Zendesk vs Intercom in 2023: Detailed Analysis of Features, Pricing, and More

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. This has helped to make Zendesk one of the most popular customer service software platforms on the market. 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 is a customer messaging platform that enables businesses to engage with customers through personalized and real-time communication. Both Zendesk and Intercom are customer support management solutions that offer features like ticket management, live chat and messaging, automation workflows, knowledge centers, and analytics. Zendesk has traditionally been more focused on customer support management, while Intercom has been more focused on live support solutions like its chat solution. While the company is smaller than Zendesk, Intercom has earned a reputation for building high-quality customer service software. The company’s products include a messaging platform, knowledge base tools, and an analytics dashboard.

Cost-Friendly Intercom Alternatives in 2024

Zendesk also packs some pretty potent tools into their platform, so you can empower your agents to do what they do with less repetition. Agents can use basic automation (like auto-closing tickets or setting auto-responses), apply list organization to stay on top of their tasks, or set up triggers to keep tickets moving automatically. 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. You can use it for customer support, but that’s not its core strength. Zendesk’s user face is quite intuitive and easy to use, allowing customers to quickly find what they are looking for.

• The top of the agent workspace shows an agent’s open tickets, ticket statistics, and satisfaction statistics, as well as tabs depicting all current tickets.
• You can set office hours, live chat with logged-in users via their user profiles, and set up a chatbot.
• These are both still very versatile products, so don’t think you have to get too siloed into a single use case.
• The Sell dashboard, different from the Service dashboard, features pre-built widgets that agents can organize however they want, to view the metrics they care most about.
• Right out of the gate, you’ve got dozens of pre-set report options on everything from satisfaction ratings and time in status to abandoned calls and Answer Bot resolutions.
• With the integrations provided through each product, you can make use of both platforms to provide your customers with comprehensive customer service.

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.

For real zen, switch to Intercom

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. Their chat widget looks and works great, and they invest a lot of effort to make it a modern, convenient customer communication tool. Zendesk also has an Answer Bot, which instantly takes your knowledge base game to the next level.

Customization is more nuanced than Zendesk’s, but it’s still really straightforward to implement. You can opt for code via JavaScript or Rails or even integrate directly with the likes of Google Tag Manager, WordPress, or Shopify. Intercom, on the other hand, was built for business messaging, so communication is one of their strong suits. Combine intercom zendesk that with their prowess in automation and sales solutions, and you’ve got a really strong product that can handle myriad customer relationship needs. You need a complete customer service platform that’s seamlessly integrated and AI-enhanced. When it comes to which company is the better fit for your business, there’s no clear answer.

Integrate with Fullview

As a Zendesk user, you’re familiar with tickets – you’ll be able to continue using these in Intercom. Businesses of all sizes can rely on the Zendesk customer service platform and benefit from workflow management, powerful AI tools, robust insights, and more. If that sounds good to you, sign up for a free demo to see our software in action and get started.

Intercom offers admin full visibility and control over all company inboxes, as well as agent access controls and role management. Intercom wins the reporting and analytics category due to its unique visualization and display formats for contact center and article data. Survey responses automatically save as data in users’ profiles, and Intercom provides survey data in analytics and reporting.

Integrations are the best way to enhance the toolkit of your apps by connecting them for interoperable actions and features. Both Zendesk and Intercom have integration libraries, and you can also use a connecting tool like Zapier for added integrations and add-ons. 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. Intercom has a full suite of email marketing tools, although they are part of a pricier package.

• 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.
• Intercom also has a community forum where users can help one another with questions and solutions.
• Operator, Intercom’s automation engine, empowers Intercom chatbots to gather key information from each website visitor to qualify leads and route customers to the right destination.
• 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.

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. 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. Zapier lets you build automated workflows between two or more apps—no code necessary. Survey composer allows you to create the question and answer format, also customizing color, rating scales, and greetings.

Still, for either of these platforms to have some email marketing or other email functionality is common sense. Zendesk can also save key customer information in their platform, which helps reps get a faster idea of who they are dealing with as well as any historical data that might assist in the support. Zendesk Sunshine is a separate feature set that focuses on unified customer views. When it comes to self-service portals for things like knowledgebases, Intercom has a useful set of resources. Intercom also has a community forum where users can help one another with questions and solutions.

Intercom has more customization features for features like bots, themes, triggers, and funnels. Zapier helps you create workflows that connect your apps to automate repetitive tasks. A trigger is an event that starts a workflow, and an action is an event a Zap performs. With Zapier’s 6,000 integrations, you can unify your tools within a connected system to improve your team’s efficiency and deepen their impact.

At the same time, Zendesk looks slightly outdated and can’t offer some features. Zendesk and Intercom offer help desk management solutions to their users. The company’s products include a ticketing system, live chat software, knowledge base software, and a customer satisfaction survey tool.

There are many features to help bigger customer service teams collaborate more effectively — like private notes or a real-time view of who’s handling a given ticket at the moment, etc. At the same time, the vendor offers powerful reporting capabilities to help you grow and improve your business. 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. Intercom has a wider range of uses out of the box than Zendesk, though by adding Zendesk Sell, you could more than make up for it. Both options are well designed, easy to use, and share some pretty key functionality like behavioral triggers and omnichannel-ality (omnichannel-centricity?).

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. Keep your Zendesk Guide articles in sync with your Intercom Help Center and use them to power Intercom Support tools in the Messenger, Bots and Inbox for improved self-serve performance and team efficiency.

The price levels can even be much higher if we’re talking of a larger company. 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. If I had to describe Intercom’s helpdesk, I would say it’s rather a complementary tool to their chat tools. Yes, you can localize the Messenger to work with multiple languages, resolve conversations automatically in multiple languages and support multiple languages in your Help Center.

Since these providers may collect personal data like your IP address we allow you to block them here. Please be aware that this might heavily reduce the functionality and appearance of our site. 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.