13 Must-Know Zendesk Alternatives for 2024

Table of Contents

1 . 5 Reasons to Look for Zendesk Alternatives

2. 13 Best Zendesk Alternatives

• Kapture CX
• Freshdesk
• Zoho Desk
• Salesforce Service Cloud
• Hiver
• Hubspot Service Hub
• Gorgias
• Front
• HappyFox
• Missive
• GrooveHQ
• Gladly
• Kustomer

Jeff Bezos once said, “We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we’re the hosts. It’s our job to make the customer experience a little bit better.”

Simply put, every customer interaction matters and plays a key role in building loyalty. It not only strengthens relationships but also enhances the overall customer experience, driving long-term business success.

This is where software like Zendesk steps in.

Zendesk, a top customer service platform, is loved for its ability to drive meaningful conversations and deliver exceptional customer support. Its AI-powered tools enhance agent efficiency and adapt quickly to your business needs, helping foster strong customer-brand relationships.

Businesses use this platform because it simplifies customer interactions, improves response times, and streamlines workflows. However, while Zendesk is a strong contender, there are better alternatives that deserve attention.

Exploring these options can reveal solutions with more tailored features, offering an even better fit for your organization’s unique needs. Read on as we explore 13 Zendesk alternatives that are just as good and could provide the perfect solution for your business.

6 Reasons to Look for Zendesk Alternatives

Although Zendesk is a highly accomplished platform for managing customer service and agent productivity, sometimes businesses look for Zendesk Alternatives for the following reasons:

1. Costly Packages and Add-Ons

Although customer service software like Zendesk is considered an investment because of all the benefits it brings, Zendesk can actually be expensive to maintain.

Especially if you have a large team of support agents, access to Zendesk for each agent would cost you upwards of $69 per month. This isn’t a competitive price, considering the plethora of alternatives available on the market today.

2. Steep Learning Curve

Zendesk isn’t your friendliest software to learn to use. Since this is a highly comprehensive platform, it consists of multiple controls and settings that could take longer to get familiar with.

The learning curve is steep, which could lead to longer adoption times and inefficiencies while working. If you are looking for a quick customer service solution, Zendesk may not help you at all.

Additionally, employees who are not tech-savvy may require additional training to understand Zendesk, which means additional time to get it fully online and functional for the actual job.

3. Lackluster Customer Support

According to many user reviews on reputed third-party websites, Zendesk’s customer support isn’t strong. If you run into issues while using the platform, you would need to cross multiple hurdles before a solution is offered to you.

Considering that Zendesk is helpdesk software itself, it is ironic that its customer support is lacking. This is one of the major reasons why customers end up looking for Zendesk alternatives.

4. Segregated Channel Management

Customers today expect omnichannel experiences, and businesses expect software that helps them consolidate their channels into a single queue for customer service. 

While Zendesk offers omnichannel support, its approach to integrating and managing these interactions may not suit every organization’s needs.

For instance, in Zendesk, chat and email tickets are handled separately, making it difficult to manage customer queries in one unified queue. This separation can create operational inefficiencies and lead to service delays—issues that businesses strive to avoid in a high-performing customer service department.

5. Limited Automation

Emails form an important part of customer service, establishing an official line of communication between a brand and its customers.

It is necessary to have automation capabilities for email so that agents can easily schedule follow-ups, onboarding, welcome letters, etc. With Zendesk, however, automation for email sequences is available only if you purchase two separate subscriptions.

This may create roadblocks in your workflows and a dent in your budget for a feature that is naturally included as part of the package with Zendesk competitors.

6. Outdated Interface

Zendesk’s interface lacks the modern, sleek design that many users expect from today’s software. Instead, it presents an outdated, cluttered layout overloaded with tools and features, making navigation cumbersome and unintuitive.

This dated design can significantly impact efficiency and customer satisfaction, leading to delays and requiring extensive staff training. When agents struggle to find the right tools during service calls, it reduces productivity and can lead to frustration, ultimately affecting the overall performance of your customer service team.

