Intercom vs Zendesk 2023: A Comprehensive Comparison

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. 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.

• However, for more advanced CRM needs like lead management and sales forecasting, Intercom may not make the cut, unfortunately.
• It means that Zendesk’s prices are slightly easier to figure out than Intercom’s.
• Whether you’ve just started searching for a customer support tool or have been using one for a while, chances are you know about Zendesk and Intercom.

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 also offers various integrations with third-party tools, including CRMs, marketing automation platforms, and analytics tools. Zendesk’s integration with these tools allows businesses to track customer interactions, personalize messaging, and automate workflows.

Clunky platform

Zendesk’s mission is to build software designed to improve customer relationships. When deciding on choosing between Zendesk or Pipedrive for your business, there is a lot to keep in mind. With Zendesk, you can connect your sales and support teams, empowering them with the information they need to deliver better customer experiences. On the other hand, Pipedrive doesn’t offer a customer service solution, limiting users to third-party integrations. Intercom offers a wide range of integrations with various third-party tools, including CRMs, marketing automation platforms, and analytics tools. Some of the popular integrations include Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo, and Google Analytics.

In this section, we will briefly overview Intercom and Zendesk, including their history and key features. The customer support platform starts at just $5 per agent per month, which is a very basic customer support tool. If you want dashboard reporting and integrations, you’ll need to pay $19 per agent per month. Multilingual content and other advanced features come with a $49 price per agent per month. 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.

Zendesk vs. Intercom: An Overview

Test any of HelpCrunch pricing plans for free for 14 days and see our tools in action right away. Say what you will, but Intercom’s design and overall user experience are leaving all its competitors far behind. It’s beautifully crafted and thought through, and their custom-made illustrations are just next level stuff. You can see their attention to detail in everything — from their tools to their website.

Zendesk has more pricing options, and its most affordable plan is likely cheaper than Intercom’s, although without exact Intercom numbers, it is not easy to truly know the cost. As for Intercom’s general pricing structure, there are three plans, but you’ll have to contact them to get exact prices. For those of you who have been waiting for the big showdown between these two customer support heavyweights, we are glad to present the ultimate Zendesk vs Intercom comparison article. Boost your lead gen and sales funnels with Flows – no-code automation paths that trigger at crucial moments in the customer journey. They fall within roughly the same price range, that most SMEs and larger enterprises should find within their budget. Both also use a two-pronged pricing system, based on the number of agents/seats and the level of features needed.

Nowadays, it’s a crucial component in helping businesses focus on high-priority interactions and scale their customer service. 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. 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.

The highlight of Zendesk’s ticketing software is its omnichannel-ality (omnichannality?). Whether agents are facing customers via chat, email, social media, or good old-fashioned phone, they can keep it all confined to a single, easy-to-navigate dashboard. That not only saves them the headache of having to constantly switch between dashboards while streamlining resolution processes—it also leads to better customer and agent experience overall.

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. Zendesk Sunshine is a separate feature set that focuses on unified customer views. Help desk SaaS is how you manage general customer communication and for handling customer questions. Zendesk is quite famous for designing its platform to be intuitive and its tools to be quite simple to learn.

Customers appreciate the platform’s ease of use, customization options, and robust reporting capabilities. However, some users have reported issues with the platform’s customer support and pricing. One of the standout features of Zendesk’s customer support is its ticketing system. Users can submit support tickets through the platform, and customer support teams can manage and track those tickets to ensure they are resolved promptly. This feature ensures that users receive the support they need when needed. Intercom was founded in 2011 by Eoghan McCabe, Ciaran Lee, Des Traynor, and David Barrett.

Zendesk has a rating of 4.3 out of 5 stars, based on over 5,600 reviews. Intercom has a rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars, based on over 2700 reviews. Intercom has a community forum where users can engage with each other and gain insights from their experiences. The Zendesk marketplace is also where you can get a lot of great add-ons.

