The 14 Best Zendesk Competitors and Alternatives 2023

Choose a tool that provides excellent customer support and resources to help you resolve any issues that may arise. Here’s a curated list of the best affordable Intercom alternatives for small businesses that want to provide exceptional customer service without going bankrupt. If you’re looking for a tool to improve your customer service workflow, there are solutions that can offer the same benefits without costing an arm and a leg. It’s important to evaluate your business needs and budget to decide whether Intercom is the right fit for you.

HubSpot’s live chat tool is seamlessly integrated with a chatbot creator, which doesn’t require any coding. This enables businesses to create chatbots that can qualify leads, schedule appointments, address common queries, and more. HubSpot’s online knowledge base and the Academy offer self-help resources, including a vast library of articles and premium courses for earning credentials. The Starter package includes email and live chat support, while phone support is available with Professional and Enterprise subscriptions. One notable feature of HubSpot’s integration is the two-way data sync, allowing real-time data exchange between HubSpot and external solutions.

Intercom, Drift and Zendesk Strategies On Website

Pricing is an important factor to consider when choosing between Zendesk and Intercom as the support tool you choose can have a significant impact on your business’s budget and overall return on investment. Zendesk and Intercom each have their own marketplace/app store where users can find all the integrations for each platform. Intercom does not offer a native call center tool, so it cannot handle calls through a cloud-based phone system or calling app on its own. However, you can connect Intercom with over 40 compatible phone and video integrations.

• Their reports are attractive, dynamic, and integrated right out of the box.
• One thing unique about Gist is while their base plan starts at $29/mo with 5 users included, their $99/mo plan includes unlimited users making it a perfect and affordable suite for large teams.
• Their customer service management tools have a shared inbox for support teams.
• Unlike platforms like Jetdocs, which gives you unlimited departments in their pro plan, Zoho limits you to 15 departments even on their highest tier.
• Some of the categories of data you can import and organize into dashboards include comments, average customer reply times and events/activities.
• Another thing that makes Help Scout so attractive is that there is a refined feature set and intuitive interface that make the system simple to use.

Advanced AI powers Ortto’s next-generation live chat tool, Talk, which lets businesses leverage insights from their customer data platform to provide truly personalized conversations at scale. Unlike existing solutions, with functional data limitations that are more hindrance than help, Talk is built into Ortto’s marketing automation, analytics, and customer data platform. Make a list of the features and functionalities you need in a customer support tool. This can include things like live chat, shared inbox, auto follow-ups, and more. Ensure that the alternative you choose provides all the necessary features that you need to effectively support your customers. First of all, Zendesk is built with customer service and ticket management in mind while Intercom is built more around sales with a built-in CRM.

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Depending on the seat type (subscription plan), users get access to different features. For example, the Messaging feature is not available in the Support plan, while Articles aren’t available in the Engage and Conver plans. Unfortunately, you can’t calculate the price by yourself since Intercom hid its pricing table. Though, you can sum up the price together with the Intercom sales team accurately if you contact them. They have a nice implementation of live chat in their product as well, it’s actually thoughtful (and further customer-focused).

This feature allows Drift users to hop on a call with prospects and use screen share to add more context to the conversation. Intercom is a flexible Zendesk alternative with many features in sales and marketing in addition to advanced customer support. Its omnichannel features allow businesses to manage communication channels. Thanks to Qpien, agents can easily monitor all customer communications on a single screen and provide fast feedback.

Intercom vs Zendesk: Which One is Right for Your Business?

For example, with this integration, businesses can ask customers for feedback after they have interacted with customer service representatives or completed a purchase on their website. AzureDesk is an excellent Zendesk alternative for businesses looking for an easy-to-use and comprehensive customer service platform. It provides a full suite of tools to help you manage customer interactions, including ticketing, messaging, and automated workflows. Plus, the intuitive interface makes it easy to set up and use right away. Zendesk Chat is a customer communication platform that offers live chat, messenger, and email integrations (CCM solutions).

Yes, you can find the Intercom integration in the Zendesk Marketplace—and it’s free to install. Zendesk is a great and robust support too, but is Intercom a replacement for Zendesk in terms of functionality? 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.

Intercom or Zendesk: Help desk and ticketing

As a freelancer, I don’t need all the integrations and support that Intercom provides. Both Zendesk Chat and Intercom have a free trial available and a freemium model to test out which chat service will work best for your company. Intercom features phone support, online support, and a knowledge base. Therefore, Intercom may be a better fit for larger businesses with multiple agents helping people. When a customer works with two agents and receives two different answers, they’re going to be very frustrated and won’t value the experience. Both Zendesk Chat and Intercom have similar features, but Intercom is more suited for small to mid-sized companies.

