Awesome Sauce

February 21, 2024

Zendesk is a mega player in customer service software, competing primarily with Kustomer, Freshdesk, Intercom and Gorgias. And with over 50,000 paying customers (largely small businesses with B2B transactional models), Zendesk is a respectable brand name.

But don’t get lost in the allure of their mighty brand name and powerful corporate marketing, because the Zendesk customer disappointment is real.

Zendesk’s resources and willingness to prioritize customer relationships has come under fire since it was acquired for $10B in a private equity deal. In this guide, we’ll break down the many reasons why customers are switching away from Zendesk.

Scroll down to see a list of the most popular alternatives to Zendesk, along with the top features, pricing, pros and cons of an ideal customer service platform.

So why look for an alternative to Zendesk?

Zendesk suggests switching to them for stability, but it comes at a cost — Zendesk just raised their prices by 15%, but promises a “grandfathered rate” to customers who agree to an annual commitment.

Limited customer support leading to frustration

Users on Reddit recently voiced their dissatisfaction with the company’s limited customer support options.

One user even said: “Quit limiting the way we can contact support. It’s really annoying to spend almost 60K a year on Zendesk, and not be able to call.”

Another frustrated user on G2 recently said:

“At the end of my experience, this service felt like it was a scam. They take your money, won’t let you downgrade, keep charging your card, and you can never speak to a real person.“

Given the critical importance of excellent customer service, it’s no wonder why users are frustrated with Zendesk.

In a recent study we ran here at Kustomer, we found that customer service is ranked #2 as the most important attribute when selecting software or a solution right below price as the #1 ranked attribute.

Pricing considerations

Zendesk is considered a premium service with an expensive subscription that may not be within the budget range for startups.
The starting price for a monthly suite plan at Zendesk is $55 per month, which could increase depending on your varying needs. Cheaper options are available but come with limited facilities, such as fewer agents supported.
Their professional plan starts at $115 per user / per month, and their enterprise pricing is currently not disclosed.

Steep learning curve and overwhelming setup process

On top of being expensive, Zendesk can also be quite feature-heavy with a steep learning curve before getting ramped up with the platform.
Onboarding with Zendesk can be an intimidating and overwhelming process.
Zendesk makes you rely on their self-service resources for deployment, so you won’t have access to a live customer support team if you need help.

One user said it took nearly 3 months to fully deploy Zendesk:

“It took me 3 to 4 weeks to learn Zendesk. Then another couple of weeks to meet with the various department leaders to help refine their processes and design workflows. It took me 3 weeks to build the whole thing out in the production environment and test everything. Then we spent a week migrating our tickets over from the old system and training all the agents.”

Top 20 Zendesk Competitors On The Market Right Now

1. Kustomer

With Kustomer securing a recent $60M investment, the company’s future shines brighter than ever, and also holds exciting expansion plans. Kustomer is projecting to double the size of the company while making significant investment in their product — this is Kustomer’s commitment to AI-driven customer support innovation.

Overview of Kustomer

Kustomer is an omni-channel customer engagement platform providing a 360-degree view of all customer interactions — to summarize, Kustomer’s suite of support tools is the ultimate CX solution for modern businesses.

Using Kustomer for your entire helpdesk, you can:

Deliver a consistent customer experience across all channels.
Reduce the cost and complexity of customer support operations.
Aggregate customer data from all business segments to attain a holistic understanding of each customer.
Customize business logic and automate CX workflows.
Reduce turnaround time when support agents aren’t available.
Track agent performance and reduce ticket volume.

Kustomer’s Advanced Features:

Unified Customer View: Consolidates customer conversations from various channels, offering support agents a comprehensive picture of a customer’s history.
Intelligent Automation: Features smart workflows to automate tasks and manage customer requests efficiently.
Real-Time Analytics: Feature-rich dashboard for monitoring customer experience and agent performance.
Self-Service Portal: Add an easy-to-navigate, searchable, and SEO-friendly help center to your website to reduce contact rates at scale. Customize the look and feel of your knowledge base without writing code. Cater to different audiences, regions, or brands and localize content in over 70 languages.

Why switch from Zendesk to Kustomer?

Compared with Zendesk, Kustomer shines with a more user-friendly UI, better omni-channel support, enhanced AI capability, and overall value pricing.

