14 Best Zendesk Alternatives & Competitors

Zendesk offers robust, pre-built reports for sales and support teams. Here are our top reporting and analytics features and an overview of where Intercom’s reporting limitations lie. Apps and integrations are critical to creating a 360 view of the customer across the company and ensuring agents have easy access to key customer context. When agents don’t have to waste time toggling between different systems and tools to access the customer details they need, they can deliver faster, more personalized customer service.

Zendesk provides a variety of solutions including customized ticketing automation, self-service solutions, and customizable configurations based on your business needs. HubSpot Service Hub is a cloud-based customer service platform that aims to simplify the process related to customer support. HubSpot can work for companies of nearly every size, allowing users to quickly connect via conversational bots, live chat, canned responses, and phone calls with live agents.

Features Zendesk

By considering the factors mentioned above, you can narrow down your choices and select the ideal Zendesk competitor that aligns with your business requirements and goals. Get to a resolution faster by switching to voice calls and share your screen – without switching to another platform. This is why HubSpot makes sense as an Intercom alternative for large brands who are already familiar with or using other aspects of this tool. When integrating data, you can fill some Intercom fields that don’t have corresponding Zendesk fields (or vice versa) with constant values. You can use lookup mapping to map target columns to values, gotten from other target objects depending on source data.

Visit either of their app marketplaces and look up the Intercom Zendesk integration. Like with many other apps, Zapier seems to be the best and most simple way to connect Intercom to Zendesk. The main idea here is to rid the average support agent of a slew of mundane and repetitive tasks, giving them more time and mental energy to help customers with tougher issues. Every single bit of business SaaS in the world needs to leverage the efficiency power of workflows and automation. Customer service systems like Zendesk and Intercom should provide a simple workflow builder as well as many pre-built automations which can be used right out of the box. You get call recording, muting and holding, conference calling, and call blocking.

How to integrate Intercom and Zendesk

Leveraging AI-powered chatbots, Zoho Desk employs Zia, an intelligent assistant, to share relevant knowledge base solutions with customers and agents. As a conversational relationship platform, Zendesk gives you the option of live chatting with customers via your website, mobile, and messaging. Though, if you compare Zendesk chat vs Intercom, the plugin is a bit hard to use as reviewed by customers.

The Intercom vs. Zendesk pricing may be justified by the value-added services and minor features that they have for their all-in-one pricing. For example, for businesses that want just a couple of features, there are subscription packages. Each of such packages contains a set of tools from basic to advanced features.

Zendesk vs. Intercom

Intercom also does mobile carousels to help please the eye with fresh designs. Intercom, of course, allows its customer support team to collaborate and communicate too, but overall, Zendesk wins this group. A customer service department is only as good as its support team members, and these highly-prized employees need to rely on one another. Tools that allow support agents to communicate and collaborate are important aspect of customer service software. Intercom built additional tools to aid in marketing and engagement to supplement its customer service solution. But we doubled down and created a truly full-service CX solution capable of handling any support request.

This means that you don’t have to rely solely on the features and functions that Intercom provides — you can add new features, functions, and integrations to the platform as well. When you’re troubleshooting something with a user, knowing exactly what’s happening on the backend can be enormously helpful. Unfortunately, Intercom doesn’t have this functionality and you’ll need to ask your users for console information like network and device details, user steps, bugs, etc.

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If I had to describe Intercom’s helpdesk, I would say it’s rather a complementary tool to their chat tools. If you create a new chat with the team, land on a page with no widget, and go back in the browser for some reason, your chat will go puff. Intercom has more customization features for features like bots, themes, triggers, and funnels. 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. However, you should know that just like Zendesk, the free alternatives limit your features and functionality until you pay for a premium account.

Just as Zendesk, Intercom also offers its own Operator bot which will automatically suggest relevant articles to customers who ask for help. If you want to deliver better customer service, live chat is the key. However, live chat can also take up a lot of time and resources, which you may not have. If you’re a small business, you may want to consider Intercom as it offers a nice set of features in its most basic package—without breaking the bank.

Pricing plans: Zendesk vs. Intercom

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. 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. 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. Save your team time and provide more consistent support by establishing customer service workflows that enable you to automate repetitive tasks and route tickets to the right team member more efficiently.

Intercom calculates the price based on the number of seats (users) you request. Depending on the seat type (subscription plan), users get access to different metadialog.com features. For example, the Messaging feature is not available in the Support plan, while Articles aren’t available in the Engage and Conver plans.

How to Choose the Right Zendesk Competitor

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. Whichever solution you choose, mParticle can help integrate your data. MParticle is a Customer Data Platform offering plug-and-play integrations to Zendesk and Intercom, along with over 300 other marketing, analytics, and data warehousing tools. With mParticle, you can connect your Zendesk and Intercom data with other marketing, analytics, and business intelligence platforms without any custom engineering effort.

Even though Intercom doesn’t offer this feature natively, there are integrations for it — including ours — which we’ll delve into shortly. Positive reviews mention how intuitive the UI is, how powerful the feature set is and how Intercom’s chat and email functions make customer communication easy by consolidating everything in one place. Negative reviews often mention that Intercom’s ticket management and sorting functionalities are more limited than other solutions on the market. Other reviewers detracted points based on the fact that many essential support tools are behind paywalls. Hiver’s automations, including smart assignment rules, workflows, and Harvey, the AI bot, help automate repetitive tasks. The platform also offers SLA and escalation setups to ensure timely responses.

Adding widgets to stand-alone pages in Refined sites

Zendesk Sales Engagement Tools (Reach) uses a credit system to help you find new leads or add information to existing leads. Create entry rules that trigger when the messaging campaign begins, choosing the target audiences and when follow-up messages generate. Create code-free screencast tours of products, websites, webpages, and applications within your website. Set triggers to target particular audiences at the right time, utilize carousels as part of a communication campaign, and compare carousels with A/B testing.

Intercom and Zendesk are neck to neck in reviews from various sites such as G2, Capterra, Financesonline, and more. We’ve analyzed a dozen of reviews to help you get an average estimate of Zendesk vs Intercom functionality. The debate rages between WooCommerce, Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce for best ecomm platform — we’ll help you find the best one for you. To help explore these gaps, we decided to check out the reviews of both Zendesk and Intercom and get a sense of where the complaints pointed. Sure, you can have a front desk—but you don’t necessarily have to plunk down the cost it would take to buy that desk, train an employee, and add them to your payroll.

• Help Scout is a Zendesk alternative that works well for small businesses.
• Yes—as your business’s needs grow, you will require a more sophisticated case management system.
• 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.
• When it comes to creating an optimum knowledge base experience, both Intercom and Zendesk are excellent choices with similar capabilities for your needs.
• Automated service to migrate your data between help desk platforms without programming skills — just follow simple Migration Wizard.
• The rate limits also depend on what type of licensing plan you have with Zendesk.