Intercom Vs Zendesk: Pricing, Features, Integrations in 2023

Whether it’s syncing data with your CRM, enhancing communication via messaging platforms, or automating tasks with productivity apps, Zendesk makes it possible. Let’s explore these unique offerings and see how they can benefit your business. 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. It delivers a multi-channel support system with customer service automation.

Create entry rules that trigger when the messaging campaign begins, choosing the target audiences and when follow-up messages generate. Create code-free screencast tours of products, websites, webpages, and applications within your website. Automation and AI save resources and time–every automated workflow and routing decision frees an agent to work on more complex issues. Set triggers to target particular audiences at the right time, utilize carousels as part of a communication campaign, and compare carousels with A/B testing. Both products are so full-featured that they both take quite a while to learn. Intercom and Zendesk are neck to neck in reviews from various sites such as G2, Capterra, Financesonline, and more.

For real zen, switch to Intercom

We can say that Zendesk’s user interface is very clean and clear to understand. Besides its easy navigation, it also offers a mesmerizing ticketing system, multichannel communication, and analytics reporting. So, Zendesk’s users are always going to have a smooth experience with it. The sophisticated nature of its chatbot makes it more than a task automation tool — it takes customer interactions to the next level. What makes Desku unique is that it has competitively priced services with similar features as those provided by other companies but at a lower cost.

We’ve analyzed a dozen of reviews to help you get an average estimate of Zendesk vs Intercom functionality. Groove has put together an informative review of both brands to highlight the similarities and differences to allow you to make the right choice. Secret has already helped tens of thousands of startups save millions on the best SaaS like Zendesk, Intercom & many more. Not only for the operator, but even the companies find it tedious, too. Moreover, they will have to put some hours into managing the operator, and the list goes on. Rated 5 stars out of 5 on G2, ThriveDesk is highly regarded by users.

When evaluating the cost of any software tool, you have to look beyond the price tag. ROI comes down to getting the most out of the features available, so payment structures that are scaleable and flexible are a must. Its tight focus on customer support keeps things simple, especially when people are learning the software. See how leading multi-channel consumer brands solve E2E customer data challenges with a real-time customer data platform. Pricing for both services varies based on the specific needs and scale of your business.

This makes it an excellent choice if you want to engage with support and potential and existing customers in real time. Both tools also allow you to connect your email account and manage it from within the application to track open and click-through rates. In addition, Zendesk and Intercom feature advanced sales reporting and analytics that make it easy for sales teams to understand their prospects and customers more deeply. Zendesk takes the slight lead here because it offers some advanced help desk features, which Intercom does not.

Intercom vs Zendesk: Pricing and Plans

Although Zendesk does not have an in-app messaging service, it does have one unique feature, and that is its built-in virtual call assistant, Zendesk Talk. It is a totally cloud-based service; you can operate this VOIP technology by sitting in any corner of the world. You will be able to find the most common chatting system with a single communication channel. So, communicating with customers on different communication channels would be difficult on Intercom. It will help you understand your customer’s issue and solve it instantly. Although you cannot be with your customers all the time in real-time, through Desku’s live chatting, you can actually have their back.

Zendesk offers robust, pre-built reports for sales and support teams. Here are our top reporting and analytics features and an overview of where Intercom’s reporting limitations lie. There are many features to help bigger customer service teams collaborate more effectively — like private notes or a real-time view of who’s handling a given ticket at the moment, etc. At the same time, the vendor offers powerful reporting capabilities to help you grow and improve your business. 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?).

Beyond that, you can create custom reports that combine all of the stats listed above (and many more) and present them as counts, columns, lines, or tables. 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. 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. The dashboard’s left-hand column organizes and sorts all tickets by urgency.

Zendesk’s tried and true approach to ticketing is both familiar and effective. 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. 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. Very rarely do they understand the issue (mostly with Explore) that I am trying to communicate to them.

You can construct an omnichannel suite by combining productivity, e-commerce, CRM, analytics, social media, and other applications. BotPenguin, an innovative addition to the chatbot landscape, emphasizes innovation and customization. Offering more than just chatbots, BotPenguin integrates cutting-edge technology to provide businesses with comprehensive solutions for personalized customer experiences. Intercom offers a wide range of integrations with other popular tools and platforms, allowing businesses to connect their customer support with other systems. Zendesk also offers integrations, but the ecosystem may not be as extensive as Intercom’s. Both Zendesk and Intercom are standout performers when it comes to providing comprehensive multi channel support, catering to diverse customer needs.

Intercom and Zendesk both offer comprehensive customer support solutions. 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. In general, Zendesk offers a wide range of live chat features such as customizable chat widgets, automatic greetings, offline messaging, and chat triggers.

In this case, each customer service software has a unique way of generating reports such as scheduling, the scope of the analysis, and more. Zendesk does not provide its customers with email marketing tools for the basic subscriptions at the time of writing. However, the add-on Customer Lists available for Professional and Enterprise subscriptions does have mass email options.

