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

This comparison will delve into the features, similarities, differences, pros, cons, and use cases of Zendesk and Intercom, providing you with the insights needed to make an informed decision. However, you’ll likely end up paying more for Zendesk, and in-app messenger and other advanced customer communication tools will not be included. Both Zendesk and Intercom have knowledge bases to help customers get the most out of their platforms. 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. To automate operations and reduce your employees’ workload, it is critical that customer support systems allow integration with other products. This enables organizations to work more efficiently and easily integrate their software without having to alter their present business processes.

What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk is how its tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously. 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. You can create dozens of articles in a simple, intuitive WYSIWYG text editor, divide them by categories and sections, and customize them with your custom themes.

Pricing Structure

So when it comes to chatting features, the choice is not really Intercom vs Zendesk. The latter offers a chat widget that is simple, outdated, and limited in customization options, while the former puts all of its resources into its messenger. Whether you’ve just started searching for a customer support tool or have been using one for a while, chances are you know about Zendesk and Intercom.

Pricing for both services varies based on the specific needs and scale of your business. Intercom, on the other hand, is a better choice for those valuing comprehensive and user-friendly support, despite minor navigation issues. Lastly, Intercom offers an academy that offers concise courses to help users make the most out of their Intercom experience. Customers https://chat.openai.com/ 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. You get call recording, muting and holding, conference calling, and call blocking.

You can even finagle some forecasting by sourcing every agent's assigned leads. Customerly’s reporting tools are built on the principle that you can’t improve what you can’t measure. Intercom’s reporting is less focused on getting a fine-grained understanding of your team’s performance, and more on a nuanced understanding of customer behavior and engagement. It’s definitely something that both your agents and customers will feel equally comfortable using.

It has a more sophisticated user interface and a wide range of features, such as an in-app messenger, an email marketing tool, and an AI-powered chatbot. At the same time, Zendesk looks slightly outdated and can’t offer some features. Zendesk AI offers advanced features that have been pre-trained on IT ticket data and can be used out of the box.

Additionally, you can trigger incoming messages to automatically assign an agent and create dashboards to monitor the team’s performance on live chat. This makes it an ideal choice for businesses looking to engage customers directly within their product, app or website. It also supports email and other channels – like Whatsapp, SMS, social media channels and more, through integrations. But its core strength lies in providing a seamless, conversational experience for customers. Core features include automated support powered by a knowledge base, a streamlined ticketing system built around messaging, and a powerful inbox to centralize all customer queries.

Powered by Explore, Zendesk's reporting capabilities are pretty impressive. 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. You can even save custom dashboards for a more tailored reporting experience. Intercom's chatbot feels a little more robust than Zendesk's (though it's worth noting that some features are only available at the Engage and Convert tiers).

However, Zendesk’s pricing is generally more affordable for smaller businesses, while Intercom’s pricing tends to be higher but offers more advanced features and capabilities. When choosing a customer support tool, it’s essential to consider what other users have to say about their experience with the platform. Intercom and Zendesk offer robust integration capabilities that allow businesses to streamline their workflow and improve customer support. Choosing Intercom or Zendesk will depend on your specific needs and requirements. Intercom also offers an API enabling businesses to build custom integrations with their tools. The API is well-documented and easy to use, making it a popular choice for companies that want to create their integrations.

If compared to Intercom’s chatbot, Zendesk offers a relatively latest platform that makes support automation possible. So far, the chatbot can transfer chats to agents or resolve less complex queries in seconds. That means all you have to do is add the code to your website and enable it right away. Today, Zendesk is used by over 200,000 businesses worldwide, including Airbnb, Uber, and Slack. The platform is known for its ease of use, customizable workflows, and extensive integrations with other business tools. Messagely’s pricing starts at just $29 per month, which includes live chat, targeted messages, shared inbox, mobile apps, and over 750 powerful integrations.

The customer journey timeline provides a clear view of customer activities, helping you understand behaviors and tailor your responses accordingly. Your agents will love the seamless assistance Aura AI provides throughout the entire customer interaction. From handling multiple questions to avoiding dreaded customer-stuck loops, Aura AI is the Swiss Army Knife of customer service chatbots. Traditional ticketing systems are one of the major customer service bottlenecks companies want to solve with automation.

