Zendesk vs Intercom: Which is better?

Zendesk Support app Help Center

Also, it’s the pioneer in the support and communication tools market. You can always count on it if you need a reliable customer support platform to process tickets, support users, and get advanced reporting. Combining these two powerhouses improves the management of customer tickets and support inquiries. Intercom transforms Zendesk into an even more efficient and responsive customer support system. It enables better tracking and resolution of customer issues, directly impacting customer satisfaction and support team effectiveness. Its tight integration with the Intercom app helps bridge the gap between customer feedback and product development.

Intercom is a complete customer communications platform with bots, apps, product tours, etc. Mailchimp is one of the biggest names in email marketing software. When looking for Intercom integrations that elevate customer communication and marketing efforts, Mailchimp integrates seamlessly.

You need a complete customer service platform that’s seamlessly integrated and AI-enhanced. As a Zendesk user, you’re familiar with tickets – you’ll be able to continue using these in Intercom. 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. In a nutshell, none of the customer support software companies provide decent assistance for users.

However, if you are looking for a robust messaging solution with customer support features, go for Intercom. Its intuitive messenger can help your business boost engagement and improve sales and marketing efforts. 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. In general, Zendesk offers a wide range of live chat features such as customizable chat widgets, automatic greetings, offline messaging, and chat triggers. In addition to these features, Intercom offers messaging automation and real-time visitor insights.

You can set office hours, live chat with logged-in users via their user profiles, and set up a chatbot. Customization is more nuanced than Zendesk’s, but it’s still really straightforward to implement. You can opt for code via JavaScript or Rails or even integrate directly with the likes of Google Tag Manager, WordPress, or Shopify. 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. 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.

You can create an omnichannel CRM suite with a mix of productivity, collaboration, eCommerce, CRM, analytics, email marketing, social media, and other tools. Both app stores include many popular integrations, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Mailchimp, and Zapier. Intercom offers an easy way to nurture your qualified leads (prospects) into customers with Intercom Series. Now that we’ve discussed the customer service-focused features of Zendesk and Intercom, let’s turn our attention to how these platforms can support sales and marketing efforts. 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. Zendesk is billed more as a customer support and ticketing solution, while Intercom includes more native CRM functionality.

Both options are well designed, easy to use, and share some pretty key functionality like behavioral triggers and omnichannel-ality (omnichannel-centricity?). But with perks like more advanced chatbots, automation, and lead management capabilities, Intercom could have an edge for many users. You can create articles, share them internally, group them for users, and assign them as responses for bots—all pretty standard fare. Intercom can even integrate with Zendesk and other sources to import past help center content. I just found Zendesk’s help center to be slightly better integrated into their workflows and more customizable. The Zendesk Support app gives you access to live Intercom customer data in Zendesk, and lets you create new tickets in Zendesk directly from Intercom conversations.

Because Intercom started as a live chat service, its messenger functionality is very robust. It feels very modern, and Intercom offers some advanced messenger features that Zendesk does not. Broken down into custom, resolution, and task bots, these can go a long way in taking repetitive tasks off agents’ plates.

Zendesk is a cloud customer support ticketing system with customer satisfaction prediction. See how leading multi-channel consumer brands solve E2E customer data challenges with a real-time customer data platform. Zendesk has over 1,300 integrations, compared to Intercom’s 300+ apps, making it the leader in this category.

Though Zendesk now considers itself to be a “service-first CRM company,” since its founding in 2007, their bread and butter offering has leaned much more heavily toward the “service” part of that equation. 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. When you migrate your articles from Zendesk, we’ll retain your organizational structure for you. We’ll even flag any content you need to review and give you advice on how to fix it. If you’d like to remove the sync with Zendesk (and related data), you can do this from Articles Settings.

Unito supports more fields — like assignees, comments, custom fields, attachments and subtasks. You can also map fields and build flexible rules to perfectly suit your use case. Skyvia’s import supports all DML operations, including UPDATE and DELETE. This allows using import to perform mass update operations or mass deleting data, matching some condition. Skyvia’s import can load only new and modified records from Intercom to Zendesk and vice versa.

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 https://chat.openai.com/ dashboards to monitor the team’s performance on live chat. Zendesk is among the industry’s best ticketing and customer support software, and most of its additional functionality is icing on the proverbial cake.

This gives your team the context they need to provide fast and excellent support. Technology has drastically changed how we communicate, and effective communication tools can now make or break a company, especially in customer relations and support. But here’s the kicker—its superpowers shine when you team it up with other tools.The seamless integration of other tools can significantly intercom zendesk integration enhance efficiency and customer satisfaction. Let’s dive into how Intercom integrations can level up your business communication. Whichever solution you choose, mParticle can help integrate your data. MParticle is a Customer Data Platform offering plug-and-play integrations to Zendesk and Intercom, along with over 300 other marketing, analytics, and data warehousing tools.

