The 14 Best Zendesk Competitors and Alternatives 2024

Once ready, schedule the migration, create a checklist for configuring settings, disable the source tool, and set up Intercom to match your requirements. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. From there, kickstart the data transfer and ensure smooth migration by verifying IDs along the way. The price will mostly lean on the business data volume you need to move, the complexity of your requirements, and the features you’ll choose or customizations you’ll request. Set a Free Demo to test the Migration Wizard work and find out how much your data switch will cost. Zendesk, less user-friendly and with higher costs for quality vendor support, might not suit budget-conscious or smaller businesses. As you can imagine, banking from anywhere requires a flexible, robust customer service experience.

G2 ranks Intercom higher than Zendesk for ease of setup, and support quality—so you can expect a smooth transition, effortless onboarding, and continuous success. Whether you’re starting fresh with Intercom or migrating from Zendesk, set up is quick and easy. Secret has already helped tens of thousands of startups save millions on the best SaaS like Zendesk, Intercom & many more.

• Don’t let the migrating process overwhelm you or stop you from moving to Intercom.
• As a result, companies can identify trends and areas for improvement, allowing them to continuously improve their support processes and provide better service to their customers.
• Understanding the unique attributes of Zendesk and Intercom is crucial in this comparison.
• Zendesk and Intercom are robust tools with a wide range of customer service and CRM features.
• In fact, the Zendesk Marketplace has 1,300+ apps and integrations, from billing software to marketing automation tools.

Customers won’t need to leave your app or website to find the help they need.Zendesk, on the other hand, will redirect the customer to a new web page. 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. Don’t fret about trying to cope with hardships just as running your Supported Platform data migration. With years of accomplished data import and export mastery, they can fix any issue joined with your help desk data import or even offer help throughout the entire migration. 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.

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. If you’re exploring popular chat support tools Zendesk and Intercom, you may be trying to understand which solution is right for you. 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.

What is the purpose of a knowledge base?

This customer communication platform enables companies to provide support at scale. Front uses the simplicity of an email inbox and combines it with the automation and insights typical for a CRM to manage customer communication. Customization options include creating custom rules, macros, blueprints, SLAs, escalations, and notifications to automate tasks and workflows. Additionally, Groove allows users to create a support widget to be displayed on their website. This streamlines the process of engaging with the knowledge base in the first place, and also allows clients to open support tickets when absolutely necessary.

Learn more about the differences between leading chat support solutions Intercom and Zendesk so that you can choose the right tool for your needs. Help Desk Migration service provides endless import features with no compromising on safety. We regularly check all servers and make advancements, so that your business data is safe according to the fresh standards. Whether you’re migrating from Zendesk to Intercom, use our automated migration solution. It will permit you to migrate all your data to a future platform in just a couple of clicks.

Zoho Desk

Intercom, on the other hand, was built for business messaging, so communication is one of their strong suits. Combine that with their prowess in automation and sales solutions, and you’ve got a really strong product that can handle myriad customer relationship needs. In the domain of customer onboarding, Intercom takes a definitive lead with its distinctive feature – the ability to create interactive product tours.

You can create an omnichannel CRM suite with a mix of productivity, collaboration, eCommerce, CRM, analytics, email marketing, social media, and other tools. Both app stores include many popular integrations, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Mailchimp, and Zapier. Intercom allows visitors to search for and view articles from the messenger widget.

Use ticketing systems to manage the influx and provide your customers with timely responses. When it comes to advanced workflows and ticketing systems, Zendesk boasts a more full-featured solution. Due to our intelligent routing capabilities and numerous automated workflows, our users can free up hours to focus on other tasks. The Zendesk chat tool has most of the necessary features like shortcuts (saved responses), automated triggers, and live chat analytics. The Intercom versus Zendesk conundrum is probably the greatest problem in the customer service software world. They both offer some state-of-the-art core functionality and numerous unusual features.

Help Desk Migration service fulfills to upmost security principles, providing utmost greatest security for your records. We are compliant with HIPAA, CCPA, PCI DSS Level 1, GDPR, and other key data safety principles. You can carry out records migration in a few simple actions, using our automated migration app. However, if you have special demands or a non-standard data structure, feel free to go with a custom route. They have a 2-day SLA, no phone support, and the times I have had to work with them they have been incredibly difficult to work with.

