Intercom vs Zendesk: Help Desk & Chat Comparison 2024

Intercom’s messaging system enables real-time interactions through various channels, including chat, email, and in-app messages. Connect with customers wherever they are for timely assistance and personalized experiences. Designed for all kinds of businesses, from small startups to giant enterprises, it’s the secret weapon that keeps customers happy. Zendesk Message and chat enable users to connect to their customers on a scalable app. Zendesk’s mobile app is also good for ticketing, helping you create new support tickets with macros and updates.

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. However, as Monese grew and eyed 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. Monese is another fintech company that provides a banking app, account, and debit card to make settling in a new country easier.

One seamless platform

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. Intercom’s app store has popular integrations for things like WhatsApp, Stripe, Instagram, and Slack. There is a really useful one for Shopify to provide customer support for e-commerce operations.

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. They bought out the Zopim live chat solution and integrated it with their toolset. Some people like Intercom’s conversational support tool, which lets customers talk to you in a more personalised and interactive way.

With all accounted for, it seems that Zendesk still has a number of user interface issues. Zendesk has over 150,000 customer accounts from 160 countries and territories. They have offices all around the world including countries such as Mexico City, Tokyo, New York, Paris, Singapore, São Paulo, London, and Dublin. Agents can respond in any channel by typing in the text box and have access to deep customer experience history and background in the right-hand column.

Popular Zendesk Alternatives

Sendcloud adopted these solutions to replace siloed systems like Intercom and a local voice support provider in favor of unified, omnichannel support. 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. In this paragraph, let’s explain some common issues that users usually ask about when choosing between Zendesk and Intercom platforms. If you’d want to test Intercom vs Zendesk before deciding on a tool for good, they both provide free trials for 14 days.

However, with Zendesk, agents can gain relevant context by viewing a customer’s profile and past interactions. Moreover, features such as typing indicators, delivery events, and rich message types like emojis, GIFs, etc. can give life to any conversation. On the first impression, ProProfs Help Desk feels as simple as using Gmail or just any other email client. You can view customer conversations under multiple inboxes, check pending tickets, set the priority of issues, add labels- all from an intuitive dashboard. With the Team Inbox, your support agents can manage and reply to conversations, wherever they’re happening- Email, live chat, Twitter, Facebook, and more.

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. At the same time, Zendesk looks slightly outdated and can’t offer some features.

Intercom also offers scalability within its pricing plans, enabling businesses to upgrade to higher tiers as their support needs grow. With its integrated suite of applications, Intercom provides a comprehensive solution that caters to businesses seeking a unified ecosystem to manage customer interactions. This scalability ensures businesses can align their support infrastructure with their evolving requirements, ensuring a seamless customer experience. Intercom is the go-to solution for businesses seeking to elevate customer support and sales processes. With its user-friendly interface and advanced functionalities, Intercom offers a comprehensive suite of tools designed to effectively communicate and engage with customers. Intercom’s ticketing system and help desk SaaS is also pretty great, just not as amazing as Zendesk’s.

They have an extensive help center, video tutorials, and articles to help your agents use the tool to its full potential. In terms of usability, ProProfs Help Desk has been diligently designed to meet the needs of customer service teams of any size, business. Right from small startups to large enterprises, all businesses can manage their ticketing needs and stay available to their customers 24×7. If money is limited for your business, a help desk that can be a Zendesk alternative or an Intercom alternative is ThriveDesk. Choose the plan that suits your support requirements and budget, whether you’re a small team or a growing enterprise.

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. In terms of pricing, Intercom is considered one of the most expensive tools on the market. 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.

You can add agents, create teams, and set agent roles & permissions to decide their level of access to the tool. Automated ticket routing ensures that all tickets have an owner and are shared with the most capable agents. You can also choose their Round-robin ticket assignment feature to equally distribute tickets among your agents.

Create personalized messages for specific customer segments, driving engagement and satisfaction. 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. Intercom features phone support, online support, and a knowledge base. One of these differences is the ability for agents to connect to customers through their own apps versus using a collaboration feature.

Zendesk Chat

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.

The Zendesk marketplace is also where you can get a lot of great add-ons. There are also several different Shopify integrations to choose from, as well as CRM integrations like HubSpot and Salesforce. The learning and knowledgebase category is another one where it is a close call between Zendesk and Intercom.

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. If you want automated options, Intercom starts at either $499 or $999 per month for up to ten users, depending on the level of automation you’re looking for. If you want both customer support and CRM, you can choose between paying $79 or $125 per month per user, depending on how many advanced features you require. On the other hand, Zendesk’s customer support includes a knowledge base that’s very intuitive and easy to navigate.

This is especially helpful for smaller businesses that may not need a lot of features. Intercom’s live chat reports aren’t just offering what your customers are doing or whether they are satisfied with your services. They offer more detailed insights like lead generation sources, a complete message report to track customer engagement, and detailed information on the support team’s performance. A collection of these reports can enable your business to identify the right resources responsible for bringing engagement to your business.

