Intercom vs Zendesk: Which Is Right for You in 2024?

As the more recent of the two, offering a modern look-and-feel and frictionless experience is a key magnet for Intercom. It effortlessly brings together in-app chat, automated chatbots, and a unified inquiry inbox in its help center. Having only appeared in 2011, Intercom lacks a few years of experience on Zendesk. It also made its name as a messaging-first platform for fostering personalized conversational experiences for customers.

However, this is somewhat subjective, and depending on your business needs and favorite tools, you may argue we got it all mixed up, and Intercom is truly superior. Some startups and small businesses may prefer one app, while large companies and enterprise operations will have their own requirements. 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.

With its in-app messenger, the UI resembles a chat interface, making interactions feel conversational. This makes it a strong choice for businesses prioritizing customer engagement. Choosing the right customer service platform is critical for any business. It enables you to streamline all incoming customer queries, and ensure your support team is equipped to provide prompt, efficient solutions. 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.

Zendesk excels with its AI-enhanced user experience and robust omnichannel support, making it ideal for businesses focused on customer service. On the other hand, Intercom shines with its advanced AI-driven automation and insightful analytics, perfect for those who value seamless communication and in-app messaging. Consider which features align best with your business needs to make the right choice.

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. Don’t miss out on the latest tips, tools, and tactics at the forefront of customer support. It’s where customers ask the questions that may result in the largest sales in your company’s history.

Zendesk vs. Intercom: FAQ

Intercom has a different approach, one that’s all about sales, marketing, and personalized messaging. Intercom has your back if you’re looking to supercharge your sales efforts. It’s like having a toolkit for lead generation, customer segmentation, and crafting highly personalized messages. This makes it an excellent choice if you want to engage with support and potential and existing customers in real time. One of Zendesk’s standout features that we need to shine a spotlight on is its extensive marketplace of third-party integrations and extensions.

Both are known for their range of features – AI, analytics, automation, and ticketing, amongst others. You can use both Zendesk and Intercom simultaneously to leverage their respective strengths and provide comprehensive customer support across different channels and touchpoints. With simple setup, and handy importers you’ll be up and running in no time, ready to unlock the Support Funnel and deliver fast and personal customer support. Messagely’s pricing starts at just $29 per month, which includes live chat, targeted messages, shared inbox, mobile apps, and over 750 powerful integrations.

It can also handle complex interactions and provide real-time insight to customer support agents. Overall, Intercom is a better option if personalized and robust chatbots are something you are looking for when managing customer support strategy. In today’s business world, customer service is fast-paced, and customers have higher expectations. To enhance customer satisfaction, businesses must equip their teams with customer support solutions and customer service software. As a customer support specialist, you may need to manage multiple tools to provide excellent support to your customers.

Zendesk customers are switching to Intercom every single day

Its messaging also has real-time notifications and automated responses, enhancing customer communication. 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. Far from impersonalizing customer service, chatbots offer an immediate and efficient way to address common queries that end in satisfaction.

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.

Intercom does have a ticketing dashboard that has omnichannel functionality, much like Zendesk. Keeping this general theme in mind, I’ll dive deeper into how each software’s features compare, so you can decide which use case might best fit your needs. Customerly allows you to rate prospects, either manually or automatically, so you can prioritize the most valuable leads.

Query Assignment and Tracking

On the other hand, if you prioritize customer engagement, sales, and personalized messaging, Intercom is a compelling option, especially for startups and rapidly scaling businesses. When comparing Zendesk and Intercom, evaluating their core features and functionalities is essential to determine which platform best suits your organization’s customer support needs. Let’s explore how Zendesk and Intercom stack up in terms of basic functionalities required by a helpdesk software. Gain valuable insights with Intercom’s analytics and reporting capabilities.

Before choosing the customer support software, it is crucial to consider the size of the business. Some software only works best for startups, while others have offerings only for large enterprises. Let us look at the type and size of business for which Zednesk and Intercom are suitable. Businsses need to do a cost analysis whenever they select customer service software for their business.