Research by Zoho reports that customer relationship management (CRM) systems can help companies triple lead conversion rates. Those same tools also increase customer retention by 27% while saving 23% on sales and marketing costs. Intercom built additional tools to aid in marketing and engagement to supplement its customer service solution.

What’s more, only your company representatives with admin rights can import your Zendesk records. The Migration Wizard will includes measure for ensuring your data security during all phases of the migration process. To confirm the maximal protection of your data whether they are in import or at rest, we use tried runthrough. These contain conducting constant security analysis, retaining our servers safe, complying with different regulations, and more. This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks.

This gives your team the context they need to provide fast and excellent support. Zendesk is billed more as a customer support and ticketing solution, while Intercom includes more native CRM functionality. Intercom isn’t quite as strong as Zendesk in comparison to some of Zendesk’s customer support strengths, but it has more features for sales and lead nurturing. You could technically consider Intercom a CRM, but it’s really more of a customer-focused communication product. It isn’t as adept at purer sales tasks like lead management, list engagement, advanced reporting, forecasting, and workflow management as you’d expect a more complete CRM to be. Intercom does just enough that smaller businesses could use it as a standalone CRM or supplement it with a simpler CRM at a lower pricing tier, but bigger companies may not be satisfied with Intercom alone.

Freshdesk is a help desk solution that focuses on usability and affordability, while offering a range of features to streamline customer support. Help Scout also makes it easy for organizations to track engagements with specific customers from the moment an internal ticket is open to the moment the issue is resolved. This allows all internal teams to remain on the same page when working through a specific customer’s problem. Anyway, Helpjuice focuses specifically on enabling users to create a fully-customizable knowledge base to be used by both internal employees and their customers. Such customization allows users to tailor the look and feel of both their customer-facing knowledge base as well as their internal knowledge base to that of their brand.

Before making the move to Intercom, there are a couple of things to take care of. Start by creating your teammates and teams on Intercom, just like you did on Zendesk. Additionally, don’t forget to disable notifications and set up custom fields for conversations. This tool took the “painful” and “time-consuming” factors out of the data migration. Transfer effortlessly your ticket side conversations while moving from Zendesk.

From there, you can include FAQs, announcements, and article guides and then save them into pre-set lists for your customers to explore. 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.

Sugar Serve also includes SugarBPM, a process automation tool that helps automate key service processes and workflows, such as intelligent case routing, custom rules, and notifications. The Active Subscriptions Dashlet displays a list of purchased goods and services, along with subscription statuses, enabling upselling or cross-selling opportunities. Best Zendesk alternative for organizations looking for an all-in-one help desk solution with real-time data collection. Intercom’s customer messaging platform focuses on enabling organizations to build authentic relationships with their clients throughout every stage of the sales funnel. See how leading multi-channel consumer brands solve E2E customer data challenges with a real-time customer data platform. While both Zendesk and Intercom offer ways to track your sales pipeline, each platform handles the process a bit differently.

In addition, Zendesk and Intercom feature advanced sales reporting and analytics that make it easy for sales teams to understand their prospects and customers more deeply. The strength of Zendesk’s UI lies in its structured and comprehensive environment, adept at managing numerous customer interactions and integrating various channels seamlessly. However, compared to the more contemporary designs like Intercom’s, Zendesk’s UI may appear outdated, particularly in aspects such as chat widget and customization options. This could impact user experience and efficiency for new users grappling with its complexity​​​​​​. This exploration aims to provide a detailed comparison, aiding businesses in making an informed decision that aligns with their customer service goals.

Intercom feels more wholesome and is more client-success-oriented, but it can be too costly for smaller companies. 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. 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.

Pricing plans: Zendesk vs. Intercom

With over 100,000 customers across all industries and regions, Zendesk knows what it takes to interact with customers while retaining and growing relationships. Compare Zendesk versus Intercom to determine who will be the best partner for your business at every phase of the customer journey. Test any of HelpCrunch pricing plans for zendesk intercom free for 14 days and see our tools in action right away. Say what you will, but Intercom’s design and overall user experience leave all its competitors far behind. Well, I must admit, the tool is gradually transforming from a platform for communicating with users to a tool that helps you automate every aspect of your routine.

Intercom distinguishes itself with its real-time communication and conversational engagement features, making it an attractive choice for businesses and organizations prioritizing instant customer interactions. Intercom’s pricing structure offers different plans to cater to various customer support and engagement needs, accommodating users with different budgets. Zendesk is more robust in terms of its ticket management capabilities, it offers more customization options and advanced features like a virtual call center app. On the other hand, Intercom is more focused on conversational customer support, and has more help desk features suited for live chat and messaging.

