Zendesk vs Intercom: Which One Is Right for You?

At the same time, Zendesk looks slightly outdated and can’t offer some features. Zendesk, unlike Intercom, is a more affordable and predictable customer service platform. Also, it’s the pioneer in the support and communication tools market.

Intercom also excels in real-time chat solutions, making it a strong contender for businesses seeking dynamic customer interaction. This unpredictability in pricing might lead to higher costs, especially for larger companies. While it offers a range of advanced features, the overall costs and potential inconsistencies in support could be a concern for some businesses​​​​. 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. Intercom’s products are used by over 25,000 customers, from small tech startups to large enterprises.

Using this, agents can chat across teams within a ticket via email, Slack, or Zendesk’s ticketing system. This packs all resolution information into a single ticket, so there’s no extra searching or backtracking needed to bring a ticket through to resolution, even if it involves multiple agents. Zendesk for Sales offers three plans, ranging from $19 to $99 monthly per user, with free trials available for each plan. However, customers can purchase multiple Intercom plans to use together, or purchase add-ons to select just the features they want. The Zendesk Admin Center panels allow administrators to control settings, accessibility, automations, and workflows for everything from chatbots to integrations and custom APIs. The workspace left-hand column notifies agents of all ticket updates.

But I like that Zendesk just feels slightly cleaner, has easy online/away toggling, more visual customer journey notes, and a handy widget for exploring the knowledge base on the fly. Zendesk for Service, a customer service solution, provides unified customer-facing communication channels, self-service, collaboration, customer routing, and analytics–all organized in one dashboard. If money is limited for your business, a help desk that can be a Zendesk alternative or an Intercom alternative is ThriveDesk.

Intercom vs Zendesk: pricing

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. Intercom users often mention how impressed they are with its ease of use and their ability to quickly create useful tasks and set up automations. Even reviewers who hadn’t used the platform highlight how beautifully designed it is and how simple it is to interact with for both users and clients alike. With a very streamlined design, Intercom’s interface is far better than many alternatives, including Zendesk.

It’s also possible to examine their particulars elements, for example tools, plans, rates, terms and conditions, etc. Similarly, read the terms carefully for information on hidden fees, such as, setup cost, separate helpdesk support, upgrade fees, storage fees, and other similar charges. Zendesk offers a basic plan that is affordable and will suit my needs. However, I do recommend Intercom for eCommerce stores that may need to integrate the features with their store.

This live chat service provider offers 200+ integrations to its user base. With a mix of productivity, collaboration, eCommerce, CRM, analytics, email marketing, social media, and other tools, you get the option to create an omnichannel suite. ThriveDesk empowers small businesses to manage real-time customer communications. The customer support platform starts at just $5 per agent per month, which is a very basic customer support tool. If you want dashboard reporting and integrations, you’ll need to pay $19 per agent per month.

In this article, we’ll compare Zendesk vs Intercom to find out which is the right customer support tool for you. Google Groups is widely used by many businesses for team collaboration. It’s free, it’s part of the Google Workspace and hardly takes 5 minutes to… When comparing the omnichannel support functionalities of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms show distinct strengths and weaknesses. They are great though and the industry standard for live chat (if you can justify having a few full-time employees to manage your live chat). Lastly, Intercom offers an academy that offers concise courses to help users make the most out of their Intercom experience.

Integrations

You can create these knowledge base articles in your target audience’s native language as their software is multilingual. These products range from customer communication tools to a fully-fledged CRM. Zendesk boasts incredibly robust sales capabilities and security features. Intercom is a customer support platform known for its effective messaging and automation, enhancing in-context support within products, apps, or websites. It features the Intercom Messenger, which works with existing support tools for self-serve or live support.

• Both options are well designed, easy to use, and share some pretty key functionality like behavioral triggers and omnichannel-ality (omnichannel-centricity?).
• Intercom is the go-to solution for businesses seeking to elevate customer support and sales processes.
• Welcome to another blog post that helps you gauge which live chat solution is compatible with your customer support needs.

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. Triggers should prove especially useful for agents, allowing them to do things like automate notifications for actions like ticket assignments, ticket closing/reopening, or new ticket creation. Their template triggers are fairly limited with only seven options, but they do enable users to create new custom triggers, which can be a game-changer for agents with more complex workflows.

