Intercom vs Zendesk Why HubSpot is the Best Alternative

On the other hand, Intercom, starting at a lower price point, could be more attractive for very small teams or individual users. However, additional costs for advanced features can quickly increase the total expense. Intercom stands out for its modern and user-friendly messenger functionality, which includes advanced features with a focus on automation and real-time insights. Its AI Chatbot, Fin, is particularly noted for handling complex queries efficiently. When comparing Zendesk and Intercom, various factors come into play, each focusing on different aspects, strengths, and weaknesses of these customer support platforms. Again, Zendesk has surpassed the number of reviewers when compared to Intercom.

Instead, using it and setting it up is very easy, and very advanced chatbots and predictive tools are included to boost your customer service. With a multi-channel ticketing system, Zendesk Support helps you and your team to know exactly who you’re talking to and keep track of tickets throughout all channels without losing context. The setup is designed to seamlessly connect your customer support team with customers across all platforms. Zendesk also offers digital support during business hours, and their website has a chatbot. 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.

• Intercom is a customer messaging platform that enables businesses to engage with customers through personalized and real-time communication.
• Intercom doesn’t really provide free stuff, but they have a tool called Platform, which is free.
• Both Zendesk and Intercom offer robust solutions, but the choice ultimately depends on specific business needs.
• Intercom offers an integrated knowledge base functionality to its user base.
• Advanced workflows are useful to customer service teams because they automate processes that make it easier for agents to provide great customer service.

Here’s a list of criteria we’ve used to differentiate the two for you. 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. Messagely also provides you with a shared inbox so anyone from your team can follow up with your users, regardless of who the user was in contact with first.

Zendesk is a much larger company than Intercom; it has over 170,000 customers, while Intercom has over 25,000. While this may seem like a positive for Zendesk, it’s important to consider that a larger company may not be as agile or responsive to customer needs as a smaller company. In order to obtain an idea of the financial consequences that will be incurred by your team as well as the predicted number of clients, it is essential to compare their plans in a meticulous manner. Before you jump to any conclusions, we suggest you take a free trial to get a better look and feel of the product.

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.

Pricing for both services varies based on the specific needs and scale of your business. When comparing the automation and AI features of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms come with unique strengths and weaknesses. When comparing the user interfaces (UI) of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms exhibit distinct characteristics and strengths catering to different user preferences and needs. You can also follow up with customers after they have left the chat and qualify them based on your answers.

Zendesk: Cons

Broken down into custom, resolution, and task bots, these can go a long way in taking repetitive tasks off agents’ plates. Zendesk’s user face is quite intuitive and easy to use, allowing customers to quickly find what they are looking for. Additionally, the platform allows users to customize their experience by setting up automation workflows, creating ticket rules, and utilizing analytics. Zendesk offers a free 30-day trial, after which customers will need to upgrade to one of their paid plans.

They have offices all around the world including countries such as Mexico City, Tokyo, New York, Paris, Singapore, São Paulo, London, and Dublin. We hope this list has provided you with a better grasp of each platform and its features. Remember that there is no one-size-fits-all solution, and the optimal platform for you will be determined by your individual demands. Customers of Zendesk can purchase priority assistance at the enterprise tier, which includes a 99.9% uptime service level agreement and a 1-hour service level goal. At all tiers, there is an additional fee to work with a member of the Zendesk success team on unique engagements.

Right from small startups to large enterprises, all businesses can manage their ticketing needs and stay available to their customers 24×7. With Zendesk, businesses can build a dedicated help center and a community forum to encourage customers to resolve issues at their own pace- while reducing the ticket volume. Moreover, agents can collaborate with other members or teams and get real-time updates about who is viewing a ticket at any given moment. So yeah, two essential things that Zendesk lacks in comparison to Intercom are in-app messages and email marketing tools. Intercom on the other hand lacks many ticketing functionality that can be essential for big companies with a huge customer support load. Zendesk also has the Answer Bot, which can take your knowledge base game to the next level instantly.

But the company’s story isn’t just one of pandemic-induced change—in the first half of the year, Novo’s client base grew from 2,000 to tens of thousands. Check out the research-backed comparison below to better understand how each solution can add value to your organization. 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.

For automation and messaging at scale, you can choose from two plans- Accelerate ($499) or Scale ($999) per month for up to ten users, depending on your business needs. Intercom costs can go even higher with custom add-ons such as Product Tours (from $199/month, Advanced lead generation (from $499/month), Advanced customer engagement (from $499/month), etc. With Zendesk, you can easily sort or filter your tickets using parameters such as date, ticket priority, tags, source, and more. Now, when it comes to customizing your dashboard and making it suitable for your unique needs, Zendesk does a good job. The tool can be integrated with 500+ business apps including Zendesk Explore, which offers you relevant omnichannel analytics and customer engagement metrics. However, if you look at Zendesk’s high pricing and complicated features, the tool doesn’t work well for small businesses that have limited needs.

