Intercom vs Zendesk: Which One is Right for Your Business?

Zendesk, just like its competitor, offers a knowledge base solution that is easy to customize. Their users can create a knowledge repository to create articles or edit existing ones as per the changes in the services or product. It also provides detailed reports on how each self-help article performs in your knowledge base and helps you identify how each piece can be improved further. They offer an omnichannel live chat solution that integrates with multiple messaging platforms and marketing channels and even automates incoming support processes with bots.

The API is well-documented and easy to use, making it a popular choice for companies that want to create their integrations. There’s plenty of information about customer support and ticketing software options. Read these resources to learn more about why users choose Zendesk vs Intercom. It enables them to engage with visitors who are genuinely interested in their services.

Top 10 Intercom Alternatives for Amazing Customer Support

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. Once you add them all to the picture, their existing plans can turn out to be quite expensive.

We have numerous customers that do this and benefit greatly from our out-of-the-box integration with Intercom. Yes—as your business’s needs grow, you will require a more sophisticated case management system. But that doesn’t mean you have to completely switch from your current provider if you’re not quite ready.

Zendesk VS Intercom: In-Depth Analysis & Review

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. Intercom offers an easy way to nurture your qualified leads (prospects) into customers with Intercom Series. If you’re exploring popular chat support tools Zendesk and Intercom, you may be trying to understand which solution is right for you.

When a customer asks a question in the Messenger widget, the Operator automatically suggests a handful of relevant articles based on keywords to help customers resolve their own issues. Self-service tools let customers resolve their own issues quickly and 24/7, improving satisfaction and reducing excessive agent workload. In fact, agents can even add customers to private messaging chats when necessary, and the customer will receive the whole conversation history by email to ensure they’re up to date.

Unique Features

With its CRM, you have the ability to place your clients in your sales funnels and follow through with them until conversion. With this kind of organization, you will not only find your favorite apps but also discover new ones to meet your needs. However, the Intercom app store is far more intuitive and is much easier to navigate.

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​​​​​​. Understanding the unique attributes of Zendesk and Intercom is crucial in this comparison.

The platform is recognized for its ability to resolve a significant portion of common questions automatically, ensuring faster response times. 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 is favored by customer support, helpdesk, IT service management, and contact center teams. The primary function of Intercom’s mobile app is the business messenger suite, including personalized messaging, real-time support tools, push notifications, in-app messaging and emailing. Intercom also does mobile carousels to help please the eye with fresh designs.

Intercom’s help center allows you to draft and organize collections of articles, accessible to customers via a search bar in the Messenger widget. Intercom self-service chatbot widgets, highly customizable and capable of conversing in 32 different languages, embed into your website or application. Design and send out mobile push messages–phone pop-ups containing text and images that prompt customers to take action and redirect to a specific app page when clicked. Zendesk wins the ticketing system category due to its easy-to-use interface and side conversations tool. Zendesk for Service transforms customer queries and conversations from all channels–call, web chat, tweet, text, or email–into tickets in the Agent Workspace. To sum up this Intercom vs Zendesk battle, the latter is a great support-oriented tool that will be a good choice for big teams with various departments.

Zendesk has over 1,300 integrations, compared to Intercom’s 300+ apps, making it the leader in this category. However, you can browse their respective sites to find which tools each platform supports. Intercom does intercom vs zendesk not offer a native call center tool, so it cannot handle calls through a cloud-based phone system or calling app on its own. However, you can connect Intercom with over 40 compatible phone and video integrations.

Chatbots are automated customer support tools that can assist with low-level ticket triage and ticket routing in real-time. How easy it is to program a chatbot and how effective a chatbot is at assisting human reps is an important factor for this category. Zendesk wins the major category of help desk and ticketing system software. It lets customers reach out via messaging, a live chat tool, voice, and social media. Zendesk supports teams that can then field these issues from a nice unified dashboard. Why don’t you try something equally powerful yet more affordable, like HelpCrunch?

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. Leave your email below and a member of our team will personally get in touch to show you how Fullview can help you solve support tickets in half the time. Learn how top CX leaders are scaling personalized customer service at their companies. Christiana Jolaoso-Oloyede creates compelling content for B2B tech companies.

Also, many users find combining its products and hubs complex and expensive. Its no-code email automation features also make it beginner friendly, and these features are available for free. You can also connect your HubSpot account to email providers such as Gmail and Microsoft 365.

• Intercom is a customer support platform known for its effective messaging and automation, enhancing in-context support within products, apps, or websites.
• It also includes extensive integrations with over 350 CRM, email, ticketing, and reporting tools.
• The primary function of Intercom’s mobile app is the business messenger suite, including personalized messaging, real-time support tools, push notifications, in-app messaging and emailing.
• 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.

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. You can create articles, share them internally, group them for users, and assign them as responses for bots—all pretty standard fare. Intercom can even integrate with Zendesk and other sources to import past help center content.

The dashboard’s left-hand column organizes and sorts all tickets by urgency. When an agent clicks on a conversation, the full conversation history populates the middle screen. 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. Sequence all channels–chat, web post, email, chatbot outreach, tour message, banner, push notification, or carousel–mixing and matching modes of outreach to fit campaign goals. Zendesk wins the collaboration tools category because of its easy-to-use side conversations feature. With Intercom workload management tools, administrators can ensure that incoming conversations, traffic, and workload are evenly distributed among team members.

• It enables them to engage with visitors who are genuinely interested in their services.
• What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk is how their tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously.
• Both options are well designed, easy to use, and share some pretty key functionality like behavioral triggers and omnichannel-ality (omnichannel-centricity?).
• Hivers offers round-the-clock proactive support across all its plans, ensuring that no matter the time or issue, expert assistance is always available.
• If you thought Zendesk prices were confusing, let me introduce you to the Intercom charges.

As mentioned before, the bot builder is a visual drag-and-drop system that requires no coding knowledge; this is also how other basic workflows are designed. The more expensive Intercom plans offer AI-powered content cues, triage, and conversation insights. Zendesk has many amazing team collaboration and communication features, like whisper mode, which lets multiple agents chime in to help each other without the customer knowing. There is also something called warm transfers, which let one rep add contextual notes to a ticket before transferring it to another rep. You also get a side conversation tool. In the category of customer support, Zendesk appears to be just slightly better than Intercom based on the availability of regular service and response times.