Check out what real users on G2 are saying about the benefits of Kustomer:

It’s an omni channel platform for all types of interactions like chats, emails, calls, social media, SMS and WhatsApp.
The flexibility of customizing the platform based on what we need to support the business aside from the ease of use.
Kustomer keeps their platform up to date with the latest AI technology.
Collaboration capabilities make all team members work together on support tickets, saving time and effort.
Many 3rd party apps can be integrated so easily.
Finally, the most important part is reporting and analytics. Kustomer provides detailed reporting and analytics, enabling businesses to gain valuable insights into their customer support performance and identify areas for improvement

Here are some of the ways Kustomer exceeds expectations when compared to Zendesk:

Pricing is a no-brainer. Kustomer starts at $89 per month / per user for the enterprise package, meanwhile Zendesk does not disclose.
Kustomer provides 360-degree customer insights by allowing you to merge data from different channels, whereas Zendesk has limited customer visibility.
Kustomer makes it effortless to switch between the various channels and connect data across all your digital channels, allowing you to provide a high level of personalized customer support. There are no channel limitations as you would encounter with Zendesk.
AI capabilities provided by Kustomer are enhanced for high speed and low response times. You can easily embed AI into your automated workflows and deploy bots when required.
Kustomer offers a rich set of essential tools to boost agent productivity. The learning curve is very low, and maintenance with Kustomer can be done in-house without hiring any expensive third-party consultant help.
With Kustomer, you get easy report generation for tracking all tasks your agents are currently working on. Kustomer presents an overall easier interface than Zendesk, which requires a complex setup.

What real people are saying on LinkedIn:

A prospective customer recently shared their rollercoaster ride with Zendesk, and it’s a whirlwind:

Zendesk notified the customer of an upcoming price hike, clearly driven by their private equity overlords’ profit demands.
Not seeing the value, the Zendesk customer sent them a cancellation notice two months before the contract’s end, but of course — Zendesk played hard to get.
Zendesk went radio silent for a month, leaving them hanging in suspense.
When they finally replied, Zendesk claimed they sent the notice to the wrong email and now they couldn’t cancel because it wasn’t within the mandatory 30-day window.
They just want to switch to Kustomer, but Zendesk’s throwing up roadblocks.
So, here’s the deal: Zendesk took a swing at Kustomer, but it boomeranged right back at them. If you’re stuck in a Zendesk contract and need a way out, Kustomer’s got your back.
Kustomer can also help with the data migration process – making the switch easy and painless.

2. Freshdesk

Freshdesk is another cloud-based support platform that helps you manage customer interactions, queries, and issues. It provides all the essential helpdesk features such as omni-channel support, knowledge base, and automation.

With Freshdesk, you can automatically create issues based on incoming communication through email, chat, social media messages, and phone calls. The ticketing system provided by Freshdesk is easy to use and can integrate with a range of third-party applications, allowing you to multitask from a single platform.

It is also powered by AI, therefore enabling the best use of automation and analytics in your customer relationship management.

Why users like Freshdesk: (according to G2)

Some key features of Freshdesk:

An excellent ticket management system with support for categorization and priority-based scheduling.
A thank you detector feature that automatically reopens or resolves tickets based on customer messages.
Facilitates collaboration with other teams by sharing ownership of tickets with complete transparency.
Automatic creation and assignment of tickets based on chats, emails, or customer calls.
Progress analysis reporting to keep track of issues and overall productivity.
Agent collision detection to enable efficient ticket management.
Template responses to speed up response times.

Who is Freshdesk a good fit for?

Freshdesk is a simple and easy-to-use tool when compared to the feature-heavy Zendesk.
Freshdesk users seem to be happy with the bundle option for $15 a month, offering a Shopify integration plus the custom knowledge base.
It’s great for efficiency, ease of use and presents a good ticket management system that any company can use.
While Freshdesk suffices the need for most common use cases, it lacks the level of customization that you can get with Zendesk.
So, this tool could be a good alternative to cash-strapped startups and small businesses that might find Zendesk too expensive.
Freshdesk is also good for collaboration functionalities like real-time chat, ticket assignment, and internal notes, foster smooth collaboration among support agents.
Freshdesk is a solid choice for omnichannel support, offering diverse communication channels such as email, phone, social media, and live chat.

Freshdesk Pricing

Freshdesk has a free plan with basic features like ticketing, analytics, and email support. Its premium subscription rates start from $15 per month per agent.

3. Help Scout

If you are a growing business needing extra support for your customer service operations, Help Scout could be a solid alternative to Zendesk. It is cheaper yet feature-rich, has an intuitive UI, and comes at a lower learning curve when compared to Zendesk.

Why users like Help Scout: (according to G2)

Some key features of Help Scout:

One of the coolest features you get from Help Scout is shared inboxes for enhanced email support.
Shared inboxes allow you to drive collaboration among your teams by being able to share information and be up to date on all previous customer interactions.
It also provides a saved replies database that makes it easier to respond to customer queries and has built-in automation features and AI capabilities that make ticketing and workflows efficient.
Help Scout also gives you access to a Docs feature that you can utilize for self-service support. You can build a knowledge base and share it with your customers for quick issue resolutions.
Help Scout integrates readily with e-commerce platforms like Shopify and supports data migration tools to help you bring customer data from multiple sources.
It also provides a wide range of tools for improving your services, such as Customer satisfaction surveys and metrics tools.