Zendesk lets you chat with customers through email, chat, social media, or phone. Customers of Zendesk can purchase priority assistance at the enterprise tier, which includes a 99.9% uptime service level agreement and a 1-hour service level goal. At all tiers, there is an additional fee to work with a member of the Zendesk success team on unique engagements. Some of the links that appear on the website are from software companies from which CRM.org receives compensation. 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.

But I like that Zendesk just feels slightly cleaner, has easy online/away toggling, more visual customer journey notes, and a handy widget for exploring the knowledge base on the fly. 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. 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. This is especially helpful for smaller businesses that may not need a lot of features.

Chat features

It relies on fairly basic automation while routing more complex issues to live agents. While its integrations are not as far-reaching as Zendesk’s, it seamlessly works with modern communication and business tools, like WhatsApp and the most prominent CRMS. Not to mention marketing and sales tools, like Salesforce, Hubspot, and Google Analytics. One of Zendesk’s other key strengths has also been its massive library of integrations.

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.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. On the other hand, Zendesk’s customer database may not offer the same level of depth and richness as Intercom. A messenger platform that helps engage customers on your website or app. It provides bots and chats automation features to make communication with clients more efficient.

One place Intercom really shines as a standalone CRM is its data utility. Broken down into custom, resolution, and task bots, these can go a long way in taking repetitive tasks off agents’ plates. Overall, I actually liked Zendesk’s user experience better than Intercom’s in terms of its messaging dashboard. Intercom has a dark mode that I think many people will appreciate, and I wouldn’t say it’s lacking in any way.

Intercom’s Customer Support

Missouri Star Quilt Company is one of the world’s largest online retailers of fabric and quilting supplies, shipping thousands of orders a day. After struggling with different customer service solutions, Missouri Star Quilt Company turned to Zendesk for service and sales. Connecting Zendesk Support and Zendesk Sell allows its customer service and sales-oriented wholesale team to work together effortlessly. With Zendesk, you can use lead tracking features to filter and segment your leads in real time.

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. With this data, businesses identify friction points where the customer journey breaks down as well as areas where it’s performing smoothly. 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.

That way, your sales team won’t have to worry about manually updating these changes as they work through a deal. Intercom offers a comprehensive customer database with detailed profiles, enabling businesses to gather and analyze customer data easily. This helps in providing personalized experiences and targeted messaging.

Pipedrive also includes lead management features like automatic lead nurturing, labeling, and bulk imports. However, Pipedrive does not include native desktop text messaging features. One user noted that, in some cases, it can take Pipedrive at least eight hours to populate saved leads, making intercom or zendesk it difficult to quickly communicate with hot leads. While they like the ease of use this product offers its users, they’ve indeed rated them low in terms of services. Zendesk’s user interface is also modern and user-friendly but with a slightly different design aesthetic than Intercom.

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. Intercom does have a ticketing dashboard that has omnichannel functionality, much like Zendesk. 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? These are both still very versatile products, so don’t think you have to get too siloed into a single use case. Zendesk is a ticketing system before anything else, and its ticketing functionality is overwhelming in the best possible way. Both products are so full-featured that they both take quite a while to learn.

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. Intercom offers a simplistic dashboard with a detailed view of all customer details in one place. Operators will find its dashboard quite beneficial as it will take them seconds to find necessary Chat GPT 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.

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. 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.

If you’re looking for a comprehensive solution with lots of features and integrations, then Zendesk would be a good choice. On the other hand, if you need something that is more tailored to your customer base and is less expensive, then Intercom might be a better fit. Why don’t you try something equally powerful yet more affordable, like HelpCrunch? Zendesk offers so much more than you can get from free CRMs or less robust options, including sales triggers to automate workflows. For example, you can set a sales trigger to automatically change the owner of a deal based on the specific conditions you select.

Basically, if you have a complicated support process, go with Zendesk for its help desk functionality. If you’re a sales-oriented corporation, use Intercom for its automation options. Both tools can be quite heavy on your budget since they mainly target big enterprises and don’t offer their full toolset at an affordable price.

The dashboard is customizable, allowing users to efficiently access the features they use most frequently. Intercom’s clean and minimalistic design focuses on white space and easy-to-read fonts. The user interface is also highly responsive, making it easy to use on mobile devices.