13 Best Zendesk Alternatives

Let’s dive into the top 13 Zendesk Alternatives you should consider if you require a customer experience platform in 2024:

1.  Kapture CX

Kapture CX is a comprehensive customer service platform that uses AI to deliver hyperpersonalized experiences to customers. It provides omnichannel support and automation to help ease workflows.

Key Features

• Advanced Analytics and Reporting: Derive key insights from customer conversations through insightful reports and real-time analytics. Leverage customizable dashboards to suit your unique needs.
• Workflow Automation: Create tailored workflows for ticket management, streamlining service processes and optimizing backend processes easily.
• AI-Driven Personalization: Personalize every customer interaction with insights extracted using AI-powered predictions, customer history, details, and key activities.
• Mobile Support: Use the mobile app to provide customers exemplary service anytime, anywhere.
• Security and Compliance: Encrypt sensitive customer data and mask customer information like PPI/PHI for regulatory compliance. Ensure that agents access only necessary customer information.
• Empower Your Agents: Provide AI-powered agent assistance to derive better outcomes from conversations. Generate 360° views of your customers by gathering data from all touchpoints at a single place. Leverage GenAI to enhance the knowledge base.
• Customer Trust: Offer seamless omnichannel support to meet your customers where they are. Leverage the AI-powered self-service options like troubleshooting guides to make customer journeys easier. Gather feedback with sentiment analysis at each customer touchpoint.
• Integrations: Integrate with over 1,000 popular, out-of-the-box integrations to support your operations better: Oracle, Shopify, Flightslogic, Dynamics 365, and many more.
• Comprehensive Toolset: Contact center, service center, live chat, field service, ticketing software, self-serve, internal ticketing, chatbots, LMS, KMS, helpdesk system, and reporting and analytics.
• Industry-Specific Features: Automated and omnichannel support for the retail industry, regulatory compliance to GDPR, HIPAA, etc. and data security using RBAC, MFA, DLP, and EKM security protocols for BFSI industry, continuous multilingual support and escalation management for the travel industry.

KaptureCX vs Zendesk

• KaptureCX has a high emphasis on AI-driven automation to help streamline processes and provide more personalized experiences to customers.
• KaptureCX offers industry-specific solutions, which help in accessing more relevant feature sets for your use case.
• The integration capabilities in KaptureCX are stronger than Zendesk.

Pricing

Contact sales for pricing.

Ratings and Reviews

• G2: 4.3/5 (132 reviews)
• Capterra: 4.2/5 (37 reviews)
• Gartner: 4.8/5 (53 ratings)

2.  Freshdesk

Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer service platform that allows you to streamline and scale your ticketing process with AI. Use this tool to empower your customer teams with intuitive and contextual support resources.

Key Features

• Ticketing: Manage tickets from multiple channels in one inbox, avoid duplicate work with Agent Collision, and streamline workflows with custom ticket statuses.
• Issue Resolution: Resolve issues faster by collaborating internally or externally, share ticket ownership without losing visibility, link related tickets, and use parent-child ticketing for multistage issues.
• Channel Support: Convert emails into trackable tickets, set up a contact center for call tracking, and engage customers via chat, social media, websites, and instant messaging.
• Productivity: Automatically assign tickets based on criteria like requester or keywords, use Intelligent Ticket Assignment to balance workloads, and trigger automation for maintenance tasks.

Freshdesk vs Zendesk

• Freshdesk provides AI-powered automation for routine tasks, such as ticket routing and response generation, which isn’t easy with Zendesk.
• Freshdesk also provides gamified experiences that help to motivate agents and keep them engaged, which Zendesk does not have.

Ratings and Reviews

• G2: 4.4/5 (3,180 reviews)
• Capterra: 4.5/5 (3,314 reviews)
• Gartner: 4.4/5 (617 ratings)

3.  Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk is a customer service platform that makes it easy to provide consistent, uninterrupted customer service. Leverage this platform to speed up issue resolution and boost customer retention.

