Zendesk vs Intercom Comparison 2023: Which One Is Better?

For those of you who have been waiting for the big showdown between these two customer support heavyweights, we are glad to present the ultimate Zendesk vs Intercom comparison article.

We will compare prices, ease of use, and customer support, as well as go over a bunch of the most crucial features and toolkits, including help desk tools, ticketing systems, messaging, phone and email features, and team collaboration, among other aspects.

What is the difference between Zendesk and Intercom?

The main difference between Intercom and Zendesk is that Zendesk is mainly a customer service platform that now also offers a sales module, whereas Intercom has always been more of an all-in-one business communications tool for support but with some marketing and sales tools as well.

Your typical Zendesk review will often praise the platform’s simplicity and affordability, as well as its constant updates and rolling out of new features, like Zendesk Sunshine. For example, you can read in many Zendesk Sell reviews how adding sales tools benefits Zendesk Support users.

Meanwhile, an average Intercom review will be quick to highlight special tools like Intercom Messenger as giving great advantages to support teams who are particularly fond of messaging as both a customer service, outreach, and customer engagement tool.

Zendesk vs Intercom comparison chart

Check out this table quickly before we get a move on with the real meat and potatoes of this text. Spoiler alert: This table shows you who the winner will be. 

Zendesk vs Intercom for pricing

Zendesk pricing plans offer two subscription categories. There are 3 Basic support plans at $19, $49 and $99 per user per month billed annually, and 5 Suite plans at $49, $79, $99, $150, and $215 per user per month billed annually. That’s a lot of options.

For Intercom’s pricing plan, on the other hand, there is much less information on their website. There is a Starter plan for small businesses at $74 per month billed annually, and there are add-ons like a WhatsApp add-on at $9 per user per month or surveys at $49 per month. 

As for Intercom’s general pricing structure, there are three plans, but you’ll have to contact them to get exact prices.

Winner: Zendesk 

The winner here is obvious. Zendesk has more pricing options, and its most affordable plan is likely cheaper than Intercom’s, although without exact Intercom numbers, it is not easy to truly know the cost. 
 

Zendesk vs Intercom for customer support

Intercom does not have very much information about its customer support on this website for those who have not yet become paid subscribers. There is a smart chat widget that you can always use, as well as email support. Intercom also offers training webinars, and for premium subscribers, there are onboarding support options too.

Zendesk also offers digital support during business hours, and their website has a chatbot. Premiere Zendesk plans have 24/7 proactive support with faster response times. Other customer service add-ons with Zendesk include custom training and professional services.

Winner: Zendesk

In the category of customer support, Zendesk appears to be just slightly better than Intercom based on the availability of regular service and response times. However, it is possible Intercom’s support is superior at the premium level.
 

Intercom vs Zendesk for knowledgebase & learning

When it comes to self-service portals for things like knowledgebases, Intercom has a useful set of resources. There is a blog, a glossary, and an academy with webinars. Intercom also has a community forum where users can help one another with questions and solutions. 

Meanwhile, Zendesk also has some nice self-service features. These include a Zendesk help center and community, adoption and onboarding tools, a guided learning path, and a YoutTube channel with video tutorials.

Winner: Intercom

The learning and knowledgebase category is another one where it is a close call between Zendesk and Intercom. However, we will say that Intercom just edges past Zendesk when it comes to self-service resources. 
 

Zendesk vs Intercom for ease of use

Zendesk is quite famous for designing its platform to be intuitive and its tools to be quite simple to learn. This is aided by the fact that the look and feel of Zendesk’s user interface are neat and minimal, with few cluttering features.

Intercom also strives for user friendliness and it shows. Intercom’s dashboards may not be as aesthetically pleasing as Zendesk’s, but they still allow users to navigate their tools with few distractions.

Winner: Tie

Both of these helpdesk and customer support SaaS understand that ease of use is a high priority and that customer support reps will only excel at helping customers when the technological tools they have are aids rather than necessary obstructions.

Intercom vs Zendesk features & functionality

In this section, we will focus on the main features of these two tools, including:

• Help desk and ticketing

• CRM

• Chatbot features

• Team communication

• Email features

• Voice and phone tools

• Workflows and automation

• Analytics and reporting

• Mobile apps

• Integrations and add-ons
   

Intercom or Zendesk: Help desk and ticketing 

Both Zendesk and Intercom are primarily help desk platforms. Help desk SaaS is how you manage general customer communication and for handling customer questions. 