By team

Now, their use cases comprise support, engagement, and conversion. Their chat widget looks and works great, and they invest a lot of effort to make it a modern, convenient customer communication tool. So when it comes to chatting features, the choice is not really Intercom vs Zendesk. The latter offers a chat widget that is simple, outdated, and limited in customization options, while the former puts all of its resources into its messenger.

Intercom recently ramped up its features to include helpdesk and ticketing functionality. Zendesk, on the other hand, started as a ticketing tool, and therefore has one of the market’s best help desk and ticket management features. If you’re exploring popular chat support tools Zendesk and Intercom, you may be trying to understand which solution is right for you. In this detailed comparison, we’ll explore the features and characteristics of Intercom and Zendesk, highlighting each of their unique capabilities, so you can identify the right solution for your needs. 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.

Which offers more customization, Intercom or Zendesk?

With this tool, users can quickly search across all of their connected apps, files, and more. The functionality lets users search all their connected apps simultaneously, eliminating the tedious need to search each individually. On its own, ClickUp’s all-in-one productivity platform comes with an impressive list of features. Its extensive set of third-party integrations extends its functionality even further. Using Zendesk, you can create community forums where customers can connect, comment, and collaborate, creating a way to harness customers’ expertise and promote feedback.

When a conversation is found in Intercom, create a ticket in Zendesk and keep both in sync. While both Zendesk and Intercom offer ways to track your sales pipeline, each platform handles the process a bit differently. 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.

To sum things up, one can get really confused trying to make sense of the Zendesk suite pricing, let alone calculate costs. They’ve been marketing themselves as a messaging platform right from the beginning. How to set up a regular sync of all public articles from your Zendesk Guide Help Center into Intercom. Get accurate info in the right place, at the right time, save hours on busywork, and align your team — giving them the freedom to focus and achieve more than ever.

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. Triggers should prove especially useful for agents, allowing them to do things like automate notifications for actions like ticket assignments, ticket closing/reopening, or new ticket creation. Their template triggers are fairly limited with only seven options, but they do enable users to create new custom triggers, which can be a game-changer for agents with more complex workflows. 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. Just like Zendesk, Intercom also offers its Operator bot, which will automatically suggest relevant articles to clients right in a chat widget.

You’ll see a green confirmation banner indicating the removal has been successful and synced articles will be deleted from your Articles list. Synced articles and their content will be retrievable from the Public API similar to Intercom articles. However, you won’t be able to edit or manipulate synced articles via API calls.

It guarantees continuous omnichannel support that meets customer expectations. Basically, if you have a complicated support process, go with Zendesk, an excellent Intercom alternative, for its help desk functionality. If you’re a sales-oriented corporation, use Intercom for its automation options.

When considering Intercom integrations for gathering vital user feedback, SurveySparrow seamlessly integrates with Intercom. The software offers a dynamic way to collect customer insights directly, allowing businesses to take steps to improve the customer experience. Through SurveySparrow’s integration, Intercom customer conversations can evolve into another valuable source of feedback.

Zendesk also offers a sales pipeline feature through its Zendesk Sell product. You can set up email sequences that specify how and when leads and contacts are engaged. With Zendesk Sell, you can also customize how deals move through your pipeline by setting pipeline stages that reflect your sales cycle. You can collect ticket data from customers when they fill out the ticket, update them manually as you handle the conversation. The Help Center software by Intercom is also a very efficient tool. You can publish your self-service resources, divide them by categories, and integrate them with your messenger to accelerate the whole chat experience.

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. On the contrary, Intercom is far less predictable when it comes to pricing and can cost hundreds/thousands of dollars Chat PG per month. 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. 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.

This integration allows for more targeted email campaigns by utilizing customer data and Intercom contacts. ClickUp’s full range can be realized through the plethora of templates it offers, that cover many use cases businesses deal with daily. The email automation template, for example, uses ClickUp’s integration with Intercom to streamline customer conversations.

These are both still very versatile products, so don’t think you have to get too siloed into a single use case. Yes, you can support multiple brands or businesses from a single Help Desk, while ensuring the Messenger is a perfect match for each of your different domains. Just visit Articles in Intercom, click Get started with articles and then Migrate from Zendesk. In terms of pricing, Intercom is considered one of the most expensive tools on the market.

