Although it has been a front-runner in the help desk industry for quite some time, a whole host of Zendesk alternatives have emerged to eat into their market share.
It’s not that Zendesk has lost its touch — it’s about other customer service tools providing different services for varying organizational needs. There are cheaper alternatives to Zendesk, as well as others with more advanced capabilities, improved integrations, and sector specialisms.
In this article, we’re going to run through 10 of the best Zendesk alternatives, covering their capabilities, strengths, weaknesses, and what kind of companies will get the best use out of them.
To help you navigate the products, here are some of the main features to look out for in CRM systems for customer service.
-
Multichannel support for managing customer interactions across various apps such as email, phone, chat, social media, and more.
-
A user-friendly platform that reduces training time and allows your team to focus more on assisting customers rather than navigating complex software.
-
Seamless integrations with your CRM, marketing, and other business tools.
-
Automated ticket routing, responses, and workflows that significantly enhance efficiency by reducing manual tasks.
-
Advanced reporting and analytics for you to monitor performance, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions.
So, with that foundation for your analysis, let’s dive into the Zendesk alternatives.
1. Bitrix24 — The AI-empowered help desk with the most features at the lowest price
Bitrix24 offers a low-cost, all-in-one business platform, with a customer service ticketing system, detailed analytics, CRM, sales intelligence, marketing, and HR tools in one place. This gives you seamless access to customer data and sales records and facilitates personalized messaging in every interaction, whether automated or not.
You get a range of communication channels to send these messages through, allowing your customers to find you where they feel most comfortable. You can also create a knowledge base and training materials on your website for users to find their own solutions and relieve pressure on your customer service team.
Bitrix24’s customer support software options include email, phone, social media, live chat, and more, all in a unified platform. If a customer makes their first complaint via a chat widget on your website and then sends a follow-up email, any of your customer service team will be able to pull up the interaction history and be informed of the continued query.
With its AI-powered CoPilot by your side, Bitrix24 stakes its claim as one of the best Zendesk competitors for customer service. CoPilot will transcribe your calls and autofill CRM fields to cut down on admin time and reduce the risk of human error. What’s more, it will create and assign follow-up tasks and checklists to provide superior service with nothing falling through the cracks. Extensive project management tools mean you can tailor standardized customer service workflows to your specific requirements and launch them whenever a complaint comes in.
In summary, Bitrix24 strikes a balance between quality and quantity that few other Zendesk alternatives manage. With your customer service center natively linked alongside all your other business processes, you get scalable services at a low price.
Bitrix24 is the best free alternative to Zendesk
Bitrix24 Combines excellent customer service tools, AI-driven features, stellar analytics, and native integrations with all your other business apps
Register Today
2. Freshdesk — The user-friendly option with generative AI
Freshdesk provides a dedicated help desk and ticketing software that combines automations and analytics with multi-channel support and integrations to make for a Zendesk alternative with far-reaching capabilities.
Freshdesk’s vision for SaaS customer service tools is based on self-service channels and AI-driven bots. Comprehensive knowledge bases and community forums give your users a faster and more autonomous way of finding information. At the same time, this reduces the amount of calls, emails, and chats that go to the traditional help desk software solutions. Guides and chatbots provide a more interactive experience while removing a human support agent from the equation.
Artificial intelligence stretches across the Freshdesk platform, streamlining automations, workflows, and reporting. It cuts out routine tasks and takes care of the admin so that agents can focus on the trickier cases that require more nuance.
Generative AI takes things a step further by communicating with customers with personalized messages and help. For software similar to Zendesk, this is still a rather uncommon feature, although we’re sure to see more widespread adoption soon.
3. Help Scout — Email-based ticketing with a smooth interface
Help Scout is an email-based ticketing system that simplifies support operations, making it easy for agents to manage inquiries. The interface is smooth, with each ticket appearing like an email to make it intuitive for newbies.
