Hi there, and welcome to SelectHub’s ultimate Zendesk review.

We’re here to give you a detailed tour and our honest, unbiased opinions about Zendesk.

If you’re more of a binge watcher than a bookworm, good news! We’ve also recorded a 10-part video series. Check out the first video in the Zendesk series below.

Since you’re already here, you know that Zendesk is a leader in customer service software. Now you’re doing your homework and trying to figure out if it’s right for your business and how it stacks up against the competition. Let’s go!

Table of Contents

• What Does Zendesk Do?
• In-depth Zendesk Review
  • Who Is Zendesk Best Suited For?
  • Who Is Zendesk NOT Suited For?
  • Top Zendesk Differentiators
  • Features Not Supported By Zendesk
  • Zendesk Pricing: How Much Does It Cost?
  • Zendesk Alternatives: How Do They Stack Up?
  • Zendesk Reviews: Themes From Users
• Final Zendesk Review
• What’s next?

What Does Zendesk Do?

Zendesk is a customer support platform for helping businesses manage and improve their customer experiences. It offers a range of capabilities that enable companies to effectively handle customer interactions, respond to inquiries and resolve issues.

Zendesk is an omnichannel customer support platform for businesses of all sizes. Source

As a true omnichannel solution, Zendesk centralizes all your customer support needs in one place. Your conversations, customer data, tools and integrations are built into a single workspace so you can communicate with customers no matter how or where they contact you. This makes it easy for teams to personalize conversations, scale their service operations and adapt their support — all from one platform.

The key benefits of Zendesk are the following.

• Omnichannel Support: Zendesk allows support teams to manage and track support tickets from multiple channels, such as email, phone, chat and social media. This enables teams to prioritize and respond to customer inquiries in a timely manner.
• Self-Serve Portal: Zendesk customers can create a self-service portal, which includes a searchable knowledge base, FAQs and community forums. This helps customers find answers to questions on their own without needing to contact support directly.
• Powerful Automation and Workflows: Zendesk provides tools that help customer support teams streamline their processes, such as automatic ticket routing, assignment and prioritization. This helps teams work more efficiently and ensures that inquiries are handled by the appropriate agents.
• Built-In Reporting: Zendesk includes built-in reporting tools that allow businesses to track key customer support metrics, such as response times, resolution rates and customer satisfaction. These insights can help companies identify areas for improvement and optimize their support processes.

Reporting dashboard in Zendesk. Source

• 1,400+ Integrations and Flexible API: Zendesk integrates with over 1,400 third-party applications. It also offers an API, allowing businesses to customize the platform and connect it with their existing tools and systems.

Many competing platforms — some of which we’ll compare in the Alternatives section below — boast similar benefits; however, there are several key differences you should be aware of before making a final decision. With this primer out of the way, let’s get into the deep dive.

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In-Depth Zendesk Review

As a company that’s been around for 15+ years, Zendesk is certainly popular — but popularity doesn’t always make for a perfect fit. Next up, we cover who Zendesk is best suited for, who it’s not suited for, top differentiators, alternatives and our analyst review.

Who Is Zendesk Best Suited For?

Zendesk is best suited for businesses seeking a robust customer support platform to manage customer interactions across channels and improve customer satisfaction. It’s beneficial for companies with a focus on customer experience, as well as those looking to enhance their self-serve capabilities, automate workflows and gain insights from customer data.

While companies in any industry can benefit from Zendesk, many of its most successful customers are in the verticals of technology, business and professional services, financial services, manufacturing, and retail.

Functionally, the two groups that find the most value in Zendesk are CX and IT.

CX Leaders are responsible for running customer service and are involved in day-to-day execution, as well as long-term strategy. Their goals include scaling teams, lowering customer churn and improving agent productivity. Their challenges are implementing complex workflows that are hard to maintain and often require IT or developer support. This prevents rapid growth amidst high request volumes, data silos and emerging technologies.

The CX leaders responsible for championing Zendesk typically have these titles:

• VP or Director of CX
• VP or Director of Support Operations
• VP or Director of Customer Success
• VP or Director of Customer Service

Meanwhile, IT Leaders oversee all IT operations in an organization, including its business applications, technology platforms and maintenance. Their goal is to align technology within a company, adapt to the changing pace of technology and ensure technology is scaled in a sustainable way. They are often held back by legacy infrastructure, competing department priorities and conflicting responsibilities across the organization.

