Intercom vs Zendesk: Comparing features, integrations, and pricing

These 13 Intercom alternatives provide great options for sales, marketing, and support help for your business. Zendesk is well-known in the industry as a large tool with a number of business solutions, especially when it comes to service and sales. By using Help Scout, whether or not you like it, you’re joining a “customer-centric support community”. When I see companies using Help Scout, I can’t help but just feel connected to them – just like that, they feel like a friend.

• If you’re looking for the best messaging option or a tool that offers the best interface, choose Intercom.
• So yeah, two essential things that Zendesk lacks in comparison to Intercom are in-app messages and email marketing tools.
• Their reports are attractive, dynamic, and integrated right out of the box.
• Or do you really have to go out of your way and build an entire integration with something else just to be able to send SMS.
• Best Intercom alternative for large businesses who are already HubSpot users.
• It’s also worth noting that since Intercom has an Open API you can easily integrate it with your own product, tech stack, or other tools.

Zendesk and Intercom are robust tools with a wide range of customer service and CRM features. 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 allows visitors to search for and view articles from the messenger widget. When a visitor selects an article, it opens in the messenger. Customers won’t need to leave your app or website to find the help they need.Zendesk, on the other hand, will redirect the customer to a new web page.

Access Denied – Sucuri Website Firewall

HubSpot’s all-in-one suite of tools includes capabilities for landing page creation, lead generation, email marketing automation, customer support, sales prospecting, operations, and more. Zendesk has strong positive reviews especially since the software has mobile apps for access. Though some complained that it’s not easy to check the tickets using the apps.

Additionally, you can create custom bots that collect up-front information, help prioritize urgent issues, and connect customers to the right people on your team. Zendesk – Founded in 2007, Zendesk has been around the longest of the customer support tools, and has become the 800 pound Gorilla of the customer support world. While it is feature rich, it is less intuitive than a tool like Gorgias and requires more development resources to set up and optimize. Users described Zendesk as a large enterprise tool with lots of tech debt and various functions kluged on. If you happen to be doing business for the government and restricted by FedRAMP approved SaaS, then Zendesk is your only solution right now.

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Generally, humans can’t handle this volume of exchange, that’s why help desk software was made. By leveraging the out-of-the-box Netomi virtual agent integration, companies enhance both the agent and customer experience, while also reducing costs. Other chatbots don’t sit natively within the agent desk, but with Netomi, virtual and human agents work alongside each other, creating an efficient and ultra-powerful customer service team. Zendesk is a comprehensive CRM and support suite that offers a variety of features for customer support, sales, and marketing. One of Zendesk’s most notable aspects is its robust ticketing system.

It enables them to engage with visitors who are genuinely interested in their services. You get to engage with them further and get to know more about their expectations. This becomes the perfect opportunity to personalize the experience, offer assistance to prospects as per their needs, and convert them into customers. Welcome to another blog post that helps you gauge which live chat solution is compatible with your customer support needs.

Is Zendesk better than Intercom? Our final points

Intercom gives you the ability to see who your customers are and what they do in your web and mobile apps in real time. Zendesk Message and chat enable users to connect to their customers on a scalable app. This allows agents to work on their own device anytime and anywhere. Zendesk has tons of products that are similar to Intercom’s including Zendesk chatbot software, messaging, team collaboration, knowledge base, analytics and reporting.

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 features. For example, the Messaging feature metadialog.com is not available in the Support plan, while Articles aren’t available in the Engage and Conver plans. Unfortunately, you can’t calculate the price by yourself since Intercom hid its pricing table.

Compare Zendesk vs

With both tools, you can also use support bots to automatically suggest specific articles, track customers’ ratings, and localize help center content to serve your customers in their native language. Intercom’s large series of bots obviously run on automations as well. 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. Intercom has a full suite of email marketing tools, although they are part of a pricier package.

