What Are the Best Zendesk Alternatives? 9 Top Options

Zendesk is a powerful help desk with every feature a support team could ever need, but with that power comes complexity:

• 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.

• Taking advantage of many of the platform's features requires technical support from development or engineering teams.

• The platform isn't very intuitive, making it difficult to train new agents to use it.

• When you need support, you probably won't get it.

Beyond that, Zendesk is one of the highest-priced support tools on the market. While its pricing page makes the platform look comparable to other tools on the market, customers report having to consistently upgrade to higher-priced plans and pay for add-ons to get access to the basic features they need.

If you're looking for something that has all of the features you need without the overhead, complexity, and opaque pricing, consider these nine Zendesk alternatives.

1. Help Scout – Best overall Zendesk alternative

Help Scout has all of the power of Zendesk without the complexity. Its 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 an expert user 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 team inboxes to manage your customer conversations across all channels — email, 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.

Create a database of saved replies to make answering routine customer requests a breeze, or set up workflows to increase productivity and efficiency by automating things like assigning conversations to specific teams or agents.

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 always send a reply at the perfect time with scheduled replies.

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. Beacon can be embedded on your website and in your app, and customers can use it to search your knowledge base; get instant, AI-generated answers (coming soon); or request live or email support from your team.

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 quickly by providing summaries of the key points of long conversation threads. 

AI assist acts as a partner and provides writing assistance. Use it in replies or when creating knowledge base articles to clean up spelling and grammar issues, make length or tone changes, or translate your text if you support customers 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 in the right place at the right time

Help Scout’s Beacon makes it easy to deliver instant 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 to provide instant support.

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.

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.

Get exceptional support so you can deliver exceptional support

Help Scout has one of the highest ratings for customer support of all of the help desks on the market. Here's what some of its customers have to say about the support they've received:

• "The customer support is over-the-top, amazing, above-and-beyond helpful. These are not clichés, they should be taken literally." (Read the full review.)

• "This is an incredible help desk UI, and absolutely NO ONE beats Help Scout's own customer care approach and attention to detail….Help Scout is a care desk that has been made by amazing professionals already in the customer care space — a service BY support teams FOR support teams." (Read the full review.)

• "I love Help Scout's product; using it has been an excellent experience. Moreover, their own support team, blog, and support content have been incredibly useful and valuable, both personally and professionally. You can tell these people care about people!" (Read the full review.)

Help Scout offers 24/6 support, along with a detailed help center, free resources and guides, and live classes hosted by Help Scout experts, so you'll have everything you need to support your customers day in and day out.

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 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

Help Scout's pricing is completely transparent. No gotchas will pop up after you pick a plan and subscribe to the service: Everything you'll get on each plan is specified on its pricing page.

The platform offers a robust free plan that comes with everything you need to get started: one inbox, one knowledge base, 10 views, 10 saved replies, 10 workflows, one Beacon, 10 messages (excluding surveys and NPS), 100 tags, 30 days of reporting data, 50 included contacts* per month, unlimited users, and full access to all AI features without any additional usage fees.

For those that need more functionality, Help Scout has three paid plans. Each comes with all of the above, plus additional features and included contacts. Paid plans start at $50 per month.

*A contact is someone who received a reply from your team or had their question resolved by AI answers (coming soon) in a given month. Multiple conversations with the same person count as one contact.

2. Intercom – Best for automated support

Some of the customer support tools on the market, like Help Scout, have added AI to their offerings to enable human support agents to work faster and more efficiently. Others have focused more on using AI to replace the need for human support agents. Intercom falls into the latter category, having pivoted recently to an AI-first model with Fin, its AI bot.

Fin is available through Intercom's live chat widget and via email and will answer customer questions on your behalf. You train it by adding content to its library, which can include your website, knowledge base, and support tickets as well as one-off information you want to provide like text snippets, PDF documents, and individual URLs.

Once you've fed Fin all of your knowledge sources, you can specify how you want it to reply to customers. Choose a tone that matches your brand voice, and specify how long its answers should be. It can also translate any of its knowledge into 45 different languages.

Workflows give you more control over how Fin handles specific types of queries so you can do things like automatically send billing questions to human support agents. Finally, you can see exactly how Fin is performing and how much time it's saving your support team in Intercom's detailed reports.

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 (tickets) into Intercom does not give you access to those conversations in Intercom. Instead, it just uses that data to train Fin.

