The 9 Best Zendesk Alternatives in 2026: Detailed Reviews
If you're looking to replace Zendesk, this list of the nine best Zendesk alternatives will help you find the perfect fit. We've reviewed each platform in great detail, sharing what types of teams and businesses they're best suited for, looking at how their features and pricing compare to Zendesk’s, and sharing reviews from some customers who've switched from Zendesk to each alternative.
Zendesk alternatives comparison
Below, you'll find a side-by-side comparison of the primary differences between each of the Zendesk alternatives we review later in this post. For pricing, we're showing the price of each platform's lowest-cost plan that includes features for managing email, self-service, live chat, and social media support to give you a better sense of how similar plans compare in price.
| Software | Overview | G2 Rating | Free Trial | Multichannel Pricing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Help Scout | Help Scout offers all of the power of Zendesk without the complexity, and its pricing is a fraction of the cost. | 15 days | $25/user/month | |
Intercom | Intercom has built AI into nearly every feature of its platform and is great for support teams looking to automate as much as possible. | 14 days | $85/seat/month | |
Freshdesk Omni | Freshdesk offers more than 700 integrations and is great for teams that need to connect their help desk to niche third-party tools. | 14 days | $29/agent/month | |
Zoho Desk | Zoho Desk is an affordable option that comes with a feature for building community forums, which is rare to find in help desk tools. | 15 days | $14/user/month | |
Kustomer | Kustomer caters to large retail businesses and provides full omnichannel support across email, chat, phone, and social. | Not available | $89/seat/month | |
Gorgias | Gorgias' highlight is its deep Shopify integration that allows its AI agents to answer questions and update order information. | 7 days | $10/month (includes 50 tickets) | |
HubSpot Service Hub | HubSpot Service Hub is ideal for customer success teams that need a deep CRM integration and customer health scores. | Not available | $90/seat/month | |
Dynamics 365 Customer Service | Dynamics 365 Customer Service is deeply integrated with Microsoft's ecosystem and built for complex enterprise use cases. | 30 days | $50/user/month | |
Dixa | Dixa is a good one-to-one replacement for Zendesk with powerful routing features and extensive collaboration tools. | Not available | $89/agent/month |
Why look for alternatives to Zendesk?
Zendesk is a powerful help desk with every feature a support team could ever need, but with that power comes complexity:
Taking advantage of many of the platform's features requires technical support from development or engineering teams. Since many customer service teams have a hard time getting this type of support from other departments, it means there are a lot of Zendesk features you probably won't be able to use.
The platform isn't very intuitive, making it difficult to train new agents to use it. In addition to having to train new agents on your product and support style/processes, you'll have to spend a lot of time training them how to use Zendesk itself.
When you need support, you probably won't get it. Social media and review sites are full of complaints from Zendesk customers about the lack of support provided, particularly to their small and mid-sized customers.
If you're considering buying Zendesk (not a current customer), you should keep in mind that it can take months to set up the platform. Zendesk's partners estimate that implementation takes a minimum of four weeks, plus an additional week for every 10 agents on your team.
Beyond that, Zendesk is one of the highest-priced support tools on the market. While its pricing page makes the platform look comparable to many alternatives, customers report having to consistently upgrade to higher-priced plans and pay for add-ons to get access to the basic features they need.
Important factors to consider when looking for a Zendesk replacement
Migrating to a new support platform requires a lot of work and entails a lot of risk. It's not an exercise you want to do more than once, so it's crucial to make the right decision on which platform to switch to the first time. Here are some things to consider as you're evaluating options so you can make sure you find the perfect alternative for your team:
Does it have the essential features your team needs? Before you start shopping, make a list of all of the features your team depends on in their day-to-day work, and determine which are must-haves. When you know exactly what you need, it's a lot easier to remove platforms that don't offer those features from your consideration list.
Does it support all of the channels that you support? Make sure it provides phone support if you support customers over the phone, customer portals if you want private spaces to share support statuses with specific customers, and social support for all of the social media sites from which you receive and respond to requests.
Can it be customized to fit some of your more unique needs? Make sure it integrates with any business-critical tools you use for delivering support and that it either comes with the reports you need out of the box or allows you to build custom reports that let you analyze your data and performance in the way you need to.
Will it scale alongside your team and business? Since one of your goals should be to switch support platforms as infrequently as possible, it's important to consider not only how the platform will work for your team right now but also how it might work for you three years from now. Does it offer features and channels you might need in the future?
What’s your timeline? Some tools are easy to set up; others take more time to implement. Make sure you consider how long the initial setup and training will take. If you choose a tool that takes months to onboard, will you be able to afford to pay for both it and your existing support platform in the interim?
Can you afford it? You likely have a budget to stick to when choosing your Zendesk replacement, making pricing another quick way to remove options from your consideration list. Just make sure you fully understand what you're getting at the price you believe you'll pay — software pricing pages are not always fully transparent.
