Zendesk vs Intercom: A comparison guide for 2024

It’s virtually impossible to predict what you’re going to pay for Intercom at end of the day. To sum things up, one can get really confused trying to make sense of Zendesk’s pricing, let alone to calculate costs. But it’s designed and crafted so well that I can’t seem to get enough of it. It’s highly customizable, so you can adjust it according to your website or product’s style.

If delivering an outstanding customer experience and employee experience is your top priority, Zendesk should be your top pick over Intercom. Zendesk has the CX expertise to help businesses of all sizes scale their service experience without compromise. Make life easier for your customers, your agents and yourself with Sprinklr’s all-in-one contact center platform.

Discover the blueprint for exceptional customer experiences and unlock new pathways for business success. You can access detailed customer data at a glance while chatting, enabling you to make informed decisions in real time. The customer journey timeline provides a clear view of customer activities, helping you understand behaviors and tailor your responses accordingly.

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. 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.

Zendesk offers various pricing tiers depending on the functionalities needed, with plans ranging from $49 to $215 per agent per month. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. This gives businesses the flexibility to choose a plan that best suits their needs and budget. Zendesk provides a good set of tools for managing customer relationships, but it requires additional enrollment in ‘Sell’ for a comprehensive CRM solution. The best help desks are also ticketing systems, which lets support reps create a support ticket out of issues that can then be tracked.

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. 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.

In this article, we’ll compare Zendesk vs Intercom to find out which is the right customer support tool for you. Zendesk has a broad range of security and compliance features to protect customer data privacy, such as SSO (single sign-on) and native content redaction for sensitive data. In comparison, Intercom’s reporting and analytics are limited in scope when it comes to consumer behavior metrics, custom reporting, and custom metrics. Provide a clear path for customer questions to improve the shopping experience you offer. Customerly’s CRM is designed to help businesses build stronger relationships by keeping customer data organized and actionable. Simply put, we believe that our Aura AI chatbot is a game-changer when it comes to automating your customer service.

Guru GPT integrates your company’s internal knowledge with ChatGPT, making it easy to access and use information from Guru and connected apps. Zendesk which is less user-friendly and charges more for quality support, might not work for smaller businesses. What differentiates them is the kind of reports they equip your teams with. Honestly, when it comes to Zendesk, it is not the most modern tool out there.

So when I realized lots of companies actually prefer Zendesk over Intercom, I was surprised. Let’s delve deeper into their features to see how they fare in various categories. Our mission is to break apart what CRM is and means.Here we discuss anything that helps create more meaningful lasting work relationships.

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. In 2023, businesses will have an abundance of options zendesk vs intercom when it comes to choosing a customer support and relationship management tool. Both of these tools have unique strengths and weaknesses, and choosing between them can be difficult for businesses of all sizes. Pop-up chat, in-app messaging, and notifications are some of the highly-rated features of this live chat software.

Messagely’s chatbots are powerful tools for qualifying and converting leads while your team is otherwise occupied or away. With chatbots, you can generate leads to hand over to your sales team and solve common customer queries without the need of a customer service representative behind a keyboard. Meanwhile, Intercom excels with its comprehensive AI automation capabilities, all built on a unified AI system. That being said, while both platforms offer extensive features, they can be costly, especially for smaller enterprises.

Using any plan, this integration is available to all customers, making the customer support experience and onboarding smooth. On the other hand, Intercom’s chatbots have more advanced features but do not sacrifice simplicity and ease of use. It helps businesses create highly personalized chatbots for interactive customer communication. Zendesk and Intercom offer basic features, including live chat, a help desk, and a pre-built knowledge base. They have great UX and a normal pricing range, making it difficult for businesses to choose one, as both software almost looks similar in their offerings. Intercom focuses on real-time customer messaging, while Zendesk provides a comprehensive suite for ticketing, knowledge base, and self-service support.

Intercom is a customer-focused communication platform with basic CRM capabilities. While we wouldn’t call it a full-fledged CRM, it should be capable enough for smaller businesses that want a simple and streamlined CRM without the additional expenses or complexity. This organization is important because it brings together customer interactions from all channels in this one place. And, Zendesk is nothing if not geared for helping agents deal with large ticket volumes efficiently. If you prioritize seamless, personalized customer interactions, it’s arguably the better option of the two.

It also helps promote automation in routine tasks by automating repetitive processes and helps agents save time and errors. Its messaging also has real-time notifications and automated responses, enhancing customer communication. In today’s business world, customer service is fast-paced, and customers have higher expectations.