Pricing

Ticket resolutions by Fin are $0.99 per resolution regardless of which plan you're on. So if you're using Fin, you'll have a base per seat per month cost for access to Intercom's platform in addition to the total cost of any resolutions Fin provides. The upside is that you get access to all of Fin's features in all plans.

On Intercom's base plan, which starts at $29/seat per month, you get access to one shared inbox, one knowledge base, live chat, and reports. For workflows, social support, and lite users, you'll need to be on the Advanced plan ($85/seat per month). To get multiple help centers, custom permissions, and SSO, you'll need to be on the Enterprise plan ($132/user per month).

3. Freshdesk – Best for variety of integrations

One of the big advantages of Zendesk is that it integrates with nearly 2,000 other tools. The only other product on the market that comes close is Freshdesk, which offers nearly 700 integrations through its app marketplace. So if integrating your support software with other niche tools your company uses is a must-have, Freshdesk is likely the right choice for your team.

Freshdesk is also one of the few help desks that, like Zendesk, offers native phone support capabilities through its Freshcaller product — most of the other platforms only offer phone support via integration.

Beyond these unique features, you'll get access to the same channels and tools you'll find in any help desk: a shared inbox, live chat, social support, a knowledge base, workflow automation, round-robin ticket routing, and mobile apps. Freshdesk also offers a free forever plan that gives up to two agents access to its basic features at no monthly cost.

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

Freshdesk's free plan can be used by up to two agents and includes a shared inbox, ticketing, reports, and a knowledge base. Its Growth plan gets you all of those features plus custom reports, a customer portal, and automations for $15/agent per month.

To get access to Freddy AI, you'll need to be on either the Pro ($49/agent per month) or Enterprise ($79/agent per month) plans. Those plans also include SLAs, round-robin, forums, and business hours. Up to 500 sessions with Freddy AI are included in those plans, and additional sessions are $100 for every additional 1,000.

To add phone support, you'll need to subscribe separately to Freshcaller. It has a free plan, but it's not technically free — you just pay for minutes used instead of a monthly per-user rate. To get access to Freddy AI, you'll need to be on the Enterprise plan which starts at $69/agent per month and includes 5,000 phone minutes.

4. Zoho Desk – Best for creating community forums

Another Zendesk feature you won't find in all help desks is its community forums. Freshdesk has them, but only on its higher-tier plans ($49+/agent per month). Zoho Desk offers forums at a much lower cost, starting at $14/agent per month.

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, business intelligence tool, project management platform, and HR software among many, many other features. A complete Zoho migration can get all of your business systems under one integrated platform.

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

Zoho Desk has an Express plan that gives you ticketing, social support, and reports for up to five agents for $7/user per month. Its Standard plan ($14/user per month) includes community forums, email support, and a help center. The Professional plan ($23/user per month) adds in phone support, and live chat is only available on its Enterprise plan ($40/user per month).

5. Kustomer – Best for ecommerce support

Kustomer stands out due to its variety of integrations with the tools that ecommerce support teams use.

Its Shopify integration, as an example, can be set up in one click. Once activated, it 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 AI answers by KIQ Customer Assist, enabling the bot to do more sophisticated things like process refunds, update orders, and provide details on when shipped products will arrive. KIQ also answers more general questions for customers using information from your knowledge base.

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

Kustomer has two plans: an Enterprise plan that starts at $89/user per month, and an Ultimate plan for $139/user per month. Both plans include the bulk of Kustomer's features, but Ultimate has higher limits for some features and a guaranteed 99% uptime SLA.

To get access to KustomerIQ, you'll have to purchase the add-on, which costs an additional $39/user and $0.75/resolution.

6. HubSpot Service Hub – Best for small businesses

If you're a small business that ended up on Zendesk because someone recommended it but are finding that it's much more complex than what you need right now, HubSpot Service Hub could be a good alternative — particularly if you're already using its marketing or CRM products. 

HubSpot Service Hub includes most of the standard help desk features like a shared inbox, live chat, knowledge base builder, chatbots, customer satisfaction surveys, workflows, and reporting dashboards to track performance. These features are all pretty pared-down from what you'll get in other help desks, but if simplicity is what you're looking for, it's perfect.

It works especially well if you have marketing or sales team members doing the bulk of your support — such as in an early-stage, sales-led organization. Since these team members are already in HubSpot all day long doing their normal work, Service Hub's system will be familiar to them and easy to use without any training required.