Alongside your email platform, you can create a help center, which gives customers a chance to find their own solutions. For unique questions, a real-time chatbot connects users to your agents, who can draw on information from the customer data you already have.
Help Scout has recently brought AI into the mix to be the foundation of your customer service team so they can concentrate on the human touch. Like other Zendesk alternatives on this list, the AI mainly takes care of repetitive tasks, freeing up a bunch of time every month.
Help Scout’s AI assists in non-direct ways too, such as summarizing long email threads into bullet points to get you up to date on complex queries. Customer profiles help on the CRM side by segmenting your users, which allows you to reply with personalized, context-aware support for a better customer experience.
Help Scout lacks quite a lot of features that the top customer service software like Zendesk provides, such as a comprehensive CRM. However, you can integrate the help desk with leading platforms on the market.
4. Zoho Desk — AI-enhanced contextual support
Among the best-known Zendesk alternatives, Zoho Desk has a strong reputation for its multi-channel support, custom dashboards, and self-service options. Users who are already in the Zoho ecosystem will likely see Zoho Desk as one of the most obvious Zendesk competitors for customer service, as it has a familiar interface and usability. Naturally, it’s quite a challenge if you’re not used to the Zoho sphere.
The ticket management service brings together customer requests from instant messenger, email, phone, social media, live chat, and web forms into one dashboard. Zoho Desk’s new AI-powered Zia tool will share relevant solutions from your knowledge base and automatically add tags to segment requests by topic.
Zia also draws on ChatGPT’s technology to help you generate responses to both external and internal tickets. Like other AI assistants on this list, you can ask it to draft a message, before making minor adjustments such as shortening the text, making it more formal, or including an apology.
5. Kayako — A Zendesk alternative that looks at each customer’s behavior
Kayako used to pride itself on giving context to all of the interactions leading up to the conversation, not just the immediate question itself. This was quite a dubious claim, seeing as all good CRM systems for customer service do the same things.
It contains everything you’d expect from a serious Zendesk alternative, such as unified conversations, and bringing customer interactions from a range of channels into one unified thread. A joint inbox means any of your team can jump in and take control of a query at a moment’s notice.
However, it has now differentiated itself in a new way, by using AI to answer up to 80% of all questions coming from your users. Currently an integration, it is a relatively new addition to their customer support software options and is still unproven. In theory, it uses generative AI to provide automated responses, allowing you to answer queries immediately and react to ongoing conversations in real time.
6. Intercom — Excellent reporting and product tours
Intercom is another Zendesk alternative that has harnessed AI for quicker responses and less investment in the human side of customer service. In this case, it’s partly aimed at enhancing shared inboxes, where it summarizes conversations, personalized replies, and auto-fills information on tickets.
The solution comes with some effective supporting tools, such as workflows and real-time reporting dashboards. Use the visual builder to generate a series of tasks detailing the next steps, complete with rules, deadlines, and time-saving bots.
Their reporting features give you a clear-eyed view of where you’re excelling and where you need to focus more attention. This makes it easier to optimize your customer service processes and improve KPIs without wasting a whole load of time in the process.
As a final point, Intercom stands out for its product tours. Similar to an onboarding process, it’s a series of pages and steps that users can access at any time and get to know your product or service inside and out.
7. HubSpot Service Hub — Enterprise help desk on the HubSpot system
HubSpot Service Hub is among the most recognized enterprise support software alternatives on the market with advanced ticketing, customer feedback collection, and extensive automation capabilities.
Service Hub is just one branch of the HubSpot ecosystem, and it comes with:
-
A knowledge base for customers to find answers themselves
-
A full suite of communication tools to meet your customers where they are
-
Call tracking that saves data to your CRM
-
SLA management to improve efficiency and for a better experience
-
AI-powered chatbots, customized to your own company
As you’d expect, HubSpot’s customer service offering seamlessly connects to its other systems, such as the CRM and sales platforms. Each element syncs with the rest in real time, providing a single source of truth that helps you to scale up to multiple offices that all work together on the cloud.