The IT leaders involved in Zendesk implementations typically have these titles:

• VP or Director of Technical Support
• VP or Director of Enterprise Applications
• VP or Director of IT Ops
• VP or Director of Tech Services
• VP or Director of Information Security
• VP or Director of Digital Transformation

Next up, let’s cover who Zendesk is not suited for.

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Who Is Zendesk NOT Suited For?

Here are two of the main scenarios in which Zendesk may not be a perfect fit.

• Businesses With Very Simple Support Needs: Zendesk is an omnichannel service solution, so it may have more bells and whistles than what a company handling all customer support requests through a single channel — e.g., email only — may need.
• Companies That Don’t Have a High Volume of Customer Support Tickets: If a business handles most of its customer interactions in person or doesn’t have a high volume of support tickets or customer inquiries, then a full-featured platform like Zendesk might be more advanced than necessary.

It’s essential to evaluate your specific needs, budget and goals before deciding whether Zendesk is the right fit.

Compare Zendesk to the Top Competitors

Top 8 Differentiators of Zendesk

Zendesk has a lot of features packed into one product. Here are the top differentiating capabilities that SelectHub found in its review.

Key Differentiator #1: Agent Workspace

Zendesk’s Agent Workspace empowers agents to seamlessly manage conversations across messaging, email, social media and phone — all from one place. This unified interface houses all the tools, insights and context agents need to efficiently manage requests. With visibility into the right details, agents can streamline efforts and prioritize work that matters most.

Key Differentiator #2: CX-Powered AI

Zendesk’s AI-powered bots, workflows and agent assistant tools are accessible and ready to use right out of the box — no developers, heavy IT spend or months of lead time required.

Based on billions of data points from real service interactions, Zendesk’s AI is built specifically for CX and only gets smarter over time. Agents get the benefit of easy-to-use AI tools that enable them to boost productivity and focus on meaningful work.

Key Differentiator #3: Sunshine Platform

Sunshine is Zendesk’s open, flexible CRM platform. Customers use it to develop custom apps, connect to external customer data, automate workflows and extend messaging capabilities by adding additional messaging channels and AI services. This lets you store and manage customer data in a single location and get a comprehensive view of each customer’s history and interactions across multiple touchpoints.

It’s easy for businesses to create custom CX without much heavy lifting thanks to out of the box point-and-click tools and industry standard languages. And it’s a solution that seamlessly integrates with any existing tech investments.

Key Differentiator #4: Sunshine Conversations

Sunshine Conversations is Zendesk’s advanced messaging platform that enables businesses to engage with customers across multiple communication channels, such as social media, messaging apps, SMS and more. It gives businesses full control over their customer experiences.

Whether you want to extend Zendesk’s out-of-the-box messaging capabilities or build their own from scratch, Sunshine Conversations can help create engaging, dynamic experiences for every user and unify messages from every channel into a single conversation.

Key Differentiator #5: Omnichannel Support

We’ve said it before, but we’ll say it again. Omnichannel support is where Zendesk shines. Critical support channels, like email, messaging, voice, social messaging and self-service are included out of the box and can be activated in a few clicks. Teams can manage conversations across any channel and measure performance from a single platform.

Zendesk’s omnichannel support includes messaging, social messaging and self-service. Source

Key Differentiator #6: Easy-to-Use Interface

Customer interactions, data and integrations are centralized in a simple yet powerful platform so agents can solve issues with speed and accuracy. The consistency in UI across support channels contributes to faster onboarding for agents and resolution times for customers.

Key Differentiator #7: Built for CX Agility

Admins can leverage native, low-to-no code tools to quickly adapt service operations to any customer, market or business change with no developer required to stay ahead of the competition.

Critical support tools (eg. routing, reporting, automations and more) are ready right out of the box and have CX best practices built in, so teams see faster time to value. They’re robust enough to handle complex workflows as-is, but you can customize further with additional apps, integrations or APIs.

