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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Customer.io

    Score9.1 out of 10
    Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
    Customer.io is a customer engagement platform that enables marketers to build sophisticated automated messaging campaigns. With access to real-time behavioral data, users can create personalized and relevant messages to engage and retain customers. This includes sending emails, push notifications, SMS, in-app messages, and more through a visual building experience. Built for scale, Customer.io boasts users among over 5,300 companies, sending over 17 billion messages per year.

    $100

    per month

    Zendesk Suite

    Score8.5 out of 10
    N/AZendesk is a customer support solution with built-in ticketing, conversational messaging, and live chat, designed to help businesses of all sizes and industries deliver personalized service at scale. Zendesk's AI agents are trained in CX to help Service teams resolve customer issues faster and more accurately while still providing a human-centered experience. Zendesk ultimately aims to help businesses improve time to value, reduce effort per ticket, and keep costs low.

    $69

    per month per agent

    Pricing
    Customer.ioZendesk Suite
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Suite Team
    $69
    per month per agent
    Suite Growth
    $115
    per month per agent
    Suite Professional
    $149
    per month per agent
    Suite Enterprise
    Contact Sales
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Customer.ioZendesk Suite
    Free Trial
    YesYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalOptional
    Additional DetailsEssentials: For startups and small teams engaging customers on their mobile and web apps. - Up to 5,000 profiles*, Send Emails, Push, In-App, and SMS, Visual Workflow Builder, Segmentation, Two Workspaces, Email Support, Customer Community Premium: For high-growth companies looking for greater control over their messaging outcomes. - Everything in Essentials, Custom Data + Message Volume, Premium Product Features, Additional Workspaces, 90-day Onboarding Program, Premium Email & Chat Support, Managed Deliverability, Dedicated IPs, Parcel Pro Licenses, HIPAA Compliance Enterprise: For at-scale companies looking to create world-class customer experiences. - Everything in Premium, Managed Infrastructure*, Customer Success Manager, Quarterly Success Reviews, Technical Account Manager*, Audit Logging & Data Governance*, Parcel Business Licenses, Migration Support*, *Available by consultation.20% discount available with annual pricing.
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Customer.ioZendesk Suite
    Considered Both Products
    Customer.io
    Chose Customer.io
    Customer.io had the best suite of features and - most importantly for us - was willing to sign a BAA with us so we could maintain HIPAA compliance. Mailchimp was fine but we felt Customer.io had a cleaner interface and was easier for general marketers who aren't dedicated email …
    Incentivized
    Chose Customer.io
    Customer.io has in my opinion more robust features for comms campaigns vs some of the other tools available on the market that have other focuses primarily and then have CRM tacked on. We've also found Customer.io to be more easy to integrate with the tech stack of our business …
    Incentivized
    Zendesk
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    14 Answers
    87%
    Would buy again
    123 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    11 Answers
    85%
    Delivers good value for the price
    108 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    14 Answers
    92%
    Happy with the feature set
    131 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    9 Answers
    85%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    82 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    10 Answers
    85%
    Implementation went as expected
    94 Answers
    Features
    Customer.ioZendesk Suite
    Incident and problem management
    Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Customer.io and Zendesk Suite
    Feature
    Customer.io
    -
    Ratings
    Zendesk Suite
    8.6
    187 Ratings
    5% above category average
    Organize and prioritize service tickets00 Ratings9.1186 Ratings
    Expert directory00 Ratings7.9127 Ratings
    Subscription-based notifications00 Ratings8.4130 Ratings
    ITSM collaboration and documentation00 Ratings7.8131 Ratings
    Ticket creation and submission00 Ratings9.3186 Ratings
    Ticket response00 Ratings9.0185 Ratings
    Self Help Community
    Comparison of Self Help Community features of Customer.io and Zendesk Suite
    Feature
    Customer.io
    -
    Ratings
    Zendesk Suite
    8.5
    169 Ratings
    6% above category average
    External knowledge base00 Ratings8.5163 Ratings
    Internal knowledge base00 Ratings8.4156 Ratings
    Multi-Channel Help
    Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of Customer.io and Zendesk Suite
    Feature
    Customer.io
    -
    Ratings
    Zendesk Suite
    8.4
    182 Ratings
    5% above category average
    Customer portal00 Ratings9.1150 Ratings
    IVR00 Ratings8.076 Ratings
    Social integration00 Ratings7.4119 Ratings
    Email support00 Ratings9.2178 Ratings
    Help Desk CRM integration00 Ratings8.4138 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Customer.ioZendesk Suite
    Small Businesses
    Simplify360
    Score7.8 out of 10
    Help Scout
    Score9.3 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Braze
    Score8.7 out of 10
    LiveAgent
    Score8.8 out of 10
    Enterprises
    SAP Service Cloud
    Score8.5 out of 10
    Front