In our experience, when future clients start thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of Intercom vs. Zendesk, these are the questions they want answers to. In terms of pricing, Intercom is considered one of the most expensive tools on the market. And there’s still no way to know how much you’ll pay for them since the prices are only revealed after you go through a few sale demos with the Intercom team.

If you’re looking for a comprehensive solution with lots of features and integrations, then Zendesk would be a good choice. On the other hand, if you need something that is more tailored to your customer base and is less expensive, then Intercom might be a better fit. 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.

In this paragraph, let’s explain some common issues that users usually ask about when choosing between Zendesk and Intercom platforms. Though the Intercom chat window says that their customer success team typically replies in a few hours, don’t expect to receive any real answer in chat for at least a couple of days. If you’d want to test Intercom vs Zendesk before deciding on a tool for good, they both provide free trials for 14 days. But sooner or later, you’ll have to decide on the subscription plan, and here’s what you’ll have to pay. 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. Intercom has more customization features for features like bots, themes, triggers, and funnels.

Zendesk vs. Intercom: Which is better?

This can make it more difficult to import CRM data and obtain complete context from customer data. For example, Intercom’s Salesforce integration doesn’t create a view of cases in Salesforce. 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. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. In a nutshell, none of the customer support software companies provide decent assistance for users.

Finally, you’ll have to choose your reporting preferences including details about what you’ll be tracking and how often you want to be reported of changes. 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. If you’re an enterprise team, check out Zendesk, otherwise, stay away, and check out another option like Help Scout. They “integrate” with almost everything (what that even means is many things… does that mean it’ll do what you want it to do? questionable), they have help docs, an included community platform even. It brings with it anxiety of responding (had one client that wouldn’t use the restroom out of fear they weren’t there to respond to a customer shortly after implementing Intercom into their business. We have numerous customers that do this and benefit greatly from our out-of-the-box integration with Intercom.

As your business grows, so does the volume of customer inquiries and support tickets. Managing everything manually is becoming increasingly difficult, and you need a robust customer support platform to streamline your operations. For support teams, ensuring that agents are on the same page is an essential part of the 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.

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? These are both still very versatile products, so don’t think you have to get too siloed into a single use case. While Intercom does not offer free trials, they do offer demo versions of each plan.

Zendesk is a ticketing system before anything else, and its ticketing functionality is overwhelming in the best possible way. Currently based in Albuquerque, NM, Bryce Emley holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NC State and nearly a decade of writing and editing experience. When he isn’t writing content, poetry, or creative nonfiction, he enjoys traveling, baking, playing music, reliving his barista days in his own kitchen, camping, and being bad at carpentry.

Zendesk Chat vs Intercom – Integration Capabilities

Winner of our Supreme Software Award, Zendesk is a customer support solution that helps boost customer service and improve customer retention. The platform’s modules include chat support, call center solutions, help desk applications, and knowledge base, so you’ll cover all the bases of efficient customer services. 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.

On the other hand, Intercom brings a dynamic approach to customer support. Its suite of tools goes beyond traditional ticketing and focuses on customer engagement and messaging automation. From in-app chat to personalized autoresponders, Intercom provides a unified experience across multiple channels, creating a support ecosystem that nurtures and converts leads. Intercom, while differing from Zendesk, offers specialized features aimed at enhancing customer relationships.

In terms of G2 ratings, Zendesk and Intercom are both well-rated platforms. Zendesk has a rating of 4.3 out of https://chat.openai.com/ 5 stars, based on over 5,600 reviews. Intercom has a rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars, based on over 2700 reviews.

Monese is another fintech company that provides a banking app, account, and debit card to make settling in a new country easier. By providing banking without boundaries, the company aims to provide users with quick access to their finances, wherever they happen to be. If a customer starts an interaction by talking to a chatbot and can’t find a solution, our chatbot can open a ticket and intelligently route it to the most qualified agent.

Compared to being detailed, Zendesk gives a tough competition to Intercom. Operators can easily switch from one conversation to another, therefore helping operators manage more interactions simultaneously. However, as Monese grew and eyed Chat PG a European expansion, it became clear that the company needed to centralize data in a single solution that would scale along with them. As you can imagine, banking from anywhere requires a flexible, robust customer service experience.