Who is Help Scout a good fit for?

SMB companies: Help Scout’s simple interface, affordable pricing, and focus on basic features make it ideal for smaller teams that need a user-friendly solution.
Remote and distributed teams: Help Scout’s easy to use mobile app enables teams to work effectively from anywhere.
Teams needing light customization: With Help Scout, teams can customize workflows, branding, and reporting to meet specific needs.

Help Scout Pricing

Help Scout offers a very competitive pricing model, which starts at $20 per user per month. It also provides a free trial for 15 days to help you assess the tool.

4. Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk is another cost-effective Zendesk alternative that provides an extensive list of features to manage your CRM functionalities. It is a great fit for sales-focused teams with features like an easy-to-use customer portal, SLA management, and customizable templates.

Why users like Zoho Desk: (according to G2)

Some key features of Zoho Desk:

Zoho is known for its CRM tools and business applications, which integrate seamlessly with the Zoho desk solution.
It is also cloud-based and can be a centralized platform to manage customer interactions from multiple channels like social media, chatbot, email, or phone calls.
It has everything you look for in a helpdesk solution, such as a knowledge base, instant messaging, a chatbot called Zia, automatic ticketing from customer messages, workflow automation, alerts, and more.
Zoho allows for integration with more than 800 third-party apps, giving you a high degree of flexibility you couldn’t achieve with Zendesk API integrations.
It also has more transparent pricing options compared to Zendesk.

Who is Zoho Desk a good fit for?

Medium and large businesses: Zoho Desk offers advanced features and functionality suitable for larger companies with more complex support requirements.
Zoho Desk appears to be a solid choice for companies who want to develop a robust set of self-service options.
Teams that need extensive integrations: Zoho Desk integrates with wide selection of third-party applications, enhancing its functionality and connecting it to other business tools.

Zoho Desk Pricing

Zoho Desk services start from $14 per month per agent. There is also a free plan available with limited features.

5. Salesforce Service Cloud

If you already use the Salesforce platform, you can easily integrate with the Salesforce service cloud, which provides a comprehensive CRM and support solution.

Salesforce has a long track record of providing SaaS-based services for businesses, therefore providing access to a wide range of features and easy integrations with third-party apps.

Why users like Salesforce Service Cloud: (according to G2)

Some key features of Salesforce Service Cloud:

Chatbots (or bots).
AI-driven customer insights via their predictive analysis tool, Einstein.
Omni-channel support, including phone (call center), live chat, and social media.
Salesforce health cloud (provides healthcare-specific services).
Drag and drop UI functionalities.
Personalized email and SMS.

Salesforce can provide complete visibility into customer data, which is not the case with Zendesk. It also has a more accurate reporting feature when compared to Zendesk.

Who is Salesforce Service Cloud a good fit for?

Salesforce Service Cloud is particularly well-suited for businesses with extensive customer bases and a high volume of inquiries.
Salesforce Service Cloud is an obvious choice for those businesses already using Salesforce systems such as the CRM and marketing cloud.

Salesforce Service Cloud Pricing

Pricing is very wide ranging, however it starts at $25 per month / per user, with a 30 day free trial.

6. Gorgias

Gorgias is a customer service solution that is geared towards eCommerce businesses, with a customer base of around 12,000 merchants.

It easily integrates with all major eCommerce platforms like BigCommerce, Shopify, and Adobe Connect.

One of the stand-out qualities of Gorgias is their high quality customer service. Unlike Zendesk, which provides generic support, Gorgias customers say they are able to resolve issues with a quick turnaround time.

Gorgias also has an easy-to-use interface with built-in features for customer feedback and marketing, which usually come as add-ons with additional costs in Zendesk.

Why users like Gorgias: (according to G2)

Some key features of Gorgias:

Omni-channel support including SMS, WhatsApp, phone calls, live chat and email.
AI-driven responses for customer inquiries and chatbots.
Integration with e-commerce platforms, notably Shopify. You can let your customers carry out important operations like order placements, refunds, and order cancellations on Shopify through Gorgias.
Automation for enhanced personalization and agent assistance.

Who is Gorgias a good fit for?

Gorgias is a standout choice for companies primarily selling through eCommerce monetization models.
Gorgias is an excellent option for companies running on Shopify, or want to integrate with tools like Klaviyo.

Gorgias Pricing

The starter plan for Gorgias is one of the lowest, starting at $10 per month — however it comes with limitations and you need to pay more for feature upgrades and management of higher support ticket volumes.

7. LiveAgent

LiveAgent is a simple customer support platform that provides all the basic features that you need for essential customer relationship management. It offers live chat, a ticketing system, and social media integrations.