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 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. Zendesk’s mission is to build software designed to improve customer relationships. Zendesk’s pricing structure provides increasing levels of features and capabilities as businesses move up the tiers.

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. If you’re still on the fence about which platform to choose, consider exploring Tidio as a strong alternative. Tidio stands out with its advanced AI-powered chatbots and seamless automated workflows, making customer interactions efficient and personalized. It also features an AI-driven ticketing system, an omnichannel dashboard to manage all customer communications in one place, and customizable chat widgets to enhance user engagement.

While deciding between Zendesk and Intercom, you should ensure the customization, AI automation, and functionalities align with your business goals. Intecom’s pricing strategies are not as transparent as Zendesk’s pricing. 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.

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. Intercom offers fewer integrations, supporting just over 450 third-party apps. This makes it challenging to customize the software as your business grows. Furthermore, data on customer reviews, installation numbers, and ecommerce integrations is not readily available. There are pre-built workflows to help with things like ticket sharing, as well as conversation routing based on metrics like agent skill set or availability. There are even automations to help with things like SLAs, or service level agreements, to do things like send out notifications when headlights are due.

Our robust, no-code integrations enable you to adapt our software to new and growing use cases. Compared to Zendesk, Intercom offers few integrations, which may hinder its scalability. If you are looking for more integration options and budget is not an issue, Intercom can be the perfect live chat solution for your business. It is also ideal for businesses who are searching for conversational chatbot functionality. Their AI-powered chatbot can enable your business to boost engagement and improve marketing efforts in real-time.

Since Intercom is so intuitive, the time you’ll need to spend training new users on how to interact with the platform is greatly reduced. 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. 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.

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. Why don’t you try something equally powerful yet more affordable, like HelpCrunch? ProProfs Live Chat Editorial Team is a passionate group of customer service experts dedicated to empowering your live chat experiences with top-notch content.

Zendesk vs Intercom: Which one should you choose?

Zendesk, just like its competitor, offers a knowledge base solution that is easy to customize. Their users can create a knowledge repository to create articles or edit existing ones as per the changes in the services or product. It also provides detailed reports on how each self-help article performs in your knowledge base and helps you identify how each piece can be improved further.

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. 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.

If you’re not ready to make the full switch to Intercom just yet, you can integrate Intercom with your Zendesk account. This will provide live data on who your users are and what they do in your app. This means you can use the Help Desk Migration product to import data from a variety of source tools (e.g. Zendesk, ZOHOdesk, Freshdesk, SFDC etc) to Intercom tickets.

We stay ahead of the curve on trends, tackle technical hurdles, and provide practical tips to boost your business. With our commitment to quality and integrity, you can be confident you’re getting the most reliable resources to enhance your customer support initiatives. Pop-up chat, in-app messaging, and notifications are some of the highly-rated features of this live chat software. 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. This makes it an ideal choice for businesses looking to engage customers directly within their product, app or website.

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. The setup can be so complex that there are tutorials by third parties to teach new users how to do it right. In this article, we’ll compare Zendesk vs Intercom to find out which is the right customer support tool for you. Zendesk has over 1,300 integrations, compared to Intercom’s 300+ apps, making it the leader in this category.

Its intuitive messenger can help your business boost engagement and improve sales and marketing efforts. Both Zendesk Messaging and Intercom Messenger offer live chat features and AI-enabled chatbots for 24/7 support to customers. Additionally, you can trigger incoming messages to automatically assign an agent and create dashboards to monitor the team’s performance on live chat.

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. 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.

Help Center in Zendesk also will enable businesses to organize their tutorials, articles, and FAQs, making it convenient for customer to find solutions to their queries. That being said, while both platforms offer extensive features, they can be costly, especially for smaller enterprises. Ultimately, your choice should reflect whether your priority is comprehensive customer support (Zendesk) or a blend of CRM and sales support (Intercom). Today, amid the rise of omnichannel customer service, it offers a centralized location to manage interactions via email, live chat, social media, or voice calls.

Can I use both Zendesk and Intercom?