So when it comes to chatting features, the choice is not really Intercom vs Zendesk. The latter offers a chat widget that is simple, outdated, and limited in customization options, while the former puts all of its resources into its messenger. Whether you’ve just started searching for a customer support tool or have been using one for a while, chances are you Chat PG know about Zendesk and Intercom. The former is one of the oldest and most reliable solutions on the market, while the latter sets the bar high in terms of innovative and out-of-the-box features. 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.

Zendesk’s simplicity, combined with its robust functionality, significantly reduces the margin for errors and confusion. In the realm of user-friendliness, Zendesk clearly emerges as the superior choice. Every Zendesk installation is set up differently to match each organization’s own process for managing companies, contacts, tickets and related data. Some objects are easier to transfer than others, depending on how similar they are between Zendesk and Intercom. For example, transferring companies is relatively easy, as both platforms have a similar concept of a company object with similar fields. Tickets have dependencies on other objects and chronological items like ticket comments that need to be preserved during the transfer.

Broken down into custom, resolution, and task bots, these can go a long way in taking repetitive tasks off agents’ plates. What’s really nice about this is that even within a ticket, you can switch between communication modes without changing views. So if an agent needs to switch from chat to phone to email (or vice versa) with a customer, it’s all on the same ticketing page. There’s even on-the-spot translation built right in, which is extremely helpful. I also assist our executive team in developing our go-to-market strategy for our services team and solutions, developed in collaboration with our technology partners Appian, Twilio, Intercom, and AWS. With that in mind, take another look through this guide as you begin to narrow down your choices.

However, it’s essential to consider the strengths of Zendesk, which offers a comprehensive and versatile customer support platform. While Intercom excels in certain aspects of customer communication, Zendesk offers its own set of strengths that cater to different aspects of customer support and engagement. Luckily, a range of customer service solutions is available that enables you to communicate directly with your customers in real-time. These tools are ideal for personalizing the customer experience and building better customer relationships.

During the data migration, these conversations will be imported as private comments into your new helpdesk. Rescue yourself from the challenging task of adding wanted record types or data entities throughout Zendesk to Intercom migration. Our service greenlights you map fields and modify your data import and export.

Start by migrating historical records and then set up the Delta migration option to move your most recently changed tickets. Hivers offers round-the-clock proactive support across all its plans, ensuring that no matter the time or issue, expert assistance is always available. This 24/7 support model is designed to provide continuous, real-time solutions to clients, enhancing the overall reliability and responsiveness of Hivers’ services.

Intercom has a wider range of uses out of the box than Zendesk, though by adding Zendesk Sell, you could more than make up for it. Both options are well designed, easy to use, and share some pretty key functionality like behavioral triggers and omnichannel-ality (omnichannel-centricity?). But with perks like more advanced chatbots, automation, and lead management capabilities, Intercom could have an edge for many users. Zendesk’s help center tools should also come in handy for helping customers help themselves—something Zendesk claims eight out of 10 customers would rather do than contact support. To that end, you can import themes or apply your own custom themes to brand your help center the way you want it.

It’s known for its unified agent workspace which combines different communication methods like email, social media messaging, live chat, and SMS, all in one place. This makes it easier for support teams to handle customer interactions without switching between different systems. Plus, Zendesk’s integration with various channels ensures customers can always find a convenient way to reach out. Some users might find the system a bit overwhelming due to its extensive features, and setting up and customizing these multichannel integrations can be a bit complex, especially for beginners or smaller teams.

With Zapier, you can integrate everything from basic data entry to end-to-end processes. Here are some of the business-critical workflows that people automate with Zapier. Zendesk and Intercom both have an editor preview feature that makes it easier to add images, videos, call-to-action buttons, and interactive guides to your help articles. Help Desk Migration has an amazing Free Demo Migration that brings immense value. With this feature, you can effortlessly test the migration and get a sneak peek of the results beforehand.