Zendesk offers robust reporting capabilities, providing businesses with detailed insights into consumer interactions, ticketing systems, agent performance, and more. Zendesk excels with its powerful ticketing and customer support capabilities, making it ideal for streamlining service operations. Unlike Intercom, Zendesk is scalable, intuitively designed for CX, and offers a low total cost of ownership. You can also use Intercom as a customer service platform, but given its broad focus, you may not get the same level of specialized expertise. One of the standout features of Zendesk’s user interface is the ability to view customer interactions in a timeline format, which can help track the progress of a customer’s support request. Additionally, Zendesk offers a wide range of customization options, allowing users to tailor the user interface to their needs.

Intercom doesn’t really provide free stuff, but they have a tool called Platform, which is free. The free Intercom Platform lets you see who your customers are and what they do in your workspace. It has very limited customization options in comparison to its competitors. While Intercom and Zendesk both offer robust features, they may not be the perfect fit for everyone. To help you explore more options, we’ve put together a list of the best Zendesk alternatives as well as the best Intercom alternatives you might want to consider.

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. With Intercom, you get email features like targeted and personalized outbound emailing, dynamic content fields, and an email-to-inbox forwarding feature. Email marketing, for example, is a big deal, but less so when it comes to customer service. Still, for either of these platforms to have some email marketing or other email functionality is common sense.

Connecting Zendesk Support and Zendesk Sell allows its customer service and sales-oriented wholesale team to work together effortlessly. When choosing the right customer support tool, pricing is an essential factor to consider. In this section, we will compare the pricing structures of Intercom and Zendesk. Intercom’s user interface is known for being modern, intuitive, and user-friendly. The dashboard is customizable, allowing users to efficiently access the features they use most frequently.

Sometimes, businesses do not even realize the importance of various aspects you must consider while making this choice. Intercom is ideal for personalized messaging, while Zendesk offers robust ticket management and self-service options. Zendesk has a help center that is open to all to find out answers to common questions. Apart from this feature, the customer support options at Zendesk are quite limited.

Platform

With smart automation and AI, it streamlines case handling, prioritization and agent support. Not only is optimizing customer experiences for the weak of the heart, but also is keeping track of each experience, at each touchpoint. Customer interactions are often spilled all over the place and making sense of them all can be tricky. Here are the benefits of using a customer experience tool for your business. 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’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. HubSpot and Salesforce are also available when support needs to work with marketing and sales teams. Chatbots are automated customer support tools that can assist with low-level ticket triage and ticket routing in real-time. How easy it is to program a chatbot and how effective a chatbot is at assisting human reps is an important factor for this category.

In the category of customer support, Zendesk appears to be just slightly better than Intercom based on the availability of regular service and response times. However, it is possible Intercom’s support is superior at the premium level. While some of these functionalities related to AI are included in the Zendesk suite, others are part of advanced AI add-ons.

It provides a real-time feed and historical data, so agents can respond instantly to consumer queries, as well as learn from past CX trends. By using its workforce management functionality, businesses can analyze employee performance, and implement strategies to improve them. While not included with its customer service suite, it offers a full-fledged standalone CRM called Zendesk Sell.

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. Its strength in creating a comprehensive self-service knowledge base and its extensive integration ecosystem make it a versatile option. Intercom is a customer messaging platform that enables businesses to engage with customers through personalized and real-time communication. Zendesk is a customer service software company that provides businesses with a suite of tools to manage customer interactions. The company was founded in 2007 and today serves over 170,000 customers worldwide.

Intercom pricing

Just keep in mind that, while Intercom’s upfront pricing may seem cheaper, there are additional costs to factor in. When factoring in AI-first tools for all agents, multi-channel campaigns, and proactive support, it could easily cost significantly more than Zendesk. Similar to Zendesk, Intercom’s pricing reserves its most powerful automations for higher-paying customers, the good news is that Fin AI comes with all plans.

But you also need to consider the fact that Intercom has many add-ons that cost extra, especially their AI features. Pricing for both services varies based on the specific needs and scale of your business. Both Zendesk and Intercom have very different and distinct user interfaces. In this guide, I compare Zendesk and Intercom – on pricing and features – to help you make an informed decision. In terms of pricing, Intercom is considered one of the hardest on your pocket. Zendesk can be more flexible and predictable in this area as you can buy different tools separately (or even use their limited versions for free).

