What are the best Zendesk alternatives? Top 13 Options

When searching for customer support tools, Zendesk often comes to mind first. It's a well-known platform with many features. However, it's not always the best choice for every team.

Two main concerns arise with Zendesk: price and setup time. Zendesk's entry-level plan is costly compared to other options in the market, and getting Zendesk ready for use can be time-consuming and complex (some organizations report that it takes several months to go through all the needed steps to set it up properly).

These factors suggest Zendesk might not benefit all support teams, especially those with limited budgets or those needing to get started quickly. With that being the case, many teams look for alternatives that better fit their needs and resources.

The 13 best Zendesk alternatives and competitors

Below, we look at the best Zendesk alternatives, list their key features, and offer some insight into what types of teams each Zendesk competitor works best for.

1. Help Scout

2. Zoho Desk

3. Freshdesk

4. Gorgias

5. HubSpot Service Hub

6. Front

7. HappyFox

8. Intercom

9. Hiver

10. Jira Service Management

11. Dixa

12. Salesforce Service Cloud

13. Missive

There is some overlap of features and functionality with these tools, but most have nuances that make them better suited for certain use cases.

1. Help Scout

Best alternative to Zendesk for growing teams.

Help Scout is a complete customer support platform built with both the customer and the agent experience in mind. An intuitive, user-friendly interface means the learning curve for using Help Scout is minimal: You’ll be up and running in a matter of hours and be an expert by the end of week one. When you sign up for Help Scout, you get access to a feature-rich platform with a variety of powerful customer support tools.

All of your channels, all in one place

Create one or more shared team mailboxes to manage your customer conversations across all your favorite channels — email, chat, and social. Shared inbox 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.

Create a database of saved replies to make answering routine customer requests a breeze, or set up workflows to increase productivity and efficiency by automatically doing things like assigning conversations to specific teams or agents. Customer profiles provide your team with the context they need to deliver personalized customer service experiences, and tags and custom fields help you keep everything organized.

Help them help themselves

Research shows customers want to be empowered to find answers on their own, and creating a customer-facing knowledge base is a great way to do that. With Docs, you can create a customized help center that makes it easy for clients to find the information they need when they need it.

Supported by humans, enhanced by AI

Help Scout’s customer-first approach to AI features gives your team the tools to help customers more efficiently, freeing up their time for more complex and valuable tasks.

AI summarize helps your team get up to speed on long conversation threads fast, while AI assist acts as a partner and provides writing assistance. Use AI assist in conversation, chat, Messages, and Docs editors to help with spelling and grammar checks, length or tone changes, or copy translation if you support people in more than one country.

AI drafts gives your team a head start on every reply by using generative AI, past conversations, and the content of your Docs site to help draft responses to incoming emails. Simply read the AI draft, edit as necessary, and hit send.

Connect with customers at the right place and the right time

Help Scout’s Beacon lets you connect with customers when and where they need you the most. Simply install our messaging widget on any page of your website or within your app to provide instant access to customer support. Your users can easily reach out to your support team via live chat or access a knowledge base article all from within your customer experience.

But communication isn’t just a one-way street — Beacon also lets your business 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.

Analytics so you don’t need to guess

Help Scout comes loaded with pre-built dashboards — reducing admin work — 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 to assess growth and focus on the metrics you care about most. If you want to do even more with your data, you can use our API or Fivetran to connect to the business intelligence tool of your choosing.

Here to support you so you can support them

Along with our robust tools, we also offer 24/6 support provided by our customers team. We have a detailed help center, free resources and blog content, and live classes hosted by Help Scout experts, all so you have everything you need to support your customers, day in and day out.

Thinking about making the switch?

Lastly, Help Scout understands the importance of keeping your level of support high, even through periods of change. The platform’s data migration capabilities simplify the process of bringing your existing customer data and conversation history with you so that your team always has the information required to provide your customers with a great support experience.

Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $22/user per month.

2. Zoho Desk

Best Zendesk alternative for teams that need a community forum.