Key Differentiator #8: Robust Self-Service

Zendesk offers a customizable knowledge base that allows customers to find answers to their questions without needing to contact support agents directly, reducing the workload for support teams and increasing customer satisfaction. Their smart knowledge management tools make it even easier to manage large amounts of content, whether that’s through team-based approval workflows or AI-powered content recommendations.

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Features Not Supported by Zendesk

The following are features that SelectHub found to be missing or still in development with Zendesk.

• Integrations With Specific Software: While Zendesk offers an impressive amount of app integrations (1,400+) versus competitors like ServiceNow (800+) and Freshworks (30+), some enterprise systems like Salesforce and Oracle offer even larger integration marketplaces and advanced integration capabilities.

  There’s still a good chance Zendesk will be able to connect with all the tools you require — whether it’s through their native integrations or an integration platform like Zapier or Tray.io — but it’s a good idea to triple check and make sure you have all the integrations you require, as some reviews have mentioned this point.

• Certain Quality-of-Life Enhancements: In many user reviews on software selection sites like SelectHub and others, people praise Zendesk’s overall system while mentioning certain quality-of-life enhancements they would like to see addressed. These include: the ability to create group chats or rooms more easily, the ability to share picture attachments easily and the ability to edit posts once they’re submitted.

  Many users also say the system can be slow at times. While not dealbreakers, it’s worth inquiring with their sales team about customer reviews that may concern you.

• On-Premise Deployment: As a cloud-based solution, Zendesk doesn’t offer on-premises deployment. This can be a limitation for companies that require complete control over their data or do not have reliable internet access.

It’s important to note that features and limitations of Zendesk can vary depending on individual business requirements. It’s crucial to thoroughly evaluate different platforms and choose the one that best aligns with your needs and objectives.

Compare Zendesk to the Top Competitors

Zendesk Pricing: How Much Does It Cost?

Pricing for Zendesk is based on a subscription model, with different plans available to accommodate different business needs and budgets. Here are the highlights of each plan.

• Suite Team: Aimed at smaller teams with basic support needs, this plan includes essential features like omnichannel support, a unified agent workspace, a self-serve help center, reporting and analytics, and workflow automations. It’s perfect for businesses establishing their service from the ground up and need a solution that’s easy to use, implement, and scale.
• Suite Growth: Designed for growing businesses, Zendesk Growth includes features like multiple branded help centers, smart knowledge bases, personalized customer portals, advanced knowledge management tools, service level agreements (SLAs) and automated CSAT surveys.

  It helps service teams deliver seamless, conversational experiences and scales across multiple regions, products, services and channels. Most teams purchasing this tier need a service platform that can help them manage rising ticket volumes while keeping agent priorities aligned.

• Suite Professional: Zendesk Professional offers everything teams need to optimize service operations and boost efficiency with powerful collaboration, routing and analytics.

  With benefits like private side conversations (via email, Slack and/or Microsoft Teams), skills-based routing, customizable reports and dashboards, community forums, advanced messaging customization (via Sunshine Conversations), advanced security and compliance (HIPAA, automatic credit card redaction and data locality), it’s ideal for buyers with mature CX teams that have mastered CX basics and now need advanced capabilities to analyze their service data and collaborate across different business units.

• Suite Enterprise: Zendesk Enterprise delivers the control and customization enterprises need to create personalized service experiences at scale. Key benefits include: Support for up to 300 branded help centers, AI-powered knowledge recommendations (Content Cues), help center approval and publishing workflows, scheduled publishing and verification for help center articles, dynamic contextual workspaces, custom agent roles and permissions, real-time dashboards, audit logs and sandbox testing environments.
• Suite Enterprise Plus: Zendesk Enterprise Plus combines Zendesk’s most advanced enterprise features — including enhanced customization tools — to help organizations with aggressive service goals that require tailored service solutions, namely multi-department service teams that require maximum customization, flexibility and security to fit their business needs.

  Key features include: detailed sandbox testing environments, maximum API limit rates, maximum data limits, maximum data storage capacity, maximum light agent licenses and enhanced disaster recovery.

It’s important to note that Zendesk’s pricing can change over time and may differ based on your unique requirements or any promotions they’re offering. To get an accurate quote for your organization, it’s best to get a demo from Zendesk directly and consult with their sales team to discuss your needs and receive a customized pricing plan.