The best way to figure out if a platform has all of the features you need is to look at its pricing page. Most platforms provide more detail on this page in a "side-by-side plan comparison" table than any other page of their sites. Generally, this table will list every single feature available in the platform, so it's a good place to start when doing your research.
The bonus of identifying available features in this way is that you'll start to get a really good understanding of the platform's pricing, too. Lots of tools look like they're a lot cheaper than they are at a glance, but by reviewing the plan comparison, you can start to understand which plan actually has all of the features you need — and how much you're going to have to pay to get them.
The 9 best Zendesk alternatives and competitors
Below, you'll find our detailed reviews of the nine best Zendesk alternatives, including information about who each platform is best for and how they compare with Zendesk in terms of functionality and price.
1. Help Scout – Best for growing teams that need a sophisticated support platform at an affordable price
With Help Scout, you get access to the same powerful features you'll find in Zendesk but without the complexity and high price tag. Help Scout's intuitive interface makes it easy to set up, simple to use, and effortless to train new agents on, and its pricing is only a fraction of what you'll pay for Zendesk and many of the other Zendesk alternatives on this list.
How Help Scout compares to Zendesk
Help Scout's multichannel support plans are between $30 and $94/user per month less than Zendesk's, and Help Scout also offers a free plan for small businesses that's similar to Zendesk's $19/user per month Starter plan. Additionally, Help Scout's AI Answers are half the per-resolution cost of Zendesk's.
Help Scout is much easier to set up and use than Zendesk. You can also automatically migrate your data from Zendesk to Help Scout using Import2, a service that's free for most customers.
Help Scout only offers phone and SMS support via integrations with other tools, where Zendesk has phone and SMS support built into the platform natively.
Help Scout doesn't offer a few of the features you'll find in Zendesk, such as community forums, skill-based routing, and custom data explorations, so it may not be the best fit for enterprise teams with deep customization needs.
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Manage all of your channels in one place
Help Scout lets you create one or more team inboxes to manage your customer conversations across all channels: email, live chat, and social. Features like private notes let your team exchange information about the conversation before replying to customers, and real-time collision detection prevents multiple team members from working on or replying to the same request.
Customer profiles provide your team with the context they need to deliver personalized support experiences, and tags, custom fields, and views help you keep everything organized. You can even stay focused by snoozing conversations that don't need a reply yet, or you can send a reply at the perfect time with scheduled replies.
Get conversations to the right person or team using manual assignments, set up routing to assign conversations to team members automatically — both round-robin and load-based options are available — or build workflows to automatically assign specific types of requests to specific teams.
Finally, save time using saved replies (a library of pre-written answers to FAQs), AI Drafts (a feature that writes custom responses using knowledge from your previous support conversations, help center, and website), or AI Assist (a copilot that can translate, shorten, expand, or edit responses you write yourself).
Help customers help themselves
With Docs — Help Scout's knowledge base builder — you can create a customized help center that makes it easy for customers to find the information they need when they need it.
Use Docs to create help center articles for your customers, or create private collections that are only accessible to your team. All of your external-facing articles are optimized for search in both your help center and on major search engines so customers can easily find what they're looking for.
You can also serve your help center articles through Beacon — Help Scout's live chat and self-service widget. Beacons can be embedded on your website and in your app, and customers can use it to search your knowledge base, request live or email support from your team, or get instant, AI-generated answers.
Instant answers in Beacon are powered by AI Answers, an AI-powered chatbot that replies to customers for you. It forms its answers using knowledge from your help center and any website you add as a source, ensuring the answers it provides are accurate and on brand. When it can't find the right answer, customers can easily send the question to a human member of your team from the same interface.
Connect with customers in the right place at the right time
Help Scout’s Beacon also makes it easy to deliver real-time support to your customers through live chat. You can set up office hours for when live chat is available, and the widget won't show live chat as an option unless someone on your team is available.
Beacon also lets you reach out to customers proactively. Launch a chat window or surface a help doc during tricky places in the customer journey, place a banner on your site to announce a new feature, or even send out a survey to capture customer feedback. It’s all possible using Beacon’s targeting features, which allow you to dial in on your audience using events like URL visited, time on page, and more.
Make data-driven decisions with reports
Help Scout comes loaded with pre-built dashboards so you can see how your team performs from day one. See what times of day are busiest, common reasons for customer queries, CSAT results, and which communication channels are most popular with your customers.
You can also create custom views to refine reports in order to assess performance and focus on the metrics you care about most. If you want to do even more with your data, you can use Help Scout's API or Fivetran integration to connect to the business intelligence tool of your choosing.
Reviews from customers who switched from Zendesk to Help Scout
"Having worked with Zendesk before, the difference was night and day. Our team enjoys Help Scout because of the ease of use, user-friendly platform, reporting, and more! … Support is always quick to respond and helpful when we need guidance." Read the full review.
"I have used several 'more advanced' solutions like Zendesk and Desk, and Help Scout really rivals these in terms of functionality. My current company is still small, but I would be confident and comfortable using Help Scout even at my former larger company post-merger." Read the full review.
