Help Scout vs Zendesk vs. Intercom vs. Front What Help Desk Software Should I Use?

We’ve analyzed a dozen of reviews to help you get an average estimate of Zendesk vs Intercom functionality. Both products are so full-featured that they both take quite a while to learn. While Intercom does not offer free trials, they do offer demo versions of each plan.

• Survey responses automatically save as data in users’ profiles, and Intercom provides survey data in analytics and reporting.
• LiveAgent is primarily a help desk software that focuses on helping organizations streamline the processes of ticket intake and service provision.
• If your organization prioritizes data privacy and security or has specific compliance requirements, JitBit’s self-hosting option is worth considering.
• Ultimately, the right platform should enhance your support processes, improve customer satisfaction, and contribute to your business’s long-term success.
• Intercom does have a ticketing dashboard that has omnichannel functionality, much like Zendesk.
• Additionally, Jetdocs’ competitive pricing at 1/5th the cost of Zendesk makes it an attractive option for businesses of all sizes looking to optimize their customer support without breaking the bank.

If you’re an enterprise organization and need an all in one customer support solution,

Zendesk would be a great fit. I wanted a simple multi-user solution for my CS team that DID NOT involve a complex ticketing system like Zendesk and had a suite of essential team features. Support teams aren’t just about interacting directly with customers.

Intercom vs. Zendesk – helpdesk software with customer service features that make it less painful to build custom chatbots

Help Scout continues to offer a strong shared inbox product, though Intercom’s user experience has improved. While the agent experience won’t look revolutionary to most support professionals, the customer experience is pretty nice. Our goal is to be objective,

simple and your first stop when researching for a new service to help you grow your business. We will help you find alternatives and reviews of the products you already use. With Front, you won’t have to choose between efficiency and building strong customer relationships.

Gladly is best suited for support teams that are mature and looking to invest in a high-end tool that focuses on phone support, robust routing, and IVR. However, it is worth mentioning that Gladly is similar to Zendesk in that the learning curve is steep, and some companies decide against it for that reason. Using Intercom, users can communicate with clients via email, live chat, push notifications, and in-app messaging. These options enable companies large and small to reach the right people on every platform at the right moment.

Why look for alternatives to Zendesk?

“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.

To customize your Zendesk experience, you can integrate the tool with third-party business applications such as Trello, Salesforce, Shopify, Aircall, etc. Intercom is better designed for smaller companies and teams, while Zendesk is suitable for large companies to skyrocket customer support. In addition, Intercom offers omnichannel inbox, robust reporting, and automated workflows. The bot feeds customers and employees the relevant articles upon making a query. The main difference is its connectivity with the Intercom Team Inbox. This makes things faster for support teams to access information without bothering other users.

Feature Comparison: Intercom Vs. Zendesk

Intercom assists with the onboarding and retention of customers through targeted email and in-app messages triggered by time or behavior. Zendesk Chat shows up as a chat bar docked at the bottom of your site. Both Zendesk Chat and Intercom have a free trial available and a freemium model to test out which chat service will work best for your company. Therefore, if you happen to have Zoho CRM and want to integrate your chat feature with it, you should go with Zendesk. It should be noted that Intercom can integrate with Zendesk, so if there are Zendesk products that you like, aside from the chat feature, you can still use those. Therefore, Intercom may be a better fit for larger businesses with multiple agents helping people.

That’s why we bundle tools to make you successful, like a full features Knowledge base that you can use to create public or private sites. With that in mind, take another look through this guide as you begin to narrow down your choices. Don’t opt for a more advanced tool because you “might” use the more advanced features at some point in the future.

Knowledge Base Solutions

Every Zendesk installation is set up differently to match each organization’s own process for managing companies, contacts, tickets and related data. Anyone looking for a customer relationship management (CRM) tool to run and improve the whole customer journey can use and benefit from Zendesk. This feature alone facilitates the operation process on incoming tickets, as agents can use their favorite social channels to get in touch with each other without swapping applications.

