Intercom vs Zendesk Why HubSpot is the Best Alternative

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 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. Intercom bills itself first and foremost as a platform to make the business of customer service more personalized, among other things.

Zendesk chat allows you to talk with your visitors in real time through a small chat bar at the bottom of your site. When visitors click on it, they’ll be directed to one of your customer service teammates. For basic chat and messaging, Intercom charges a flat fee of $39 per month for its basic plan with one user and $99 per month for its zendesk chat vs intercom team plan with up to 5 users. If you want automated options, Intercom starts at either $499 or $999 per month for up to ten users, depending on the level of automation you’re looking for. When you see pricing plans starting for $79/month, you should get a clear understanding of how expensive other plans can become for your business.

Intercom Agent Dashboard

However, HubSpot‘s interface is not as user friendly as Zendesk’s, and its combined pricing for marketing, sales and service functions is quite expensive and complex. However, it offers a generous free version, allowing you to try its features—something missing in Zendesk. Intercom plays a very important role in the customer experience through messaging platforms, team collaboration products, and a valuable knowledge base solution.

Using this, agents can chat across teams within a ticket via email, Slack, or Zendesk’s ticketing system. This packs all resolution information into a single ticket, so there’s no extra searching or backtracking needed to bring a ticket through to resolution, even if it involves multiple agents. What’s really nice about this is that even within a ticket, you can switch between communication modes without changing views.

Company Size

Since the user is spending a considerable amount of time on your site, it is more likely that they will engage with your business and potentially become a customer. To sum up this Intercom vs Zendesk battle, the latter is a great support-oriented tool that will be a good choice for big teams with various departments. Intercom feels more wholesome and is more client-success-oriented, but it can be too costly for smaller companies. Yes, you can integrate the Intercom solution into your Zendesk account. It will allow you to leverage some Intercom capabilities while keeping your account at the time-tested platform.

Intercom’s chat window states that their team usually replies in a few hours, but they will often respond in a matter of minutes. While Zendesk’s support is also fast, it is only available if you’re already a Zendesk user. If you’re only browsing their website, you will have to send a message to their sales team by entering your email address.

On the other hand, if you need something that is more tailored to your customer base and is less expensive, then Intercom might be a better fit. Intercom’s solution aims to streamline high-volume ticket influx and provide personalized, conversational support. It also includes extensive integrations with over 350 CRM, email, ticketing, and reporting tools.

Some startups and small businesses may prefer one app, while large companies and enterprise operations will have their own requirements. So, by now, you can see that according to this article, Zendesk inches past Intercom as the better customer support platform. 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 does not offer a free trial period for users to examine the software prior to joining up for their services. That being said, in your search for the best customer support tool, you must have come across Zendesk and Intercom.

If you want dashboard reporting and integrations, you’ll need to pay $19 per agent per month. Multilingual content and other advanced features come with a $49 price per agent per month. This live chat service provider offers 200+ integrations to its user base. With a mix of productivity, collaboration, eCommerce, CRM, analytics, email marketing, social media, and other tools, you get the option to create an omnichannel suite. Intercom also offers automation features for streamlining your customer support. Their bots use machine learning to suggest web links, knowledge base articles, and answers to FAQs directly within live chats.

This additional cost can be a considerable factor for businesses to consider when evaluating their customer support needs against their budget constraints. When comparing the reporting and analytics features of Zendesk and Intercom, both platforms offer robust tools, but with distinct focuses and functionalities. While both platforms have a significant presence in the industry, they cater to varying business requirements.

App Marketplace

You can use Zendesk Sell to track tasks, streamline workflows, improve engagement, nurture leads, and much more. Though Zendesk now considers itself to be a “service-first CRM company,” since its founding in 2007, their bread and butter offering has leaned much more heavily toward the “service” part of that equation. Keeping this general theme in mind, I’ll dive deeper into how each software’s features compare, so you can decide which use case might best fit your needs.