"We don't need a major solution like Zendesk, and Help Scout is the happy medium of exactly the features we need for our support efforts. I am able to quickly train new team members on how to use Help Scout, and that helps us scale quickly while spending smartly!” Read the full review.
*Quotes throughout this post have been lightly edited for clarity.
Recommended Reading
Migrating from Zendesk to Help Scout
Help Scout offers automatic migration from Zendesk to Help Scout using Import2, and the service is completely free for most customers.
Import2 will migrate all of your support tickets/emails, tags, and customer profiles from Zendesk to Help Scout, and Help Scout also has a separate tool you can use to migrate your help center articles.
Pricing
Free plan and trial available. View Help Scout's current pricing.
Learn more about Help Scout:
2. Intercom – Best for teams that want to use AI to automate everything
Intercom is the market leader when it comes to AI customer service software. The platform is full of AI features that answer customers' questions automatically, help agents write replies, update data in integrated systems, provide CSAT ratings on all support interactions, and much more.
How Intercom compares to Zendesk
Intercom is unique in that you can use its AI chatbot, Fin, as a stand-alone product. It even integrates with Zendesk if you like the standard features of Zendesk's support platform but aren't thrilled with its AI agents.
Whether Intercom is more affordable or more expensive than Zendesk really depends on the size of your team. For small teams looking for more standard support software features, Zendesk's base plans have lower per-user costs. But for large and enterprise teams needing advanced features, Intercom's highest-cost plans are priced lower than Zendesk's.
Both Intercom and Zendesk let you deliver support across all channels natively. Both also offer social media support integrations with Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, but only Zendesk offers an X integration.
Both platforms are similar in their AI feature offerings, but Intercom doesn't have a feature that's comparable to Zendesk's AI-powered scheduling add-on.
Intercom's key features
Intercom's AI agent, Fin, answers customers' questions automatically and can be used on conversations received over email, chat, social, and SMS. You can also purchase add-ons to use Fin to answer questions received over the phone, on Slack, or through other systems you've connected using Intercom's API. It's trained on content from your website, knowledge base, and support tickets.
Intercom's AI copilot helps your team draft replies quickly. It pulls knowledge from your help center and from previous conversations your team has had with customers to compose replies in seconds, and it also shows you the sources it used so you can fact-check if necessary.
Other AI features you'll find in Intercom do things like update data in third-party systems when necessary to help customers, predict and add CSAT scores to all conversations even when customers didn't complete a survey themselves, and provide insights that show instances where the support a customer received didn't meet their expectations.
Keep in mind that all of this automation comes at a cost. Fin is priced per-resolution (its per-resolution costs are lower than Zendesk's, but none of Intercom's plans include free resolutions), and most of the other AI features we mentioned are sold as add-on products on top of the platform's base per-user fees.
Reviews from customers who switched from Zendesk to Intercom
"While using Zendesk, we were at an average CSAT score of 64%, and after just three months with Intercom, we've been reporting between 85% to 100% CSAT. This is a major improvement that we know couldn't have been possible without Intercom." Read the full review.
"My favorite thing about Intercom is how user-friendly the entire platform is. We've used Zendesk in the past, and when it came to onboarding a new employee, Zendesk always was our biggest learning curve. Intercom eliminates a lot of the hassle because things are just super easy to use!" Read the full review.
Migrating from Zendesk to Intercom
Intercom has built-in tools to help you migrate your users, knowledge base articles, and conversation history (with a caveat) from Zendesk.
To migrate users, you download a CSV from Zendesk and upload it to Intercom. To migrate your help center, you simply enter its URL into Intercom, and Intercom imports the articles.
It's important to note that importing your Zendesk conversation history does not give you access to those conversations in Intercom. Instead, it just uses that data to train Fin.
Pricing
Free trial available. View Intercom's current pricing.
Recommended Reading
3. Freshdesk Omni – Best for teams that need to integrate their support software with niche third-party systems
One of the big advantages of Zendesk is that it integrates with nearly 2,000 other tools. The only other customer service platform on the market that comes close is Freshdesk, which offers nearly 700 integrations through its app marketplace. If integrating your customer support software with other niche tools your company uses is a must-have, Freshdesk is likely the right choice for your team.
How Freshdesk compares to Zendesk
While Zendesk offers a bigger selection of integrations, Freshdesk's large integrations marketplace may also have what you need if you're looking to move away from Zendesk but need niche integrations that you won't find in most other support tools.
Freshdesk's ecosystem makes it more customizable than Zendesk’s. If you only need to deliver email support, you can subscribe to Freshdesk. If you only need to deliver phone support, you can subscribe to Freshcaller. This can make your total cost much lower if you don't need a platform that works across all channels.
Freshdesk Omni doesn't have quite as many AI features as Zendesk — offering only AI agents, copilots, and an AI reporting insights tool — but its AI chatbot's per-resolution costs are significantly lower than what you'll pay for Zendesk's.
