Zendesk vs Intercom: Which Solution to Choose in 2024?

Zendesk, unlike Intercom, is a more affordable and predictable customer service platform. You can always count on it if you need a reliable customer support platform to process tickets, support users, and get advanced reporting. Ultimately, it’s important to consider what features each platform offers before making a decision, as well as their pricing options and customer support policies. Since both are such well-established market leader companies, you can rest assured that whichever one you choose will offer a quality customer service solution. It provides clients with a quality in-app help experience for a variety of mobile apps and mobile games.

The best help desks are also ticketing systems, which lets support reps create a support ticket out of issues that can then be tracked. When it comes to self-service portals for things like knowledgebases, Intercom has a useful set of resources. Intercom also has a community forum where users can help one another with questions and solutions. Choose Zendesk for a scalable, team-size-based pricing model and Intercom intercom and zendesk for initial low-cost access with flexibility in adding advanced features. While Intercom offers unique feature options that weave together well into campaigns and series, it lacks voice calling–a critical feature–and spreads its more advanced features out too much among plans. However, customers can purchase multiple Intercom plans to use together, or purchase add-ons to select just the features they want.

Zendesk vs Intercom for pricing

While Intercom offers fewer integrations than Zendesk, it is still compatible with many popular apps like Slack, Stripe, Salesforce, and HubSpot. This allows customers to resolve their own issues quickly, reducing inbound conversation volume and scaling your team’s support capacity. Both Zendesk and Intercom offer automation features that improve efficiency and reduce your labor costs. While Zendesk’s pricing may seem confusing at first glance, it’s much easier if you choose to purchase one of their Zendesk Suite plans. These plans include all the features available for email, live chat, voice, and social media support. Real-time analytics are displayed on a live feed, providing necessary information on your dashboard and broadcasting it to your support agents.

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)? You can even improve efficiency and transparency by setting up task sequences, defining sales triggers, and strategizing with advanced forecasting and reporting tools. 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.

How Zendesk and HubSpot Stack Up

It is favored by customer support, helpdesk, IT service management, and contact center teams. Intercom’s app store has popular integrations for things like WhatsApp, Stripe, Instagram, and Slack. There is a really useful one for Shopify to provide customer support for e-commerce operations. HubSpot and Salesforce are also available when support needs to work with marketing and sales teams. 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 and Intercom offer help desk management solutions to their users. Zendesk is renowned for its comprehensive toolset that aids in automating customer service workflows and fine-tuning chatbot interactions. Its strengths are prominently seen in multi-channel support, with effective email, social media, and live chat integrations, coupled with a robust internal knowledge base for agent support.

Add the Zendesk Support app to your inbox

Intercom also offers a 14-day free trial, after which customers can upgrade to a paid plan or use the basic free plan. Unlike Zendesk, the prices for Intercom are based on the number of seats and contacts, with each plan tailored to each customer, meaning that the pricing can be quite flexible. This is especially helpful for smaller businesses that may not need a lot of features. Intercom is a customer relationship management (CRM) software company that provides a suite of tools for managing customer interactions. The company was founded in 2011 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

• Both Intercom and Zendesk offer great customer support for their clients.
• App users can receive immediate in-app help with automated solutions for simple to complex issues.
• I’ll dive into their chatbots more later, but their bot automation features are also stronger.
• The program is simple to use and includes all of the necessary capabilities for providing good customer service.
• The admin and manager dashboard provides a zoomed-out view of all activity taking place in each inbox, for whole departments and individual agents.

Intercom’s products are used by over 25,000 customers, from small tech startups to large enterprises. One of the things that sets Zendesk apart from other customer service software providers is its focus on design. The company’s products are built with an emphasis on simplicity and usability. This has helped to make Zendesk one of the most popular customer service software platforms on the market.

Zendesk vs. Intercom

Yes, you can localize the Messenger to work with multiple languages, resolve conversations automatically in multiple languages and support multiple languages in your Help Center. When you switch from Zendesk, you can also create dynamic macros to speed up your response time to common queries, like feature requests and bug reports. If you’ve already set up macros in Zendesk just copy and paste them over. Check out this tutorial to import ticket types and tickets data into your Intercom workspace.

This gets you unlimited email addresses and email templates in both text form and HTML. Zendesk’s per-agent pricing structure makes it a budget-friendly option for smaller teams, allowing costs to scale with team growth. Pricing for both services varies based on the specific needs and scale of your business. Intercom, on the other hand, is ideal for those focusing on CRM capabilities and personalized customer interactions.

Also, if you’re looking for a CRM that focuses more on customer service and support, Zendesk is the better option. Businesses engaging in direct sales through multiple channels will benefit from Zendesk Sell’s offerings, too. Most Zendesk users say the CRM software is a solid tool for customer relationship management. However, some are unhappy about the occasional platform crash and slowdown, which reduces their productivity.

For very small companies and startups, Intercom also offers a Starter plan–with a balanced suite of features from each of the above solutions–at $74 monthly per user. The Zendesk Admin Center panels allow administrators to control settings, accessibility, automations, and workflows for everything from chatbots to integrations and custom APIs. Users with light access–such as knowledgeable agents and supervisors–can be added to tickets for browsing and feedback. While light agents cannot interact with the customer on the ticket, they can make notes and interact privately with other team members and agents involved with the ticket.