Talk

This is where you’ll start to see some really impressive features for your sales-focused CRM. For one, it allows for unlimited users, although it’s important to remember that you’ll be paying more for each one you add. With simple setup, and handy importers you’ll be up and running in no time, ready to unlock the Support Funnel and deliver fast and personal customer support. They’ve been rated as one of the easy live chat solutions with more integrated options. When you see pricing plans starting for $79/month, you should get a clear understanding of how expensive other plans can become for your business.

However, keep in mind that pricing is based on the number of users, and the costs can quickly escalate as your team grows. These features collectively help businesses build stronger relationships with their customers, provide quality customer service, and drive growth by increasing customer engagement and satisfaction. As a Zendesk user, you’re familiar with tickets – you’ll be able to continue using these in Intercom. The Zendesk Support app gives you access to live Intercom customer data in Zendesk, and lets you create new tickets in Zendesk directly from Intercom conversations. This gives your team the context they need to provide fast and excellent support. Again, Zendesk has surpassed the number of reviewers when compared to Intercom.

Their help desk is a single inbox to handle customer requests, where your customer support agents can leave private notes for each other and automatically assign requests to the right people. Zendesk also has the Answer Bot, which can take your knowledge base game to the next level instantly. It can automatically suggest your customer relevant articles reducing the workload for your support agents. Ultimately, the choice between Zendesk and Intercom depends on your business needs. If you need a solution that can rapidly scale and offer strong self-service features, Zendesk may be the best fit. However, if your focus is on creating a seamless, automated customer service experience with proactive engagement, Intercom could be the ideal choice.

It is favored by customer support, helpdesk, IT service management, and contact center teams. Zendesk provides comprehensive security and compliance features, ensuring customer data privacy. This includes secure login options like SAML or JWT SSO (single sign-on) and native content redaction for sensitive information.

Zendesk and Intercom are robust tools with a wide range of customer service and CRM features. For small companies and startups, Intercom offers a Starter plan — with a balanced suite of features from each of the solutions below — at $74 per month per user, billed annually. Zendesk’s Help Center and Intercom’s Articles both offer features to easily embed help centers into your website or product using their web widgets, SDKs, and APIs. With help centers in place, it’s easier for your customers to reliably find answers, tips, and other important information in a self-service manner. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. These plans make Hiver a versatile tool, catering to a range of business sizes and needs, from startups to large enterprises looking for a comprehensive customer support solution within Gmail.

Compared to Zendesk and Intercom, Helpwise offers competitive and transparent pricing plans. Its straightforward pricing structure ensures businesses get access to the required features without complex tiers or hidden costs, making it an attractive option for cost-conscious organizations. What sets Zendesk apart is its user-friendly interface, customizable workflows, and scalability. It caters to a wide range of industries, particularly excelling in e-commerce, SaaS, technology, and telecommunications.

It can automatically suggest relevant articles for agents during business hours to share with clients, reducing your support agents’ workload. Zendesk is quite popular with customers as well, netting relatively zendesk and intercom high ratings on the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. Users noted that the software is easy to use and the price, while a tad expensive, is definitely worth it when it comes to the Support features.

These premium support services can range in cost, typically between $1,500 and $2,800. This additional cost can be a considerable factor for businesses to consider when evaluating their customer support needs against their budget constraints. On the other hand, Intercom, starting at a lower price point, could be more attractive for very small teams or individual users.

After switching to Intercom, you can start training Custom Answers for Fin AI Agent right away by importing your historic data from Zendesk. Fin AI Agent will use your history to recognize and suggest common questions to create answers for. Check out this tutorial to import ticket types and tickets data into your Intercom workspace. If a title has been set for a conversation it will use this to populate the resulting Zendesk ticket title. Before you start, you’ll need to retrieve your Zendesk credentials and create a Zendesk API key. You can do this by going to your settings within Zendesk (click on the cog on the left hand side), and navigating to API in the ‘Channels’ section.

