Intercom vs Zendesk Why HubSpot is the Best Alternative

Premiere Zendesk plans have 24/7 proactive support with faster response times. Other customer service add-ons with Zendesk include custom training and professional services. The highlight of Zendesk’s ticketing software is its omnichannel-ality (omnichannality?). Whether agents are facing customers via chat, email, social media, or good old-fashioned phone, they can keep it all confined to a single, easy-to-navigate dashboard. That not only saves them the headache of having to constantly switch between dashboards while streamlining resolution processes—it also leads to better customer and agent experience overall.

You need a complete customer service platform that’s seamlessly integrated and AI-enhanced. The two essential things that Zendesk lacks in comparison to Intercom are in-app messages and email marketing tools. On the other hand, Intercom lacks many ticketing functionality that can be essential for big companies with a huge client support load. Intercom live chat is modern, smooth, and has many advanced features that other chat tools don’t. It’s highly customizable, too, so you can adjust it according to your website or product’s style. So when it comes to chatting features, the choice is not really Intercom vs Zendesk.

While both Zendesk and Intercom are great and robust platforms, none of them are able to provide you with the same value Messagely gives you at such an  affordable price. And while many other chatbots take forever to set up, you can set up your first chatbot in under five minutes. You can also follow up with customers after they have left the chat and qualify them based on your answers. However, if you’re looking for a streamlined, all-in-one messaging platform, there is no better option than Messagely.

Depending on your needs, you can set up Intercom on your website or mobile app and add your automations. Setting up Intercom help centers is also very easy and intuitive, with no previous knowledge required. Although it can be pricey, Zendesk’s platform is a very robust one, with powerful reporting and insight tools, a large number of integrations, and excellent scalability features.

It has automation options, including ticket dispatching that assigns agents to tickets based on skill, or you can configure it for round-robin distribution. You can also set automatic email notifications to alert customers and agents to ticket updates. This cloud-based live chat and messaging platform helps support teams communicate with customers via website or mobile app.

Both Zendesk and Intercom have integration libraries, and you can also use a connecting tool like Zapier for added integrations and add-ons. You get call recording, muting and holding, conference calling, and call blocking. Zendesk also offers callback requests, call monitoring and call quality notifications, among other telephone tools. When it comes to self-service portals for things like knowledgebases, Intercom has a useful set of resources.

After this, you’ll have to set up your workflows, personalizing your tickets and storing them by topic. You can then add automations and triggers, such as automatically closing a ticket or sending a message to a user. Again, Zendesk has surpassed the number of reviewers when compared to Intercom. Some of the highly-rated features include ticket creation user experience, email to case, and live chat reporting.

However, you won’t be able to edit or manipulate synced articles via API calls. This way, your clients will never have to repeat themselves or get frustrated because their new representative doesn’t know their background. With Zendesk, you can anticipate customer questions, allowing for shorter reply periods.

In this article, we’ll compare Zendesk vs Intercom to find out which is the right customer support tool for you. We hope that this Intercom VS Zendesk comparison helps you choose one that matches your support, marketing, and sales needs. But in case you are in search of something beyond these two, then ProProfs Chat can be an option. While they like the ease of use this product offers its users, they’ve indeed rated them low in terms of services.

The Zendesk chat tool has most of the necessary features like shortcuts (saved responses), automated triggers, and live chat analytics. Intercom is more for improving sales cycle and customer relationships, while Zendesk has everything a customer support representative can dream about, but it does lack wide email functionality. On the other hand, it provides call center functionalities, unlike Intercom. Intercom’s full CRM suite offers many different use cases, rather than focusing on customer service and support.

G2 ranks Intercom higher than Zendesk for ease of setup, and support quality—so you can expect a smooth transition, effortless onboarding, and continuous success. Whether you’re starting fresh with Intercom or migrating from Zendesk, set up is quick and easy.

