Zoho Desk: A better alternative to Zendesk
Zoho Desk and Zendesk are both powerful, feature-enriched customer service software solutions. How do they fare against each other? Here's a detailed comparison to help you make the best choice for your business and customers.
Sign Up For FreeDoes Zendesk have all that you need?
Not really. Increased dependency on third-party integrations, multiple contracts, multiple add-ons, and a cluttered interface interfere with the implementation and usability of Zendesk making it unavoidable to look for an alternative.
Here's what Zoho Desk offers your business:
Effortless integration
Faster deployment
Transparent pricing
Free migration
Simplified onboarding
increase in First contact resolution.
faster response time.
increase in CSAT score.
reduction in customer churn rate.
* Metrics reported by our customers through an internal survey.
What's the price difference?
Number of users: 25
Save up to 59% by switching to the best help desk software.
Feature comparison
When looking for a Zendesk alternative, you should strive for a solution that delivers robust features at a reasonable price. Customer service software should not only make life easier for your agents, but for the other stakeholders (your customers, managers, and administrators) as well. Let's take a look at how Zendesk Support and Zoho Desk compare in specific categories.
Zendesk Support limits your support channels to email and social media. To offer support via phone, live chat, or instant messaging channels, you are required to purchase additional apps.
Zoho Desk helps you provide a complete omnichannel experience to your customers with built-in email, live chat, telephony, social media, web forms, and instant messaging. You can view interactions from all your channels in one place, or from the dedicated modules for live chat, instant messaging, and social media, meaning your agents are better equipped to offer instant and personalized responses.
| Telephony | $ | |
| Live Chat | $ | |
| Web forms | $ | |
| $ | ||
| Line | $ | |
| $ | ||
| Telegram | $ |
Telephony
$
Live Chat
$
Web forms
$
$
Line
$
$
Telegram
$
Zendesk allows agents to manage ticket workflows by creating list views, but does not offer automatic organization of tickets based on priority, due date, status, or CRM status. Furthermore, Zendesk does not allow you to create customizable filters to classify tickets based on various categories. In Zendesk, Cloning tickets, tracking time, splitting tickets, and receiving article suggestions can be accessed through marketplace extensions.
Keeping in mind the needs of agents, Zoho Desk is designed to be user-friendly and accessible to all with its new UI, User Preferences, and Accessibility Controls. Along with these, agents can organize and view tickets according to their needs and preferences with Work Modes, Table View, and customizable filter views. Ticket management is a lot easier with all the essential built-in features in Zoho Desk.
| Quick Ticket View (Peek View) | ||
| Work Modes | ||
| Table View | ||
| Snippets for Faster Response | Marketplace extension | |
| Split Tickets | Marketplace extension | |
| Clone Ticket | Marketplace extension | |
| Night mode |
Quick Ticket View
(Peek View)
Work Modes
Table View
Snippets for Faster Response
Marketplace extension
Split Tickets
Marketplace extension
Clone Ticket
Marketplace extension
Accessibility Controls
Night mode
Zendesk Support's self-service options are limited to a knowledge base and dashboards, increasing your reliance on other apps. To make the help center and community support available to your customers and agents, you'll be required to purchase an additional app. And for a chat bot, you'll be required to subscribe to an add-on.
With Zoho Desk, you can customize your help center to reflect your brand ideology, support customers globally with the multilingual knowledge base, reduce agent workloads with Zia and Guided Conversations, and help customers help each other with community support.
| Knowledge Base | $ | |
| Multilingual Knowledge Base | $ | |
| Community Forums | $ | |
| Guided Conversations | $ |
Knowledge Base
$
Multilingual Knowledge Base
$
Community Forums
$
Answer Bot in ASAP
$
AI should simplify the lives of your customers, agents, and managers. Zendesk offers limited AI features. Sentiment Analysis and the Auto-Tagging feature are available as add-ons in Zendesk, while they come built-in with Zoho Desk. Plus, Zoho Desk's AI, Zia, caters to all stakeholders by offering reply assistance to agents communicating with customers, and anomaly notifications to alert managers about heavy traffic on incoming tickets.