LiveAgent is best suited for small teams and startups looking for a “quick and dirty” helpdesk implementation. It is extremely easy to set up and get started, whereas Zendesk requires much effort and a learning curve to get acquainted with.

Why users like LiveAgent: (according to G2)

Some key features of LiveAgent:

Omni-channel support with an intuitive interface.
Metrics and analytics for improved customer experience.
High-resolution rates are enabled with a call center feature.
A cost-saving ticketing system.
Knowledge base feature to build your information hub for self-service facilities. The articles, how-to guides, and manuals can all be directly accessed from your dashboard.

Who is LiveAgent a good fit for?

LiveAgent appears to be a good fit for small businesses that need the simplest and cheapest possible customer service platform.

LiveAgent Pricing

LiveAgent offers various plans that start from $9 per month / per agent for small businesses, meanwhile their enterprise plan starts at $69 per month.

8. HappyFox

HappyFox goes beyond the basic functionalities of a helpdesk platform by offering additional capabilities that help with project management and team collaboration.

Compared to Zendesk, HappyFox stands out with unique features like helpdesk automation, multi-brand SSL support, and shared inboxes at a fraction of the cost that you would pay for Zendesk.

Ultimately, HappyFox is well suited for companies that require heavy cross-departmental collaboration, but are seeking an affordable alternative to Zendesk.

Why users like HappyFox: (according to G2)

Some key features of HappyFox:

Offers a knowledge base.
Ticket system with automatic conversion of customer messages from chats and emails into tickets.
The ticket management system also provides accessible interface options like quick actions, previews, and list views.
Advanced automation capabilities.
SLA management tool.
Categorized integrable apps and widgets.
In-app training modules to familiarize your agents with HappyFox features.

Who is HappyFox a good fit for?

HappyFox is good for small startups who have outgrown Gmail and need to start managing customer support in a more systemized way.
HappyFox can be set up and running fast. For small teams with basic needs, HappyFox can definitely be a solid option for getting off the ground and running.
HappyFox is one of the easiest CX platforms to use. So if you just need the essentials, it’s not a bad option.

HappyFox Pricing

HappyFox subscription price starts at $39 per agent / per month. But unlike other platforms, you must subscribe to at least five agents for every plan.

9. Nextiva

Nextiva is an AI-powered, omnichannel customer experience platform designed to empower businesses in effortlessly managing their digital brand presence and customer service experiences.

With Nextiva, you get a unified dashboard and helpdesk for monitoring and engaging in digital conversations across social media, messaging, chat, email and online review channels. With features like real-time analytics, sentiment analysis, and automated responses, Nextiva enables businesses to enhance engagement, monitor brand sentiment, and create positive customer experiences.

Nextiva is more than just a cloud contact center – it’s a CX platform designed to elevate your brand.

Why users like Nextiva: (according to G2)

Some key features of Nextiva:

Digital Customer Service: Omnichannel customer experience dashboard and helpdesk (ticketing, routing, responding)
Online Review Management: Listen & respond to reviews on local and digital listings, as well as online and app stores
Social Media Management: Connect, observe and engage with communities across all major social media platforms
Live Chat: Improve sales & support interactions on your website and messaging apps with real time response to customer inquiries
Conversation AI: Automate sales & service engagements, optimize workflows and let technology do the heavy lifting

Who is Nextiva a good fit for?

Nextiva is the best choice for teams who need to integrate with a VoIP phone system or call center software.

Pricing:

Nextiva has plans for businesses of all sizes and offers a 30 day free trial.

10. HubSpot Service Hub

HubSpot Service Hub is a customer service software designed to help businesses manage and improve their customer support and service operations. It is one of the most basic tools on the market today. Because of its simplicity, HubSpot Service Hub is also one of the most popular solutions out there.

Why users like HubSpot Service Hub: (according to G2)

Some key features of HubSpot Service Hub:

Ticketing System: For prioritizing customer inquiries, complaints and support requests.
Knowledge Base: A basic knowledge hub where businesses can store information such as FAQs, guides, and other resources to help customers find answers on their own.
Live Chat: Basic live chat functionality for communication between customers and support teams.
Analytics: Reporting tools to track key metrics related to customer service performance.
Integration with HubSpot CRM: HubSpot Service Hub is natively integrated with HubSpot’s CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system, a popular choice for unifying customer interactions across marketing, sales, and service.

Who is HubSpot Service Hub a good fit for?

HubSpot Service Hub is the best choice for companies who want to stick within the HubSpot ecosystem of tools – such as their CRM and marketing automation platform.
This interview on the George B. Thomas podcast goes in-depth into the pros and cons.

Pricing:

HubSpot Service Hub pricing starts at $450 per month.

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