Key Features

• Ticket Management: Omnichannel support, IMS for all popular channels like WhatsApp, multi-department ticketing, and web forms to gather vital service quality feedback.
• Contextual AI: Answer bot “Zia” for agents and customers, auto-tagging of tickets for smoother identification, sentiment analysis for better customer service, and anomaly detection.
• Self-Serve: Guided conversations for customer self-service, embeddable self-service with ASAP plugin, and multi-brand help center for all your brands.
• Agent Productivity: Work modes to automatically organize open tickets and enhance productivity; responses using customer context, FAQs, templates, and more; mobile management for tickets; accessibility controls, CRM integration, and more.
• Automation: Automated ticket assignment, custom notification rules, automated violations of SLAs and escalations, workflow automation, management of cross-functional service processes, and more.

Zoho Desk vs Zendesk

• Zoho Desk offers higher customization capabilities when it comes to automating workflows or branding.
• Zoho Desk also offers support for multi-brand and multi-department ticketing, which is beneficial for larger enterprises to keep their ticketing organized.

Ratings and Reviews

• G2: 4.4/5 (5,774 reviews)
• Capterra: 4.5/5 (2,162 reviews)
• Gartner: 4.4/5 (1,700+ ratings)

4. Salesforce Service Cloud

Salesforce Service Cloud is a unified customer service management console that allows you to boost the productivity of your customer service agents. Use its AI-powered digital workspace to manage major incidents and other support cases easily.

Key Features

• Customer Service Management: Enhance case management with relevant data and automate the distribution of cases to the right agents. Automate your appointment scheduling and omnichannel routing.
• Field Service: Speed up the delivery of service with pre-work briefs and summarized insights. Facilitate on-site knowledge search for quick service. Leverage the Field Service mobile app to create a mobile workforce.
• Omnichannel Engagement: Set up exemplary digital engagement with live chat and messaging with AI-powered chatbots. Leverage proactive messaging to serve customers with automated outbound setups. Leverage omnichannel routing to get the right agents on call for a better experience.
• Intelligent Service Operations: Use service performance dashboards to gather your KPIs in one place. Save service time using embedded insights and predictions powered by AI.
• Expansive Product Set: Data-driven service, customer service AI, contact center, customer service automation and process, and self-service experiences.

Salesforce Service CLoud vs Zendesk

• One distinguishing feature of Salesforce Service Cloud is Einstein AI, which provides you with intelligent features like agent recommendations, case routing, predictive analytics, and more.
• The AppExchange hub in Salesforce lets you expand your functionality with more apps.

Ratings and Reviews

• G2: 4.3/5 (3,883 reviews)
• Capterra: 4.4/5 (766 reviews)
• Gartner: 4.4/5 (322 ratings)

5. Hiver

Hiver is a revolutionary helpdesk platform that converts your inbox into a help desk. It eliminates the need for you to implement a conventional helpdesk by providing a convenient inbox-based management setup.

Key features

• Collaboration: Leverage notes, mentions, and conversation histories to resolve customer queries contextually. Share email threads with members with labels, permalinks, and more. Set up collision alerts for team members to eliminate duplicate responses.
• Automation: Use email auto-responders to speed up emails using conditional or custom triggers. Manage team workloads based on skills or availability and set assignment limits. Automatically tag and filter incoming conversations.
• AI: Personalize customer support without skipping SLAs, summarize emails with AI, auto-close emails with gratitude messages and responses, leverage email template suggestions, and accelerate the response times of agents.
• Analytics: Utilize custom reports to achieve the desired context on customers faster. Get leadership reports on schedule to measure overall achievements. Use consolidated dashboards to make data-driven decisions.
• Integrations and API: Easily connect the platform with your existing systems or create a customized integration. Leverage the pre-existing integrations with apps like Aircall, Asana, QuickBooks, and more for better tasking and quick results.

Hiver vs Zendesk

• Hiver provides integration with Gmail, which can be handy when you don’t want to set up dedicated software.
• Hiver provides better analytics and reporting through practical dashboards and scheduled reporting tools.