This enables support staff to reach customers where they want to be reached – making the entire process easier for everyone. Now that we’ve discussed the customer service-focused features of Zendesk and Intercom, let’s turn our attention to how these platforms can support sales and marketing efforts. Both Zendesk Messaging and Intercom Messenger offer live chat features and AI-enabled chatbots for 24/7 support to customers. Additionally, you can trigger incoming messages to automatically assign an agent and create dashboards to monitor the team’s performance on live chat. Zendesk started in 2007 as a web-based SaaS product for managing incoming customer support requests. Since then, it has evolved into a full-fledged CRM that offers a suite of software applications to its over 160,000 customers like Uber, Siemens, and Tesco.

It really shines in its modern messenger interface, making real-time chat a breeze. Its multichannel support is more focused on engaging customers through its chat and messaging systems, including mobile carousels and interactive communication tools. However, compared to Zendesk, Intercom might not offer the same breadth in terms of integrating a wide range of external channels. While it excels in interactive and engaging communication, especially on mobile, some businesses might find its focus on chat-based interfaces limiting if they need extensive email or voice call support. Intercom’s UI excels in modern design and intuitive functionality, particularly noted for its real-time messaging and advanced features. It is tailored for automation and quick access to insights, offering a user-friendly experience.

There are several notable alternatives to Zendesk in the customer support and engagement space, including Intercom, Freshdesk, Help Scout, and Zoho Desk. Gorgias offers social media sentiment analysis, something many other competitors do not have as their feature. With the help of artificial intelligence, their engine will scan the page looking for positive and negative comments about your products or services.

Intercom does have a ticketing dashboard that has omnichannel functionality, much like Zendesk. You could say something similar for Zendesk’s standard service offering, so it’s at least good to know they have Zendesk Sell, a capable CRM option to supplement it. You can use Zendesk Sell to track tasks, streamline workflows, improve engagement, nurture leads, and much more. The amount of data you have for each object in Zendesk will affect the duration of the transfer process. The more data you have, the longer it will take to transfer it from Zendesk to Intercom.

Users can benefit from using Intercom’s CX platform and AI software as a standalone tool for business messaging. But to provide a more robust customer experience, businesses may need to consider integrating Intercom’s AI tool with a third-party customer service platform, as it falls short of a full-stack offering. We make it easy for anyone within your company to access contextual customer information—including their conversation and purchase history—to provide better experiences.

Whether agents are facing customers via chat, email, social media, or good old-fashioned phone, they can keep it all confined to a single, easy-to-navigate dashboard. That not only saves them the headache of having to constantly switch between dashboards while streamlining resolution processes—it also leads to better customer and agent experience overall. Zendesk is among the industry’s best ticketing and customer support software, and most of its additional functionality is icing on the proverbial cake. Intercom, on the other hand, is designed to be more of a complete solution for sales, marketing, and customer relationship nurturing.

Don’t opt for a more advanced tool because you “might” use the more advanced features at some point in the future. Rather, go with the tool that will help you solve your most pressing issues now, while keeping the door open for other options in the future. Their internal chat lets you discuss issues as well as create group chats with team members, share drafts, mention teammates, and use emojis and reactions. This makes it easy to scale your customer-facing team’s communication without affecting quality or efficiency. LiveAgent is primarily a help desk software that focuses on helping organizations streamline the processes of ticket intake and service provision.

• Sugar Serve is a cloud-based customer engagement and support solution designed to deliver personalized customer experiences seamlessly integrated with SugarCRM.
• Sugar Serve also includes SugarBPM, a process automation tool that helps automate key service processes and workflows, such as intelligent case routing, custom rules, and notifications.
• Zendesk’s advanced automation features make it the preferred choice for businesses seeking to optimize their workflow and enhance customer support efficiency.
• This enables all departments to collaborate seamlessly, organizing their messages and delivering timely support to customers while maintaining a personal connection.

Because Intercom started as a live chat service, its messenger functionality is very robust. It feels very modern, and Intercom offers some advanced messenger features that Zendesk does not. Moreover, for users who require more dedicated and personalized support, Zendesk charges an additional premium. 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. Intercom’s solution aims to streamline high-volume ticket influx and provide personalized, conversational support.

For instance, Intercom can guide a new software user through each feature step by step, providing context and assistance along the way. In contrast, Zendesk primarily relies on a knowledge base, housing articles, FAQs, and self-help resources. While this resource center can reduce the dependency on agent assistance, it lacks the interactive element found in Intercom’s onboarding process. Determining whether Intercom can effectively replace Zendesk depends on your specific customer support and engagement requirements. Whether Zendesk can fully replace Intercom depends on your specific customer support and engagement requirements. 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.