The best help desks are also ticketing systems, which lets support reps create a support ticket out of issues that can then be tracked. Ticket routing helps to send the ticket to the best support team agent.  

Winner: Zendesk

Zendesk wins the major category of help desk and ticketing system software. It lets customers reach out via messaging, a live chat tool, voice, and social media. There is also a special tool called Zendesk Chat. Zendesk supports teams that can then field these issues from a nice unified dashboard. Zendesk has great intelligent routing and escalation protocols as well.

Intercom’s ticketing system and help desk SaaS is also pretty great, just not as amazing as Zendesk’s. Their customer service management tools have a shared inbox for support teams. When you combine the help desk with Intercom Messenger, you get added channels for customer engagement.
 

Zendesk or Intercom: CRM

CRM, or customer relationship management, is usually considered its own standalone SaaS, though many platforms today combine CRM, marketing, sales, and support, like both Zendesk and Intercom, as well as other big names like HubSpot and Salesforce. 

It is great to have CRM functionality inside your customer service platform because it helps maintain great customer experiences by storing all past customer engagements and conversation histories. This method helps offer more personalized support as well as get faster response and resolution times.

Winner: Intercom

Intercom bills itself first and foremost as a platform to make the business of customer service more personalized, among other things. They offer an advanced feature for customer data management that goes beyond basic CRM stuff. It gives detailed contact profiles enriched by company data, behavioral data, conversation data, and other custom fields.

Zendesk can also save key customer information in their platform, which helps reps get a faster idea of who they are dealing with as well as any historical data that might assist in the support. Zendesk Sunshine is a separate feature set that focuses on unified customer views.
 

Intercom or Zendesk: Chatbot features

We have already mentioned several times above how chat tools are one of the main ways that customers can reach out to a help desk or support team, but let us delve deeper into advanced chat widget features. 

Chatbots are automated customer support tools that can assist with low-level ticket triage and ticket routing in real-time. How easy it is to program a chatbot and how effective a chatbot is at assisting human reps is an important factor for this category.

Winner: Intercom

Intercom has a very robust advanced chatbot set of tools for your business needs. There is a conversation routing bot, an operator bot, a lead qualification bot, and an article-suggesting bot, among others. It is also not too difficult to program your own bot rules using Intercon’s system. It is a visual no-code bot builder. You can also customize both inbound and outbound bots.

Zendesk has an AI-powered answer bot. It works quite well, although we would say not as effectively as Intercom’s system. One neat thing about Zendesk’s answer bot is that it can send answers through emails, ticket form, live chat, messaging, Slack, or API.
 

Zendesk or Intercom: Team communication

A customer service department is only as good as its support team members, and these highly-prized employees need to rely on one another. Tools that allow support agents to communicate and collaborate are important aspect of customer service software. 

They should have an in-app messaging platform, as well as be able to @-mention one another, get notifications about each other’s tasks that are relevant to the whole department, and easily work together on tickets, share tickets, split them or fuse them as a customer support team. 

Winner: Zendesk 

Zendesk has many amazing team collaboration and communication features, like whisper mode, which lets multiple agents chime in to help each other without the customer knowing. There is also something called warm transfers, which let one rep add contextual notes to a ticket before transferring it to another rep. You also get a side conversation tool.

Intercom, of course, allows its customer support team to collaborate and communicate too, but overall, Zendesk wins this group. You do not get the advanced team features like Zendesk, although it is not too difficult to do things like work together on a ticket, transfer a ticket, or just seek advice from another member of the support team.
 

Zendesk or Intercom: Email features

In this category, we are going to zoom in a bit on emailing. Email marketing, for example, is a big deal, but less so when it comes to customer service. Still, for either of these platforms to have some email marketing or other email functionality is common sense.

Emails are a great way to keep in touch with customers without being intrusive, for example, to send offers for product tours or out customer satisfaction surveys, known as CSATs. 

Winner: Intercom

Intercom has a full suite of email marketing tools, although they are part of a pricier package. With Intercom, you get email features like targeted and personalized outbound emailing, dynamic content fields, and an email-to-inbox forwarding feature. There is also a great custom email template library.

Zendesk is not far behind Intercom when it comes to email features. There is a simple email integration tool for whatever email provider you regularly use. This gets you unlimited email addresses and email templates in both text form and HTML. There is automatic email archiving and incoming email authentication.
 