Ratings and reviews

• G2: 4.6/5 (1,090 reviews)
• Capterra: 4.7/5 (117 reviews)
• Gartner: Not enough reviews

6. Hubspot Service Hub

Hubspot Service Hub is a reliable customer service software that allows you to deliver high value to customers and generate long-term retention. With its AI-driven, omnichannel capabilities, it seamlessly integrates with your marketing and sales data to deliver exceptional service and drive meaningful customer relationships.

Key Features

• Scale Support: Leverage at-scale support using features like AI-powered ticket resolution, omnichannel messaging, call tracking, and effective SLA management to increase the efficiency of your customer care representatives.
• Drive Retention: Manage customer success efficiently using robust features like feedback management with NPS, CSAT, CES, and custom surveys. Use conversation intelligence to gain AI-powered insights. Use customer portals to empower your customers to keep track of their tickets.
• Insights: Utilize the fully integrated Smart CRM to track customer details automatically. Service analytics help you with key insights to deliver great service. Use team management and automated customer service tools to drive efficiencies. Additionally, Mobile Inbox makes on-the-go service possible.

Hubspot Service Hub vs Zendesk

• Hubspot offers a comprehensive marketing and sales suite that gives you integrated software to manage customer service and success effectively. This is not possible with Zendesk.
• You can create seamless customer journeys using Hubspot’s marketing automation tools with this software as well, making it a seamless solution.

Ratings and reviews

• G2: 4.4/5 (2,354 reviews)
• Capterra: 4.5/5 (160 reviews)
• Gartner: 4.5/5 (2100+ reviews)

7. Gorgias

Gorgias is an AI-powered customer experience platform designed for e-commerce businesses. It is an automated CX platform that you can use to set up a comprehensive helpdesk and automate most of your customer support.

Key Features

• Helpdesk: Gather the entirety of your customer support in a single place with support management for email, chat, social media, phone, and more. Access full customer information at your fingertips to make it easy to respond to queries. Share customer data between support tools and update information across all apps from the Gorgias interface.
• Automation: Automate up to 60% of your customer support activities. Enhance customer experience with personalized responses in less than one minute. Resolve issues fully with pre-built actions. Improve the accuracy of your care agents with Coach AI and reviews. Leverage AI Agent to handle support queries autonomously.
• Conversion: Enrich the customer journeys with targeted campaigns and personalization to enhance conversion rates by 6%. Use the power of AI for cross-selling, product recommendations, and more to enhance sales. Design personalized campaigns that offer timely discounts and useful insights.

Gorgias vs Zendesk

• Gorgias has inbuilt eCommerce integration with Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento, which is extremely helpful for online retailers.
• Gorgias provides well-rounded marketing and support features that work effectively for eCommerce businesses.
• The AI automation in Gorgias is more capable than Zendesk in reducing manual processes in your workflows.

Ratings and reviews

• G2: 4.6/5 (514 reviews)
• Capterra: 4.7/5 (114 reviews)
• Gartner: Not enough reviews

8. Front

Front is a service solution for customer service and support teams that helps streamline agent and team communication. Use this platform to deliver exceptional customer service at every touchpoint your business has.

Key Features

• Omnichannel Inbox: Gather all your channels in one place and centralize customer conversations for better service. Reduce context switching and respond faster to your customers. Leverage automated workflows to organize and prioritize conversations.
• Support Report: Publish your most important service metrics in real time and inform your marketing accordingly. Share performance metrics with the team for motivation. Promote your self-service content effectively with a Support Report built-in with a knowledge database.
• Live Chat: Connect with your customers in real-time in whichever channel they reach out to. Leverage branded chat widgets for websites and apps for better service. Use customizable bots to gather customer context automatically.
• AI: Utilize smart AI bots to deflect simple queries and allow your teams to focus on critical tasks. Leverage AI to craft efficient responses with real-time AI assistance. AI also helps you catch up on customer context easily.
• Workflow automation: Route messages automatically and instantly to the right person. Automatically monitor your response times, resolution speed, and performance.