Zendesk and Intercom are robust tools with a wide range of customer service and CRM features. For small companies and startups, Intercom offers a Starter plan — with a balanced suite of features from each of the solutions below — at $74 per month per user, billed annually. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. You can create an omnichannel CRM suite with a mix of productivity, collaboration, eCommerce, CRM, analytics, email marketing, social media, and other tools. Both app stores include many popular integrations, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Mailchimp, and Zapier. Now that we've discussed the customer service-focused features of Zendesk and Intercom, let's turn our attention to how these platforms can support sales and marketing efforts.

When deciding between Intercom and Zendesk, businesses should consider their specific needs and goals. For those with a complicated customer support process, Zendesk may be the better option. However, Intercom may be the better choice if a business is more sales-oriented. Ultimately, the decision between these two tools will depend on company size, budget, and specific business needs.

I just found Zendesk's help center to be slightly better integrated into their workflows and more customizable. Simply put, we believe that our Aura AI chatbot is a game-changer when it comes to automating your customer service. Just keep in mind that, while Intercom’s upfront pricing may seem cheaper, there are additional costs to factor in.

Zendesk boasts robust reporting and analytics tools, plus a dedicated workforce management system. With custom correlation and attribution, you can dive deep into the root cause behind your metrics. We also provide real-time and historical reporting dashboards so you can take action at the moment and learn from past trends. Meanwhile, our WFM software enables businesses to analyze employee metrics and performance, helping them identify improvements, implement strategies, and set long-term goals.

The more expensive Intercom plans offer AI-powered content cues, triage, and conversation insights. The best help desks are also ticketing systems, which lets support reps create a support ticket out of issues that can then be tracked. These weaknesses are not as significant as the features and functionalities Zendesk offers its users.

If you own a business, you’re in a fierce battle to deliver personalized customer experiences that stand out. Keep up with emerging trends in customer service and learn from top industry experts. Master Tidio with in-depth guides and uncover real-world success stories in our case studies. Discover the blueprint for exceptional customer experiences and unlock new pathways for business success. Is it as simple as knowing whether you want software strictly for customer support (like Zendesk) or for some blend of customer relationship management and sales support (like Intercom)? Using this, agents can chat across teams within a ticket via email, Slack, or Zendesk's ticketing system.

Best Customer Service Apps Your Customer Service Team Will Love

Research by Zoho reports that customer relationship management (CRM) systems can help companies triple lead conversion rates. Those same tools also increase customer retention by 27% while saving 23% on sales and marketing costs. This means, even when you choose a higher plan, you’ll be paying considerably less than what you would have to pay for Zendesk or intercom. The platform also allows teams to track queries, enabling supervisors to monitor progress and ensure timely responses. Intercom actively enhances its analytics capabilities by leveraging AI to forecast customer behavior.

With Zendesk, businesses don’t have to worry about the cost of scale limitations. Additionally, Zendesk is built to scale and has a low TCO, meaning your business can quickly get up and running without needing help from developers. As expected, the right choice between Zendesk and Intercom will depend on your budget, your company, and your needs.

What Type of Business Model Fits Both Software?

Zendesk’s Suite Team plan (the cheapest plan) costs $49 per user per month. You get multiple support channels at no extra cost with over 1000 APIs and integrations. They also offer several other features such as pre-defined responses, custom rules, and customizable online forms.

But don’t just take our word for it—listen to what customers say about why they picked Zendesk. This is not a huge difference; however, it does indicate that customers are generally more satisfied with Intercom's offerings than Zendesk's. 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. It will allow you to leverage some Intercom capabilities while keeping your account at the time-tested platform.

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. Every CRM software comes with some limitations along with the features it offers. You can analyze if that weakness is something that concerns your business model. The final prices are revealed after engaging in sales demos and are not revealed upfront.

• Utilizing modern CRM software can help your sales team boost their productivity and sales performance.
• Fin's advanced algorithm and machine learning enable the precision handling of queries.
• With Intercom, you can keep track of your customers and what they do on your website in real time.
• Intercom's CRM can work as a standalone CRM and requires no additional service to operate robustly.

It allows businesses to automate repetitive tasks, such as ticket routing and in-built responses, freeing up time for support agents to deal with more crucial cases requiring more agent attention. This automation enhances support teams' productivity as they do not have to spend too much responding to similar complaints they have already dealt with. 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?).