    Score9.2 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Customer.ioZendesk Suite
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.1
    (20 ratings)
    8.7
    (225 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (43 ratings)
    Usability
    9.2
    (12 ratings)
    8.6
    (98 ratings)
    Availability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (14 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (11 ratings)
    Support Rating
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    5.5
    (31 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Online Training
    -
    (0 ratings)
    6.4
    (10 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (19 ratings)
    Configurability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (4 ratings)
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    Professional Services
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Customer.ioZendesk Suite
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Customer.io
    Talking from the perspective of a marketer at a SaaS with average. 50K email subscribers, Customer IO has been an excellent tool for us. Our requirements include sending users newsletters, marketing emails, and transactional emails, running lead-nurturing campaigns, and more. For a comprehensive use case like ours, CustomerIO is great. While it also has a learning curve, when you have such requirements, it’s worth it. I don’t think CustomerIO is the best fit if you have basic requirements like only weekly newsletter emails.
    Incentivized
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    Zendesk
    Zendesk is good for small teams where work is not passed along to internal teams or situations where escalations lead to further customer interactions and no further oversight is needed. It is weak as a product for larger and medium-sized companies, where processes are in place that are not aligned with its workflow, as it is a very rigid tool.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Customer.io
    • Managing users, attributes and events. You are easily able to modify any user, based on their ID, and add or remove attributes, assign events to them. That makes it very easy to segment later and to assign them to several campaigns based on behavior. Just a warning: this integration isn't so easy (at least it wasn't for us).
    • Creating workflows of campaigns is very easy. You can quickly create behavioral campaigns based on attributes, segments and add elements to the workflow. You can send an email, then wait, then send another, then exit the campaign if they converted, etc. The workflow is easy to configure and very powerful for automation.
    • We don't use many email templates (we make them in MJML) but it's very easy to add senders, to change templates and in general to test designs.
    • Deliverability works very well, at least for us. It sends emails pretty fast and without issues.
    • Exporting is very quick and easy. Importing wasn't a feature until recently, but it works well too.
    • Seeing activity it's also useful. In general, logs are awesome (be it of a customer, of activity on the site, email sends, etc.).
    • We don't use environments, but it might be very useful for a bigger company.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Zendesk
    • Merging of the tickets with similar issues, it is easy to avoid confusion
    • Al global team somehow gets connected with different ways like Slack, with the Zendesk Suite which is so easier to highlight & the issue quickly
    • The best thing is that this tool gives you to send the message via chat-, email, call through the one single platform
    • Now AI has been added so it works good
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Customer.io
    • Price is quite expensive for Premium or once you get into high volumes of contacts.
    • Depending on how you'll use it, it may require some help from developers to set up.
    • Despite the support being great, you have to email them, there's not chat feature.
    Read full review
    Zendesk
    • Is there a way for AEs and CSMs to be informed in a weekly summary of all their accounts and any tickets? Example: Disney submitted a ticket on XYZ. Google has an urgent issue on X still unresolved.
    • Is there a way for CSMs or AEs to have a Dashboard that's specific to their accounts instead of seeing all the tickets in the queue that are not relevant to them?
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Customer.io
    No answers on this topic
    Zendesk
    Zendesk is an amazing tool for communicating with your customers easily. The communication tickets from sellers to us or from us to sellers are stored, and there are statuses used to make communication easy. We have internal conversations between departments, linked with useful software such as Zingtree, Talkdesk, and Webs.
    Incentivized
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    Usability
    Customer.io
    Super intuitive and easy interface to start off with. There are not a lot of guides and the documentation is helpful but not super extensive, but even if you're a little technical, you can easily figure most of the things out by yourself. Everything is super easy to start with and the platform does not overwhelm you with a lot of options, or data.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Zendesk