For standard reporting like response times, leads generated by source, bot performance, messages sent, and email deliverability, you’ll easily find all the metrics you need. Beyond that, you can create custom reports that combine all of the stats listed above (and many more) and present them as counts, columns, lines, or tables. You can even finagle some forecasting by sourcing every agent’s assigned leads. Though Zendesk now considers itself to be a “service-first CRM company,” since its founding in 2007, their bread and butter offering has leaned much more heavily toward the “service” part of that equation.

That helps companies resolve a negative comment right away or upsell to a satisfied customer. Top Zendesk alternative for businesses looking to deliver top-notch customer support with efficiency and ease. Companies can also use Groove to create a knowledge base and customer portal, as well. On these platforms, organizations can present information via text and/or multimedia to help their clients quickly find the information they’re looking for. However, some users may find the customization options to be limited, and there are occasional issues with redundant messaging and ticket management.

Migrating your Zendesk help content to Intercom Articles is a simple and fast process that does not require any custom development. You can use the Intercom Articles feature to automatically import all of your published articles from Zendesk and organize them into collections that match your existing knowledge base structure. Just browse to Articles within your Intercom dashboard, and click “Migrate from Zendesk”.

Agents can use basic automation (like auto-closing tickets or setting auto-responses), apply list organization to stay on top of their tasks, or set up triggers to keep tickets moving automatically. When it comes to ease-of-use, Zendesk undeniably takes the lead over Intercom. Zendesk’s intuitive design caters to beginners and non-technical users, offering a seamless experience https://chat.openai.com/ right from the start. For instance, when you need to access specific features or information, Zendesk’s organized interface ensures that everything is easily locatable, reducing search time and user frustration. There are several notable alternatives to Intercom in the customer support and engagement space, including Zendesk, Freshdesk, Help Scout, HubSpot, and Zoho Desk.

It’s an invaluable tool for businesses aiming to enhance customer satisfaction, increase conversions, and build lasting relationships. However, it’s essential to recognize that Zendesk has its own array of strengths, particularly in its comprehensive and versatile customer support platform. Another critical difference between Zendesk and Intercom is their approach to CRM. In addition to its service features, Zendesk offers a fully integrated CRM solution, Zendesk Sell, available for an additional cost, starting at $19/agent/month. It includes tools for lead management, sales forecasting, and workflow management and automation. Its customer data platform lets you manage customer data, segmentation, and automated reminders.

Here’s what you need to know about Zendesk vs. Intercom as customer support and relationship management tools. You need a complete customer service platform that’s seamlessly integrated and AI-enhanced. When comparing the pricing of Zendesk and Intercom, there are significant differences to take into account. Zendesk’s pricing offers a range of plans, including a tiered model with different levels of features and capabilities. While the pricing can be flexible, it may become more costly as your organization’s requirements and usage increase. Groove is another Zendesk alternative that streamlines the process of collecting customer inquiries and providing support as needed.

However, while Zendesk may be a great fit for some companies, it’s not for everyone. For example, the software’s robustness and advanced functionality can actually be a turnoff for organizations with limited time and resources on hand. For startup companies operating on a budget, Zendesk might simply be too much for them to handle for the time being, while larger companies may end up paying more than they need to for features they don’t use. Zendesk and Intercom are robust tools with a wide range of customer service and CRM features. Intercom offers an easy way to nurture your qualified leads (prospects) into customers with Intercom Series. Using Intercom Series, you can create rules that trigger when the sales campaign begins, choose a target audience, and set the time you want to follow up, whether via email, messenger, or within your product.

Prioritize the agent experience to maximize productivity and customer satisfaction while reducing employee turnover. It will allow you to leverage some Intercom capabilities while keeping your account at the time-tested platform. In this paragraph, let’s explain some common issues that users usually ask about when choosing between Zendesk and Intercom platforms. Though the Intercom chat window says that their customer success team typically replies in a few hours, don’t expect to receive any real answer in chat for at least a couple of days. Besides, the prices differ depending on the company’s size and specific needs.

Freshdesk also allows users to customize ticket fields and workflows to suit their specific needs and preferences. Intercom also excels in real-time chat solutions, making it a strong contender for businesses seeking dynamic customer interaction. This unpredictability in pricing might lead to higher costs, especially for larger companies. While it offers a range of advanced features, the overall costs and potential inconsistencies in support could be a concern for some businesses​​​​.