Migrating from Zendesk to HubSpot Service Hub

HubSpot 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

HubSpot Service Hub has a free plan for up to two users that includes one shared inbox, up to three canned snippets, up to five knowledge base articles, and a live chat widget with HubSpot branding. 

Paid plans, which remove the HubSpot branding and significantly increase the limits of the different features (e.g., up to 5,000 canned snippets and knowledge base articles), start at $15/user per month.

Small businesses may also be able to take advantage of HubSpot's startup plan, which discounts the cost of the software by up to 75%.

7. Salesforce Service Cloud – Best for enterprise companies

If you found Zendesk's complexity to be a feature rather than a hurdle, Salesforce Service Cloud is probably the best alternative for you. It's built for enterprise teams that have highly complex processes and organizational structures, with features like incident detection, diagnostic tools, broadcast communications, asset tracking, and omnichannel routing.

Finally, Salesforce offers a variety of AI tools to expedite support operations: 

• Use its chatbot to automatically reply to customer questions and requests. It can even understand and reply to pictures, videos, and audio files that customers send. 

• Turn support conversations into knowledge base articles automatically.

• Automatically summarize long support threads, and add the summary to the end of the conversation.

• Deliver instant answers in your self-service portal, on WhatsApp, Apple Messages for Business, and Facebook Messenger, and via text message.

Salesforce's AI tools also use its Einstein Trust Layer to make sure the AI never shares private data, and you can set up specific rules for the types of queries that should always be routed to a human support agent.

Migrating from Zendesk to Salesforce Service Cloud

Salesforce does not offer any native migration tools for importing your Zendesk data into Service Cloud. However, it does integrate with the third-party service Help Desk Migration, which can do the data transfer for you for a fee.

Pricing

Salesforce Service Cloud's base plan starts at $25/user per month and includes ticketing, reports, and a knowledge base. To get access to its field service tools, you'll need to be on the Enterprise plan ($165/user per month). 

For all of its AI features, you'll need to be on the Einstein 1 Service plan, which starts at $500/user per month. It is worth noting that Service Cloud is one of the only help desks that doesn't charge additional per-session or per-resolution fees for its AI features.

8. Jira Service Management – Best for technical support

While Zendesk can be used by more technical engineering or IT support teams, it's not really built for that use case — it's primarily designed for customer service teams. For an alternative that is designed for technical support, Jira Service Management is probably your best bet.

For IT support teams, you can create a service desk, use AI to provide automated answers, configure SLAs, and manage your company assets. You can also code your own intake forms and automated workflows or access libraries of hundreds of pre-built, no-code templates.

For engineering support teams, you can link tickets to issues reported in Jira — Atlassian's bug-tracking tool — as well as manage incidents, aggregate product requests, and group similar incidents and bugs together as problems. You can also use its API to integrate with any programming or email tools you use.

IT operations teams can coordinate efforts across multiple teams to manage change requests, prevent incidents, monitor new releases, and create on-call schedules.

Migrating from Zendesk to Jira Service Management

Atlassian does not offer any native migration tools for importing your Zendesk data into Jira Service Management. However, it does integrate with the third-party service Help Desk Migration, which can do the data transfer for you for a fee.

Pricing

Jira Service Management has a free plan for up to three agents that includes multi-channel support, a knowledge base, and incident, problem, and change management. For access to its AI and asset management features, you'll need to be on the Premium plan ($44.27/agent per month).

9. Dixa – Best for multi-department collaboration

For larger companies with more complex organizational structures, Dixa is a good choice. It comes with several unique features that make cross-team collaboration easy.

Its 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 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.

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.

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 can do the data transfer for you for a fee.

Pricing

Dixa's base plan starts at $39/agent per month. It includes its routing and side conversation features, but the only channel included in the plan is live chat. To get access to all of the other support channels, you'll need to be on the Growth plan ($89/agent per month).

Dixa's AI features are each sold as add-on products. Instant chatbot answers are $0.20/conversation, and Co-Pilot — which provides AI summaries, translations, and drafts — is an additional $29/agent per month.

The 9 best Zendesk alternatives: Side-by-side comparison

Choosing the right Zendesk alternative for your business

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. Ask yourself these questions:

• What can I afford? Budget is a constraint for most teams. Creating a short list based on your 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 features you might want in a tool, then go through and mark which are “need to have” versus “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 the initial setup and training will take.

After answering those questions, your next job is to narrow your list to two to three options and do demos and/or 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. This ensures the option you choose will work 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.