Different Criteria Used to Differentiate Zendesk & Intercom

Intercom’s live chat reports aren’t just offering what your customers are doing or whether they are satisfied with your services. They offer more detailed insights like lead generation sources, a complete message report to track https://chat.openai.com/ customer engagement, and detailed information on the support team’s performance. A collection of these reports can enable your business to identify the right resources responsible for bringing engagement to your business.

Zendesk makes running your online business easy with pre-built integrations that provide a smooth customer journey. If you’re not ready to make the full switch to Intercom just yet, you can integrate Intercom with your Zendesk account. This will provide live data on who your users are and what they do in your app. This means you can use the Help Desk Migration product to import data from a variety of source tools (e.g. Zendesk, ZOHOdesk, Freshdesk, SFDC etc) to Intercom tickets. Compared to Intercom, Zendesk’s pricing starts at $49/month, which is still understandable but not meant for startups looking for affordable pricing plans. These plans are not inclusive of the add-ons or access to all integrations.

Zendesk, with its extensive toolkit, is often preferred by businesses seeking an all-encompassing customer support solution. Understanding the unique attributes of Zendesk and Intercom is crucial in this comparison. Zendesk is renowned for its comprehensive range of functionalities, including advanced email ticketing, live chat, phone support, and a vast knowledge base.

Zendesk provides limited customer support for its basic plan users, along with costly premium assistance options. On the other hand, Intercom is generally praised for its support features, despite facing challenges with its AI chatbot and the complexity of its help articles. Intercom is a customer support platform known for its effective messaging and automation, enhancing in-context support within products, apps, or websites. It features the Intercom Messenger, which works with existing support tools for self-serve or live support. Zendesk is a customer service software offering a comprehensive solution for managing customer interactions.

They charge for customer service representative seats and people reached, don’t reveal their prices, and offer tons of custom add-ons at additional cost. Is it as simple as knowing whether you want software strictly for customer support (like Zendesk) or for some blend of customer relationship management and sales support (like Intercom)? Powered by Explore, Zendesk’s reporting capabilities are pretty impressive.

Its analytics features make it an excellent choice for tracking customer interactions and requests. Zendesk would be a perfect option for businesses that are searching for a well-integrated support system. It offers a suite that compiles help desk, live chat, and knowledge base to their user base. This enables them to speed up the support process and build experiences that customers like.

Intercom or Zendesk: Chatbot features

However, you’ll likely end up paying more for Zendesk, and in-app messenger and other advanced customer communication tools will not be included. For basic chat and messaging, Intercom charges a flat fee of $39 per month for its basic plan with one user and $99 per month for its team plan with up to 5 users. If you want automated options, Intercom starts at either $499 or $999 per month for up to ten users, depending on the level of automation you’re looking for. Its sales CRM software starts at $19 per month per user, but you’ll have to pay $49 to get Zapier integrations and $99 for Hubspot integrations. Finally, you can pay $199 per month per user for unlimited sales pipelines and advanced reporting along with other features.

It’s worth looking into if you have a global business operating multiple brands and is likely the best Zendesk offering for a truly large company. Zendesk lets businesses pay for services on an annual or monthly bases, but unless you’re planning on sticking with the plans for less than nine months, it’s more economical to sign up annually. In this guide to Zendesk pricing, we’ll walk you through the various price plans for each tier of Zendesk CRM, as well as a few ways that can help you save money on the platform.

Intercom is an all-in-one solution, and compared to Zendesk, Intercom has a less intuitive design and can be complicated for new users to learn. It also offers a confusing pricing structure and fewer integrations, making it less scalable and cost-effective. The Zendesk Marketplace offers over 1,500 no-code apps and integrations. Customer expectations are already high, but with the rise of AI, customers are expecting even more.

And while many other chatbots take forever to set up, you can set up your first chatbot in under five minutes. You don’t have to pay per contact on your database, and you there are many free features you can use. Zendesk, on the other hand, has revamped its security since its security breach in 2016. Since Intercom doesn’t offer a CRM, its pricing is divided into basic messaging and messaging with automations. You can also contact Zendesk support 24/7, whereas Intercom support only has live agents during business hours.

