10 Best Zendesk Alternatives & Competitors for Customer Support (2023)

Go through the detailed comparison of the best Zendesk alternatives and choose the right one for your business.

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Zendesk offers integrated customer support, knowledge base and smart self-service options, live chat messaging, and integrated voice software — everything you need to provide quality customer support while taking your customer experience to the next level.

And while this customer experience solution may be perfect for companies like Venmo, Slack, Uber, and Shopify, that doesn’t mean that it’s ideal for your business.

So let’s dive into some of the best Zendesk alternatives for those of us looking for something different.

Why There’s a Need To Look For Top Zendesk Competitors?

Zendesk is one of the top preferred cloud based customer service solutions but there are some areas that act as the downside of the tool, which is why it is not considered as a go-to customer support tool for every organization.

Here are some of the key areas where the tool seems to be missing out when compared to other Zendesk alternatives.

  • Data export issues – Zendesk has no options to export data directly into a JSON or CSV file. You need to depend upon a developer to export data. The Zendesk export API requires you to write a code to extract data.
  • Minimal control over client data – Zendesk being a SaaS-based system, does not allow complete control over your customers’ data in a third-party setup. Zendesk servers store all the critical data that is actually not secured when it comes to data control.
  • Business needs are different – Not every business needs a long list of features and functionality. Zendesk is loaded with features and small companies end up paying for features they do not use.
  • High recurring costs – Zendesk paid plans are quite expensive. It is not an affordable solution, especially for businesses and teams with a small size & budget. The plan begins at $49/agent/month to $215/agent/month. Hence businesses look for affordable.
  • Basic plans = basic features only – The basic plans of Zendesk lack important customer service features, like a self-service customer portal, AI-powered knowledge management, customizable ticket layouts, and shareable dashboards, etc.

Zendesk Alternatives Comparison Chart

ToolKey FeaturesBest forPricing
Veemo Support
  • Omnichannel Support
  • Shared Inbox
  • Advanced Knowledge Base
  • Task Management
  • Client Portal
  • Workflow Automations
Small and medium businesses (SMBs) and Enterprises for Omnichannel Support
Kayako
  • Live Chat
  • Self Service
  • Collaborations
  • Integrations
Organizations of all types and sizes – from microbusiness to the enterprise Kayako plans start at $15/agent/month.
Helpjuice
  • Intelligent Analytics
  • Easy Authoring
  • Content Formatting
  • Amazing Integrations
Small, mid-size, large enterprises and in any industry segmentThe plans at Help juice starts at $120/month for up to 4 users.
Document360
  • Knowledge Base Portal
  • Integration & Extensions
  • Proform API
Best suited for small to large enterprisesThe pricing starts at $249/month – 20 team accounts
Freshdesk
  • Advanced Reporting
  • Customer Portal
  • Ticketing System
  • Customization
Larger companies who have their own call center teamsThe plans start at $15/agent per month.
Liveagent
  • Advanced Ticketing
  • Knowledge Base
  • Live Chat
  • Help Desk Platform
Growing teams looking for simple ticketing systemThe plans for LiveAgent start at $15/agent/month
Hubspot Service Hub
  • Omni Channel Messaging
  • Customer Portal
  • Knowledge Base
  • VoIP Calling
Best for any company looking to improve its customer service operationsThe plans of Hubspot Service starts at $200/month
Intercom
  • Business Messenger
  • Customizable Bots
  • Live Chat
  • Integrations
Customer engagement platformIntercom plans start at $39/month
Supportbee
  • Shared Inbox
  • Customer Portal
  • Knowledge Base
It is the best ticket management system for small businessesSupportbee plans start from $15/mo.
Proprofs
  • Live Chat
  • Survey Maker
  • Help Desk
  • Qualaroo Insights
Great for businesses of all sizesThe pricing plans begin with $1/learner/mo.

What features you must look for in a Best Zendesk Alternative?