Zoho is probably best known for its customer relationship management tool to help manage sales leads, but it also makes a customer support solution. Zoho Desk has a number of features like a shared inbox, phone integration, and chat. However, some features — like chat — are limited to the highest-cost plan.

Zoho Desk also boasts a selection of integrations that partners the system with the rest of your tech stack. For larger teams, there are team management features you can take advantage of, like time tracking. They even offer AI options such as chatbots, sentiment analysis, and ticket field and tag predictions. 

A Zendesk feature that is less common with other customer service tools is a community management feature. Zoho Desk is one of the few all-in-one type platforms that offer forum support. Communities can be a great addition to your self-service options and can help your organization build better customer relationships.

Price: Free trial and plan available. Paid plans start at $7/user per month. Plans with community forums start at $14/user per month. Learn about other tools similar to Zoho Desk.

3. Freshdesk

Best alternative to Zendesk for larger teams.

Freshdesk is the tool that is most similar to Zendesk on this list. It boasts a shared inbox, it can manage customer communications across several popular channels, it has a customizable knowledge base builder, and it can connect to other systems using apps in its marketplace. Freshdesk also has other tried and true ticketing system features like workflow automations, CSAT surveys, round-robin ticket routing, and a mobile app so you can respond to customers even if you’re not at a computer.

Like most customer service platforms on the market, Freshdesk has AI technology — referred to as Freddy AI — that can be added to your plan to help you save time and reduce ticket volume. Subscribers can purchase any of these three offered AI add-ons: AI-powered chatbots, a support agent assistant that can help with tasks like drafting replies or improving agent-composed text, or AI-enhanced reporting features.. 

Price: Free trial and plan available. Paid plans start at $15/agent per month. Customer Service Suite plans start at $29/agent per month. Learn about other tools similar to Freshdesk.

4. Gorgias

Best Zendesk alternative for ecommerce companies.

When you sign up for Gorgias, you get access to a multi-channel shared inbox that you can use to manage channels like email, voice, social media, and live chat. You can also create a help center to promote self-service and use the platform’s reporting dashboards to gather insights about your support operations and measure improvement.

Historically, the biggest difference between Gorgias and other help desks has been its ecommerce integrations, particularly the Shopify connection. Through the integration, you can see order details, edit orders, and even make refunds directly from your help desk, which can save your team a lot of time. These days, however, Zendesk (and many of its competitors) also offers similar functionality. 

One thing to keep in mind about Gorgias is that many of the platform’s automation, AI, and campaign features require additional add-on fees on top of the regular pricing plans.

Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $10 per month. Learn about other tools similar to Gorgias.

5. HubSpot Service Hub

Best Zendesk alternative for teams using HubSpot as a CRM.

HubSpot is a recognizable logo and is well-known for its marketing and sales software, but it also has a customer support offering called HubSpot Service Hub. Service Hub is help desk software that includes most standard features like a shared inbox, live chat, a knowledge base builder, chatbots, customer satisfaction surveys, workflow automations, and reporting dashboards to track performance.

If you’re a HubSpot CRM user, it makes a lot of sense to keep your customer service solution in the family. You can connect customer profiles to Service Hub, giving your staff more context and insight as they work through the queue.

Price: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $15/seat per month. Learn about other tools similar to HubSpot.

6. Front

Best Zendesk alternative for startups focused on account management.

While the ability to manage personal email alongside team inboxes used to be the main selling point for the platform, Front has grown substantially over the last few years and now offers many other features that make it stand up as a solid alternative to Zendesk.

Front can help you manage most of the channels Zendesk offers, like email, live chat, social, messaging, chatbots, voice, and a help center, though some channels require third-party integrations. Along with shared inbox capabilities, Front also has collaboration, automation, and AI features, which can make managing communications faster and more efficient. 