Zendesk Suite pricing per agent per month shown for annual billing cycles. To see monthly pricing, visit Zendesk’s pricing page.

Get a Free Zendesk Price Quote for Your Specific Needs

Zendesk Alternatives: How Do They Stack Up?

Googling “Zendesk alternatives” will lead you down a rabbit hole of customer service solutions.

G2 claims Zendesk’s top alternatives are Freshdesk, Intercom and HubSpot. Gartner lists Zoho Desk, Sugar Serve and Oracle Service. TrustRadius says Agiloft, Gist and LiveChat.

While Zendesk alternatives include a lot of the logos listed above, the most common — and likely most competitive — would be Salesforce, ServiceNow and Freshworks.

In reviewing why organizations chose Zendesk alternatives, reasons include:

• Single Vendor Relationship: Certain Zendesk alternatives try to be everything for everyone. They offer multiple solutions for different departments, promoting a “360-degree” customer view on a single platform. However, Zendesk’s strength is that it’s a best-of-breed solution dedicated specifically to customer service. It integrates with other technologies, so organizations can create their own ideal tech stacks without making trade offs between CX technology and a single vendor.
• Low Costs and/or Steep Discounts: Smaller and/or newer Zendesk alternatives sometimes offer lower prices that align with their limited functionality. Conversely, established competitors may offer heavy discounts, bundles or “free” licenses that look good on paper but include additional fees for implementation, administrative support and other services.
• Non-CX Specialties: Some Zendesk alternatives are tailored to non-CX specialties (e.g., ITSM). This makes these options better equipped for non-CX requirements, such as ITIL certification, native incident management and native asset management. However, Zendesk offers apps, integrations and APIs to accommodate specific non-CX use cases.

Now that we’ve covered the reasons why businesses might choose Zendesk alternatives, here are the reasons why organizations choose Zendesk over its competitors.

• Grounded in CX: Zendesk originated as a CX solution and is a proven leader. Zendesk’s tools are tailored to service teams and agents — not other functions like sales and marketing — ensuring businesses have the latest CX innovations and best practices.
• Preconfigured, Extensible Platform: Zendesk works out of the box, so teams can focus on differentiating their CX rather than customizing a platform. Whether they expand in size or customer base, Zendesk’s platform is extensible so businesses can tailor operations to fit their needs long-term.
• Bespoke Experiences Without Heavy Lifting: Unlike competitors, Zendesk uses industry-standard languages, not proprietary languages, so teams have greater flexibility. Hiring skilled developers to implement and maintain a CX tool requires additional headcount and can become expensive overtime. But with Zendesk’s low-to-no code tools, teams can customize their service without sacrificing valuable time and resources.
• User Experience and Ease of Use: Zendesk was designed to be simple and intuitive so agents and admins can focus on supporting customers, not working with developers. The unified, omnichannel agent experience in Zendesk translates to agile change management and faster agent onboarding.
• Best-In-Class Architecture: Zendesk is focused on creating best-in-class customer experiences. CX innovations, like AI, are built into the tools so teams can start using them immediately. Plus, Zendesk’s open platform integrates with existing technology so business can access best-in-class CX without being pigeonholed into using one vendor.
• Return on Investment and Best Total Cost of Ownership: Zendesk is ready to launch in weeks, not months, and its user-friendly UI streamlines the agent experience. According to The Total Economic Impact of Zendesk for Enterprise study by Forrester, customers saw an almost immediate payback within 6 months and a 286% ROI in 3 years.

  On top of seeing faster onboarding and time to value, Zendesk offers one of the lowest total costs of ownership when you take implementation, ongoing admin and license costs into consideration.

Despite a crowded space and a long list of alternatives, Zendesk is a solid category leader. If you’re looking for a best-of-breed customer service solution and aren’t in need of specific non-CX use cases that it can’t support, you won’t regret selecting it.

Want more? Our data-rich Zendesk alternatives comparison has you covered.

Compare Zendesk to the Top Competitors

Zendesk Reviews: Themes From Users

There are many customer stories about how Zendesk has helped organizations of all sizes improve their customer support. Here are three themes commonly mentioned in Zendesk reviews.

• Open, Flexible and Customizable Platform: Customers find it easy to configure Zendesk without a developer, especially when it comes to customizations and third-party platforms. Zendesk also offers several critical integrations required by businesses.