Zendesk is one of the most widely used, but it’s not the go-to customer support tool for every organization. Different businesses look for different features, hence look for alternatives of Zendesk software.

Let’s take a look at key areas where the tool seems to be losing out when compared to other Zendesk alternatives.

  • Omnichannel Capabilities: Ensure the platform can offer seamless and integrated support across multiple channels, to improve customer experience and provide a consistent response.
  • Self-Service Knowledge Base: A comprehensive and easily searchable knowledge base for customers to quickly find answers to their questions, reducing support inquiries.
  • Powerful Workflow Automations: Look for a platform that offers robust automation features, such as automating ticket routing and resolution, to improve efficiency and speed up response times.
  • Single Customer View: A unified customer view that aggregates all interactions, data, and history, to provide a complete picture of each customer, improving personalization and support.
  • Advanced Customer and Team reporting: Access to real-time data insights and reporting to track key metrics, measure team performance, and identify areas for improvement.
  • Team Collaboration: Look for a platform that offers robust collaboration features, such as shared inboxes and task management tools, to improve team efficiency and communication.
  • Client Portal: Look for a Zendesk competitor that offers a client portal, which enables customers to easily access their support tickets, knowledge base, and other resources, improving self-service and customer experience.
  • Advanced Customer Support Features: Look for a platform that offers advanced customer support features, such as asset management, task management, and status pages, to improve efficiency, accuracy, and transparency of support operations. These features can help manage tickets more effectively and provide real-time updates to customers on the status of their requests.

10 Best Zendesk Alternatives that Meet Your Business Needs

Zendesk offers integrated customer support, knowledge base and smart self-service options, live chat messaging, and integrated voice software — everything a business needs to provide quality customer support while taking your customer experience to the next level.

While Zendesk’s customer experience solution may be perfect for some companies, that does not mean that it is ideal for your business. You need to find out the most appropriate one for your business.

We have summarized ten best Zendesk alternatives along with their key features, pros, cons and their pricing plans that will offer valuable insights for you to determine which alternative works best for your business.

  1. Veemo Support
  2. Kayako
  3. Helpjuice
  4. Document360
  5. Freshdesk
  6. Liveagent
  7. Hubspot Service Hub
  8. Intercom
  9. Supportbee
  10. Proprofs

Let us dive into the best Zendesk alternatives for all those who are looking for something that complements your business better..

#1. Veemo Support – Best Zendesk Alternative for Omnichannel Help Desk and Conversational Support

Veemo Support offers the one of the best omnichannel help desk and customer support software with stronger emphasis on conversations than traditional ticketing. With an integrated shared inbox, knowledge base, task management and customer CRM, Veemo Support makes it breeze to manage customer support more efficiently and seamlessly

Veemo help desk solution empowers businesses to provide exceptional customer support with addressing client queries faster with accurate solutions. It allows businesses to stay at the top of key customer service metrics i.e. response time. It helps to deliver delightful experiences that further retains customers and increase conversions.

Key Features

Shared Inbox for Omnichannel Help Desk & Ticketing

Veemo Support provides an omnichannel shared team inbox to convert your customer issues into conversations to
The best Zendesk alternative should have the potential to convert your support emails into tickets to keep easy track & provide instant response. You can tag a relevant status to the tickets so that it floats across the right departments. When tickets route to the right team/agent, faster is the resolution.

Advanced Knowledge base

Look for a latest multilingual customer support portal in the Zendesk alternatives that will empower you to deliver automated service. It also helps your team and agents with version control, customization and SEO capabilities.

Omnichannel Support

Modern customers can reach out to you from different channels like live chat, messaging apps, social media platforms, chatbot, email etc. The best Zendesk alternative should have the feature to streamline all customer requests under one platform and offer real time consistent support.

Workflow Automations

The best Zendesk alternatives help to automate tasks that lead to SLA application, handle premium clients and address tickets based on priority level. Automation feature helps to automate routine customer support processes that improves agent productivity and multichannel capability.