Zendesk has a slight edge when it comes to ticketing, but Intercom’s automation makes up for it

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. With Intercom you can send targeted email, push, and in-app messages which can be based on the most relevant time or behavior triggers. Basically, you can create new articles, divide them by categories and sections zendesk or intercom — make it a high end destination for customers when they have questions or issues. If you’re a huge corporation with a complicated customer support process, go Zendesk for its help desk functionality.

Another feature Intercom offers that Zendesk doesn’t is email marketing tools. Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to communicate with your customers. Both Intercom and Zendesk provide you with their own Operator bot, which immediately suggests relevant material to clients via the chat widget.

Users can benefit from using Intercom’s CX platform and AI software as a standalone tool for business messaging. But they also add features like automatic meeting booking (in the Convert package), and their custom inbox rules and workflows just feel a little more, well, custom. I’ll dive into their chatbots more later, but their bot automation features are also stronger. Today, both companies offer a broad range of customer support features, making them both strong contenders in the market. Zendesk offers more advanced automation capabilities than Intercom, which may be a deciding factor for businesses that require complex workflows. Both companies provide a set of services that are intended to simplify communication, support, and the overall customer experience.

Respond to all conversations across different messaging platforms in one place and avoid juggling between dozens of tabs. Collaborate with your teammates by easily assigning the right rep to best handle a customer query. It’s clear that both of these tools are designed for different use cases.

With a comprehensive range of features, it enables you to provide exceptional support to your customers across various channels. With Freshdesk, organizations can set up automations to handle specific customer inquiries as appropriate. This includes automatic delivery of help desk tickets to the correct department or agent, prioritization of inquiries based on severity, and escalation of urgent issues.

If you don’t plan on building a huge enterprise just yet, we have to give the edge to Zendesk when it comes to flexible pricing options. Help desk software creates a sort of “virtual front desk” for your business. That means automating customer service and sales processes so the people visiting your website don’t actually have to interact with anyone before they take action.

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. 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 bills itself first and foremost as a platform to make the business of customer service more personalized, among other things. They offer an advanced feature for customer data management that goes beyond basic CRM stuff.

Businesses should always consider a tool’s TCO before committing to a purchase. Many software vendors aren’t upfront about the cost of using their products, maintenance costs, or integration fees. Altogether, this can significantly impact affordability in the long term.

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. 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.

In this article, we’ll compare Zendesk vs Intercom to find out which is the right customer support tool for you. The platform is evolving from a platform for engaging with consumers to a tool that assists you in automating every element of your daily routine. Zendesk is a customer service platform that allows you to communicate with customers via any channel. That being said, in your search for the best customer support tool, you must have come across Zendesk and Intercom. Here is a Zendesk vs. Intercom based on the customer support offered by these brands.

Zendesk’s mission is to build software designed to improve customer relationships. Whenever new features are released (which in some companies happens daily), more data needs labelling and testing is required. Customer support agents may only tag a support ticket with one or two general topics.

The future of customer service is integrated, AI-enhanced—and powered by Intercom

With the Team Inbox, your support agents can manage and reply to conversations, wherever they’re happening- Email, live chat, Twitter, Facebook, and more. Has live chat analytics to monitor customer satisfaction, employee performance. Overall, Zendesk’s Chat is less customizable than Intercom’s but still has all the essentials. In 2018, Intercom raised $125 million in funding, which brought its value up to $1.25 billion and provided the company with all the rights to call itself a unicorn. First of all, Intercom positions itself as a business messenger, the primary aim of which is to deliver modern and reliable customer communication tool.

You can even finagle some forecasting by sourcing every agent’s assigned leads. 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. Discover customer and product issues with instant replays, in-app cobrowsing, and console logs.

The design philosophy is based on keeping things as simple as possible so that even people who have never used the site before can quickly figure out how it works. Both systems include pricing plans that are tiered and vary according to the amount of user seats or active contacts. Intercom is primarily concerned with price on a per-user basis, in contrast to Zendesk, which blends user seats with contact tiers when it comes to pricing. As discussed above, Zendesk started as a ticketing tool and, therefore, has one of the best ticket management workflows in place. Intercom’s design and overall user-interface feel modern, intuitive, and quite easy on the eyes.