• Out-of-the-Box Functionality: Customers love the convenience of consolidating vendors into one platform, and being able to access all their support channels in one place. The built-in tools are also robust enough for teams to use out of the box, and businesses can launch quickly with Zendesk’s existing tools versus waiting for customized applications to be built out.

• Ease of Use: Zendesk’s user-friendly interface is easy to learn for admins and agents. Implementation is quick and easy for admins, meaning minimal downtime — a huge plus for businesses with limited timelines. End-users also reported that it’s easier to make changes in Zendesk when they need to scale or adapt to any business/market changes.

Conversely, here are some of the cons of why some users may churn from Zendesk or choose not to use it.

• Cost Savings: With increased economic uncertainty, some businesses needing to reallocate budgets and consolidate vendors have found it difficult to pay for dedicated customer support tools like Zendesk when their other tools offer overlapping functionality.

  Competitors may also offer steeper discounts, free licenses, and multi-product deals — but at what cost? Lower prices often mean lower functionality, or hidden costs for essentials like data storage, implementation, technical support and so on. Be wary, as short-term savings can drive up operational costs in the long run.

• Hands-on Support: Some organizations need extensive hands-on support to implement, maintain and optimize their service operations. This level support is available with Zendesk’s paid Professional Services plans, but not every customer chooses to add this to their Zendesk experience.

  For teams who choose not to work with the Professional Services team, Zendesk offers a wealth of self-serve documentation, online support, virtual training/certification and in-person support for select businesses, though some users feel they need more and don’t think they should have to pay for it.

• Cloud Deployment Only. Zendesk doesn’t provide self-hosting options. If you require on-premise solutions, you won’t be able to use Zendesk.

Individual experiences with Zendesk vary, and user reviews may not be representative of all users’ experiences. It’s essential for organizations considering Zendesk to evaluate the platform based on their specific requirements and to get a demo to better understand its capabilities and potential fit with their organization.

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Final Zendesk Review

Many players in today’s CX space require customers to make serious tradeoffs.

On one end of the spectrum, legacy systems offering enterprise-grade capabilities often compromise on agility and cost. These platforms rely on extensive customization, dedicated technical resources and third parties to get anything accomplished. Businesses can’t be agile and adapt to change fast enough, which means there’s no innovation taking place. They’re also incurring high costs to maintain systems, and without a CX partner that’s focused on building best practices in their tools, businesses put themselves at risk of falling behind service trends.

At the other end of the spectrum, newer tools in the market provide agility for businesses and are less reliant on customizations; however, there are trade offs around scale, resiliency and the ability to meet enterprise expectations. In most cases, newer tools are not proven at scale, meaning customers outgrow them over time and incur switching costs. These tools also only offer pieces of what’s required to deliver truly personalized service experiences.

Zendesk is at the sweet spot between those two extremes. It’s robust enough to be able to deliver on virtually all customer service use cases, and it’s affordable, easy to use and loaded with incredible features out of the box, complete with an intuitive interface that doesn’t take a master’s degree to figure out.

Ultimately, if a friend asked me, “Hey, I’m thinking about using Zendesk, what do you think?” here’s what I would say…

Zendesk is a solid choice when it comes to a customer service solution. From its world-class ticketing system and omnichannel support to automation, integrations, and more, it blends robust functionality with user-friendliness, and it’s excellent at helping organizations scale.

Plus, beyond being a great platform, it offers a host of fringe benefits — from a specialized community of CX practitioners, thought leaders and developers to an active customer community, ample support and CX-oriented conferences and events. CX is in their DNA, and if you want to take customer support seriously, whether you’re a small, medium or enterprise-scale business, you can’t go wrong with Zendesk.

What’s Next?

Still haven’t decided on the right solution? Behold these resources.

Get a Zendesk Demo

Get Zendesk Pricing Quote

About the Author

About Devon Hennig: Devon is SelectHub’s sultan of software selection. He most recently served as VP of Marketing for Docebo (Nasdaq: DCBO) and, prior to that, he was VP of Demand Generation at Vendasta, the leading provider of white-label products and services for global resellers. His passion is helping companies find the right solutions for their tech stack.