Front vs Zendesk

• Front features a visual workflow builder that helps you significantly streamline your processes and customize them, which Zendesk does not have.
• Front provides a mobile app that empowers agents to work remotely on their tickets.

Ratings and reviews

• G2: 4.7/5 (2,135 reviews)
• Capterra: 4.5/5 (263 reviews)
• Gartner: No reviews

9. HappyFox

HappyFox is an advanced ticket management and helpdesk software that helps you optimize your workflows for efficiency. Use this platform to reduce the chaos in your support systems and reinforce your customer service with efficiency.

Key Features

• Ticketing System: Create rules to work with custom ticket queues and auto-sort tickets into categories like support, sales, etc. Leverage omnichannel ticketing for email, socials, chat, etc. Enhance efficiency with pinned tickets.
• Automation: Define smart rules for trigger conditions to automate everyday tasks. Automate entire workflows to speed up ticket management. Automate your escalations based on SLAs. Manage auto-escalation to senior agents or managers for support and eliminate admin interventions.
• Task management: Break down ticket management workflows into bite-sized tasks for better productivity. Assign due dates and deadlines to each task to ensure it is completed on time. View all your pending tasks in a single place to address them efficiently.
• Asset Management: Create and modify assets—old or new—in a single place. Work with bulk editing to make widespread changes quickly. Better manage assets with interlinking, audit trails, and filters.

Happyfox vs. Zendesk

• Happyfox supports gamification that helps you keep your agents motivated towards work – a feature that Zendesk does not have.
• Happyfox offers industry-specific features (for IT, healthcare, etc.) that come in handy when you need targeted, relevant tools instead of generic ones for customer support.

Ratings and reviews

• G2: 4.5/5 (253 reviews)
• Capterra: 4.6/5 (92 reviews)
• Gartner: No reviews

10. Missive

Missive is a collaboration and support platform that allows you to work with team inboxes and chat apps. The platform basically converts your email into a business-first collaborative experience.

Key Features

• Team Inboxes: Leverage assignment flows to triage messages for the whole support team. Assign active/observer members for notifications to enhance ownership.
• Flexible Email Setup: Set up shared and personal inboxes, and Google groups on any email setup by any email provider.
• Developer Tools: Automate your tasks and use content from the web to enrich conversations. Leverage webhooks to set up app communications.
• Chat: Share ideas and get help internally through Chat. Use flexible chatting options, reply-to, text formatting, and emoji reactions for rich messaging.
• Assignment: Make workflows and tasks easier by assigning conversations directly from within emails and chats. Give assignments to an entire team or specific people.
• Analytics: Measure key performance indices that matter to your organization, like reply time, handle time, messages received, and more.
• Multichannel: Manage and collaborate on conversations across different channels like SMS, email, messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, and more.

Missive vs Helpdesk

• Missive offers more powerful email template builders that you can use to create custom templates for emails. This gives you better flexibility with email.
• Missive offers assignments straight through conversation windows, significantly shortening the workflows and saving time.

Ratings and reviews

• G2: 4.7/5 (223 reviews)
• Capterra: 4.9/5 (90 reviews)
• Gartner: No reviews

11. GrooveHQ

GrooveHQ is helpdesk software that allows you to set up powerful, shared inboxes that are scalable and easy to use. It is powered by AI that can be used to facilitate personalized support for customers.

Key Features

• Shared Inbox: Use conversation assignments to clarify ownerships. Collision detection helps you eliminate double replies. Use mentions and notifications to keep your team members up to date.
• Live Chat: Leverage Round Robin is assigned to balance workloads. Use unattended message logic to never miss a chat. Use email continuation features to pick up where you left off with customers.
• Knowledge Base: Establish a knowledge base to let customers help themselves. Let your team contribute to articles with full team access. Use embeddable widgets to allow access to the knowledge base from anywhere on the app or website.
• Reporting: Keep your performance metrics at your fingertips and monitor your team’s performance. With conversational insights, you can better understand your customers. Robust satisfaction insights can also help you gauge customer sentiment.
• Integrations: Work smoothly with countless integrations to popular apps like Trello, recharge, Slack, Salesforce, Facebook Messenger, and more.