8. Salesforce Service Cloud — Exceptional customizations at a premium price point
Salesforce is one of the most comprehensive business software platforms on the internet, and its Service Cloud is just as detail-oriented as the rest of its offerings.
Customization is the name of the game with Salesforce. Although you need a dedicated Salesforce agent to manage your onboarding, after a lot of time, money, and training, you will at least get the best enterprise support software alternatives that are fully optimized for your business.
It brings artificial intelligence in the form of conversational, predictive, and generative capabilities for seamless interactions. Similarly, you can use it to draw on its familiarity with your company to produce knowledge articles, including product guides and FAQs.
A stand-out feature of Salesforce’s AI is its ability to generate answers from existing content to match unique agent and customer search queries. Support for multiple languages opens you up to international users at a fraction of the cost and time of traditional methods.
9. LiveAgent — A low-cost alternative for small businesses
In the cheaper alternatives to Zendesk category, LiveAgent still offers live chat, a ticketing system, a call center, and reporting and analytics. With no need to splash out on setup fees and training, you can get started for free to make sure it’s a good tool for you.
LiveAgent will collect conversations from emails, instant messenger apps, feedback, and social media and channel them all into the same space. Then, reply through chat widgets, emails, and calls, with everything recorded on your ticketing system.
Integrations with all kinds of website creation apps, ecommerce platforms, email marketing hubs, and project management software elevate the utility of LiveAgent. Yes, it might get pricey when combining a bunch of different apps, rather than an all-in-one solution, but LiveAgent still stands as one of the best Zendesk alternatives for small to mid-sized businesses.
10. GrooveHQ — Great customer service for a simple help desk platform
GrooveHQ is a highly rated Zendesk alternative that has begun adding AI to its arsenal of a shared inbox, team collaboration, knowledge base capabilities, analytics, automations, and live chat widgets. The AI serves similar purposes to other AI bots on this list, such as message drafting and case summaries, so GrooveHQ is a bit behind the curve.
GrooveHQ’s SaaS customer service tools boast a quick two-minute setup, offer a free trial, and have a comparatively low price point once you’re up and running. This makes it excellent for small companies who don’t need all the intricate details offered by software similar to Zendesk.
Users consistently report that Groove HQ is always on hand to solve problems, which can’t be said for other top customer service software like Zendesk. However, others have pointed out plenty to complain about, such as difficulty filtering email apps, missed internal notes, and a lack of customizations.
Bitrix24: The best all-round Zendesk alternative
Sure, there’s no perfect Zendesk alternative that works for every single company. As you’ve seen, all the help desk software solutions in this article bring unique strengths, from generative AI to powerful analytics.
Bitrix24’s all-encompassing platform makes it an exceptional choice for organizations of all sizes. Combining excellent customer service tools, AI-driven features, stellar analytics, and native integrations with all your other business apps, it significantly improves service delivery, streamlines workflows, and boosts customer satisfaction.
Sign up for Bitrix24 today if you want a powerful, affordable solution to upgrade your help desk.
Bitrix24 is the best free alternative to Zendesk
Bitrix24 Combines excellent customer service tools, AI-driven features, stellar analytics, and native integrations with all your other business apps
Register Today
FAQs
What are the top features to look for in alternatives to Zendesk?
The top features to look for in alternatives to Zendesk are:
How does other customer service software compare to Zendesk in pricing?
Other customer service software varies widely in pricing, depending on the capabilities and scalability they offer. While some alternatives like Bitrix24 offer generous free tiers, others like Salesforce may provide more specialized features at a premium.
What are the advantages of using different customer service platforms over Zendesk?
The advantages of using different customer service platforms over Zendesk include:
-
More integrations with existing tools
-
A diverse range of customization options
-
Specialized features like AI-driven support and advanced analytics
-
An easier learning curve
-
Better customer support