Like Zendesk, Freshdesk Omni lets you deliver support via email, chat, social, and phone, and you can also use Freshdesk to publish a knowledge base, create a community forum, and build individual customer portals. However, SMS support is only available on Freshdesk via integration.
Freshdesk Omni's key features
Freshdesk Omni is Freshworks' omnichannel support platform. It allows teams to deliver support over email, chat, and social; native phone support capabilities are available through its Freshcaller add-on; and you can even use Freshdesk's AI voicebot to automatically answer customers' questions over the phone.
Other AI features you'll find in Freshdesk include an AI chatbot that automatically replies to customers' questions via email and messaging apps, an AI copilot that will draft replies to conversations or create knowledge base articles for you, automatic sentiment detection tools that help you prioritize requests, and a conversational AI analysis tool that helps you analyze your data more easily.
Beyond these features, you'll get access to the same channels and tools you'll find in any help desk: a shared inbox, a knowledge base, workflow automation, round-robin ticket routing, and mobile apps. Other, more niche features that not all help desks have but that are available in Freshdesk Omni include the ability to create community forums and the ability to build customer portals for individual customers.
Reviews from customers who switched from Zendesk to Freshdesk
"It's easy to use and in some ways more intuitive than Zendesk. The support we receive is great, and the Freshdesk team is always available via chat. The platform is pretty quick and looks nicer than Zendesk to me personally." Read the full review.
"The APIs available are robust and well documented. Everything worked without a hitch! The automation engine in Freshdesk is super easy to work with and powerful. Zendesk is the only competitor I had used previously, and when comparing Freshdesk to Zendesk, I was satisfied with the parity." Read the full review.
Migrating from Zendesk to Freshdesk
Freshdesk does not offer any native migration tools for importing your Zendesk data into its system. However, it does integrate with the third-party service Help Desk Migration, which can do the data transfer for you for a fee.
Pricing
Free trial available. View Freshdesk Omni's current pricing.
Recommended Reading
4. Zoho Desk – Best Zendesk alternative for small businesses
Zoho Desk is one of the lowest-cost support platforms on the market, making it a great fit for small businesses with small budgets. Plus, taking advantage of its low cost doesn't mean you have to sacrifice on features. You'll likely see a significant price reduction when switching from Zendesk to Zoho Desk without losing much of the functionality you had available to you in Zendesk.
How Zoho Desk compares to Zendesk
Zoho Desk is significantly less expensive than Zendesk. In fact, Zoho Desk's highest-cost plan costs less per user than Zendesk's lowest-cost Suite plan.
Both platforms let you deliver support via email, chat, phone, and social (Facebook, Instagram, X, and WhatsApp). However, SMS support is available natively in Zendesk but only available via integration in Zoho Desk.
Both platforms let you build customer portals and community forums.
Zoho Desk is less customizable than Zendesk. It's a better fit for smaller businesses, where Zendesk caters more to large and enterprise companies.
Zoho Desk's key features
One feature you'll find in Zendesk that isn't very common in help desks is community forums. Freshdesk Omni has them, but only on its higher-tier plans. Zoho Desk offers its forums feature in plans that are much less expensive than both Zendesk and Freshdesk.
With Zoho's community forums, your customers can ask their own questions and answer those asked by other customers. Community members can upvote conversations to show support for things like feature requests. Agents can answer questions and bump their replies to the top. Finally, everything can be indexed by search engines to provide another way for customers to find the answers they're looking for quickly.
Zoho also offers its own entire ecosystem of business apps, so it can be a good choice if you're looking to replace several of the tools in your tech stack. It has a CRM, a business intelligence tool, a project management platform, and HR software among many others. A complete Zoho migration can get all of your business systems under one integrated platform.
Finally, Zoho Desk has a unique time tracking feature that you won't find in other support platforms. Your agents can track the time they spend on specific tickets or types of tasks, giving you helpful data on individual performance and ticket complexity. On higher-cost plans, you can even set up automatic time tracking so agents don't need to remember to start and stop timers.
Reviews from customers who switched from Zendesk to Zoho Desk
"One of the standout positives is the responsive customer service — they reply relatively quickly, addressing issues more efficiently than what we experienced with Zendesk. Additionally, the user interface feels significantly better. It's intuitive and streamlined, making it easier for our team to manage tickets and navigate the platform." Read the full review.
"I came from Zendesk, and when I researched and compared, Zoho Desk offered more features for a lower price. And migrating from Zendesk to Zoho Desk wasn't as complex and challenging as I thought it would be." Read the full review.
Migrating from Zendesk to Zoho Desk
Zoho Desk has its own platform, Zwitch, that can be used to migrate your data from Zendesk. It will transfer your agents, tickets, conversations, threads, customers, contacts, and knowledge base articles. Unfortunately, if you have an existing community forum on Zendesk, that data cannot be migrated to Zoho Desk using Zight.
Pricing
Free plan and trial available. View Zoho Desk's current pricing.