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. Now that we know a little about both tools, it is time to make an in-depth analysis and identify which one of these will be perfect for your business. Here’s a list of criteria we’ve used to differentiate the two for you. Intercom doesn’t really provide free stuff, but they have a tool called Platform, which is free.

As a free Intercom alternative, tawk.co provides real-time monitoring, allowing agents to view chat history and performance analytics. A few of tawk.to’s features include a native ticketing system, customizable tabs, real-time alerts and notifications, and an activity dashboard. Drift offers live chat software that allows real-time, personalized conversations between agents and customers. Drift also has automated support through AI-powered chatbots and knowledge base integrations. These self-service options help deflect tickets to make ticket queues more manageable. It also features a built-in customer relationship management (CRM) tool that stores customer data collected via methods like email and chat surveys.

But that’s not it, if you want to resolve customer common questions with the help of the vendor’s new tool – Fin bot, you will have to pay $0.99 per resolution per month. Their chat widget looks and works great, and they invest a lot of effort to make it a modern, convenient customer communication tool. The Intercom versus Zendesk conundrum is probably the greatest problem in the customer service software world. They both offer some state-of-the-art core functionality and numerous unusual features. Basically, if you have a complicated support process, go with Zendesk, an excellent Intercom alternative, for its help desk functionality. If you’re a sales-oriented corporation, use Intercom for its automation options.

Zendesk vs Intercom: customer support

However, there are occasional criticisms regarding the effectiveness of its AI chatbot and some interface navigation challenges. The overall sentiment from users indicates a satisfactory level of support, although opinions vary. Intercom’s solution aims to streamline high-volume ticket influx and provide personalized, conversational support. It also includes extensive integrations with over 350 CRM, email, ticketing, and reporting tools. The platform is recognized for its ability to resolve a significant portion of common questions automatically, ensuring faster response times. Zendesk also offers digital support during business hours, and their website has a chatbot.

If I had to describe Intercom’s helpdesk, I would say it’s rather a complementary tool to their chat tools. Well, I must admit, the tool is gradually transforming from a platform for communicating with users to a tool that helps you automate every aspect of your routine. So you https://chat.openai.com/ see, it’s okay to feel dizzy when comparing Zendesk vs Intercom platforms. This guide will help you choose the right apps for your business from the more than 1,200 available on the Marketplace. Find reporting for all articles (including synced articles) in the Articles report.

Founded as a business messenger, it now extends to enabling support, engagement, and conversion. Zendesk, unlike Intercom, is a more affordable and predictable customer service platform. Also, it’s the pioneer in the support and communication tools market. You can always count on it if you need a reliable customer support platform to process tickets, support users, and get advanced reporting. Zoho offers a suite of tools across many use cases, including its customer service software, Zoho Desk.

Introduction to Intercom & Zendesk

This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data. Intercom does have a ticketing dashboard that has omnichannel functionality, much like Zendesk. Their reports are attractive, dynamic, and integrated right out of the box.

However, if your focus is on creating a seamless, automated customer service experience with proactive engagement, Intercom could be the ideal choice. However, you’ll likely end up paying more for Zendesk, and in-app messenger and other advanced customer communication tools will not be included. Intercom isn’t as great with sales, but it allows for better communication. With Intercom, you can keep track of your customers and what they do on your website in real time. Like Zendesk, Intercom allows you to chat with online visitors and assist with their issues.

The more expensive Intercom plans offer AI-powered content cues, triage, and conversation insights. Because of the app called Intercom Messenger, one can see that their focus is less on the voice and more on the text. This is fine, as not every customer support team wants to be so available on the phone. The best help desks are also ticketing systems, which lets support reps create a support ticket out of issues that can then be tracked. Ticket routing helps to send the ticket to the best support team agent. 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.

What’s worse, Intercom doesn’t offer a free trial to its prospect to help them test the product before onboarding with their services. Instead, they offer a product demo when prospects reach out to learn more about their pricing structure. Zendesk has also introduced its chatbot to help its clients send automated answers to some frequently asked questions to stay ahead in the competitive marketplace. What’s more, it helps its clients build an integrated community forum and help center to improve the support experience in real-time. You can publish your knowledge base articles and divide them by categories and also integrate them with your messenger to accelerate the whole chat experience. Also, their in-app messenger is worth a separate mention as it’s one of their distinctive tools (especially since Zendesk doesn’t really have one).