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. 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. What can be really inconvenient about Zendesk is how their tools integrate with each other when you need to use them simultaneously. If you thought Zendesk prices were confusing, let me introduce you to the Intercom charges. It’s virtually impossible to predict what you’ll pay for Intercom at the end of the day. They charge for customer service representative seats and people reached, don’t reveal their prices, and offer tons of custom add-ons at additional cost.

Zendesk also has an Answer Bot, which instantly takes your knowledge base game to the next level. It can automatically suggest relevant articles for agents during business hours to share with clients, reducing your support agents’ workload. You can create dozens of articles in a simple, intuitive WYSIWYG text editor, divide them by categories and sections, and customize with your custom themes. If you create a new chat with the team, land on a page with no widget, and go back to the browser for some reason, your chat will go puff. All customer questions, be it via phone, chat, email, social media, or any other channel, are landing in one dashboard, where your agents can solve them quickly and efficiently.

Campaign Monitor helps companies leverage email marketing to enhance customer relationships. Integrating email campaigns with Intercom contacts opens the door for more highly targeted communication. This connection with customer data will also allow you to craft more relevant content that resonates better with the intended audience.

Learn more about the differences between leading chat support solutions Intercom and Zendesk so that you can choose the right tool for your needs. After switching to Intercom, you can start training Custom Answers for Fin AI Agent right away by importing your historic data from Zendesk. Fin AI Agent will use your history to recognize and suggest common questions to create answers for. At the same time, they both provide great and easy user onboarding.

With mParticle, you can connect your Zendesk and Intercom data with other marketing, analytics, and business intelligence platforms without any custom engineering effort. 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.

You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. As a widely-used platform, Intercom offers seamless integration with numerous apps. We’ve put together a list of powerful tools that can enhance Intercom’s functionality or have their functionality extended by it. Zendesk and Intercom are robust tools with a wide range of customer service and CRM features. With both tools, you can also use support bots to automatically suggest specific articles, track customers’ ratings, and localize help center content to serve your customers in their native language.

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. Yes, you can localize the Messenger to work with multiple languages, resolve conversations automatically in multiple languages and support multiple languages in your Help Center. When you switch from Zendesk, you can also create dynamic macros to speed up your response time to common queries, like feature requests and bug reports.

The two essential things that Zendesk lacks in comparison to Intercom are in-app messages and email marketing tools. On the other hand, Intercom lacks many ticketing functionality that can be essential for big companies with a huge client support load. The Zendesk chat tool has most of the necessary features like shortcuts (saved responses), automated triggers, and live chat analytics. The Intercom versus Zendesk conundrum is probably the greatest problem in the customer service software world. They both offer some state-of-the-art core functionality and numerous unusual features. With Skyvia you can easily perform bi-directional data synchronization between Intercom and Zendesk.

Jira is a well-known issue and project-tracking solution from Atlassian. The software integrates effectively with Intercom, enabling streamlined customer support workflows and enhancing team productivity. Founded in 2007, Zendesk started as a ticketing tool for customer success teams. It was later that they started adding all kinds of other features, like live chat for customer conversations. They bought out the Zopim live chat solution and integrated it with their toolset. Zendesk, unlike Intercom, is a more affordable and predictable customer service platform.

Yes, you can install the Messenger on your iOS or Android app so customers can get in touch from your mobile app. Check out this tutorial to import ticket types and tickets data into your Intercom workspace. This article explains how concepts from Zendesk work in Intercom, how you can easily get started with imports, and what to set up first. Test any of HelpCrunch pricing plans for free for 14 days and see our tools in action right away.

Which means it’s rather a customer relationship management platform than anything else. Intercom is more for improving sales cycle and customer relationships, while Zendesk has everything a customer support representative can dream about, but it does lack wide email functionality. On the other hand, it provides call center functionalities, unlike Intercom. 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 former is one of the oldest and most reliable solutions on the market, while the latter sets the bar high in terms of innovative and out-of-the-box features.

Intercom vs Zendesk: intro

When integrating data, you can fill some Intercom fields that don’t have corresponding Zendesk fields (or vice versa) with constant values. You can use lookup mapping to map target columns to values, gotten from other target objects depending on source data. Operation is executed in a cloud automatically on schedule or manually at any time. Here’s what to look for in the best Intercom integrations and the top 10 Intercom integrations to consider in 2024.

With this Intercom integration, businesses can extract customer insights directly from Intercom conversations. With this data, teams can shape product roadmaps and features based on real user feedback. But they also add features like automatic meeting booking (in the Convert package), and their custom inbox rules and workflows just feel a little more, well, custom. I’ll dive into their chatbots more later, but their bot automation features are also stronger. Zendesk and Intercom also both offer analytics and reporting capabilities that allow businesses to analyze and monitor customer agents’ productivity. As a result, companies can identify trends and areas for improvement, allowing them to continuously improve their support processes and provide better service to their customers.

