Intercom vs Zendesk: Comparing features, integrations, and pricing

Zendesk and HubSpot use artificial intelligence (AI)-powered automation and unified dashboards to improve customer relationships and team productivity, regardless of your business size. However, HubSpot‘s interface is not as user friendly as Zendesk’s, and its combined pricing for marketing, sales and service functions is quite expensive and complex. However, it offers a generous free version, allowing you to try its features—something missing in Zendesk. Intercom offers an integrated knowledge base functionality to its user base. Using the existing knowledge base functionality, they can display self-help articles in the chat window before the customer approaches your team for support.

It’s highly customizable, too, so you can adjust it according to your website or product’s style. Their chat widget looks and works great, and they invest a lot of effort to make it a modern, convenient customer communication tool. 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.

Third-Party Integrations

Just like Zendesk, Intercom also offers its Operator bot, which will automatically suggest relevant articles to clients right in a chat widget. You can publish your self-service resources, divide them by categories, and integrate them with your messenger to accelerate the whole chat experience. You can create dozens of articles in a simple, intuitive WYSIWYG intercom vs. zendesk text editor, divide them by categories and sections, and customize with your custom themes. However, as Monese grew and eyed a European expansion, it became clear that the company needed to centralize data in a single solution that would scale along with them. As you can imagine, banking from anywhere requires a flexible, robust customer service experience.

This can make it more difficult to import CRM data and obtain complete context from customer data. For example, Intercom’s Salesforce integration doesn’t create a view of cases in Salesforce. Intercom also has an omnichannel customer service solution, but it’s fairly limited, with no native voice capabilities and minimal voice integrations. 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.

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Intercom isn’t quite as strong as Zendesk in comparison to some of Zendesk’s customer support strengths, but it has more features for sales and lead nurturing. 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.

We have numerous customers that do this and benefit greatly from our out-of-the-box integration with Intercom. Yes—as your business’s needs grow, you will require a more sophisticated case management system. But that doesn’t mean you have to completely switch from your current provider if you’re not quite ready. Our integration with Intercom enables bi-directional contact and case synchronization, so you can continue using Intercom as your front-end digital experience and use Zendesk for case management.

What Intercom Offers:

In a nutshell, none of the customer support software companies provide decent assistance for users. But it’s designed so well that you really enjoy staying in their inbox and communicating with clients. The Zendesk chat tool has most of the necessary features like shortcuts (saved responses), automated triggers, and live chat analytics. 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. The Intercom versus Zendesk conundrum is probably the greatest problem in the customer service software world.

Zendesk also offers a straightforward interface to operators that helps them identify the entire interaction pathway with the customers. Operators can easily switch from one conversation to another, therefore helping operators manage more interactions simultaneously. Now that we know a little about both tools, it is time to make an in-depth analysis and identify which one of these will be perfect for your business. See how leading multi-channel consumer brands solve E2E customer data challenges with a real-time customer data platform. While both Zendesk and Intercom offer ways to track your sales pipeline, each platform handles the process a bit differently.

Leave your email below and a member of our team will personally get in touch to show you how Fullview can help you solve support tickets in half the time. Both Zendesk and HubSpot can get pricey as you combine products, but HubSpot is often more expensive than Zendesk, perhaps because it combines three hubs. To determine which is cheaper, highlight your needs and check out what the necessary tools will cost you. Meanwhile, remember that HubSpot allows you to benefit from its free version, whereas there’s no such option on Zendesk. Intercom is a user intelligence and behavioral targeting platform to better understand, improve, and benefit from your customer communication. As an example, Intercom and Zendesk are scored at 8.9 and 9.7, respectively, for all round quality and performance.

Zendesk is another popular customer service, support, and sales platform that enables clients to connect and engage with their customers in seconds. Just like Intercom, Zendesk can also integrate with multiple messaging platforms and ensure that your business never misses out on a support opportunity. 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. 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. With mParticle, you can connect your Zendesk and Intercom data with other marketing, analytics, and business intelligence platforms without any custom engineering effort.

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. 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.

Tools that allow support agents to communicate and collaborate are important aspect of customer service software. Create a help center combining knowledge base articles and a customer contact request form, embeddable into any webpage or mobile app. Customers can search the help center by query keywords and sort through articles in 40 languages. This article will compare Intercom vs Zendesk, outlining each tool’s features, ease-of-use, pricing and plans, pros and cons, and user-support options.

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 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. 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.

However, the right fit for your business will depend on your particular needs and budget. 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. Intercom is a customer relationship management (CRM) software company that provides a suite of tools for managing customer interactions. The company was founded in 2011 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

You can create these knowledge base articles in your target audience’s native language as their software is multilingual. They offer an omnichannel live 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. Intercom is better for smaller companies that are looking for a simple and capable customer service platform. Instead, using it and setting it up is very easy, and very advanced chatbots and predictive tools are included to boost your customer service. Intercom is a customer support platform known for its effective messaging and automation, enhancing in-context support within products, apps, or websites.

With a multi-channel ticketing system, Zendesk Support helps you and your team to know exactly who you’re talking to and keep track of tickets throughout all channels without losing context. The setup is designed to seamlessly connect your customer support team with customers across all platforms. These products range from customer communication tools to a fully-fledged CRM.

• Intercom offers admin full visibility and control over all company inboxes, as well as agent access controls and role management.
• For example, you can read in many Zendesk Sell reviews how adding sales tools benefits Zendesk Support users.
• Zendesk is a customer service software company that provides businesses with a suite of tools to manage customer interactions.