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. 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.

Intercom has received generally positive customer reviews, with an overall rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars on Gartner Peer Insights. Customers appreciate the platform’s ease of use, flexibility, and robust feature set. However, some users have reported issues with the platform’s pricing and customer support. When it comes to customer support and services, both Intercom and Zendesk offer robust solutions. In this section, we will take a closer look at the customer support options provided by each platform.

Its proactive support features, unified inbox, and customizable bots are highly beneficial for businesses looking to engage customers dynamically and manage conversations effortlessly. Zendesk excels in providing in-depth performance metrics for your support team. It offers  comprehensive insights on ticket volume, agent performance, customer satisfaction, first contact resolution rates and more. Intercom generally has the edge when it comes to user interface and design. With its in-app messenger, the UI resembles a chat interface, making interactions feel conversational.

It’s much easier if you decide to go with the Zendesk Suite, which includes Support, Chat, Talk, and Guide tools. There are two options there — Professional for $109 or Enterprise for $179 https://chat.openai.com/ if you pay monthly. The difference between the two is that the Professional subscription lacks some things like chat widget unbranding, custom agent roles, multiple help centers, etc.

Simply because of just how easily one puts your customer engagement on auto-pilot so you can intervene when you absolutely need to. A good customer experience platform should be powered with state-of-the-art AI to help you with the following use cases. Still, they are independent picks by Sprinklr’s editorial team based on our research and publicly available information on the review sites.

You can create these knowledge base articles in your target audience’s native language as their software is multilingual. On the other hand, Intercom prides itself on being the only complete customer service solution that provides a seamless experience across automation and human support. By aiming to resolve most customer conversations without human intervention, Intercom allows teams to focus on higher-value interactions. This not only increases customer satisfaction but also reduces operational costs. One stand out automation feature is its co-pilot, also known as Fin AI Copilot. It is an AI-powered assistant that functions as a knowledge base search tool, equipping agents with instant answers when they interact with customers, directly within the Intercom inbox.

While most of Intercom’s ticketing features come with all plans, it’s most important AI features come at a higher cost, including its automated workflows. 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.

Intercom

This is especially helpful for smaller businesses that may not need a lot of features. Zendesk helps you manage and update your leads, analyze your pipeline, and create customizable reports on the go with our mobile CRM app. Plus, visit tagging and geolocation features allow your sales team to effortlessly log in-person sales visits, letting you monitor all your sales interactions in one centralized place. Pipedrive provides a mobile app to manage sales leads, view your calendar, and access your to-do list. And while Pipedrive’s mobile app can help you look at where your leads are on the map, you won’t be able to log sales visits using geolocation features.

Compared to Zendesk and Intercom, Helpwise offers competitive and transparent pricing plans. Its straightforward pricing structure ensures businesses get access to the required features without complex tiers or hidden costs, making it an attractive option for cost-conscious organizations. With Messagely, you can increase your customer satisfaction and solve customers’ issues while they’re still visiting your site. In short, Zendesk is perfect for large companies looking to streamline their customer support process; Intercom is great for smaller companies looking for advanced customer service features.

However, for more advanced CRM needs like lead management and sales forecasting, Intercom may not make the cut, unfortunately. What’s even cooler is its ability to use AI to forecast customer behavior. Agents can use this to anticipate and proactively address issues before the escalate, or even arise in the first place.

Intercom vs Zendesk: What are Key Differences?

It may have limited abilities regarding the scalability or support of an enterprise-level company. Thus, due to its limited agility, businesses with complex business models may not find it appropriate. Picking customer service software to run your business is not a decision you make lightly.

So, whether you’re a startup or a global giant, Zendesk’s got your back for top-notch customer support. Zendesk lets you chat with customers through email, chat, social media, or phone. However, for businesses seeking a more cost-effective and user-friendly solution, Hiver presents a compelling Chat GPT alternative. It works on top of your inbox and offers essential helpdesk functionalities. Moreover, for users who require more dedicated and personalized support, Zendesk charges an additional premium. With Explore, you can share and collaborate with anyone customer service reports.

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. Intercom also uses AI and features a chatbot called Fin, but negative reviews note basic reporting and a lack of customization. Fin is priced at $0.99 per resolution, so companies handling large volumes of queries might find it costly. In comparison, Zendesk customers pay a fixed price of $50 per agent—and only Zendesk AI is modeled on the world’s largest CX-specific dataset.