Founded as a business messenger, it now extends to enabling support, engagement, and conversion. On the contrary, Intercom is far less predictable when it comes to pricing and can cost hundreds/thousands of dollars per month. But this solution is great because it’s an all-in-one tool with a modern live chat widget, allowing you to easily improve your customer experiences.

So you see, it’s okay to feel dizzy when comparing Zendesk vs Intercom platforms. Intercom does have a ticketing dashboard that has omnichannel functionality, much like Zendesk. 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. Their reports are attractive, dynamic, and integrated right out of the box. You can even finagle some forecasting by sourcing every agent’s assigned leads.

Intercom works with any website or web-based product and aims to be your one-way stop for all of your customer communication needs. Zendesk’s per-agent pricing structure makes it a budget-friendly option for smaller teams, allowing costs to scale with team growth. When comparing the automation and AI features of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms come with unique strengths and weaknesses. Intercom, on the other hand, is ideal for those focusing on CRM capabilities and personalized customer interactions. Easily reply to customer conversations and manage workload in a smart & automated way.

That’s why it would be better to review where both the options would be ideal to use. Zendesk also offers detailed reports that can be shared with others and enable team members to collaborate on them simultaneously. You can either track your performance on a pre-built dashboard or customize and build one for yourself. This customized dashboard will help you see metrics that you’d like to focus on regularly.

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. Zendesk’s pricing structure provides increasing levels of features and capabilities as businesses move up the tiers. This scalability allows organizations to adapt their support operations to their expanding customer base. Higher-tier plans in Zendesk come packed with advanced functionalities such as chatbots, customizable knowledge bases, and performance dashboards. These features can add significant value for businesses aiming to implement more sophisticated support capabilities as they scale.

The company’s products include a ticketing system, live chat software, knowledge base software, and a customer satisfaction survey tool. Zendesk also offers a number of integrations with third-party applications. Zendesk would be a perfect option for businesses that are searching for a well-integrated zendesk chat vs intercom support system. It offers a suite that compiles help desk, live chat, and knowledge base to their user base. This enables them to speed up the support process and build experiences that customers like. Zendesk directly competes with Intercom when it comes to integrations.

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. Zendesk is among the industry’s best ticketing and customer support software, and most of its additional functionality is icing on the proverbial cake. Intercom, on the other hand, is designed to be more of a complete solution for sales, marketing, and customer relationship nurturing.

Sales teams can also view outbound communications, and any support agent can access resources from the Intercom workspace. No matter how a customer contacts your business, your agents will have access to the tools and information they need to continue and close conversations on any channel. Test any of HelpCrunch pricing plans for free for 14 days and see our tools in action right away. 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. What’s really nice about this is that even within a ticket, you can switch between communication modes without changing views. So if an agent needs to switch from chat to phone to email (or vice versa) with a customer, it’s all on the same ticketing page.

You can use it for customer support, but that’s not its core strength. From the inbox, live agents and chatbots can refer to and link knowledge base articles, to elaborate on replies and help customers locate answers. In summary, choosing Zendesk and Intercom hinges on your business’s unique requirements and priorities. If you seek a comprehensive customer support solution with a strong emphasis on traditional ticketing, Zendesk is a solid choice, particularly for smaller to mid-sized businesses. Messagely’s pricing starts at just $29 per month, which includes live chat, targeted messages, shared inbox, mobile apps, and over 750 powerful integrations. For basic chat and messaging, Intercom charges a flat fee of $39 per month for its basic plan with one user and $99 per month for its team plan with up to 5 users.

Besides, the prices differ depending on the company’s size and specific needs. We conducted a little study of our own and found that all Intercom users share different amounts of money they pay for the plans, which can reach over $1000/mo. The price levels can even be much higher if we’re talking of a larger company. So yeah, all the features talk actually brings us to the most sacred question — the question of pricing.

One of Zendesk’s standout features that we need to shine a spotlight on is its extensive marketplace of third-party integrations and extensions. Imagine having the power to connect your helpdesk solution with a wide range of tools and applications that your team already uses. Whether it’s syncing data with your CRM, enhancing communication via messaging platforms, or automating tasks with productivity apps, Zendesk makes it possible. Intercom plays a very important role in the customer experience through messaging platforms, team collaboration products, and a valuable knowledge base solution. Intercom is better for smaller companies that are looking for a simple and capable customer service platform.

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. 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.