This becomes the perfect opportunity to personalize the experience, offer assistance to prospects as per their needs, and convert them into customers. If compared to Intercom’s chatbot, Zendesk offers a relatively latest platform that makes support automation possible. So far, the chatbot can transfer chats to agents or resolve less complex queries in seconds. That means all you have to do is add the code to your website and enable it right away. Messagely’s live chat platform is smooth, effective, and easy to set up. With Messagely, you can increase your customer satisfaction and solve customers’ issues while they’re still visiting your site.

Userpilot’s transparent pricing ranges from $249/month on the entry-level end to an Enterprise tier for larger companies. This a native tooltip example built with Userpilot, not an actual tooltip from Calendar by Google. If you see either of these warnings, wait 60 seconds for your Zendesk rate limit to be reset and try again.

If this becomes a persistent issue for your team, we recommend contacting Zendesk. If that’s not detailed enough, then surely their visitor browsing details will leave you surprised. This enables your operators to understand visitor intent faster and provide them with a personalized experience. Zendesk’s list of compliances and security memberships is very long, and they have won a number of security seals and awards. Zendesk also has multiple security filters that range from where it stores its files to the people it hires.

We also compare Zendesk to other CRM providers and explain why it’s one of the best CRM for small business. The company offers a flexible pricing structure that allows you to mix and match the services you use and pay for them based on your needs. Help Scout offers a 15-day free trial that allows you to test various features and tools and determine whether it’s the right fit for your needs. While Intercom is a flexible and popular solution when it comes to customer service, there are certain use cases where it will likely fall short compared to other options. The Product Tours add-on contains features that aid onboarding, adoption, and feature discovery. Intercom’s product tours can include UI patterns like modals and tooltips as well as other media formats such as microvideos.

Intercom recently ramped up its features to include helpdesk and ticketing functionality. Zendesk, on the other hand, started as a ticketing tool, and therefore has one of the market’s best help desk and ticket management features. When comparing Zendesk and Intercom, various factors come into play, each focusing on different aspects, strengths, and weaknesses of these customer support platforms.

This service lets agents chat with customers through a website widget. If your operation has a high need for customer support or a rapidly growing customer base, Zendesk Professional Suite is a simple, fast way to start serving them across all channels. The Professional plan is a top option for businesses with a large group of customers that will need to be grouped by factors including tags, language used, and business hours. As you can probably guess from the name, this plan is aimed at larger businesses with a lot of sales to manage. You’ll enjoy two custom sales pipelines, activity reports, product catalogs, task automation, and custom notifications.

Easily reply to customer conversations and manage workload in a smart & automated way. It is none other than the modern customer support software of Helpwise. Customers of Zendesk can purchase priority assistance at the enterprise tier, which includes a 99.9% uptime service level agreement and a 1-hour service level goal. At all tiers, there is an additional fee to work with a member of the Zendesk success team on unique engagements. If delivering an outstanding customer experience and employee experience is your top priority, Zendesk should be your top pick over Intercom. Zendesk has the CX expertise to help businesses of all sizes scale their service experience without compromise.

Intercom is a customer support messenger, bot, and live chat service provider that empowers its clients to provide instant support in real-time. This SaaS leader entered into the competition in 2011, intending to help its clients reach their target audiences and engage them in a conversation right away. On the other hand, Zendesk’s customer support includes a knowledge base that’s very intuitive and easy to navigate. It divides all articles into a few main topics so you can quickly find the one you’re looking for. It also includes a list of common questions you can browse through at the bottom of the knowledge base home page so you can find answers to common issues.

The Zendesk chat tool has most of the necessary features like shortcuts (saved responses), automated triggers, and live chat analytics. Intercom is more for improving sales cycle and customer relationships, while Zendesk has everything a customer support representative can dream about, but it does lack wide email functionality. On the other hand, it provides call center functionalities, unlike Intercom. The Intercom versus Zendesk conundrum is probably the greatest problem in the customer service software world.