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. Understanding these fundamental differences should go a long way in helping you pick between the two, but does that mean you can’t use one platform to do what the other does better?

Zendesk Support has voicemail, text messages, and embedded voice, and it displays the phone number on the widget. Yes, you can support multiple brands or businesses from a single Help Desk, while ensuring the Messenger is a perfect match for each of your different domains. Yes, you can localize the Messenger to work with multiple languages, resolve zendesk intercom conversations automatically in multiple languages and support multiple languages in your Help Center. After switching to Intercom, you can start training Custom Answers for Fin AI Agent right away by importing your historic data from Zendesk. Fin AI Agent will use your history to recognize and suggest common questions to create answers for.

So yeah, all the features talk actually brings us to the most sacred question — the question of pricing. You’d probably want to know how much it costs to get each of the platforms for your business, so let’s talk money now. 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. Using our API and apps framework you can build pretty much anything. And once you do, you can place it in The Zendesk Marketplace for all Zendesk customers to find.

How to set up a regular sync of all public articles from your Zendesk Guide Help Center into Intercom. Easily track your service team’s performance and unlock coaching opportunities with AI-powered insights. Before you make your choice, check out Messagely’s features and compare them to discover which platform is best for you. You don’t have to pay per contact on your database, and you there are many free features you can use.

Then, you can begin filling in details such as your account’s name and icon and your agents’ profiles and security features. Zendesk has over 150,000 customer accounts from 160 countries and territories. They have offices all around the world including countries such as Mexico City, Tokyo, New York, Paris, Singapore, São Paulo, London, and Dublin. 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.

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. I just found Zendesk’s help center to be slightly better integrated into their workflows and more customizable. Broken down into custom, resolution, and task bots, these can go a long way in taking repetitive tasks off agents’ plates.

Alternatives to Intercom, like Zendesk, were built specifically for the customer experience. Help Scout has limitations with its integrations, not including some standard or popular apps. Compared to industry leaders, Help Scout’s offers fewer integrations in its app marketplace, with around 90 integration options. It also has limited reporting capabilities that can deliver inaccurate data.

HubSpot and Salesforce are also available when support needs to work with marketing and sales teams. 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. 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.

With all accounted for, it seems that Zendesk still has a number of user interface issues. By the end of the article, you’ll not only know all of the main differences between Zendesk and Intercom, but you’ll know which is the right tool for you. On practice, I can’t promise you anything when it comes to Intercom.

It’s highly customizable, so you can adjust it according to your website or product’s style. 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. All plans come with a 7-day free trial, and no credit card is required to sign up for the trial. Our mission is to break apart what CRM is and means.Here we discuss anything that helps create more meaningful lasting work relationships. When you migrate your articles from Zendesk, we’ll retain your organizational structure for you.

Proactive Customer Support

Intercom is a customer support messenger, bot, and live chat service provider that empowers its clients to provide instant support in real-time. This SaaS leader entered into the competition in 2011, intending to help its clients reach their target audiences and engage them in a conversation right away. So yeah, two essential things that Zendesk lacks in comparison to Intercom are in-app messages and email marketing tools.

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. In a nutshell, both these companies provide great customer support. I tested both of their live chats and their support agents were answering in very quickly and right to the point. Zendesk team can be just a little bit faster depending on the time of the day. They have a dedicated help section that provides instructions on how to set up and effectively use Intercom. Intercom generally receives positive feedback for its customer support, with users appreciating the comprehensive features and team-oriented tools.