They’ve been rated as one of the easy live chat solutions with more integrated options. 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. Zendesk also offers proactive chat functionality to its user base.

Zendesk Inbox Pricing

In fact, the Zendesk Marketplace has 1,300+ apps and integrations, from billing software to marketing automation tools. Gorgias markets an out-of-the-box phone support solution for companies, however, Gorgias users complained that the phone support solution was not very robust. Gorgias users typically integrate Aircall to offer phone support or the more advanced but also more expensive alternative TalkDesk. Team package starts at $14 per agent per month and includes unlimited chats, a few triggers, and some additional customization options.

• Its sales, marketing, and support tools all back that endeavor.
• Instead, you need to refresh your browser to see the latest changes made by others… or install a plugin or browser extension that refreshes your browser every few minutes.
• With numerous features such as a ticketing system, a CRM or a knowledge base software, customer service software helps companies around the world.
• Zendesk also offers an Answer Bot that can help you eliminate wait times.
• 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.
• Compared to being detailed, Zendesk gives a tough competition to Intercom.

It’s where customers ask the questions that may result in the largest sales in your company’s history. Given that both of these platforms seem aimed at one sort of market or another, it shouldn’t surprise you that we might find a few gaps in the sorts of services they provide. But it’s also a given that many people will approach their reviews to Zendesk and Intercom with some specific missions in mind, and that’s bound to change how they feel about the platforms. 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. One of the most significant downsides of Intercom is its customer support.

Zendesk’s Explore offers exceptional reporting features, but Intercom should still be adequate for most users

Intercom is another SaaS company that was founded in 2011 with the aim to help businesses build better customer relationships through personalized, messenger-based experiences. The company caters to businesses across the globe and has offices in San Francisco, Dublin, Sydney, etc. One of these differences is the ability for agents to connect to customers through their own apps versus using a collaboration feature.

Zendesk has more pricing options, which means you’re free to choose your tier from the get-go. With Intercom, you’ll have more customizable options with the enterprise versions of the software, but you’ll have fewer lower-tier choices. 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.

Use case 1: A small business with basic needs

Intercom on the other hand is a Conversational Relationship Platform (CRP). You can use it to build better customer relationships through personalized, messenger-based experiences across the customer journey. You can use Intercom to deliver conversational customer experiences through chat, bots, and personalized messaging. Our team can not only help you choose and set up your live chat software, but our agents can monitor all your channels for you, lessening the load on your team.

With Gorgias, you can manage support on live chat, email, Facebook & Instagram. Gorgias is at a loss here as it doesn’t have this feature, but you can integrate Gorgias with Helpdocs, a knowledge base software. Gorgias comes with advanced machine learning that detects the intents and sentiments of each message. While this will help you categorize tickets based on what they’re about, they will still need human intervention. On the other hand, Intercom supports Shopify, WooCommerce, and Squarespace.

As for the category of voice and phone features, Zendesk is a clear winner. Zendesk Support has voicemail, text messages, and embedded voice, and it displays the phone number on the widget. As for Intercom’s general pricing structure, there are three plans, but you’ll have to contact them to get exact prices. We have numerous customers that do this and benefit greatly from our out-of-the-box integration with Intercom. Like so many others, Monese determined that Zendesk was the best solution to provide seamless, omnichannel support because of its scalability and reliability. Brian Kale, the head of customer success at Bank Novo, describes how Zendesk helped Bank Novo boost productivity and streamline service.

• You can also create a product tour guide to help new customers understand your product.
• Opposing Intercom vs. Zendesk inbox tools is a bit complicated.
• You could say something similar for Zendesk’s standard service offering, so it’s at least good to know they have Zendesk Sell, a capable CRM option to supplement it.
• With Intercom pricing is based on the total number of people you track and communicate with, not the number of agent seats your support team has.
• Beyond this, Zendesk Chat also offers analytics so you can study your efforts and make better decisions going forward.
• You can also integrate with PandaDoc to create, sign, and track documents.