Task Management

Task management is a critical component of help desk/customer service operations, enabling teams to organize and prioritize support tasks, assign them to the right agents, and track their progress. It helps improve efficiency, reduce response times, and increase customer satisfaction.

Client Portal

A client portal provides customers with a self-service platform where they can access their support tickets, knowledge base, and other resources, reducing the need for direct contact with support agents. This can help improve customer experience, reduce response times, and increase efficiency for support teams.

Asset Management

Asset management enables organizations to track, manage, and maintain their hardware, software, and other assets, improving accuracy and efficiency in resolving customer issues. It can also provide real-time inventory updates, automate asset tracking, and reduce manual errors, making it an essential component of customer support operations.

Pricing

#2. Kayako – Best Zendesk Alternative For Customizable Tckeitng Platform

Kayako provides a complete help desk experience with a fully customizable knowledge base that is available round the clock. It is an all-in-one solution for unified omni-channel communication and is preferred for ticketing systems, providing easy navigation for the teams. It also allows teams to collaborate effortlessly via shared inbox.

With Kayako, you can provide email, live chat, Twitter, Facebook, and mobile support for a frictionless experience. It eases customers to help themselves via a help center that features a self-service portal and knowledge base. It allows businesses to deliver faster, more proactive customer service by connecting Kayako with Zapier, Salesforce, Slack, and over 500 other business apps.

Pros

  • Highly scalable with a plethora of features from SMBs to Enterprises
  • Designed with a simple and easy to use interface
  • Offers a flexible pricing system

Cons

  • Best features of Kayako is reserved for expensive pricing plans
  • Cluttered and clunky interface makes difficult to find important business features
  • Lack of localization
  • Limited email capacity that are over 10 megabyte

Pricing
Kayako plans start at $15/agent/month for small teams that need a shared email, chat, and social inbox. All plans offer a 14-day free trial. There is no free version available.

#3. Helpjuice – Best Zendesk Alternative For Customizable Knowledge base Software

Helpjuice is yet another Zendesk alternative that is the most powerful knowledge base software designed to help you scale your customer support and collaborate better with your team. This
Zendesk’s internal knowledge base alternative delivers instant information to the team.

The most sought for knowledge base software provides the best of both worlds – an easy-to-use interface for users to add/edit articles, and the flexibility to completely customize the website. Helpjuice provides the ability to localize in 300+ languages. It allows users to easily switch languages.It offers 12+ themes to install. Allows easy customization of themes using basic panels.

Pros

  • It is stable, flexible, and user friendly
  • Allows organizations to manage remote teams
  • Enables businesses to create a centralized knowledge repository

Cons

  • No chatbot support for instant support
  • UI/UX needs to be improved
  • Image storage issues
  • No task management feature

Pricing
The plans at Help juice starts at $120/month for up to 4 users to $499/month for unlimited users. Free 14 day trial is available for all the plans.

#4. Document360 – Top Zendesk Alternative to Deliver Better Self-Service Support

Document360 is a Saas platform that helps businesses to build a great self-service knowledge base for their customers and internal users – public or private knowledge bases. It helps you manage multiple knowledge bases with different domains. The software helps you to create and manage and publish your articles in real time.

Customization tools, category manager, version control, and security features allows businesses to experience the rich authoring and brand experience. The real time data from dashboards and inbuilt advanced analytics to report on the most important information on what the customers are expecting from your knowledge base and how to improve it.

Pros

  • Deliver an exceptional authoring experience for writers and editors
  • Manage multiple knowledge bases from a single place
  • Built-in analytics and reporting

Cons

  • Improper functioning of PDF export
  • Restrictions to import WordPress content
  • Lack of support for the web interface on hand-held devices

Pricing
Document360 offers a variety of pricing options depending on your business size and requirements. It has a free plan for 5 team accounts. Its Business plan starts at $249/month – 20 team accounts and its Enterprise: $499/month for 20 team accounts.