• As it turns, it’s quite difficult to compare Zendesk against Intercom as they serve different purposes and will fit different businesses.
• Integrations are the best way to enhance the toolkit of your apps by connecting them for interoperable actions and features.
• If you’d want to test Zendesk and Intercom before deciding on a tool for good, they both provide free trials.
• Some users also report difficulty keeping track of cases, with conversation threads becoming mixed in the system.
• The cheapest (aka Essential) ‘All of Intercom’ package will cost you $136 per month, but if you only need their essential chat tools only, you can get them for $49 per month.

Users can surface historical data and real-time metrics and compare them visually with graphs and charts. The platform also integrates with some third-party apps to help businesses increase its capabilities. Messagely’s live chat platform is smooth, effective, and easy to set up.

In short, Zendesk is perfect for large companies looking to streamline their customer support process; Intercom is great for smaller companies looking for advanced customer service features. Zendesk chat allows you to talk with your visitors in real time through a small chat bar at the bottom of your site. When visitors click on it, they’ll be directed to one of your customer service teammates. For basic chat and messaging, Intercom charges a flat fee of $39 Chat GPT 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. Its $99 bracket includes advanced options, such as customer satisfaction prediction and multi-brand support, and in the $199 bracket, you also get advanced security and other very advanced features.

With chatbots, you can generate leads to hand over to your sales team and solve common customer queries without the need of a customer service representative behind a keyboard. On the other hand, Zendesk’s customer support includes a knowledge base that’s very intuitive and easy to navigate. It divides all articles into a few main topics so you can quickly find the one you’re looking for. It also includes a list of common questions you can browse through at the bottom of the knowledge base home page so you can find answers to common issues. The ProProfs Live Chat Editorial Team is a passionate group of customer service experts dedicated to empowering your live chat experiences with top-notch content.

We’ll even flag any content you need to review and give you advice on how to fix it. Just visit Articles in Intercom, click Get started with articles and then Migrate from Zendesk. Keeping this general theme in mind, I’ll dive deeper into how each software’s features compare, so you can decide which use case might best fit your needs. If you see either of these warnings, wait 60 seconds for your Zendesk rate limit to be reset and try again. If this becomes a persistent issue for your team, we recommend contacting Zendesk.

Intercom feels more wholesome and is more client-success-oriented, but it can be too costly for smaller companies. At the same time, they both provide great and easy user onboarding. Yes, you can integrate the Intercom solution into your Zendesk account. It will allow you to leverage some Intercom capabilities while keeping your account at the time-tested platform.

As a Zendesk user, you’re familiar with tickets – you’ll be able to continue using these in Intercom. Zendesk is billed more as a customer support and ticketing solution, while Intercom includes more native CRM functionality. 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. You could technically consider Intercom a CRM, but it’s really more of a customer-focused communication product. It isn’t as adept at purer sales tasks like lead management, list engagement, advanced reporting, forecasting, and workflow management as you’d expect a more complete CRM to be.

Intercom Alternatives for 2024: Discover Budget-Friendly Solutions

To select the ideal fit for your business, it is crucial to compare these industry giants and assess which aligns best with your specific requirements. Intercom’s UI excels in modern design and intuitive functionality, particularly noted for its real-time messaging and advanced features. It is tailored for automation and quick access to insights, offering a user-friendly experience. Nevertheless, the platform’s support consistency can be a concern, and the unpredictable pricing structure might lead to increased costs for larger organizations. Chatbots are automated customer support tools that can assist with low-level ticket triage and ticket routing in real-time.

With Intercom, you get email features like targeted and personalized outbound emailing, dynamic content fields, and an email-to-inbox forwarding feature. Email marketing, for example, is a big deal, but less so when it comes to customer service. Still, for either of these platforms to have some email marketing or other email functionality is common sense.

It’s important to choose the right customer service software for your business. With many Intercom alternatives to consider, our related guides make comparing them a cinch. That means we know which tools and capabilities agents need to deliver an exceptional customer experience. Its sales CRM software starts at $19 per month per user, but you’ll have to pay $49 to get Zapier integrations and $99 for Hubspot integrations. Finally, you can pay $199 per month per user for unlimited sales pipelines and advanced reporting along with other features.