However, there are a few areas where Front’s offerings aren’t as strong. For instance, its Starter plan doesn’t have any reporting features, unlike the comparable Zendesk plan. Front is also missing CSAT support on its base plan. While Zendesk’s plan also lacks the capability, other options on the list at a similar price point include reporting, CSAT scores, and more. 

Price: Plans start at $19/seat per month. Learn about other tools similar to Front.

7. HappyFox

Best Zendesk alternative for teams wanting project management features.

HappyFox is a kind of mashup of help desk and project management software. It includes the usual suspects like a shared inbox, knowledge base software, and some automation capabilities to help reduce repetitive tasks, but it can also create and assign tasks and view the ticket queue in a Kanban view for better visualization of the tickets assigned across the team.

HappyFox can also be a great choice for those in the IT industry because, in addition to ticketing and self-service tools, there is also an asset manager that can be used to keep track of company-owned devices and equipment, as well as any issues related to them.

Along with its help desk solution, HappyFox also offers products that support live chat, chatbots, and AI tools. However, all of these are considered separate applications and would need to be purchased independently of the help desk offering.

Price: Free trial period available. Plans start at $9/agent per month. Learn about other tools similar to HappyFox.

8. Intercom

Best Zendesk alternative for enterprise teams focused on proactive engagement.

Intercom is a popular communications platform that has been a favorite of sales and marketing teams for years. While its customer service offerings used to be a bit on the rough side, the organization has pivoted toward support in recent years and has made big improvements.

When it comes to support needs — ticket management features, collaborative tools, channels offered, chatbot capabilities, AI functionality, and major integrations supported — Intercom is going to feel just as powerful as Zendesk. However, Intercom’s strengths still shine brightest when it comes to sales, marketing, and customer success use cases. In particular, its messenger-focused platform is excellent for proactive engagement, customer onboarding, and user segmentation.

The main downside to using Intercom for non-enterprise companies is the pricing structure. While it is much more streamlined than it used to be, there are still a lot of add-ons and usage-based fees that are added to the monthly subscription. This makes it hard to accurately predict monthly costs for those who want to use anything but Intercom’s most basic features, which can be tough for smaller customer support teams that may be working with budget constraints.

Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $29/seat per month. Learn about other tools similar to Intercom.

9. Hiver

Best Zendesk alternative for Gmail users.

If your team relies heavily on Gmail and you’re looking for a solution that can make handling support within that ecosystem more tenable, then Hiver could be a good fit. The customer service platform is essentially a Gmail extension that lets you access shared inboxes, assign conversations, add tags, leave internal notes, and more from within your inbox window.

In addition to email, Hiver also supports live chat and has the ability to publish knowledge base articles. Some of the higher-tiered plans also offer bots and AI features. One thing that is different from other options on the list is that CSAT and most of the other reporting features are also limited to the higher plans.

However, for those looking for a way to dip their toes into expanding beyond Gmail or Google’s Collaborative Inbox, Hiver could be a good start.

Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $19/user per month. Learn about other tools similar to Hiver.

10. Jira Service Management

Best Zendesk alternative to use as a service desk.

Jira Service Management is a good pick for small to midsize companies looking for a Zendesk alternative for IT support. It has many of the same support tools you’ll find on most support platforms, but it also has features like a customer portal and incident and asset management tools that focus more on IT services.

The software also integrates seamlessly with Jira, another Atlassian product focused on project management. Given that so many development and internal technical teams are used to working within the Jira ecosystem, Service Management may have a gentler learning curve than a product like Zendesk.

Price: Free trial and plan available. Paid plans start at $17.65/agent per month.

11. Dixa

Best alternative to Zendesk for teams that use side conversations.

Dixa is an excellent customer service software tool, with all channels (email, chat, social, voice, chatbot, and messenger app) natively built into the platform. It also offers a knowledge base builder, AI features, and connectivity with plenty of popular software like CRMs and ecommerce platforms.