Intercom is geared toward sales, whereas Zendesk includes everything a customer service rep desires. Personalized messaging, in-app messaging, product tours, and chatbot capabilities set Intercom apart from Zendesk. You can contact the sales team if you’re just looking around, but you will not receive decent customer support unless you buy their service. Overall, Zendesk empowers businesses to deliver exceptional customer support experiences across channels, making it a popular choice for enhancing support operations. However, customers can purchase multiple Intercom plans to use together, or purchase add-ons to select just the features they want. Zendesk wins the self-service tools category because it provides extensive help center customization options.

Whether it’s syncing data with your CRM, enhancing communication via messaging platforms, or automating tasks with productivity apps, Zendesk makes it possible. It tends to perform well on the marketing and sales side of things, which is key for a growing company. And considering that its tools (including live chat options) are so easy to use, it’s probably going to be easier for a small business to get integrated and set up. 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.

Users also point out that it can take a couple of hours to get used to the flow of tickets, which doesn’t happen in CRM, and they aren’t pleased with the product’s downtime. Although Zendesk isn’t hard to use, it’s not a perfectly smooth experience either. Users report feeling as though the interface is outdated and cluttered and complain about how long it takes to set up new features and customize existing ones. Intercom also does not offer a free trial period for users to examine the software prior to joining up for their services. That being said the customer support for both Zendesk and Intercom is lacking.

Considering its affordable pricing, ProProfs can be a great option for small to medium-scale businesses. Moreover, you can tailor your content to different audiences such as visitors or paid customers. Customization options for color, logo, header, domain, etc. can also come in handy. With the Intercom Messenger widget on every article, your customers can instantly connect with an agent if they need further help. As a leading cloud-based help desk software, Zendesk is home to many popular businesses such as Siemens, Mailchimp, Tesco, GrubHub, and more. The tool is extremely scalable and can be used to match your growing business needs.

• Community boards make the support ecosystem even better by creating a place where people can work together and share their experiences, tips, and ask for help from their peers.
• While Zendesk features are plenty, someone using it for the first time can find it overwhelming.
• Once, the ticket is created, customers get a notification that their issue or request has been received and registered.
• When comparing Zendesk and Intercom, various factors come into play, each focusing on different aspects, strengths, and weaknesses of these customer support platforms.
• Customer support agents may only tag a support ticket with one or two general topics.

The result is that Zendesk generally wins on ratings when it comes to support capacity. They have a 2-day SLA, no phone support, and the times I have had to work with them they have been incredibly difficult to work with. Very rarely do they understand the issue (mostly with Explore) that I am trying to communicate to them. With Zendesk, you can anticipate customer questions, allowing for shorter reply periods.

This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site (including, for example, the order in which they appear). This site does not include all software companies or all available software companies offers. However, this is somewhat subjective, and depending on your business needs and favorite tools, you may argue we got it all mixed up, and Intercom is truly superior. Some startups and small businesses may prefer one app, while large companies and enterprise operations will have their own requirements. There is a simple email integration tool for whatever email provider you regularly use. This gets you unlimited email addresses and email templates in both text form and HTML.

You can also choose their Round-robin ticket assignment feature to equally distribute tickets among your agents. Moreover, you can keep your dashboard tidy with ticket organization features such as ticket prioritization, labels, and filters. In terms of usability, ProProfs Help Desk has been diligently designed to meet the needs of customer service teams of any size, business.

Due to our intelligent routing capabilities and numerous automated workflows, our users can free up hours to focus on other tasks. 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. All customer questions, be it via phone, chat, email, social media, or any other channel, are landing in one dashboard, where your agents can solve them quickly and efficiently. It guarantees continuous omnichannel support that meets customer expectations.

What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk, though is how their tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously. As I’ve already mentioned, they started as a help desk/ticketing tool, and honestly, they perfected every bit of it over the years. As it turns, it’s quite difficult to compare Zendesk against Intercom as they serve different purposes and will fit different businesses. With ThriveDesk, you can supercharge your website’s growth and streamline customer interactions like never before.

In today’s world of fast-paced customer service and high customer expectations, it’s essential for business leaders to equip their teams with the best support tools available. Zendesk and Intercom both offer noteworthy tools, but if you’re looking for a full-service solution, there is one clear winner. Founded in 2007, Zendesk started as a ticketing tool for customer success teams. It was later that they started adding all kinds of other features, like live chat for customer conversations.

These are required so that our service can reach data from your Zendesk. Our automated tool is consistently tested and upgraded to provide you with the desired results. We have our dedicated team members always ready to support you with any requests you might have. You can try any plan free for 15 days and get the look and feel of the tool before making any commitments.

This way, your clients will never have to repeat themselves or get frustrated because their new representative doesn’t know their background. You don’t have to pay per contact on your database, and you there are many free features you can use. Zendesk, on the other hand, has revamped its security since its security breach in 2016.