• We hope this help desk comparison blog will help you make the best decision for your customer service team.
• Moreover, these are new prices as they’re in the middle of changing their pricing policy right now (and they’re definitely not getting cheaper).
• Intercom also has a community forum where users can help one another with questions and solutions.
• We’re big fans of Zendesk’s dashboard with built-in collaboration tools, but we wish the Agent Workspace came with the Team or Growth plans–not just Professional.
• Among the many challenges facing businesses today is the pressing need to meet their customers where they are.
• 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.

All-in-one advanced solutions help manage their customer support processes more effectively. It stands out with its powerful automation and collaboration features. The tool allows support teams to easily manage all processes from a single screen, thus saving the teams time in customer service. Gorgias markets an out-of-the-box phone support solution for companies, however, Gorgias users complained that the phone support solution was not very robust. Gorgias users typically integrate Aircall to offer phone support or the more advanced but also more expensive alternative TalkDesk.

Customer Support: How Zendesk and Intercom Stack up

You can see exactly if your support volume is increasing, if your team is responding fast enough to your users and leads, and who on your team is the busiest. Your support metadialog.com insights will show you data about your signed up users and visitors to your site. All you conversations and team members can be accessed from the top left of the screen.

This is aided by the fact that the look and feel of Zendesk’s user interface are neat and minimal, with few cluttering features. In a nutshell, none of the companies provide any decent customer support software. Just like Zendesk, Intercom also offers its own Operator bot, which will automatically suggest relevant articles to customers right in a chat widget. You can create new articles in a simple intuitive WYSIWYG text editor, divide them by categories and sections and customize it with your custom themes.

Intercom pricing

The rate limits also depend on what type of licensing plan you have with Zendesk. For example, an Enterprise plan will allow you to transfer your data at a faster rate than a Professional plan. To transfer your data from Zendesk to Intercom, a script will need to be created by an API developer to use the Zendesk and Intercom APIs to fetch and transfer the data. The script will need to align with the data mapping document and account for system rate limits. The script will also need to be monitored and adjusted as needed during the transfer process. But, if this platform isn’t Zendesk, the best alternatives are right above, waiting for you to try them.

Since Zendesk’s inception, its ticketing system has remained the best in the business. Automated service to migrate your data between help desk platforms without programming skills — just follow simple Migration Wizard. We’re big fans of Zendesk’s dashboard with built-in collaboration tools, but we wish the Agent Workspace came with the Team or Growth plans–not just Professional.

Other alternatives to Zendesk

It’s much easier if you decide to go with the Zendesk Suite, which includes Support, Chat, Talk, and Guide tools. There are two options there — Professional for $109 or Enterprise for $179 if you pay monthly. The difference between the two is that the Professional subscription lacks some things like chat widget unbranding, custom agent roles, multiple help centers, etc.

• Our data migration capabilities make transferring your data and conversation history from your current tool into Help Scout a snap.
• However, customers should keep in mind that Intercom does not offer voice.
• 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.
• Your sales team can also collaborate with this plan, manage ongoing projects and assign tasks with the Smart List feature.
• Pricing starts at $39 and varies based on the number of records you want to migrate.
• What this means is that, unlike Zendesk, Richpanel does not require you to cherry-pick customizations and features that suit you.

So when I realized lots of companies actually prefer Zendesk over Intercom, I was surprised. I mean I stumbled upon this article where people from Outreach.io were telling why they’d switched from Intercom to Zendesk, then I saw this comparison, where Zendesk seemed to beat Intercom at the end. While doing my research for this article, I’ve not only tested both Intercom and Zendesk myself, but also read a pile of different articles, comparisons, guides, showdowns and all this kind of stuff. What really struck me though is that people seemed to like Zendesk more. Struck not in a bad way, more like in a very neutral ‘huh, this may be interesting’ way. Our team of CX consultants would be happy to show you a demo or answer questions.