Intercom vs Zendesk

Zendesk just recently entered into the Sales and CRM space, making their claim to “all-on-one” relatively weak. Zendesk CRM - known as Zendesk Sunshine -  is a newer offering in the market that was announced in winter 2018. Zendesk’s features beyond that of customer service management software are expanding, yet some software buyers may lack confidence in this relatively unproven extension of Zendesk’s core capabilities. Today, most customer service leaders expected their organizations to have both a primary CRM alongside Zendesk or Zendesk Sunshine. 

Intercom includes a customer data platform with people and company lists and custom events, but it does not offer a full CRM platform like that of Zendesk Sunshine. Intercom customers generally maintain a separate CRM to drive their business, one that Intercom integrates with. The Integration with HubSpot is available at Intercom’s Grow tier.

Customization is an area in which Zendesk shines. Through paid add-ons, Zendesk allows for robust customization to fit your business’s data needs - at a premium, of course. One such customization includes Zendesk Explore, a proprietary analytics product that touts omnichannel analytics and customer engagement metrics across multiple marketing and service channels. Beyond Explore, Zendesk dashboard features enable service leaders to simply interpret, evaluate, and improve team performance and ticket throughput. Another interesting add-on offered by Zendesk is Collaboration. With this add-on, Zendesk provides the teams with the ability to share and align with team members across departments.

Intercom is more of a specialized point solution and is suited for smaller teams than Zendesk, and therefore, is more difficult to customize. Intercom does offer customizable bots with code-free editing to match the look and feel of the website where they live. Intercom pricing packages can also be customized with add-ons for conducting product tours, account-based marketing, multi-channel campaigns, and resolution reporting.

In a relatively standard approach, Zendesk offers four paid pricing tiers to help customer service management software buyers identify and purchase the best configuration for their business. These package tiers are Essential, Team, Professional, and Enterprise. Zendesk pricing is designed such that customers will need to pay for every seat regardless of the level of access, with the exception of Zendesk Collaboration as described above. 

Intercom also offers four paid pricing tiers: Start and Grow for basic chat and messaging and Accelerate and Scale for automation and messaging at scale. Intercom’s packages come with a fixed number of users and additional users can be added for an additional charge, based on the tier. Each plan includes the capacity to reach out to 2,000 people per month and then charges customers $50/mo for every additional 1,000 people reached. This pricing can add up quickly as an organization scales, and Intercom charges between $199/mo and $499/mo for each of its add-ons.

There are a number of Zendesk integrations, spanning 1,000 apps in over 15 categories in the Zendesk Marketplace. With standard features like sorting, filtering, and searching, it is easy for users and prospects to locate and integrate their favorite third-party apps. 

Intercom offers far fewer integrations than Zendesk, its most popular integrations being with Stripe, Salesforce, Slack, HubSpot, Jira, and Segment. Noticeably lacking are its integrations for support teams, with less than 20 compared to the hundreds of helpdesk integrations with Zendesk.

Zendesk offers self-service functionality in its Support plans as Guide Lite and can be enhanced with add-on Guide purchases at various tiers. Guide includes powerful features like customization, permissioning, reporting, customer portal, and multilingual content. 

Intercom offers a help center product for self-service that is available starting with its Grow plan and offers a multi-lingual and private help center in its Accelerate and Scale plans.

Zendesk support is steeply differentiated by tiers with 24/7 email, phone and chat support only available in the Enterprise tier. At the enterprise tier, Zendesk customers can purchase priority support which includes a 1-hour service level objective and a 99.9% uptime service level agreement. The opportunity to work with the Zendesk success team member on custom engagements is available at all tiers for an add-on charge. 

Intercom offers training webinars and 24/7 chat and email support to all paid customers, with the opportunity to gain prioritized technical support and a dedicated relationship manager at the Accelerate and Scale tiers. The Scale tier includes the most support with tailored product onboarding, access to a customer success team, personalized training, and ongoing product consultation.