Say what you will, but Intercom’s design and overall user experience leave all its competitors far behind. To resolve common customer questions with the vendor’s new tool, Fin bot, you must pay $0.99 per resolution per month. So yeah, all the features talk actually brings us to the most sacred question — the question of pricing.

However, you won’t miss out on any of the essentials when it comes to live chat. Automated triggers, saved responses, and live chat analytics are all baked in. The only other downside is that the chat widget can feel a bit static and outdated. When comparing chatbots, it’s important to consider their level of intelligence, “trainability,” and customization.

Zendesk and Intercom offer a free trial of 14 days, but you will eventually have to choose once the trial ends. The pricing strategies are covered below so you can analyze the pricing structure and select your customer service software. Zendesk TCO is lower than Intercom due to its ability to scale, which does not require additional cost to update the software for a growing business. It also has a transparent pricing model so businesses know the price they will incur. Lastly, the tool is easy to set up and implement, meaning no additional knowledge or expertise makes the businesses incur additional costs. Yes, you can continue using Intercom as the consumer-facing CRM experience, but integrate with Zendesk for customer service in the back end for more customer support functionality.

That being said, in your search for the best customer support tool, you must have come across Zendesk and Intercom. In today’s hyper-competitive, hyper-connected globalized economy, customer experience has become a fundamental differentiator. As customers’ needs are constantly evolving, businesses must adapt and keep up to guarantee the best customer experience and satisfaction. For small companies and startups, Zendesk offers a six-month free trial of up to 50 agents redeemable for any combination of Zendesk Support and Sell products. 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.

Not to mention its advanced reporting capabilities, customizable dashboards, and seamless mobile app experience for an always-on approach to service. Intercom offers reporting and analytics tools with limited capabilities for custom reporting, user behavior metrics, and advanced visualization. It also lacks advanced features like collaboration reporting, custom metrics, metric correlation, and drill-in attribution. Both Zendesk and Intercom offer customer service software with AI capabilities—however, they are not created equal. With Zendesk, you get next-level AI-powered support software that's intuitively designed, scalable, and cost-effective.

Essential Plan

Zendesk also offers callback requests, call monitoring and call quality notifications, among other telephone tools. Zendesk has more pricing options, and its most affordable plan is likely cheaper than Intercom’s, although without exact Intercom numbers, it is not easy to truly know the cost. For those of you who have been waiting for the big showdown between these two customer support heavyweights, we are glad to present the ultimate Zendesk vs Intercom comparison article. As we delve into the features of Zendesk, we can identify the following weaknesses regarding user experience. Zendesk also allows Advanced AI and Advanced data privacy and protection plans, which cost $50 per month for each Advanced add-on. Let us dive deeper into the offerings of Zendesk and Intercom to make a comparison at a glance.

For example, bulk email send, email templates, email scheduling, and automation features are only available to those who purchase the Advanced plan and above. With Zendesk, even our most basic plans include a robust selection of features, including custom data fields, sales triggers, email tracking, text messaging, and call tracking and recording. The Zendesk sales CRM hits all of the functions you’d expect from CRM software, like reporting and analytics tools that can deliver key sales metrics with pre-built dashboards right out of the box. On top of that, you can use drag-and-drop widgets to create custom CRM reports with the data most important to your goals.

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. 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. There's even on-the-spot translation built right in, which is extremely helpful. You need a complete customer service platform that's seamlessly integrated and AI-enhanced.

Whether you’re looking for a CRM for small businesses or an enterprise, the Zendesk sales CRM has the flexibility to grow with you, supporting up to 2 million deals across all of our plans. On the other hand, entry-level Pipedrive users are limited to only 3,000 open deals per company, making it an insufficient CRM for enterprises and growing companies. 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.

On the other hand, Zendesk is a more comprehensive customer support tool that offers a broader range of features, including ticket management, knowledge base creation, and reporting and analytics. Its robust ticketing system and automation capabilities make it an excellent option for businesses with high-volume customer support needs. Additionally, Zendesk’s customizable dashboards and reporting features provide valuable insights into customer support performance. Both software solutions offer core customer service features like live chat for sales, help desk management capabilities, and customer self-service options like a knowledge base. They’re also known for their user-friendly interfaces and reliable support team.