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5. Kustomer – Best for large retail businesses that need to deliver omnichannel support
Kustomer is an ideal Zendesk alternative for large retail and ecommerce businesses. In addition to integrating with all of the popular ecommerce platforms, it has AI that can automatically reply to requests over chat, email, phone, and SMS. It also has integrations with Facebook, WhatsApp, X, and Instagram — key social channels for ecommerce and retail customer support teams.
How Kustomer compares to Zendesk
Kustomer is more custom-built for ecommerce and retail businesses than Zendesk, which is designed to cater to the needs of every industry.
Both platforms let you deliver support via email, chat, phone, and social (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp). However, SMS support is available natively in Zendesk but only available via integration in Kustomer, and Kustomer does not have an integration with X.
Pricing for the two platforms is comparable, though Zendesk does offer more affordable base plans than Kustomer. It's also worth noting that the per-seat costs listed on Kustomer's pricing page assumes you've added at least eight seats; pricing for fewer than eight seats can only be obtained from Kustomer's sales team. Zendesk does not have any minimum seat requirements.
Kustomer's AI chatbots cost less than half of the per-resolution price of Zendesk's. However, Zendesk includes some free resolutions in all of its plans, while Kustomer does not.
Kustomer's key features
Kustomer stands out due to its variety of integrations with the tools that retail and ecommerce support teams use. It integrates with systems like Shopify, BigCommerce, LoyaltyLion, Adobe Commerce (Magento), Recharge, and more to make it easy for you to access the customer and transaction data you need to deliver quick and personalized support.
Its Shopify integration shows all of your Shopify data in a sidebar — transactions, tracking numbers, order numbers, and shipping addresses. Additionally, you can do things like process refunds and cancel orders without leaving the Kustomer interface.
The data from your integrated systems is also used to power Kustomer's AI agents, which can answer customers' questions, process refunds, update orders, and provide details on when shipped products will arrive. You can build multiple AI agents to handle different types of tasks, and the agents can be used to respond to requests from all platforms — email, chat, social, messaging, and even voice.
Kustomer is also one of only a few truly omnichannel support platforms on the market. Because it's a combined support platform and CRM, it can connect requests to customers regardless of which channel they reach out on, which means customers can switch channels mid-conversation without you losing any context. Additionally, Kustomer's timeline view makes it easy to see a complete history of interactions a customer has had with your company.
Reviews from customers who switched from Zendesk to Kustomer
"It's the best full-boat CSM/CRM I've used. We migrated from Zendesk because their sales and support were terrible to us. The Kustomer team is responsive, helpful, and was there through the entire implementation and beyond. I couldn't be happier with Kustomer as a product and company." Read the full review.
"Kustomer has a great layout and is very user friendly. I would say it has less of a learning curve than Zendesk. I have trained people how to use it in as little as a day or two. It is easy to find where to do certain functions, and the icons make sense!" Read the full review.
Migrating from Zendesk to Kustomer
Kustomer has its own custom-built tool that customers can use to transfer tickets, tags, users, and groups from Zendesk to Kustomer automatically.
Pricing
No free trial offered. View Kustomer's current pricing.
6. Gorgias – Best for small ecommerce teams using Shopify
If you're looking for a help desk for a small ecommerce shop, another option to consider is Gorgias. Gorgias is designed exclusively for ecommerce teams, offering deep integrations with platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, WooCommerce, and PrestaShop. However, its Shopify integration is really the highlight of the platform, and its usage-based pricing makes it affordable for small online stores.
How Gorgias compares to Zendesk
While Zendesk caters to support teams in all industries, Gorgias is designed exclusively for ecommerce businesses, so its features are optimized for the unique demands of online merchants.
Gorgias' pricing is usage based, meaning you'll pay more as you respond to more customers. Zendesk's is user-based, meaning you'll pay more as you grow your support team.
Both Zendesk and Gorgias let you deliver support across all channels natively: email, chat, voice, SMS, and social. Both also have Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and TikTok Shop integrations, but Gorgias does not offer an integration with X like Zendesk does.
Gorgias' Shopify integration is more robust than Zendesk's, offering unique features like the ability to browse your entire product catalogue and see remaining inventory without leaving Gorgias. Gorgias' AI agents can even create discount codes in Shopify to encourage users to buy products.
Gorgias' key features
Gorgias integrates deeply with Shopify, allowing you to see, edit, duplicate, cancel, or refund orders directly from the Gorgias interface. Additionally, you can browse your product catalogue inside of Gorgias and see available inventory, which is helpful for responding to customers quickly.
Gorgias' AI features also use data from Shopify to automatically answer routine support requests. If a customer writes in asking for an update on their order, the AI can access the order details in Shopify and respond to the customer with the information they need. AI agents can also perform actions for you, such as canceling, refunding, or making updates to orders.
One unique feature in Gorgias that you won't find in other support platforms is its revenue statistics. This gives you data on the amount of revenue generated by customers who interacted with your support team during their buying journey, giving you insight into support's impact on revenue.
