Zendesk vs Intercom: Which Solution to Choose in 2024?

Zendesk Sunshine is a separate feature set that focuses on unified customer views. Help desk SaaS is how you manage general customer communication and for handling customer questions. “Favorable” and “Critical” user reviews are selected using the review helpfulness score. The helpfulness score predicts the relative value a user receives from a given review based on a number of factors.

Factors may include the content in the review, feedback provided by other readers, the age of the review, and other factors that indicate review quality. The favorable review displayed is selected from the most helpful 4 or 5 star review. The critical user review displayed is selected from the most helpful 1,2 or 3 star review.

Zendesk vs. Intercom: Which is better?

Intercom has a unique pricing structure, offering three separate solutions, each intended for a distinct use case. We wish some of their great features were offered in multiple plans, but none features overlap among plans. Intercom’s Messenger lets users schedule timely, targeted, and personal messages sent based on triggers and customer actions, and is automatically translatable into over 30 languages. Community forums enable customers to assist each other by asking questions and sharing tips, experiences, and best practices–creating a unique, user-based, searchable information hub.

HubSpot CRM’s paid plans provide 10 to 50 dashboards that allow 10 to 30 reports each. Its Professional and Enterprise plans offer users 100 to 500 custom reports, respectively. You’ll also find asset comparison reporting and behavioral triggers included in the reports. Zendesk and HubSpot use artificial intelligence (AI)-powered automation and unified dashboards to improve customer relationships and team productivity, regardless of your business size. However, HubSpot‘s interface is not as user friendly as Zendesk’s, and its combined pricing for marketing, sales and service functions is quite expensive and complex.

Customer rating: Zendesk vs. Intercom

Zendesk is not far behind Intercom when it comes to email features. There is a simple email integration tool for whatever email provider you regularly use. This gets you unlimited email addresses and email templates in both text form and HTML. There is automatic email archiving and incoming email authentication. Intercom’s dashboards may not be as aesthetically pleasing as Zendesk’s, but they still allow users to navigate their tools with few distractions. Zendesk is quite famous for designing its platform to be intuitive and its tools to be quite simple to learn.

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. The highlight of Zendesk’s ticketing software is its omnichannel-ality (omnichannality?).

App Marketplace

This feature ensures that each customer request is handled by the best-suited agent, improving the overall efficiency of the support team. 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.

After an in-depth analysis such as this, it can be pretty challenging for your business to settle with either option. That’s why it would be better to review where both the options would be ideal to use. Compared to Intercom, Zendesk’s pricing starts at $49/month, which is still understandable but not meant for startups looking for affordable pricing plans.

Both Zendesk and Intercom are customer support management solutions that offer features like ticket management, live chat and messaging, automation workflows, knowledge centers, and analytics. Zendesk has traditionally been more focused on customer support management, while Intercom has been more focused on live support solutions like its chat solution. Zendesk offers a comprehensive service suite with features such as a ticketing system and workflow configuration available to desktop and mobile device users. Its customer portal also helps businesses track customer interactions and provides a self-service portal, community forums and knowledge base for your customers.

But with perks like more advanced chatbots, automation, and lead management capabilities, Intercom could have an edge for many users. While Zendesk and HubSpot are great options for automating customer relationship management, HubSpot holds a slight edge for its features. Also, if you’re looking for a CRM that focuses more on customer service and support, Zendesk is the better option.

AI and ML make customer service functionalities like chatbots, sentiment analysis, ticket creation, and workflow automation possible. All these features are necessary for operational efficiency and help agents deliver fast, personalized customer experiences. Zendesk is a great option for large companies or companies that are looking for a very strong sales and customer service platform. It offers more support features and includes more advanced analytics and reports. Today, both companies offer a broad range of customer support features, making them both strong contenders in the market. Zendesk offers more advanced automation capabilities than Intercom, which may be a deciding factor for businesses that require complex workflows.

• Starting at $19 per user per month, it’s also on the cheaper end of the spectrum compared to high-end CRMs like ActiveCampaign and HubSpot.
• The workspace left-hand column notifies agents of all ticket updates.
• So far, the chatbot can transfer chats to agents or resolve less complex queries in seconds.
• Sendcloud is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that allows users to generate packing slips and labels to help online retailers streamline their shipping process.
• They’ve been rated as one of the easy live chat solutions with more integrated options.
• When they do respond, they’re usually unhelpful or want to immediately transfer you to the sales department.

It caters to a wide range of industries, particularly excelling in e-commerce, SaaS, technology, and telecommunications. It is favored by customer support, helpdesk, IT service management, and contact center teams. Chatbots are automated customer support tools that can assist with low-level ticket triage and ticket routing in real-time.

Pre-selected assignment rules customize each ticket’s destination, assigning routing paths to agents or departments based on customer priority status, query type, or issue details. Just like Zendesk, Intercom also offers its Operator bot, which will automatically suggest relevant articles to clients right in a chat widget. The Help Center software by Intercom is also a very efficient tool. You can publish your self-service resources, divide them by categories, and integrate them with your messenger to accelerate the whole chat experience. You can create dozens of articles in a simple, intuitive WYSIWYG text editor, divide them by categories and sections, and customize with your custom themes. If you create a new chat with the team, land on a page with no widget, and go back to the browser for some reason, your chat will go puff.

An inbound customer message through any of these channels becomes a ticket for your support agents, whose reply reaches the customer through the same channel they originally used. 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.

Here are our top reporting and analytics features and an overview of where Intercom’s reporting limitations lie. Intercom’s user interface is also quite straightforward and easy to understand; it includes a range of features such as live chat, messaging campaigns, and automation workflows. Additionally, the platform allows for customizations zendesk vs. intercom such as customized user flows and onboarding experiences. Zendesk’s user face is quite intuitive and easy to use, allowing customers to quickly find what they are looking for. Additionally, the platform allows users to customize their experience by setting up automation workflows, creating ticket rules, and utilizing analytics.

Working on customer queries from Gmail was exactly what we needed. Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page. If that’s not detailed enough, then surely their visitor browsing details will leave you surprised.

She has worked with web publications and tech brands such as U.S News & World Report, Elevato, LeadDyno and OMTech. Honestly, when it comes to Zendesk, it is not the most modern tool out there. I found that if I wanted to work most productively I’d need to have all four main Zendesk products opened in different browser tabs as there is no option of having all of them within a single dashboard. Additional payment per active user or seat depends on a chosen service and a plan. Intercom does not have a built-in call center solution, but you can integrate Intercom with other call center software. We give the edge to Zendesk here, as it’s typically aimed for more complex environments.