This live chat service provider offers 200+ integrations to its user base. With a mix of productivity, collaboration, eCommerce, CRM, analytics, email marketing, social media, and other tools, you get the option to create an omnichannel suite. Intercom and Zendesk offer a range of features to help businesses manage their customer interactions. While Intercom focuses more on customer messaging and personalization, Zendesk focuses more on traditional customer support ticket management. Ultimately, the choice between these two platforms will depend on the specific needs of the business and the type of customer interactions they are looking to manage.

Intercom or Zendesk: Chatbot features

Messagely’s pricing starts at just $29 per month, which includes live chat, targeted messages, shared inbox, mobile apps, and over 750 powerful integrations. Its sales CRM software starts at $19 per month per user, but you’ll have to pay $49 to get Zapier integrations and $99 for Hubspot integrations. Finally, you can pay $199 per month per user for unlimited sales pipelines and advanced reporting along with other features. To sum things up, Zendesk is a great customer support oriented tool which will be a great choice for big teams with various departments. Intercom feels more wholesome and is more customer success oriented, but can be too costly for smaller companies.

Any business knows that the front desk is where everything happens. It’s where customers ask the questions that may result in the largest sales in your company’s history. But Intercom’s friendliness for growing companies is something you can’t afford to ignore.

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. 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 the company is smaller than Zendesk, Intercom has earned a reputation for building high-quality customer service software.

Zendesk’s reporting tools are arguably more advanced while Intercom is designed for simplicity and ease of use. Zendesk also prioritizes operational metrics, while Intercom focuses on behavior and engagement. Both Zendesk and Intercom are excellent customer service solutions. However, the right fit for your business will depend on your particular needs and budget.

• With its features and pricing, Zendesk is geared toward businesses that full in the range from mid-sized to enterprise-level.
• Its live chat feature and ability to send targeted messages and notifications make it a powerful tool for customer engagement.
• Though Intercom chat window says that their team typically replies in a few hours, I received the answer in a couple of minutes.

Imagine having the power to connect your helpdesk solution with a wide range of tools and applications that your team already uses. Whether it’s syncing data with your CRM, enhancing communication via messaging platforms, or automating tasks with productivity apps, Zendesk makes it possible. Intercom focuses on real-time customer messaging, while Zendesk provides a comprehensive https://chat.openai.com/ suite for ticketing, knowledge base, and self-service support. What sets Zendesk apart is its user-friendly interface, customizable workflows, and scalability. It caters to a wide range of industries, particularly excelling in e-commerce, SaaS, technology, and telecommunications. It is favored by customer support, helpdesk, IT service management, and contact center teams.

The learning and knowledgebase category is another one where it is a close call between Zendesk and Intercom. However, we will say that Intercom just edges past Zendesk when it comes to self-service resources. 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.

Its AI-powered tools and virtual assistants make it a formidable CRM-powered software. While not included with its customer service suite, it offers a full-fledged standalone CRM called Zendesk Sell. While it’s a separate product with separate costs, it does integrate seamlessly with Zendesk’s customer service platform. You’ll still be able to get your eyes on basic support metrics, like response times and bot performance, that will help you improve your service quality. However, Intercom’s real strength lies in generating insights into areas like customer journey mapping, product performance, and retention.

The choice between the two platforms would depend on the specific needs and preferences of each business. Intercom offers a unique pricing model based on the number of people you engage with, which includes both customers and team members. On the other hand, Zendesk offers plans based on the number of support agents, making it more suitable for businesses that have a dedicated support team. Intercom is an excellent option for businesses prioritizing personalized communication and customer engagement. Its live chat feature and ability to send targeted messages and notifications make it a powerful tool for customer engagement.

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. What’s more, it helps its clients build an integrated community forum and help center to improve the support experience in real-time. After this live chat software comparison, you’ll get a better picture of what’s better for your business.

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. Its robust ticketing system and automation capabilities make it an excellent option for businesses with high-volume customer support needs.

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. 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.