Intercom or Zendesk: Voice and phone tools

Alongside messaging, chatting and emails, phone tools and other voice features are clearly key for customer service, as the telephone might be the original customer support communication channel before emailing existed. Advanced tools for telephony go well beyond simply having an 1800 phone number.

Winner: Zendesk

As for the category of voice and phone features, Zendesk is a clear winner. Zendesk Support has voicemail, text messages, and embedded voice, and it displays the phone number on the widget. 

There is caller ID, call routing, and customized greetings. You get call recording, muting and holding, conference calling, and call blocking. Zendesk also offers callback requests, call monitoring and call quality notifications, among other telephone tools.

Intercom is much weaker in this category overall. Because of the app called Intercom Messenger, one can see that their focus is less on the voice and more on the text. This is fine, as not every customer support team wants to be so available on the phone.
 

Zendesk or Intercom: Workflows and automation

Every single bit of business SaaS in the world needs to leverage the efficiency power of workflows and automation. Customer service systems like Zendesk and Intercom should provide a simple workflow builder as well as many pre-built automations which can be used right out of the box. 

The main idea here is to rid the average support agent of a slew of mundane and repetitive tasks, giving them more time and mental energy to help customers with tougher issues.

Winner: Zendesk

No matter what Zendesk Suite plan you are on, you get workflow triggers, which are simple business rules-based actions to streamline many tasks. 

There are pre-built workflows to help with things like ticket sharing, as well as conversation routing based on metrics like agent skill set or availability. There are even automations to help with things like SLAs, or service level agreements, to do things like send out notifications when headlights are due.

Intercom’s large series of bots obviously run on automations as well. As mentioned before, the bot builder is a visual drag-and-drop system that requires no coding knowledge; this is also how other basic workflows are designed. The more expensive Intercom plans offer AI-powered content cues, triage, and conversation insights. There is also a business rules analysis tool.
 

Zendesk or Intercom: Mobile apps

Providing your subscribers with a mobile app is a great way to let customer support agents keep up with their customers while away from their desks. Both Zendesk and Intercom offer native mobile apps, which means that these are interfaces designed specifically for small screens and not just the usual desktop interface that reacts and shrinks itself. 

Winner: Intercom

Intercom's native mobile apps are good for iOS, Android, React Native, and Cordova, while Zendesk only has mobile apps for iPhones, iPads, and Android devices. 

The primary function of Intercom’s mobile app is the business messenger suite, including personalized messaging, real-time support tools, push notifications, in-app messaging and emailing. Intercom also does mobile carousels to help please the eye with fresh designs.

Zendesk’s mobile app is also good for ticketing, helping you create new support tickets with macros and updates. It’s also good for sending and receiving notifications, as well as for quick filtering through the queue of open tickets.  
 

Intercom or Zendesk: Integrations and add-ons

Integrations are the best way to enhance the toolkit of your apps by connecting them for interoperable actions and features. Both Zendesk and Intercom have integration libraries, and you can also use a connecting tool like Zapier for added integrations and add-ons.

Winner: Tie

Intercom’s app store has popular integrations for things like WhatsApp, Stripe, Instagram, and Slack. There is a really useful one for Shopify to provide customer support for e-commerce operations. HubSpot and Salesforce are also available when support needs to work with marketing and sales teams.

The Zendesk marketplace is also where you can get a lot of great add-ons. Popular integrations include Slack, MailChimp, Dropbox, and Jira. There are also several different Shopify integrations to choose from, as well as CRM integrations like HubSpot and Salesforce.

A note on Zendesk Intercom integration

One more thing to add, there are ways to integrate Intercom to Zendesk. Visit either of their app marketplaces and look up the Intercom Zendesk integration. Like with many other apps, Zapier seems to be the best and most simple way to connect Intercom to Zendesk.

Is Zendesk better than Intercom? Our final points

So, by now, you can see that according to this article, Zendesk inches past Intercom as the better customer support platform. 

However, this is somewhat subjective, and depending on your business needs and favorite tools, you may argue we got it all mixed up, and Intercom is truly superior. Some startups and small businesses may prefer one app, while large companies and enterprise operations will have their own requirements.

The important thing is, when it comes to ticketing help desk software, you need to ask yourself what is most important before choosing a platform: Which communication channels you prefer, how much automation you intend to deploy, and how important is speedy resolution times versus personalized customer support. 

Many use cases call for different approaches, and Zendesk and Intercom are but two software solutions for each case.