Zendesk has traditionally been more focused on customer support management, while Intercom has been more focused on live support solutions like its chat solution. Zendesk offers simple chatbots and provides businesses with straightforward chatbot creation tools, allowing them to set up automated responses and assist customers with common queries. Zendesk may be unable to give the agents more advanced features or customization options for chatbots.

This is especially helpful for smaller businesses that may not need a lot of features. 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. Intercom stands out here due to its ability  to tailor sales workflows. You can also set up interactive product tours to highlight new features in-product and explain how they work. Zendesk started in 2007 as a web-based SaaS product for managing incoming customer support requests.

This eventually adds to overall business costs, so they carefully need to consider all plans and budgets before making a decision. The pricing structure of Intercom is complex, making it difficult for Intercom users to understand their final costs. Intercom charges the price based on representative seats and Chat GPT people reached, with additional expenses for add-ons. The best thing about this plan is that it is eligible for an advanced AI add-on, has integrated community forums, side conversations, skill-based routing, and is HIPAA-enabled. Zendesk offers various features, which may differ according to the plan.

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.

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. Zendesk takes the slight lead here because it offers some advanced help desk features, which Intercom does not. The highlight of Zendesk is its help desk ticketing system, which brings several customer communication channels to one location.

• However, you can browse their respective sites to find which tools each platform supports.
• You can create an omnichannel CRM suite with a mix of productivity, collaboration, eCommerce, CRM, analytics, email marketing, social media, and other tools.
• The platform has various customization options, allowing businesses personalized experiences according to their branding.
• 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.

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’s CRM can work as a standalone CRM and requires no additional service to operate robustly. It offers comprehensive customer data management and lead-tracking features. Some businesses may require supplemental products to meet specific needs. Intercom’s CRM utility is a solid foundation for managing customer relationships and sales in one platform.

Nowadays, it’s a crucial component in helping businesses focus on high-priority interactions and scale their customer service. As a result, customers can implement the help desk software quickly—without the need for developers—and see a faster return on investment. Plus, our transparent pricing doesn’t have hidden fees or endless add-ons, so customers know exactly what they’re paying for and can calculate the total cost of ownership ahead of time. In comparison, Intercom’s confusing pricing structure that features multiple add-ons may be unsuitable for small businesses.

This SaaS leader entered into the competition in 2011, intending to help its clients reach their target audiences and engage them in a conversation right away. It offers robust features for automating routine tasks such as ticket routing, creating queues, creating ticket statuses and more. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Features like macros, triggers, and automations allow businesses to create custom workflows tailored to their specific needs. 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.

When things get tricky, Aura AI smartly escalates the conversation to a human agent, ensuring that no customer is left frustrated. Plus, Aura AI’s global, multilingual support breaks down language barriers, making it an ideal solution for businesses with an international customer base. The dashboard follows a streamlined approach with a single intercom to zendesk inbox for customer inquiries. Here, agents can deal with customers directly, leave notes for each other to enable seamless handovers, or convert tickets into self-help resources. As the place where your agents will be spending most of their time, a functional and robust Helpdesk will be critical to their overall performance and experience.

Operators will find its dashboard quite beneficial as it will take them seconds to find necessary features during an ongoing chat with the customers. Admins will also like the fact that they can see the progress of all their teams and who all are actively answering a customer’s query in real-time. They offer an omnichannel chat solution that integrates with multiple messaging platforms and marketing channels and even automates incoming support processes with bots. It is quite the all-rounder as it even has a help center and ticketing system that completes its omnichannel support cycle. It’s an opportunity for Zendesk to differentiate itself, but unfortunately it didn’t get very high marks from users, either. Reviewers were frustrated by how long it took for their tickets to get resolved, as well as the complexity with which they were tossed around from department to department.

While there are some universal things to look out for, like the range of features, ease of use, and a seamless omnichannel experience, it’s also about your subjective experience. While both Zendesk and Intercom tick both those boxes, they each have their own distinct style. 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. Customer expectations are already high, but with the rise of AI, customers are expecting even more.