Help center

Though, if you compare Zendesk chat vs Intercom, the plugin is a bit hard to use as reviewed by customers. Installing it might take some technical skill and even when installed, could malfunction a bit. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to assist customers through self-help options or access to the relevant articles before connecting them to your team.

Intercom is known for its advanced live chat capabilities, allowing businesses to communicate with their customers in real-time. It offers features like chatbots, targeted messaging, and team collaboration tools. On the other hand, Zendesk provides a comprehensive suite of customer support solutions, including ticketing, knowledge base, and community forums. It also offers integrations with various CRM and marketing automation platforms. When comparing Zendesk and Intercom, Zendesk stands out with its robust and versatile customer support solutions.

Key offerings include automated support with help center articles, a messenger-first ticketing system, and a powerful inbox to centralize customer queries. Intercom also has a mobile app available for both Android and iOS, which makes it easy to stay connected with customers even when away from the computer. The app includes features like automated messages and conversation routing — so businesses can manage customer conversations more efficiently. When it comes to advanced workflows and ticketing systems, Zendesk boasts a more full-featured solution. Due to our intelligent routing capabilities and numerous automated workflows, our users can free up hours to focus on other tasks.

You can even finagle some forecasting by sourcing every agent’s assigned leads. 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. G2 ranks Intercom higher than Zendesk for ease of setup, and support quality—so you can expect a smooth transition, effortless onboarding, and continuous success. Whether you’re starting fresh with Intercom or migrating from Zendesk, set up is quick and easy.

Desku provides a user-friendly platform with robust features that enable easy transition during the migration from other support systems. Intercom is praised as an affordable option with high customization capabilities, allowing businesses to create a personalized intercom vs zendesk support experience. Although the interface may require a learning curve, users find the platform effective and functional. However, Intercom has fewer integration options than Zendesk, which may limit its capabilities for businesses seeking extensive integrations.

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. We’ll use the Zendesk API to make changes to the existing ticket (all changes made are internal and won’t directly be seen by the customer). Zendesk wins the self-service tools category because it provides extensive help center customization options. When a customer asks a question in the Messenger widget, the Operator automatically suggests a handful of relevant articles based on keywords to help customers resolve their own issues. Users with light access–such as knowledgeable agents and supervisors–can be added to tickets for browsing and feedback.

Intercom’s solution offers several use cases, meaning the product’s investments and success resources have a broad focus. But this also means the customer experience ROI tends to be lower than what it would be if you went with a best-in-class solution like Zendesk. Provide self-service alternatives so customers can resolve their own issues. This serves the dual benefit of adding convenience to the customer experience and lightening agents’ workloads. To sum up this Intercom vs Zendesk battle, the latter is a great support-oriented tool that will be a good choice for big teams with various departments.

Company

Send surveys at key points throughout the customer buying cycle, utilizing multiple types of question formats. Surveys turn customer insights into action, with triggers and campaign response adjustments depending on customer responses. Zendesk Sales Engagement Tools (Reach) uses a credit system to help you find new leads or add information to existing leads. The Sell dashboard’s Tasks page sorts all of an agent’s tasks by due date.

Intercom, on the other hand, is designed to be more of a complete solution for sales, marketing, and customer relationship nurturing. ThriveDesk is a help desk software tailor-made for businesses seeking extensive features and a powerful yet simple live chat assistant. Even better, it’s the most cost-effective, lightweight, and speedy live chat solution available for Shopify business owners. Zendesk receives positive feedback for its intuitive interface, wide range of integrations, and robust reporting tools. However, some users find customization challenging, and the platform is considered expensive, requiring careful cost evaluation.

Smooth migration. Simple integration.

It provides a comprehensive platform for managing customer inquiries, support tickets, and interactions across multiple channels. On the other hand, Intercom shines in its focus on conversational engagement and real-time communication with customers. Zendesk’s extensive feature set and customizable workflows are particularly appealing to organizations looking to streamline and scale their customer support operations efficiently. It offers a chat-first approach, making it ideal for companies looking to prioritize interactive and personalized customer interactions. But with perks like more advanced chatbots, automation, and lead management capabilities, Intercom could have an edge for many users.

The admin and manager dashboard provides a zoomed-out view of all activity taking place in each inbox, for whole departments and individual agents. The Sell dashboard, different from the Service dashboard, features pre-built widgets that agents can organize however they want, to view the metrics they care most about. Agents can participate in forums and turn forum posts into tickets; they also can turn community-post replies into articles for future customers. Zendesk also makes it easy to customize your help center, with out-of-the-box tools to design color, theme, and layout–both on mobile and desktop. Intercom’s help center allows you to draft and organize collections of articles, accessible to customers via a search bar in the Messenger widget. Zendesk wins the collaboration tools category because of its easy-to-use side conversations feature.

Its AI Chatbot, Fin, is particularly noted for handling complex queries efficiently. When it comes to which company is the better fit for your business, there’s no clear answer. Use ticketing systems to manage the influx and provide your customers with timely responses. One place Intercom really shines as a standalone CRM is its data utility.