Yet, this can only be achieved if you’re empowered with the right tool in your technology stack. Zendesk provides its partners with quality support and educational resources, including online training and certification programs, helping turn any salesperson into a Zendesk expert. Conversely, some Chat GPT Pipedrive users have issues working with Pipedrive, with users describing their support and onboarding experiences as slow and limited. The only relief is that they do reach out to customers, but it gets too late. In terms of customer service, Zendesk fails to deliver an exceptional experience.

However, if you are looking for a robust messaging solution with customer support features, go for Intercom. Its intuitive messenger can help your business boost engagement and improve sales and marketing efforts. In general, Zendesk offers a wide range of live chat features such as customizable chat intercom vs zendesk widgets, automatic greetings, offline messaging, and chat triggers. In addition to these features, Intercom offers messaging automation and real-time visitor insights. If ticket management and workflow optimization are your primary concerns, Zendesk’s automation capabilities might be a better fit.

Plus, Intercom’s modern, smooth interface provides a comfortable environment for agents to work in. It even has some unique features, like office hours, real-time user profiles, and a high-degree of customization. Zendesk’s automation is centered around streamlining ticket management by bringing together customer inquiries from various sources—email, phone, web, chat, and social media—into a single platform. One of Zendesk’s other key strengths has also been its massive library of integrations. It works seamlessly with over 1,000 business tools, like Salesforce, Slack, and Shopify. With its features and pricing, Zendesk is geared toward businesses that full in the range from mid-sized to enterprise-level.

Zendesk is popular due to its user-friendly interface, extensive customization options, scalability, multichannel support, robust analytics, and seamless integration capabilities. These features make it suitable for businesses of all sizes, helping them streamline their support operations and enhance the overall customer experience. Pipedrive offers five total plans, with their entry-level Essential plan offering significantly fewer features than the others.

The Essential customer support plan for individuals, startups, and businsses costs $39. This plan includes a shared inbox, unlimited articles, proactive support, and basic automation. The help center in Intercom is also user-friendly, enabling agents to access content creation easily. It does help you organize and create content using efficient tools, but Zendesk is more suitable if you want a fully branded customer-centric experience. Zendesk is an all-in-one omnichannel platform offering various channel integrations in one place. The dashboard of Zendesk is sleek, simple, and highly responsive, offering a seamless experience for managing customer interactions.

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.

These include chatbot automation features, customer segmentation, and targeted SMS messaging to reach the right audience efficiently. You can even improve efficiency and transparency by setting up task sequences, defining sales triggers, and strategizing with advanced forecasting and reporting tools. Starting at $19 per user per month, it's also on the cheaper end of the spectrum compared to high-end CRMs like ActiveCampaign and HubSpot.

Also, our reports are pre-built and customizable, so you can monitor the data that matters most to your team. In this guide, we compare two products—Zendesk vs. Spiceworks—and detail how these IT help desk software options stack up. While Spiceworks offers standard IT ticketing features, Zendesk stands apart due to our speed, reliability, scalability, and security capabilities. We’re also suitable for employee and customer support, so we can meet all your service needs. Pipedrive is limited to third-party customer service integrations and, unlike Zendesk, does not offer customer service software.

Intercom and Zendesk offer robust customer support options, including email, phone, and live chat support, comprehensive knowledge bases, and community forums. Intercom’s chatbot functionality is a standout feature, while Zendesk’s ticketing system can help resolve support issues on time. Intercom offers a range of customer support options, including email, phone, and live chat support. In addition, they provide a comprehensive knowledge base that includes articles, videos, and tutorials to help users get the most out of the platform. Both Zendesk and Intercom offer compelling features and capabilities aimed at improving customer service through efficient ticketing systems. Zendesk is a robust choice for businesses seeking quick setup, scalability, and powerful AI-driven support.

Intercom’s dashboards may not be as aesthetically pleasing as Zendesk’s, but they still allow users to navigate their tools with few distractions. As for Intercom’s general pricing structure, there are three plans, but you’ll have to contact them to get exact prices. We'd also recommend checking out this blog on suspended ticket management in ZenDesk. To sum it all up, you need to consider various aspects of your business before choosing CRM software. While deciding between Zendesk and Intercom, you should ensure the customization, AI automation, and functionalities align with your business goals.

In comparison, Intercom’s confusing pricing structure that features multiple add-ons may be unsuitable for small businesses. 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.

One of the most significant downsides of Intercom is its customer support. Existing customers have complained consistently about how they aren’t available at the right time to offer support to customers. There are even instances where customers don’t receive the first response in more than seven days. 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.