The platform is recognized for its ability to resolve a significant portion of customer questions automatically, ensuring faster response times. The platform converts all customer queries into “tickets” that agents can handle with ease and track till the point of resolution. When it comes to which company is the better fit for your business, there’s no clear answer. It really depends on what features you need and what type of customer service strategy you plan to implement. Use them to quickly resolve customer question on, for example, how to use your product. You can then create linked tickets for any bug reports or issues that require further troubleshooting by technical teams.

Zendesk and Intercom both have an editor preview feature that makes it easier to add images, videos, call-to-action buttons, and interactive guides to your help articles. Now that we know the differences between Intercom vs. Zendesk, let’s analyze which one is the better service option. Grow faster with done-for-you automation, tailored optimization strategies, and custom limits. Automatically answer common questions and perform recurring tasks with AI. Our mission is to break apart what CRM is and means.Here we discuss anything that helps create more meaningful lasting work relationships. One more thing to add, there are ways to integrate Intercom to Zendesk.

While Zeendesk provides automation services for ticket support systems, notifications, chatbots, etc., it may not be an extensive feature compared to Intercom. You could technically consider Intercom a CRM, but it’s really more of a customer-focused communication product. It isn’t as adept at purer sales tasks like lead management, list engagement, advanced reporting, forecasting, and workflow management as you’d expect a more complete CRM to be.

Intercom also provides fast time to value for smaller and mid-sized businesses with limitations for large-scale companies. 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. Zendesk is an all-in-one omnichannel platform offering various channel integrations in one place.

Experience the comprehensive power of Intercom for effective customer communication, automation, support tools, integrations, and analytics. Streamline support processes with Intercom’s ticketing system and knowledge base. Efficiently manage customer inquiries and empower customers to find answers independently. 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.

Intercom is also a customer service software that integrates entirely with third-party vendors, especially those offering messaging services. Using any plan, this integration is available to all customers, making the customer support experience and onboarding smooth. Zendesk allows businesses to group their resources in the help center, providing customers with self-service personalized support. The platform has various customization options, allowing businesses personalized experiences according to their branding.

If, after the additional prices they charge, the plan works for you, Intercom is a great way to manage your customer relationships. The final prices are revealed after engaging in sales demos and are not revealed upfront. This lack of transparency can create budgeting problems for businesses. Intercom has more customization features for features like bots, themes, triggers, and funnels. You could say something similar for Zendesk’s standard service offering, so it’s at least good to know they have Zendesk Sell, a capable CRM option to supplement it. You can use Zendesk Sell to track tasks, streamline workflows, improve engagement, nurture leads, and much more.

• With help centers in place, it’s easier for your customers to reliably find answers, tips, and other important information in a self-service manner.
• These features make it suitable for businesses of all sizes, helping them streamline their support operations and enhance the overall customer experience.
• If I had to describe Intercom’s helpdesk, I would say it’s rather a complementary tool to their chat tools.
• This organization is important because it brings together customer interactions from all channels in this one place.
• There are also several different Shopify integrations to choose from, as well as CRM integrations like HubSpot and Salesforce.

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. Compare Zendesk vs. Intercom and future-proof your business with reliable, easy-to-use software. Pipedrive offers five total plans, with their entry-level Essential plan offering significantly fewer features than the others. 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.

Zendesk is more robust in terms of its ticket management capabilities, it offers more customization options and advanced features like a virtual call center app. On the other hand, Intercom is more focused on conversational customer support, and has more help desk features suited for live chat and messaging. Both software solutions offer core https://chat.openai.com/ 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. On the contrary, Intercom’s pricing is far less predictable and can cost hundreds/thousands of dollars per month.

Pricing for both services varies based on the specific needs and scale of your business. 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. Discover customer and product issues with instant replays, in-app cobrowsing, and console logs. This is not a huge difference; however, it does indicate that customers are generally more satisfied with Intercom’s offerings than Zendesk’s.

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. Intercom does not have a dedicated workforce management solution, either.