Gorgias is also one of only a handful of support platforms that has usage-based pricing rather than user-based pricing. For teams with more members doing support but lower request volumes — such as companies that have people from multiple teams providing all-hands support — this can save you a lot of money. However, it can also make your costs less predictable and lead to a large increase in costs at busy times.
Reviews from customers who switched from Zendesk to Gorgias
"Moving over to Gorgias from Zendesk was an interesting transition. From the very beginning, we had a support team that helped us make that transition. The help docs were essential and kept up to date." Read the full review.
"We used to work with Zendesk, and when we found Gorgias, we realized how much easier it is to have all the customer's information right where their email comes in so you don't have to go searching in four different platforms before you can answer." Read the full review.
Migrating from Zendesk to Gorgias
Gorgias has a built-in import tool that migrates your macros, users, tags, and tickets from Zendesk into Gorgias. The tool will import all tickets from the last two years and process about 720 tickets per hour, so if you have a lot of tickets, it can take several days to complete.
Pricing
Free trial available. View Gorgias' current pricing.
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7. HubSpot Service Hub – Best for customer success teams
HubSpot Service Hub is a great option for sales-led companies that delegate the responsibility of delivering customer support to a customer success team. Few other support platforms offer features that not only help you manage and reply to customer inquiries but also measure the health and churn risk of customers, making it ideal for teams focused on both support and retention.
How HubSpot Service Hub compares to Zendesk
HubSpot Service Hub integrates deeply with HubSpot's industry-leading CRM, making it easy for customer success and sales teams to stay aligned. While Zendesk also offers a CRM (Zendesk Sell), the company no longer actively promotes it.
The pricing for both products is more catered to mid-sized and enterprise teams. While both offer lower-cost plans for small businesses, the features included in those plans are severely limited. However, HubSpot's startup plan can be an affordable choice for growing SaaS businesses.
HubSpot offers more features that cater to the needs of customer success teams, such as customizable customer health scores, renewal pipeline metrics, and sales activity notifications.
Both Zendesk and Service Hub are powerhouses when it comes to reporting, allowing you to build deeply customized reports and dashboards using any data the platforms collect.
HubSpot Service Hub's key features
HubSpot Service Hub stands out with its features for customer success teams. Its connection with HubSpot's CRM and marketing products makes it easy to collaborate with sales and product marketing on cross-sell, upsell, and renewal campaigns. You'll be able to see all interactions sales and marketing have had with your customers alongside details like renewal dates and contracts in each customer's profile.
HubSpot also has a customer success workspace that shows you your entire book of business in a single view. You can set up customer health scores that factor in specific interactions you specify. For example, positive customer feedback might add points while requesting customer support might deduct points. The health scores are color-coded and provide you with an easy way to identify churn risks.
HubSpot also lets you create individual portals for specific customers, set SLAs for response times, and send pre-built Net Promoter Score, customer effort score, and CSAT surveys.
Beyond the features it offers specifically for customer success teams, HubSpot Service Hub also includes most of the standard help desk features: a shared inbox, a live chat widget, a knowledge base builder, AI chatbots, workflows, and reporting dashboards to track performance.
Reviews from customers who switched from Zendesk to HubSpot Service Hub
"Switched to HubSpot from Zendesk and never looked back! As a user, HubSpot is simple to use and easy to implement and customize. It has simplified our sales/renewals process, and the knowledge base has been a game changer!" Read the full review.
"Compared to Zendesk, the interface is much more intuitive (which HubSpot is known for), and the customizable workflows are massive time savers. Only took a couple of weeks to set up, automate, and train my entire development team since we were already using HubSpot's CRM." Read the full review.
Migrating from Zendesk to HubSpot Service Hub
HubSpot does not offer any prebuilt migration tools for importing your Zendesk data into its system. However, paid migration services are available through HubSpot's Replatforming Team, a variety of HubSpot partners, and the third-party service Help Desk Migration.
Pricing
Free plan and trial available. View HubSpot's current pricing.
Recommended Reading
8. Dynamics 365 Customer Service – Best for enterprise companies
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service is a great ticketing system for enterprise-level companies because of its strong security features and its ability to integrate with other enterprise-focused tools like SAP and Oracle. It's also ideal for companies that are already using other tools in the Microsoft ecosystem thanks to its native integrations with other Microsoft platforms.
How Dynamics 365 Customer Service compares to Zendesk
Zendesk is built specifically for customer support teams while Dynamics 365 customer service is one component of a massive CRM and ERP suite designed to connect every department in your company.
Both tools are highly customizable, making them ideal for large and enterprise teams. However, this also leads to lengthy onboarding timelines and means more complexity in training new and existing team members.
Dynamics 365's out-of-the-box integrations with other Microsoft tools makes it ideal for companies that are already deeply embedded in Microsoft's app ecosystem, while Zendesk's nearly 2,000 integrations with third-party apps makes it more accommodating for teams using software from a variety of companies.