And considering how appropriate Zendesk is for larger companies, there’s a good chance you may need to take them up on that. We hope that this Intercom VS Zendesk comparison helps you choose one that matches your support, marketing, and sales needs. But in case you are in search of something beyond these two, then ProProfs Chat can be an option. If that’s not detailed enough, then surely their visitor browsing details will leave you surprised. This enables your operators to understand visitor intent faster and provide them with a personalized experience. Here’s a list of criteria we’ve used to differentiate the two for you.

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. 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. There is power to be realized in partnerships and the strategic combination of forces, and companies using chatbots for customer service can further enhance the CX, taking it to new heights. Netomi’s virtual agents sit alongside human agents to supplement and enhance the capacity of support teams, ensuring the seamless resolution of customer queries. Intercom also offers a few features that are unique to its platform – one of these being the ability to segment users based on their behavior.

When you leave a message in Freshdesk’s live chat, you can always see an indication of how fast you can expect their answer. When I was leaving mine, it said ‘Currently replying in under 15 minutes.’ 3 hours later – and I’m still waiting for someone to get back to me. Intercom supports multiple integrations but setting up some third-party platforms might be challenging. Zendesk also allows integrations, although its compatibility range isn’t specified.

Sales teams can also view outbound communications, and any support agent can access resources from the Intercom workspace. 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. The price levels can even be much higher if we’re talking of a larger company.

You can set business rules, SLA, and ticket routing based on the agent’s skills, language, and expertise. Each message will have identifiers so that they will be easy to recognize at a glance. As a result, you’ll be able to see the sender, anyone who replied, and the dates of their interaction.

What are customers saying?

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. Intercom enables customers to self-serve through its messaging platform. Agents can easily find resources for customers from their agent workspace. Intercom also has an omnichannel customer service solution, but it’s fairly limited, with no native voice capabilities and minimal voice integrations. On the other hand, Intercom lacks many ticketing functionality that can be essential for big companies with a huge client support load.

Zendesk also offers a straightforward interface to operators that helps them identify the entire interaction pathway with the customers. Compared to being detailed, Zendesk gives a tough competition to Intercom. Operators can easily switch from one conversation to another, therefore helping operators manage more interactions simultaneously. Zendesk has also introduced its chatbot to help its clients send automated answers to some frequently asked questions to stay ahead in the competitive marketplace. Talking about the Intercom, it has flexible pricing plans that its experts can help adjust as per your requirements to match contacts and number of seats.

But, you would not be able to experience such a good in-app messaging service on Zendesk. Automating onboarding messages, product guides, newsletters, and the list goes on. Intercom understands very well that email marketing is no more than a magic wand for building strong customer relations. Customers will stay with you long if they are not getting any support from your company, especially when you are new to them. Zendesk is yet another powerful way to help businesses interact with their customers. In terms of G2 ratings, Zendesk and Intercom are both well-rated platforms.

• This makes it a great choice for businesses that want to provide their customers with a more personal experience.
• Managing everything manually is becoming increasingly difficult, and you need a robust customer support platform to streamline your operations.
• Intercom has positioned itself as a messaging platform rather than a comprehensive CRM solution.
• 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.
• We need a solution that allows whoever picks up the chat or phone to quickly see the history of that customer, their request, notes, and the status of their order.

They can get the context of the customer’s questions and transfer questions from Chatbox into Message. The trigger feature reduces cart abandonment and increases conversions. In the realm of customer engagement tools, Intercom, Zendesk, and BotPenguin emerge as pivotal players, each bringing unique capabilities to the forefront, catering to diverse business needs. Zendesk stands out as a champion of customer support due to its easy-to-use work-frame, many useful add-ons, and features in all tiers. Intercom has Articles as a knowledge base solution for self-support, as well as internal support. This feature is available on all the channels your customers use to get in touch with your brand.

While light agents cannot interact with the customer on the ticket, they can make notes and interact privately with other team members and agents involved with the ticket. Collaboration tools enable agents to work together in resolving customer tickets and making sales. Automatic assignment rules establish criteria that automatically route tickets to the right agent or team, based on message or user data. 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. Moreover, internal collaboration feels a bit more engaging and effortless with notes and mentions.

Intercom, on the other hand, was built for business messaging, so communication is one of their strong suits. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. 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. While Intercom offers a “Starter Plan” for very small businesses, the price for larger companies is scaled upward, too. If you only need the services Intercom offers, then you’ll only spend around $75 a month for two seats. Another feature Intercom offers that Zendesk doesn’t is email marketing tools.

Again, Zendesk has surpassed the number of reviewers when compared to Intercom. Some of the highly-rated features include ticket creation user experience, email to case, and live chat reporting. This live chat software provider also enables your business to send proactive chat messages to customers and engage effectively in real-time. Intercom is a customer support messenger, bot, and live chat service provider that empowers its clients to provide instant support in real-time. 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. Because of its easy navigation and interface, Intercom has always received positive words from its users.

So it will transmit the live data on the users and what they are doing in your app. This option is useful for those who are looking for a smooth switch from Zendesk to Intercom. If your business has an app, in-app messaging can be used to send messages to customers.