Intercom is an AI-first customer service platform that enhances the customer experience and improves operational efficiency, built on a single AI system with three major components: AI Agent, AI Copilot and AI Analyst (coming soon) to deliver customer service.
$39
per month per seat
Zendesk Suite
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
The Zendesk Support suite is a cloud-based customer support software built for better customer relationships. Designed to improve customer satisfaction and to support customers on any channel: text SMS, web, mobile app, phone, email, social media. The vendor states more than 200,000 companies such as Uber, Groupon, Box, Airbnb, and Slack are using Zendesk to lower their support costs, raise productivity, and increase customer satisfaction. Zendesk offers a full suite of products to meet customer…
$55
per month agent
Pricing
Intercom
Zendesk Suite
Editions & Modules
Essential
$39
per month per seat
Advanced
$99
per month per seat
Expert
$139
per month per seat
The Early Stage program
From $65 for 5 support seats
per month
Proactive Support Plus add-on
from $99
per month
Support Team (Foundational Support Only)
$19
per month agent
Suite Team
$55
per month agent
Support Professional
$55
per month agent
Suite Growth
$89
per month agent
Suite Professional
$115
per month agent
Support Enterprise
$115
per month agent
Suite Enterprise
$169
per month agent
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Intercom
Zendesk Suite
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
AI customer service features included in every plan.
Intercom integrates Help desk, AI Chat bot, and Proactive support.
Unlike Zendesk, Intercom has done it right, and continues to do so. Don't underestimate how important this is, we are many out in the market that feels this way
Intercom is a lot smoother and has more integration ability. It's macro features are a lot easier to navigate and control as well. The help center is also a huge bonus and the way it integrates into the chat is a lot less stressful to put together and utilize. Intercom makes …
I implemented Zendesk at a previous organization where we actually moved away from Intercom. I greatly preferred Intercom for functionality, ease of use, and even reliability for our websites and in-platform live chat widget. We moved to ZenDesk to have a streamlined …
Intercom sweeps the floor with Drift. Drift feel poorly made, less polished, and barely focused on customer support. Intercom is the exact opposite of this.
Freshdesk & Zendesk both offered a better experience for tickets in my opinion. Tickets on Intercom being mixed in with …
I have also utilized Zendesk and YouTrack for ticketing. Intercom was chosen because of price and ease of use. Additionally, if you are integrating chat into your application, it is easier to plug in than Zendesk.
I think that Intercom's ease of use and cost will likely …
Intercom missing the merging option, it's way easier but the merging is very important. However, Zendesk is little bit old fashion and not modern like Intercom
Intercom offers really good and consistent application for our clients to talk to us. Chat support is the fastest way to contact us and intercom has made it happen.
We used Zendesk at my last company and don't use ZD at all at my current company. Our customers love love love our fast, bot-fee cs/help. You can set up bots in Intercom, but we only use automated routing. We like to give a human touch. We haven't yet exploited the ability to …
We have evaluated Zendesk multiple times, however, ultimately, their lack of support for React-based apps meant that the cost of setup was not going to be worth it for us.
Zendesk also appears to be a number of products that have been haphazardly glued together rather than a …
We evaluated a number of products before choosing to move forward with Intercom. No contest, Intercom provided us with the level of tools and support we needed to serve our own customers well. We've been with the company for 3 years now and are sticking around for the …
Intercom was built as a chat-first support system, but that UX doesn't translate well to email or form-based support processes. Zendesk is built for email first support and has a pretty good chat support experience, but it lacks a lot of automation that Intercom includes. For …
Intercom provides amazing quality of support. Although sometimes they might take few hours to respond but the response that you would receive will be very satisfactory and to the point. It has everything that a user needs. They are easy to do business with. Setting up the …
Intercom very different because I think Zendesk is way more email-based and doesn't have that chat feature mentality to it. However, Zendesk does have much more robust reporting and tagging opportunities, which was very helpful for us. I would say they are both excellent …
I use all three of these platforms in unison so it is difficult to decide which is best. I do think that I like Intercom the best visually as well as it is very user-friendly. I would say that my least favorite one to deal with would be Talkdesk but that is because I use it the …
The UI elements on both the agent and customer side make Intercom the clear winner against Zendesk Chat. Intercom allows us to quickly offer chat with an elegant design, which makes our brand appear more professional. If you view any website that uses Zendesk Chat, their chat …
Zendesk has much more functionality on the canned responses so the team saves time in selecting the repeated small issues and reduces the chance of error, or the team member frankly getting bored. Secondary the tickets system is far superior to Intercom especially how it keeps …
Zendesk is more established than these two companies and provides a more robust solution for multi-channel support. Intercom is better suited for chat support and Freshdesk doesn't offer as many features and Zendesk does.