#5. Freshdesk – Top Zendesk Alternative to Deliver Improved Customer Experience

Freshdesk is one of the most popular alternatives to Zendesk. The customer service software helps businesses of all sizes to scale their customer experience effortlessly. It is trusted by over 40,000 customers including Panasonic, HP, and American Express.

This Zendesk alternative tool has a shared inbox, a knowledge base, and the ability to connect to other software using apps in its marketplace. It also has some automation capabilities to improve productivity. It also offers features like advanced reporting and the ability to send customer satisfaction surveys (CSAT) when a ticket is closed.

Pros

  • Complete access to your helpdesk anytime, anywhere.
  • Integrates modern communication channels into one unified stream of tickets and information
  • Visually appealing interface

Cons

  • Limited tagging features
  • Advanced reporting and CSAT surveys features are limited to high-tiered plans
  • No warning feature in customer contract

Pricing
Freshdesk offers a free plan up to 3 users. And the paid plans start at $15/agent per month. TheOmnichannel plans start at $29/agent per month.

#6. Liveagent – Best Alternative for Zendesk for Offering Help Desk Services

LiveAgent is considered to be one of the best help desk solutions in the market. It provides offline support portal services and solutions such as customer portal, knowledge base, forum, and feedback and suggestions.

The LiveAgent helpdesk platform is loaded with a myriad of help desk features including ticket management and live chat. Among the tools they offer are universal inbox, hybrid ticket steam, automated ticket distribution, real-time chat, proactive chat invitations, and chats overview.

Pros

  • Highly intuitive ticketing and ticket management system
  • Add custom CRM fields to contacts to keep track of everything
  • Ticket tagging system available
  • Extensive integration with over 200+ tools you love

Cons

  • Poor statistics and reporting functionality
  • No chatbot for instant support
  • Extra $39 for adding extra channel for incoming tickets
  • Improvements needed in the mobile app interface

Pricing
The plans for LiveAgent start at $15/agent/month for a full-sized ticketing solution with free trials available for each solution.

#7. Hubspot Service Hub – Best Zendesk Tool for Exceptional Customer Service

HubSpot Service Hub is yet another Zendesk alternative backed with tools and features that help users engage, guide, and grow customers, as well as provide the best customer service. It offers users a comprehensive front office solution so they can have a clear view of their customers across marketing, sales, and services.

Service hub features and tools let you respond faster, encourage, and deliver personalized assistance to customers’ needs and concerns.With a unified platform, teams can acquire a consolidated customer record from which they could extend support.

Pros

  • Very well designed. Hubspot is very easy to use
  • Equipped with a customer feedback tool that lets you create surveys and gather audience insights to help you
  • understand your customers better
  • Comprehensive reporting and analysis

Cons

  • By default Hubspot contracts are billed annually
  • Massively overpriced plans
  • Paid technical support
  • No A/B testing in basic and pro package

Pricing
The paid plans of Hubspot Service starts at $200/month. Free plan is also available.

#8. Intercom – Top Zendesk Alternative Tool for Great Customer Engagement

Intercom is an extremely popular customer engagement and conversational relationship platform that helps nurture customer relationships through personalized interactions. Intercom’s chat widget to help identify and qualify leads, provide real-time prospect and customer support, and engage visitors on your website.

The richly featured customer service software aims to redefine how businesses communicate by empowering them to connect directly to customers using messaging and automation. Intercom provides detailed reports on new conversations, including by tag; performance by volume, busiest period, number of replies sent, conversations closed, responsiveness metrics and conversation ratings.