GrooveHQ vs Zendesk

• GrooveHQ is specially designed to cater to the needs of small businesses, as their solution is more affordable and streamlined for corresponding workloads.
• The knowledge base allows contributions from the teams, making it more comprehensive. Additionally, you can embed this knowledge base on any page on your website or apps using widgets.

Ratings and reviews

• G2: 4.6/5 (186 reviews)
• Capterra: 4.7/5 (147 reviews)
• Gartner: No reviews

12. Gladly

Gladly is a customer service platform that focuses on personalization and lets you treat your customers like customers, not just tickets. It is a unified, AI-powered platform where you can focus on providing services that customers seek.

Key Features

• AI: Work with Gladly Hero, a proprietary AI that lets you manage tickets with a human touch. Leverage Gladly Sidekick—an automation solution that works in tandem with Hero to deliver intuitive self-service experiences to customers.
• Channels: For better context and data collation, work with a single, lifelong conversation for each customer. You can use this on all channels, such as chat, voice, IMS, email, social media, and more.
• Customer: Build holistic customer profiles that go beyond ticket numbers and concerns to provide more value through service. Provide in-depth, contextual assistance to customers every single time.
• Workforce Management: Track your workforce and workloads by the second and manage delegations and assignments more effectively.
• Capabilities: Conversation timelines, People Match for automated routing, payments, knowledge base, insights, integrations, and task management.

Gladly vs Zendesk

• Gladly employs AI to understand the context of customer interactions, which enables agents to deliver more personalized support.
• Gladly provides training materials, coaching tools, and game elements to help agents get up to speed with their skills and work.

Ratings and reviews

• G2: 4.7/5 (946 reviews)
• Capterra: 4.8/5 (124 reviews)
• Gartner: 4.7/5 (3 reviews)

13. Kustomer

Kustomer is an AI-powered customer service platform where AI spans the entirety of the features it offers. You can use it to make intelligent support decisions, stay connected and be proactive in customer service.

Key Features

• CRM: Manage customer data well to contextualize it with Kustomer and deliver personalized support. Integrate with over 60 plug-and-play apps to make workflows easier.
• AI Copilot and Chatbots: Increase agent efficiency by 65% by using AI Copilot for instant communications, GenAI, and internal knowledge bases. Leverage AI bot to reduce queries by 45% using instant, personalized support on any channel.
• Omnichannel Support: Boost customer retention with support for all channels. Leverage live call recording (muting, holding, transfer, etc.) to resolve urgent issues faster. Use AI to summarize calls and chats from any channel.
• Self-Service: Leverage SEO-optimized self-service and provide multi-brand support to make customers more satisfied with support. Use the visual theme builder to customize the knowledge base.
• App Marketplace: Connect your favorite apps, or build your own, to create a customized customer service experience.

Kustomer vs Zendesk

• Kustomer is more suitable for businesses that have outgrown Zendesk because it is more scalable and has modular integrations.
• The use of AI across features is more prominent in Kustomer, delivering more value with each feature as compared to Zendesk.

Ratings and reviews

• G2: 4.4/5 (423 reviews)
• Capterra: 4.6/5 (60 reviews)
• Gartner: 4.5/5 (13 reviews)

Elevate Customer Service Beyond Zendesk

Customer service is not just about resolving tickets quickly and answering calls promptly. It is about understanding the issues a customer is facing and why those issues are arising in the first place.

While Zendesk is great for streamlining support, KaptureCX goes further by offering advanced AI capabilities, customizable solutions, and comprehensive support.

These features allow your team to provide more personalized, efficient service that scales with your business needs. KaptureCX enhances customer service by empowering your agents to deliver proactive, meaningful assistance, ensuring a superior experience for your customers.

To explore Kapture CX more, head over to our site now!