Price (Discount offered on annual plans. For proactive agent collision as well as 24/7 email and chat support, you need to start with their Enterprise plan). Best Zendesk alternative for organizations looking for an all-in-one help desk solution with real-time data collection. Intercom’s customer messaging platform focuses on enabling organizations to build authentic relationships with their clients throughout every stage of the sales funnel. Intercom also offers four package sets tailored to different company sizes and requirements. If you’re just starting out, the ‘Start’ ($59/month) or ‘Grow’ ($119/month) payment options should suffice. It seamlessly integrates with popular software like Salesforce, Google Analytics, and many others.

Customer-Centric Companies

However, Gorgias is set apart from the competition thanks to its integrations with BigCommerce, Shopify, and Magento. Many businesses find Help Scout to be a complete customer service software that takes both metadialog.com the agent and customer experience into consideration. Another thing that makes Help Scout so attractive is that there is a refined feature set and intuitive interface that make the system simple to use.

Although Zendesk is a great customer service solution, with a lot of features built into it there are some limitations and reasons why one might want to switch away from Zendesk. For one, there are some features that may require add-ons in order to fully take advantage of the platform. These add-ons can be quite expensive and may not always be necessary, so it’s important to consider this when deciding which plan is right for you.

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In addition, Freshdesk stands out with the various in-app collaborations that make it easy for support teams to work in an organized manner and resolve tickets. It is considered an important Zendesk alternative thanks to the ability of teams to collaborate seamlessly within the platform, the live chatbot, and CRM integration. Multi-channel communication and customizable analytics reports are among its other highlights. It has basic features such as channel communication, loyalty tools, and detailed customer reports for analysis. In addition, the advanced ticket system aims to keep the customer satisfaction of the enterprises at the highest level. In addition, the advanced multi-integration feature is among the ones that strengthen the hands of enterprises.

• Using the shortcut here might be frustrating for those accustomed to the hyperlink use case.
• Leveraging AI-powered chatbots, Zoho Desk employs Zia, an intelligent assistant, to share relevant knowledge base solutions with customers and agents.
• “I like how HubSpot Service Hub helps a company from every perspective.
• But to provide a more robust customer experience, businesses may need to consider integrating Intercom’s AI tool with a third-party customer service platform, as it falls short of a full-stack offering.
• Moreover, these are new prices as they’re in the middle of changing their pricing policy right now (and they’re definitely not getting cheaper).
• Moreover, Intercom bots can converse naturally with customers by using conversation starters, respond with self-help, and knowledge base articles.

Intercom offers an easy way to nurture your qualified leads (prospects) into customers with Intercom Series. Using Intercom Series, you can create rules that trigger when the sales campaign begins, choose a target audience, and set the time you want to follow up, whether via email, messenger, or within your product. You can also add apps to your Intercom Messenger home to help users and visitors get what they need, without having to start a conversation.

Onboarding features

Every single bit of business SaaS in the world needs to leverage the efficiency power of workflows and automation. Customer service systems like Zendesk and Intercom should provide a simple workflow builder as well as many pre-built automations which can be used right out of the box. Intercom’s dashboards may not be as aesthetically pleasing as Zendesk’s, but they still allow users to navigate their tools with few distractions. 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.

Intercom’s help center allows you to create and publish engaging articles around help topics. You can use its editor to effortlessly add images, videos, and call-to-action-buttons, wherever necessary. Intercom’s design and overall user-interface feel modern, intuitive, and quite easy on the eyes.

• In general, Zendesk offers a wide range of live chat features such as customizable chat widgets, automatic greetings, offline messaging, and chat triggers.
• Whatever people are using to communicate with each other, whether it be online or over the phone, they expect to also be able to talk to the businesses they use with those same tools and platforms.
• Freshdesk also understands the importance of real-time updating of information and documentation.
• You get to engage with them further and get to know more about their expectations.
• And this, undoubtedly, leaves your customer support agents free to solve urgent matters.
• Therefore, a helpdesk with a good inbox can make your team efficient in solving problems.

Intercom is primarily focused on customer messaging and engagement, with a strong emphasis on providing a personalized experience for customers. It offers a range of messaging tools, including live chat, email, and chatbots, and has a knowledge base feature for self-service support. The software is versatile and allows agents to connect with clients via chat, email, phone, or social media. If you are looking to deflect support requests to self-service options, then Kustomer has no-code chatbots available to help. The only downside to this Zendesk alternative is that it is a bit costly, and pricing can be confusing.