    Pros: The agent interface is sleek, contemporary, and relatively easy to learn compared to many other enterprise tools. For common tasks, admins are given point-and-click options- adding fields, modifying workflows, constructing macros. The knowledge base (Guide) editor is easy to use for non-developers. Drawbacks: Once you move past the initial things - complex automations, reporting/analytics in Explore, and/or customizations integrating the API, it requires much more advanced training to use successfully. Navigating between the different modules (Support, Explore, Chat, Guide) can feel very disconnected; often you are reminded that it really is a "suite" of products brought together -not really one unified platform. If you're using multiple brands managing simultaneous support tickets, or heavily customizing workflows to meet your brand, you may run into a bit of struggle with usability. So: it's a lot more user friendly than the palaces (Salesforce Service Cloud, ServiceNow), but is not used as quickly or with as much streamlined flow as a product made for a small shop. So if you are looking for a great balance, this is a good option if you are a net new organization or an organization on their way to scaling from 15 - 50 employee. Expect some elbow grease from the admin team once learning, adapting, and working efficiently once you move past the basics with your support tickets and initial customizations.
    Incentivized
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    Reliability and Availability
    Customer.io
    No answers on this topic
    Zendesk
    In the past year, I'd say I have only noticed maybe two hours total of downtime in my own usage. Very minimal.
    Read full review
    Performance
    Customer.io
    No answers on this topic
    Zendesk
    There has been minor performance degradation on a very few days out of the two years I have been using the product.
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Customer.io
    My experience with their support team has always been great. Very quick to respond, have an online chat, and are very helpful. They helped me resolve any issues I've had every time in a professional and knowledgeable manner. We've now switched to another tool, and I can't even compare the service level we get there to customer.io
    Incentivized
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    Zendesk
    We rarely need to contact their support team, but when we do they are responsive. However there have been notable times when communication between myself and the support rep was challenging despite me providing clear explanation of the issue, screenshots, and a thorough explanation of the goal we hope to achieve. It took several back and forth attempt, on a few occasions, to get resolution on an otherwise simple request
    Read full review
    Online Training
    Customer.io
    No answers on this topic
    Zendesk
    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.
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    Customer.io
    No answers on this topic
    Zendesk
    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
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    Alternatives Considered
    Customer.io
    Customer.io was really the first pure, full-featured drip email program on the market and as far as I know, it's still the simplest and best overall for that specific function. SendGrid has also added drip campaign features, but I would seriously evaluate Customer.io against any other drip email provider because they really have all the key elements you need to make it work.
    Incentivized
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    Zendesk
    At the time of evaluation, Dynamics had extremely limited knowledge and support capabilities. The UI is clunky, and reporting requires a deep understanding of the underlying data structure. Ongoing maintenance was costly and didn't provide a positive ROI in any sense of the term.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Scalability
    Customer.io
    No answers on this topic
    Zendesk
    WHY we will use Zendesk in HR and PD internally
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Customer.io
    • Positive impact on the sales side. I'm not sure about the specific ROI (you have to include the designer and the time it takes to set up) but you certainly get back the investment in a few months, once you are able to scale your email marketing.
    • Customer experience is way better by having more segmented, contextual and accurate messages sent to them.
    • Integration is costly and it will take several days or weeks to be fully achieved. Expect to invest some money on this.
    Incentivized
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    Zendesk
    • More than anything, provided a boost to our perceived professionalism. The portal is a massive improvement on email only support.
    • Workflow optimization via macros and automations has enhanced response times and raise our 'first call resolution' metric.
    • Speaking of metrics; having them at all! Before Zendesk Suite we were email only so had no insight into agent and vendor performance.
    Incentivized
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    ScreenShots

    Customer.io Screenshots

    Screenshot of data-driven or manual segments that can be created in the no-code builder for recipient lists, campaign triggers, filters, and conversion goals.Screenshot of the code editor for email, that helps navigate code and iterate.Screenshot of account performance, visible at a glance from the Dashboard view.Screenshot of drag and drop messages, time delays, and branches where desired, to build cross-channel campaigns.Screenshot of triggered campaigns based on forms submissions, customer attributes, customer actions, and dates.Screenshot of localization for global audiences. One message can be delivered in multiple languages.

    Zendesk Suite Screenshots

    Screenshot of the Zendesk Agent WorkspaceScreenshot of Omnichannel MessagingScreenshot of Zendesk TicketingScreenshot of Bots powered by Zendesk AIScreenshot of Tone shift with Zendesk AIScreenshot of Zendesk ticketing side conversations