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. Unito supports dozens of integrations, with more being added monthly. And they’re all two-way by default, meaning information can flow back and forth in real-time.

• But with perks like more advanced chatbots, automation, and lead management capabilities, Intercom could have an edge for many users.
• Learn more about the differences between leading chat support solutions Intercom and Zendesk so that you can choose the right tool for your needs.
• You can create articles, share them internally, group them for users, and assign them as responses for bots—all pretty standard fare.
• This gives your team the context they need to provide fast and excellent support.

At the same time, the vendor offers powerful reporting capabilities to help you grow and improve your business. Salesforce, a customer relationship management (CRM) leader, offers a robust integration with Intercom. This tight integration allows companies to leverage their Intercom conversations and customer data to drive sales and improve customer support. The integration enables a seamless flow of information, providing greater customer satisfaction and sales team efficiency.

But it’s designed so well that you really enjoy staying in their inbox and communicating with clients. Why don’t you try something equally powerful yet more affordable, like HelpCrunch? Zendesk started in 2007 as a web-based SaaS product for managing incoming customer support requests. Since then, it has evolved into a full-fledged CRM that offers a suite of software applications to its over 160,000 customers like Uber, Siemens, and Tesco. 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.

If you’ve already set up macros in Zendesk just copy and paste them over. 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. Intercom feels more wholesome and is more client-success-oriented, but it can be too costly for smaller companies.

Yes, you can integrate the Intercom solution into your Zendesk account. It will allow you to leverage some Intercom capabilities while keeping your account at the time-tested platform. Though the Intercom chat window says that their customer success team typically replies in a few hours, don’t expect to receive any real answer in chat for at least a couple of days. Email us at or use the live chat inside the platform with any questions or feedback.

The cheapest plan for small businesses – Essential – costs $39 monthly per seat. But that’s not it, if you want to resolve customer common questions with the help of the vendor’s new tool – Fin bot, you will have to pay $0.99 per resolution per month. Intercom live chat is modern, smooth, and has many advanced features that other chat tools don’t. It’s highly customizable, too, so you can adjust it according to your website or product’s style.

Say what you will, but Intercom’s design and overall user experience leave all its competitors far behind. You can see their attention to detail — from tools to the website. If you’d want to test Intercom vs Zendesk before deciding on a tool for good, they both provide free trials for 14 days. But sooner or later, you’ll have to decide on the subscription plan, and here’s what you’ll have to pay. So yeah, all the features talk actually brings us to the most sacred question — the question of pricing. You’d probably want to know how much it costs to get each of the platforms for your business, so let’s talk money now.

Zendesk also packs some pretty potent tools into their platform, so you can empower your agents to do what they do with less repetition. Agents can use basic automation (like auto-closing tickets or setting auto-responses), apply list organization to stay on top of their tasks, or set up triggers to keep tickets moving automatically. 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.

Skyvia offers a number of benefits for import Intercom data to Zendesk or vice versa. With Skyvia import you can use data filtering, perform data transformations, and many more. Besides, Skyvia supports the UPSERT operation — inserting new records and updating records already existing in the target. This allows importing data without creating duplicates for existing target records. ClickUp’s Intercom integration includes ClickUp’s Universal Search feature.

Customers won’t need to leave your app or website to find the help they need.Zendesk, on the other hand, will redirect the customer to a new web page. Is it as simple as knowing whether you want software strictly for customer support (like Zendesk) or for some blend of customer relationship management and sales support (like Intercom)? Powered by Explore, Zendesk’s reporting capabilities are pretty impressive.

Combining it with Intercom will take your communication and collaboration game to another level. Businesses can benefit from better customer retention and generate more growth opportunities by making this connection. 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. 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. 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’s helpdesk application allows merchants to provide cross-channel support to their shoppers. With Skyvia you can integrate Intercom with Zendesk in a number of ways. If you need to load data in one direction, from Intercom to Zendesk or vice versa, you can use Skyvia import. For loading data in both directions, Skyvia offers powerful data synchronization. For small companies and startups, Intercom offers a Starter plan — with a balanced suite of features from each of the solutions below — at $74 per month per user, billed annually. Intercom allows visitors to search for and view articles from the messenger widget.

However, you can browse their respective sites to find which tools each platform supports. For standard reporting like response times, leads generated by source, bot performance, messages sent, and email deliverability, you’ll easily find all the metrics you need. 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. Using this, agents can chat across teams within a ticket via email, Slack, or Zendesk’s ticketing system.