Help desk SaaS is how you manage general customer communication and for handling customer questions. You can collect ticket data from customers when they fill out the ticket, update them manually as you handle the conversation. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. This means you can use the Help Desk Migration product to import data from a variety of source tools (e.g. Zendesk, ZOHOdesk, Freshdesk, SFDC etc) to Intercom tickets. Intercom has more customization features for features like bots, themes, triggers, and funnels.

Though it doesn’t offer an omnichannel workspace, it does have a shared inbox that provides agents with information in one place. On the other hand, Intercom prides itself on being the only complete customer service solution that provides a seamless experience across automation and human support. By aiming to resolve most customer conversations without human intervention, Intercom allows teams to focus on higher-value interactions. This not only increases customer satisfaction but also reduces operational costs. Zendesk is an AI-powered service solution that’s easy to set up, use, and scale. It works out-of-the-box and is easy to modify when changes arise, helping businesses move faster.

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. It not only shows you all of the apps you can use, but it also divides these into topics and categories.

Both tools can be quite heavy on your budget since they mainly target big enterprises and don’t offer their full toolset at an affordable price. The right features and capabilities empower agents to take their customer service game to the next level. Check out our chart that lets you compare alternatives to Intercom at a glance. Our guide to Intercom alternatives makes it easy to compare competitors so you can choose the perfect customer service software for your business. Delivering a great customer experience (CX) can set you apart from competitors. Empowering agents with the necessary tools can make their jobs easier and create an environment that boosts the customer and employee experience.

View your users’ Zendesk tickets in Intercom and create new ones directly from conversations. 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. Zendesk makes running your online business easy with pre-built integrations that provide a smooth customer journey.

These are both still very versatile products, so don’t think you have to get too siloed into a single use case. If a title has been set for a conversation it will use this to populate the resulting Zendesk ticket title. In terms of pricing, Intercom is considered one of the most expensive tools on the market.

• The Zendesk Support app gives you access to live Intercom customer data in Zendesk, and lets you create new tickets in Zendesk directly from Intercom conversations.
• Its reporting tools are less comprehensive than those offered by Zendesk putting the solutions on different levels.
• From Answers to Assist, we released a ton of product updates in 2023.
• But unlike Zendesk, its software has limited features, channels, and integrations.

Use HubSpot Service Hub to provide seamless, fast, and delightful customer service. We will start syncing the last 24 hours of data from your Intercom account. This may take some time depending on the options you selected and your conversation volume. You can contact our Support team if you have any questions or need us to import older data. With a very streamlined design, Intercom’s interface is far better than many alternatives, including Zendesk. It has a very intuitive design that goes far beyond its platform and into its articles, product guides, and even its illustrations.

Intercom offers a simplistic dashboard with a detailed view of all customer details in one place. Operators will find its dashboard quite beneficial as it will take them seconds to find necessary features during an ongoing chat with the customers. Admins will also like the fact that they can see the progress of all their teams and who all are actively answering a customer’s query in real-time. On one hand, Zendesk offers a great many features, way more than Intercom, but it lacks in-app messenger and email marketing tools.

According to one user, it has “too many apps and products” that need to be consolidated and simplified. Intercom, on the other hand, excels in providing a seamless customer service experience by merging automation with human support. Its proactive support features, unified inbox, and customizable bots are highly beneficial for businesses looking to engage customers dynamically and manage conversations effortlessly. 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 also excels in real-time chat solutions, making it a strong contender for businesses seeking dynamic customer interaction.

Kayako offers a help desk solution with a shared inbox that helps teams manage customer requests. Kayako offers a unified workspace, SingleView, that consolidates customer requests, data, order history, self-service activity, and email conversations. Users can customize Kayako’s shared inbox interface to match agent preferences. The platform’s speed and quality may not meet expectations, leading to switching costs. Additionally, Zoho falls short of a frictionless agent experience, with different agent interfaces for chat, phone, and ticketing.