Pros

  • Powerful API and other integrations
  • Well designed and user friendly
  • Chabot customization available
  • Easy scalability of customer interactions

Cons

  • Overpriced add-on services
  • Integration with your CRM and user database is a lengthy & complicated process
  • Expensive and non-flexible pricing model
  • Customer service automation restricted to bots

Pricing
Intercom plans start at $39/month for basic live chat and outbound messaging. You can also customize your plan with special add-ons like Product Tours and Advanced Lead Generation.

#9. Supportbee – Great Zendesk Alternative to Deliver Effective Customer Service

SupportBee, one of the best Zendesk alternatives, is a user-friendly customer service software created to help businesses effectively manage their support emails. Its key features include ticket statuses, agent signatures, and customer interaction history.

The rich features of Supportbee are faster email importing, handling multiple email addresses, HTML email tracking, filters for desk automotion, faster reply using snippets, insightful reports etc. SupportBee is also an API and app platform.

Pros

  • It is easy to set up and navigate. Offers a clean and simple design
  • Easy email management from a single inbox
  • Embeddable contact form

Cons

  • No document storage or customizable branding
  • No task management feature
  • Not mobile friendly
  • Free version has minimal feature benefits

Pricing
The Supportbee plans start from $15/mo. Free version available.

#10. Proprofs – Top Zendesk Alternative Tool for Business Training Solutions

ProProfs LMS is a learning management software application used by companies in and outside of the education sector to develop plans and programs for online classes. The LMS offers businesses comprehensive training solutions by allowing them to create online courses, complemented by tests, surveys, polls and even a knowledge base.

With the plethora of features, ProProfs currently attracts an extensive client base of companies in the business of educating clients or even their own team members. It provides a platform for the creation of these classes as well as the means for evaluating and accrediting students enrolled in them.

Pros

  • Quick and easy set up
  • Extensive tools & functionalities for companies to create their online modules
  • Simple & flexible pricing

Cons

  • Poor mobile interface
  • Task management feature missing
  • Complex embedding process

Pricing
The paid plans of ProProfs LMS begins with $1/learner/mo.

Choosing the Best Zendesk Alternative for Your Team

As there are so many Zendesk alternatives available in the market, it is not really easy to pick the right tool for your customer service teams. Not necessarily, a best Zendesk competitor may be the right choice for your business for the reason it is the most popular tool.

You need to understand and list down the requirements of your customer support team and then analyze the features offered by the Zendesk alternatives discussed above to determine the best suited tool for your customer support needs.

Your best alternative tool would be one that offers you the features and functionalities that your customer support team needs the most and is affordable. You can certainly upgrade it later when you need to use more advanced features.

FAQ

Zendesk is a widely used cloud based customer service solution, offering a plethora of features and customizable tools to build customer service portal, knowledge base, powerful AI automation and integration with other tools.

The renowned all in one omnichannel support tool empowers the customer service agents for effective client communication and the sales team to boost conversions. It is an easy to use platform that eases tracking support requests, instantly answers their queries, and monitors support team’s effectiveness.

The businesses looking for a customer relationship management (CRM) tool to run and improve the whole customer journey can use and benefit from Zendesk.

There are many features but the important ones that needs to be considered are as follows:

  • Omni channel Capabilities: The alternative tool should offer unified customer experience across all online and offline communication channels.
  • Self Service Portal: It helps to improve overall customer service by allowing instant access to information and saving valuable time and organizational resources.
  • Ready Integrations: Look for Zendesk alternatives that offer ready made integrations with third party tools that suit your business needs.
  • Powerful Automation – Choose tools that help to automate business processes that help to meet customer expectations and delight them.
  • Single Customer View: It gives a 360 degree customer view to gain insights on their needs to deliver personalized support.
  • Advanced Customer & Team Reporting: The real time customer service reports gives an overview of all customer care requests so you can keep track of trends, which allows you to discover areas for improvement

The top alternatives to Zendesk are Veemo Support, HubSpot, Freshdesk, Help Scout, Zoho Desk, Salesforce Service Cloud, and Intercom. You can choose the right one based on your business needs.