While Zendesk offers highly customizable reporting for support teams, Dynamics 365 leverages Power BI for deep, cross-departmental reporting and analysis.
Dynamics 365 Customer Service's key features
Dynamics 365's built-in AI is powered by Microsoft's Copilot — an industry-leading AI tool — and its native integration with Microsoft Teams makes it easy to collaborate on tickets in your chat app.
Copilot connects to your knowledge base to answer customers' questions automatically. It can also route customers with more complex inquiries to a support agent, using AI to determine the best person to reply to the ticket based on their expertise, skillset, and workload. When routing a ticket, the AI summarizes the request so agents can get up to speed quickly.
If text-based questions and answers aren't working for resolving an issue, agents can quickly create a link to invite the customer onto a Teams video chat. They can also start a chat in Teams with other agents who handled similar queries in the past to get help solving problems they don't know how to solve.
When an agent arrives to work for the day, Copilot provides them with a summary of all of the cases that have been assigned to them. Finally, Copilot is also built into the system's reporting features, providing managers with AI-driven insights on topics to address and metrics to look into more deeply.
Migrating from Zendesk to Microsoft Dynamics 365
Microsoft does not offer any native migration tools for importing your Zendesk data into its system. However, there are third-party partners who can do the migration for you for a fee.
Pricing
Free trial available. View Dynamics 365 Customer Service's current pricing.
9. Dixa – Best for cross-team collaboration
Dixa is a good option for companies where delivering customer support is a cross-team effort. It lets you collaborate easily not only with other teams inside of your company but also with external vendors, suppliers, and other third-parties, making it ideal for complex inquiries that require input from multiple individuals to resolve.
How Dixa compares to Zendesk
Pricing for Dixa and Zendesk is comparable, though Zendesk does offer more affordable base plans than Dixa. However, the per-resolution cost of Dixa's AI chatbot is less than a third of Zendesk's, making Dixa a more appealing option for teams using AI support extensively.
All of Dixa's plans have a seven-seat minimum. Zendesk does not have minimum seat requirements, so it can be a more affordable option for smaller teams.
Zendesk caters to cross-team collaboration with light users: a type of user with limited permissions. Dixa lets you bring anyone into customer conversations using only their email address — a Dixa user account is not required.
Both platforms offer skill-based routing, accommodating large support teams that have tiered roles (e.g., tier 1 support, tier 2 support, etc.) or specialists with specific skill sets (e.g., fluency in a specific language, technical troubleshooting proficiency, etc.).
Dixa's key features
Dixa's side conversations expand on the private notes feature of other help desks by allowing you to not only tag internal colleagues but also send an email to individuals who aren't Dixa users in your organization (e.g., vendors, partners, or other third parties). The side conversation and all replies can be created and viewed alongside the customer's original ticket.
Dixa also has sophisticated automatic routing rules. Instead of putting all of your requests into a single shared inbox for your team to cherry-pick, it automatically assigns new tickets to the person who's best equipped to respond to the request. It does this by evaluating priority, skill sets, and availability.
Finally, Dixa offers a drag-and-drop, no-code builder that lets you create your ideal workflows without any IT support. You can specify what types of requests are automatically routed, create smart rules to specify what's answered by AI and what goes into the queue, and even automatically close spam or irrelevant requests.
Beyond these features, Dixa has the same help desk features you'll find in all of the products on this list: email, live chat, phone, social, and self-service support. As far as AI, you can create a summary of previous support interactions for any customers, automatically translate replies, draft AI replies, and use its chatbot to provide instant answers.
Reviews from customers who switched from Zendesk to Dixa
"I like that it is super simple to get started with. I like that it is user friendly and easy to create changes in flow and other settings. I have used Zendesk before, and I actually feel that Dixa is easier to set up and to use for agents." Read the full review.
"I love how easy it is to customize the dashboards (especially compared to Zendesk Explore). The team at Dixa (previously Miuros*) is constantly pushing improvements, and they're highly receptive to ideas for product developments." Read the full review.
*Dixa acquired the AI-powered analytics platform, Miuros, in 2022.
Migrating from Zendesk to Dixa
Dixa does not offer any native migration tools for importing your Zendesk data into its platform. However, it does integrate with the third-party service Help Desk Migration, which you may be able to use to export your data from Zendesk and import it into Dixa.
Pricing
No free trial offered. View Dixa's current pricing.
FAQs
While we covered the best overall Zendesk alternatives in our list above, you may not have found the perfect option for your team if you're looking for something very specific. To help you broaden your list of tools to consider, we've listed some options that cater to more niche use cases below.
If you're looking to migrate to a new platform because you can no longer afford to pay a monthly fee for support software (or are looking for ways to cut costs), the tools below are all good options.
Help Scout: Help Scout is a great choice for small businesses that are planning to grow. On its free plan, up to five people on your team can manage email requests in a shared inbox, and you can also create a help center to enable your customers to find answers to their questions on their own.