| Reply Assistant | ||
| Sentiment Predictions | $ | |
| Ticket Auto-Tagging | $ | |
| Anomaly Notifications | ||
| Zia Voice and Skill Builder |
Reply Assistant
Sentiment Predictions
$
Ticket Auto-Tagging
$
Anomaly Notifications
Zia Voice and Skill Builder
Both Zoho Desk and Zendesk offer automation features, such as SLA and Workflow. Despite the different names, these do pretty much the same job. Zendesk has an auto-assign feature that allows automatic assignment of unassigned tickets to the agents working on them. However, it fails to offer automatic equal assignment of incoming tickets. And it does not provide a time-tracking feature, except as an add-on.
Blueprint, a feature unique to Zoho Desk, facilitates agent understanding of process flows, so they can execute them seamlessly.
| Workflows | ||
| Multi-Level Escalations | ||
| Customer-Based SLA | ||
| Blueprints | ||
| Round-Robin Ticket Assignment by Load Balancing | ||
| Time Tracking | $ |
Workflows
Multi-Level Escalations
Customer-Based SLA
Blueprints
Round-Robin Ticket Assignment by Load Balancing
Time Tracking
$
Both apps provide plenty of customization options, like custom fields and layouts, domain mapping, and multi-language support. Zoho Desk has a slight edge here, since some of the basic customization features, like Custom Ticket Status, are not available in Zendesk. Along with this, ticket templates can only be used in Zendesk if you subscribe to an add-on.
| Customize Tabs | ||
| Custom Ticket Status and Grouping | ||
| Customize Form Fields and Layouts | ||
| Field Dependencies | ||
| Department specific Layout |
Customize Tabs
Custom Ticket Status and Grouping
Customize Form Fields and Layouts
Field Dependencies
Department specific Layout
Most useful reporting features that help you track important customer service metrics are not built in to Zendesk—they’re available through another app. It's important to note, you will have to be on Zendesk Support’s Professional Plan or higher to use their add-on. Zoho Desk provides a host of built-in reports and dashboards, along with the option to build your own.
| SLA Dashboards | $ | |
| Agent Dashboard | $ | |
| Global Analytics (All Departments) | $ | |
| Custom Reports and Dashboards | $ | |
| Response, Resolution, and FCR Dashboards | $ | |
| Zia Dashboard | ||
| Radar Mobile App (for managers) for iOS and Android |
SLA Dashboards
Agent Dashboard
$
Global Analytics (All Departments)
$
Custom Reports and Dashboards
$
Response, Resolution, and FCR Dashboards
$
Zia Dashboard
Radar Mobile App (for managers) for iOS and Android
Pricing comparison
| Free | $0 - |
| Standard | $14 |
| Professional | $23 49 |
| Enterprise | $40 99 |
| Free | |
| Support Team | $19 |
| Support Professional | $49 75 |
| Support Enterprise | $99 150 |
Free
Free
$ 00
-
Standard
Support Team
$ 14 19
-
Professional
Support Professional
$ 23 49
$49 75
Enterprise
Support Enterprise
$ 40 99
$99 150
The simplicity of Zoho Desk's UI has really helped my digital transformation team to reduce the number of hours spent, from 5 to only 2.5 or 3 hours, in training and onboarding the new agents/users of the help desk technology.
Kushagra SahniChief of Staff, Centilytics
The average response time for agents before Zoho Desk was 7 hours, but with the process in place, the agents are now responding to each ticket within 3 hours.
Jim FrancisSystems Manager, Land Title Guarantee Company
We're able to more effectively respond to our customer needs using Zoho Desk. It gives you a big picture of everything you need because it has great reporting capabilities and keeps track of customers who reach out to us via different channels. Zoho Desk's functionality is much better than Salesforce as we're able to easily merge tickets together and track who is working on which ticket.
Alex Tolbert CEO, Bernard Health
Make the switch to Zoho Desk today!
All prices shown here are in USD. The names and logos for Zoho are trademarks of Zoho Corp. All other trademarks, brand names, or product names
belong to their respective holders. Comparison information as of 05.09.2022