For teams that have a lot of issues that require team effort, Dixa has a side conversations feature. With side conversations, you can create an email or add an internal note to another party (vendors, partners, colleagues, etc.) directly from within the conversation editor. Reaching out from within Dixa ties the side conversation to the issue at hand so that anyone on your team can see the communication and pick up where you left off if necessary.

If your team relies on Zendesk’s side conversations feature, then Dixa could be a good alternative for your team. Although Dixa doesn’t offer the ability to create side Slack conversations like Zendesk, the email functionality is still pretty great.

Price: Plans start at $39/agent per month (minimum seven seats required).

12. Salesforce Service Cloud

Best Zendesk alternative for businesses offering field service.

Most people are probably familiar with Salesforce as a CRM, but they also make other business solutions, including a customer service offering called Service Cloud. With Service Cloud, you can provide omnichannel support, build a knowledge base, automate service with workflows, and answer customers more quickly with the help of their AI offering, Einstein.

The platform is a great choice for teams already using Salesforce as a CRM, but it’s also suitable for companies that offer on-site product support. The software has features specific to field service management, including dispatch and scheduling tools, work order management, and a mobile app to help your technicians in the field, even when Wi-Fi access isn’t available.

Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $25/user per month.

13. Missive

Best Zendesk alternative for basic email support.

Teams that want a simple, email-focused alternative to Zendesk for their customer support or sales teams might want to look into Missive. The software makes it easy to manage email collaboratively through the use of team mailboxes, conversation assignments, and team chat.

Another feature to help ensure that you’re always putting your company’s best foot forward in an email is Missive’s collaborative writing feature. It lets you work on an email draft as a team and discuss the copy as you work so you can nail all the details.

The company also supports live chat and several messaging channels, has task management features, and offers rules to help automate your workflows. If you have a subscription to Open AI, you can also use Missive’s integration to add AI drafting capabilities to your conversations.

Price: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $14/user per month. Learn about other tools similar to Missive.

Choosing the right Zendesk competitor for your team

Zendesk is a very complex product with lots of benefits. For those who need all of its different features and have the time and money to get it up and running, it could make life better. However, for more agile teams, it comes with many challenges and may ultimately end up being a complication.

The reality is that Zendesk is optimized to meet the needs of very large teams at companies with more than 500 employees. For leaner, growing teams at SaaS, ecommerce, online services, and DTC companies, several Zendesk competitors may align more closely with your needs.

Knowing your options is a good place to start when looking for a new support platform. Before you make a choice, though, it’s helpful to dive a little deeper.

To start, ask yourself these three questions:

• What can I afford? Money is a common constraint for most teams. Creating a short list based on budget is a simple way to narrow options and assess value early in your search.

• What features are non-negotiable? Make a list of all the possible features you might want in a potential tool, then go through and mark which are “need to have” vs. “nice to have.”

• What’s my timeline? Some tools are easy to set up, while others take more time to implement. Make sure you consider how long initial setup and training will take for any potential new tool.

After answering those questions, your next job is to narrow your list to two to three options and do demos and trials of each. Hands-on experience can help you see what works best in a real-world environment.

Also, since multiple types of roles — agents, managers, etc. — will use the tool, it’s good to have people from each level of your support team test the final contenders. That way, you ensure the option you choose works well for everyone.

Beyond the software's features and functionality, be sure to check out other aspects of each offering. Visit each tool’s help center and send an email to their support team to evaluate how they handle customer interactions. Quality of support can be a big differentiator for service providers, especially if all other things are equal.

Deciding on the best alternative to Zendesk for you

There’s no denying that Zendesk makes a great product. If you’re a very big team with an even bigger budget, they may very well be the right option for you. For everyone else, there’s probably a solution that gets you all the features and functionality you need without breaking the bank.

Take the time to truly dial into your needs and discover which tools you need to address them. Finding the right solution is much easier when those items are nailed down. From there, it’s simply testing the options and seeing what fits best.

For those with a focus on delighting customers, Help Scout offers a free 15-day free trial (no credit card required) so you can try out everything we have to offer and see if we're the right Zendesk alternative for you.