Well suited for real time customer support needs - that's where it really shines. Well suited for proactive outreach and the ability to gather feedback from customers + surveys. Less appropriate for a non techie company to set it up, basically any sort of changes in integration have to be done by an engineer.
Inbound messaging it is top notch, it does it well and couldn't imagine anyone's program doing it better. Like I said before been using ZenDesk for over 7 years and absolutely love it. We use the talk feature with the phone very limited so Zen works fine for us, but if I was running an inbound or outbound call center I don't believe Zen has all the functions I would want as a manager. For limited phone use and mostly email, text, and even web chat, ZenDesk works great. Having the iOS App is so great and flexibility with notifications allows my team to be "on call" anytime without unnecessary interruptions
Intercom's ability to centralize customer communication is a game-changer.
Intercom's automation features have saved us time and streamlined workflows.
Help desk for users.
Intercom seamlessly integrates with a variety of other tools and platforms, enhancing its functionality and making it a central part of our tech stack.
We have been and will be continuing our journey with Intercom and nothing too concerning has happened that I have experienced or heard of that has us on the edge yet. If it ever happens it will be something along the lines of "Outgrowing" the use of need of the platform.
Zendesk is super easy to use and navigate. I really enjoy the sleek layout, the ability to tailor tickets, the macro option, and the quick key guide they have to make your use of time even more effective. My whole team loves working with Zendesk and rarely ever has problems.
Everything is very straightforward and easy to see, explore, and use. Intercom provides walkthroughs and helps guides in case something is not apparent to the user and has their agents available to help. I always feel confident when exploring new features or making changes that I can have it accomplished due to the service they provide.
As an agent it's very simple to use. As an admin it's also easy to use, but sometimes lacks some functionality that would be nice to have such as expanded native 2 way sync functionality for many major apps that are commonly used today like HubSpot and Salesforce. The ability to add followers to tickets to they get updates and are in the know without the customer seeing this agent cc'd is a nice touch. This ensures additional visibility and easily following the communication without having to appear as a CC to the customer, who could accidentally remove that person in a response, thus breaking the visibility
Intercom is the premier customer support/engagement model and it definitely has one of the top tier customer support teams as well. I don't think I have ever waited more than 5 minutes to get the information I need or get help with an issue. They are incredible and I aim to model our customer service department after them.
Every time I contacted them they were not only very responsive and knowledgable, but always seemed to have a positive upbeat attitude. It probably helps that we did not have significant service outages or sev 1 level issues, but even my lower severity issues were quickly answered. And the positive and upbeat attitude really made things feel comfortable.
Zendesk has tons of available material for training - videos, webinars, articles, etc. The only reason this is not a 10 is because it can be hard to figure out how to navigate to these things and find what you are looking for.
I was very satisfied. They have a free trial for 30 days and I recommend you do that and use it. It is very easy to get started with the basics and the build on over time.
The only thing technically complex was single sign-on and integration to Salesforce.com required some tweaks – otherwise setting up system was very easy
We've used both Drift and Salesforce chat at Owl Labs in the past, and I didn't find them to meet our needs or customer needs the way Intercom has been able to. Intercom ranks higher for us regarding Integrations offered, customization, AI functionality, and user-friendliness. In the past, if chat visitors would click around our website, they'd have to start their chat over again from the start and lose their communication history with us. We also found that Salesforce chat did not have enough customization that we needed. One small example is that in Intercom, you can see when another teammate is looking at a chat and tag them in notes to collaborate. We didn't have access to anything like that when using Salesforce chat. Intercom has made it easy to work alongside one another to be more efficient.
If spoken honestly Intercom is a level-par with any nearest competitor, Tools like Zendesk has to catchup with them in speed. However, there is an advantage to Zendesk with its simple and easy-to-get software which falls in every mid and small-size business pocket wherein Intercom is way too expensive and needs a tech admin to customize the product. The kick-starting feature with negligible configuration made Zendesk the ideal choice of our organization + the budget fell under our expenses.