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. Intercom, while differing from Zendesk, offers specialized features aimed at enhancing customer relationships. Founded as a business messenger, it now extends to enabling support, engagement, and conversion.

These products range from customer communication tools to a fully-fledged CRM. Zendesk boasts incredibly robust sales capabilities and security features. 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?). But with perks like more advanced chatbots, automation, and lead management capabilities, Intercom could have an edge for many users. Users can benefit from using Intercom’s CX platform and AI software as a standalone tool for business messaging.

One place Intercom really shines as a standalone CRM is its data utility. You can create articles, share them internally, group them for users, and assign them as responses for bots—all pretty standard fare. 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.

The interface of Intercom’s native apps for iOS and Android is equally impressive. Agents can use the app to support customers who need help, even while they are away from their desk or working remotely. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Moreover, internal collaboration feels a bit more engaging and effortless with notes and mentions.

Moreover, you can keep your dashboard tidy with ticket organization features such as ticket prioritization, labels, and filters. However, if you look at Zendesk’s high pricing and complicated zendesk chat vs intercom features, the tool doesn’t work well for small businesses that have limited needs. It can be the right option for big enterprises that have global customers and big support teams.

Also, Intercom has a special proposition for early-stage startups, which can get Intercom’s pro products for $49/month for up to one year. 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. We hope this help desk comparison blog will help you make the best decision for your customer service team. Remember, before you opt for a full-fledged plan, it’s always better to go for a free trial to see how the solution really works.

They also charge based on number of contacts and the various components (features) and it gets wildly expensive very quickly. While both offer a wide number of integration options, Zendesk wins the top spot in this category. With 2.78 billion users (a number that’s still growing rapidly),it’s just not another app… Zendesk, less user-friendly and with higher costs for quality vendor support, might not suit budget-conscious or smaller businesses. 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.

Yes, you can integrate the Intercom solution into your Zendesk account. It will allow you to leverage some Intercom capabilities while keeping your account at the time-tested platform. Say what you will, but Intercom’s design and overall user experience leave all its competitors far behind. What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk is how their 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.

Zendesk has an app available for both Android and iOS, which makes it easy to stay connected with customers while on the go. The app includes features like push notifications and real-time customer engagement — so businesses can respond quickly to customer inquiries. 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.

Zendesk is renowned for its comprehensive toolset that aids in automating customer service workflows and fine-tuning chatbot interactions. 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. If you’re looking for the best messaging option or a tool that offers the best interface, choose Intercom. If you wish to strengthen both your sales and customer support teams and enjoy plenty of integrated features, go for Zendesk. On the other hand, if you are looking for a feature-rich tool that comes at less than half the cost of Zendesk and Intercom, then ProProfs can be your ideal support partner. On the other hand, Intercom brings a dynamic approach to customer support.

On the other hand, Intercom lacks many ticketing functionality that can be essential for big companies with a huge client support load. On the other hand, it is absolutely necessary to investigate the nature of these integrations in order to ascertain whether or not they are relevant to the criteria that you have in mind. It is essential to evaluate the compatibility of the connectors offered by each platform with the tools and workflows that you already have in place. During this phase, you will determine the essential features, functionalities, and tools that are essential to the operations of your firm. There is a better user experience with Intercom because the layout is more streamlined.

But sooner or later, you’ll have to decide on the subscription plan, and here’s what you’ll have to pay. 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. It means that Zendesk’s prices are slightly easier to figure out than Intercom’s. Additional payment per active user or seat depends on a chosen service and a plan.

• Still, for either of these platforms to have some email marketing or other email functionality is common sense.
• Both systems include pricing plans that are tiered and vary according to the amount of user seats or active contacts.
• Intercom offers a simplistic dashboard with a detailed view of all customer details in one place.

Zendesk pricing is divided between a customer support product called “Zendesk for support”, and a fully-fledged CRM called “Zendesk for sales”. 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. After this, you’ll have to set up your workflows, personalizing your tickets and storing them by topic. You can then add automations and triggers, such as automatically closing a ticket or sending a message to a user. Here, we’ve outlined the support options that Intercom and Zendesk provide to companies using their platforms.

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. Many businesses choose to work with Intercom because of its focus on personalization and flexibility, allowing companies to completely customize their customer service experience.

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. Intercom built additional tools to aid in marketing and engagement to supplement its customer service solution.

Intercom, on the other hand, was built for business messaging, so communication is one of their strong suits. Combine that with their prowess in automation and sales solutions, and you’ve got a really strong product that can handle myriad customer relationship needs. I tested both options (using Zendesk’s Suite Professional trial and Intercom’s Support trial) and found clearly defined differences between the two. Here’s what you need to know about Zendesk vs. Intercom as customer support and relationship management tools.