HubSpot Service Hub: HubSpot Service Hub is a good option for small customer success teams that need to collaborate with sales teams that work in HubSpot CRM. While its free plan features are pretty limited, it offers enough of the basics — like email and live chat support — to let you easily manage customer requests while you’re in the early stages of building out your department.
Zoho Desk: Zoho Desk is a good free alternative to Zendesk for small teams that need service-level agreements and only offer email support. While only one SLA is included on the free plan, that may be enough for a team of no more than three people (its limit on the free plan).
ProProfs Help Desk: If you only have one person at your company doing all of your customer support, ProProfs Help Desk is a good option. The one-user limit is the only limit on the plan; you get unlimited access to all of its other features, including features you won’t find in other free plans like custom fields, a Salesforce integration, and multiple inboxes.
osTicket: If you’re comfortable self-hosting your customer support platform, osTicket is a good choice. It’s an open source help desk that lets you deliver email support, and since you’re self-hosting it, there are no limits on the number of users you can add or tickets you can reply to. You can also use all of its features without limits and even build your own features if you need to.
Hiver: Small businesses that manage support requests by having everyone in the company spend some time in the queue will like Hiver. In addition to letting you answer customers' questions over email, chat, WhatsApp, and phone, its free plan lets you add unlimited users at no cost.
UVdesk: UVdesk is another open-source help desk that’s available for free if you self-host it. Like osTicket, it doesn’t have limits on the number of users you can add, tickets you can answer, or features you can use. What sets UVdesk apart is that it caters more to ecommerce companies with its pre-built integrations with Shopify, Magento 2, BigCommerce, and more.
Tidio: Tidio’s free plan is a good option if you want to deliver support via live video calls; video calls can be initiated by customers through Tidio’s live chat widget. However, it is a bit more limiting than some of the other tools on this list with restrictions on both the number of conversations you can handle and the number of users you can add on the free plan.
If you like Zendesk's ticketing system but aren't thrilled with its knowledge base builder, there are a number of standalone knowledge base platforms to consider that integrate with Zendesk, including Helpjuice, KnowledgeOwl, Document360, and Bloomfire.
Additionally, there are some options with unique features that cater to specific use cases, including Docsie (automatically turns video recordings into knowledge base articles), Stonly (lets you build interactive tours in your knowledge base articles), and Brainfish (an AI knowledge base that keeps your help center content updated automatically).
Zendesk's AI offerings are strong but costly. Luckily, there are a number of standalone AI platforms you can integrate with Zendesk to continue using Zendesk's core support tools but rely on a separate service for AI features.
Intercom's Fin can be used as a standalone AI chatbot and has a lower per-resolution cost than Zendesk, eesel AI offers both AI copilots and agents and is unique for its flat-rate rather than usage-based pricing, and Tidio's Lyro AI Agent comes with a feature that lets you monitor AI conversations in real time and jump in when necessary.
There are also platforms that help you replace Zendesk's other AI features. Brainfish is a good option for using AI to create and update knowledge base content automatically, SentiSum is great for AI-powered insights and sentiment analysis, and MaestroQA is a standalone AI quality assurance tool that monitors conversations customers have with both your human reps and chatbots to help you identify quality issues.
If you want to migrate from Zendesk to an open source platform to save on costs, self-host your software, or gain access to more customization, check out osTicket (for email-only support), UVdesk (for its ecommerce platform integrations), Rocket.Chat (for social media support), Chatwoot (for live chat and AI agents), and Zammad (for IT support).
While Zendesk can be used by IT support teams, it's primarily designed for customer support and often lacks the specific features that IT support teams need. For a more targeted service desk solution, consider:
Jira Service Management: Ideal for DevOps support with features for incident, problem, asset, and change management.
Freshservice: Lets managed service providers create multiple portals for different clients and manage all tickets from a central interface.
Solarwinds: Available as both a SaaS and self-hosted tool with multiple à la carte packages so you only have to pay for the specific features you need.
ServiceNow: An enterprise-grade service desk for large IT teams that need deep customization.
Choosing the right Zendesk alternative for your business
At the beginning of this post, we provided some guidance on building a shortlist of tools to consider by looking at feature and channel availability and pricing. Hopefully, that will help you identify which of the tools on this list to consider more deeply, and you can narrow your list down to two or three final options.
From there, you'll want to get demos and/or start free trials of each. Demos let you get answers to the questions you can't find on your own, and hands-on experience in a free trial will help you learn what works best in a real-world environment.
Also, since multiple types of roles — agents, managers, other teams, etc. — will use the tool, it’s good to have people from each level of your support team test the final contenders. This ensures the option you choose will work well for everyone.
Finally, beyond the software's features and functionality, be sure to check out other aspects of each platform. Visit each tool’s help center, and send an email to their support team to evaluate how they handle customer interactions. The quality of support you receive when you need it can be a big differentiator, especially if all other things are equal.
Jessica Greene
Jessica Greene is a Help Scout alum, where we make excellent customer service achievable for companies of all sizes. Connect with her on LinkedIn or through her website.