Users also point out that it can take a couple of hours to get used to the flow of tickets, which doesn’t happen in CRM, and they aren’t pleased with the product’s downtime. 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. Boost your lead gen and sales funnels with Flows – no-code automation paths that trigger at crucial moments in the customer journey. It’s definitely something that both your agents and customers will feel equally comfortable using. However, you won’t miss out on any of the essentials when it comes to live chat.

Agents can easily view ongoing interactions, and take over from Aura AI at any moment if they feel intervention is needed. Our AI also accelerates query resolution by intelligently routing tickets and providing contextual information to agents in real-time. Aura AI also excels in simplifying complex tasks by collecting data conversationally and automating intricate processes. When things get tricky, Aura AI smartly escalates the conversation to a human agent, ensuring that no customer is left frustrated.

With a very streamlined design, Intercom’s interface is far better than many alternatives, including Zendesk. It has a very intuitive design that goes far beyond its platform and into its articles, product guides, and even its illustrations. After signing up and creating your account, you can start filling in your information, such as your company name and branding and your agents’ profiles and information. Then, you can begin filling in details such as your account’s name and icon and your agents’ profiles and security features.

Intercom generally receives positive feedback for its customer support, with users appreciating the comprehensive features and team-oriented tools. However, there are occasional criticisms regarding the effectiveness of its AI chatbot and some interface navigation challenges. As any free tool, the functionalities there are quite limited, but nevertheless.

With this data, businesses identify friction points where the customer journey breaks down as well as areas where it’s performing smoothly. Powered by AI, Intercom’s Fin chatbot is purportedly capable of solving 50% of all queries autonomously — in multiple languages. At the same time, Fin AI Copilot background support to agents, acting as a personal, real-time AI assistant for dealing with inquiries.

Because of the app called Intercom Messenger, one can see that their focus is less on the voice and more on the text. This is fine, as not every customer support team wants to be so available on the phone. Intercom has a very robust advanced chatbot set of tools for your business needs. There is a conversation routing bot, an operator bot, a lead qualification bot, and an article-suggesting bot, among others. It is also not too difficult to program your own bot rules using Intercon’s system. 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.

• Gainsight offers a solid platform tailored to improve customer experience management.
• Zendesk provides a good set of tools for managing customer relationships, but it requires additional enrollment in ‘Sell’ for a comprehensive CRM solution.
• It starts with as low as $19/user/month and can go up to $49/user/ month.
• Zendesk has an app available for both Android and iOS, which makes it easy to stay connected with customers while on the go.
• ThriveDesk is a help desk software tailor-made for businesses seeking extensive features and a powerful yet simple live chat assistant.

While both Zendesk and Intercom offer the essentials, like ticketing, issue resolution, and automation, the devil’s in the details when it comes to which is best for your unique needs. 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. In this paragraph, let’s explain some common issues users usually ask about when choosing between Zendesk and Intercom platforms.

Customerly allows you to rate prospects, either manually or automatically, so you can prioritize the most valuable leads. Our platform also supports dynamic list building, enabling you to run targeted surveys, send newsletters, and automate marketing actions, all from one place. 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?

Zendesk boasts incredibly robust sales capabilities and security features. 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.

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. Intercom’s customer service software offers a range of features designed to enhance the customer experience. It lets businesses set up multilingual help centers, so customers from different regions can self-serve. With tools for managing workloads and assigning tasks, it ensures that issues reach the right agents efficiently.

Intercom’s native mobile apps are good for iOS, Android, React Native, and Cordova, while Zendesk only has mobile apps for iPhones, iPads, and Android devices. 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.

Customers have also noted that they can implement Zendesk AI five times faster than other solutions. Zendesk provides comprehensive security and compliance features, ensuring customer data privacy. This includes secure login options like SAML or JWT SSO (single sign-on) and native content redaction for sensitive information. We also adhere to numerous industry standards and regulations, such as HIPAA, SOC2, ISO 27001, HDS, FedRAMP LI-SaaS, ISO 27018, and ISO 27701.

Features like macros, triggers, and automations allow businesses to create custom workflows tailored to their specific needs. By integrating seamlessly into your app, it offers an intuitive in-app chat experience that fosters direct customer engagement. What makes Intercom stand out from the crowd are their chatbots and lots of chat automation features that can be very helpful for your team. You can integrate different apps (like Google Meet or Stripe among others) with your messenger and make it a high end point for your customers.