Support Showdown: Comparing Zendesk, Help Scout, and Intercom

Support solutions analyzed under our microscope

Selecting a customer support platform to manage and track customer requests and concerns is an underrated business task. Being able to create an experience that allows customers to easily solve their problems while better understanding their underlying issues is key to creating memorable customer experiences. While Glances works with many support platforms, choosing the right one can make a meaningful difference to your support teams. Today, we’ll compare three popular platforms: Zendesk, Help Scout, and Intercom.

Pricing

All three platforms offer pricing based on how many users (seats/agents) you have and the features you need. Certain upgrade features, such as solving tickets with bots or AI, may be charged based on how many tickets were solved, etc. To remain uniform, we’ve compared pricing based on a plan that offers at least 2 channels (such as email and phone or email and chat), a basic public-facing customer support site, and simple reporting, such as pre-built report options. We compared prices (as of April 2024) based on paying annually to take advantage of their discounted pricing.

Zendesk

Zendesk has multiple pricing tiers, with their Suite Team plan starting at $55/mo/user.

Help Scout

Help Scout has simple pricing with their Standard plan starting at $20/mo/user.

Intercom

Intercom offers basic plans with additional upgrade add-ons available. Their Essential plan begins at $39/mo/seat.

Channels

How you’re able to support your customers is key to creating frictionless experiences. Depending on your business, you may need text, in-app chat, email, or even phone options to provide robust support.

Zendesk

Zendesk prides themselves on omnichannel options, with email, phone, chat, and social media all consolidated into their unified inbox. Zendesk also offers proactive messaging, but it is an added cost and can be a little tricky to get just right.

Help Scout

Help Scout specializes in email support, but also offers live chat and social options. Phone and text channels are offered through an existing integration. All channels route to shared inboxes.

Intercom

Intercom is making waves with their AI-first thinking. Known best for its proactive and live messaging features, it also supports text, email, and social options.

Integrations

A 2023 Gartner survey reports that desk workers use an average of 11 apps to do their work. Integrations allow teams to see data from those various apps to effectively do their work. Zendesk, Help Scout, and Intercom all include integrations with leading tools and platforms. Zendesk leads the other two in sheer number of integrations and apps available in their marketplace, though Help Scout and Intercom have solid offerings of connect-able apps. The right integrations allow support teams to reduce first reply times and increase one-touch resolution numbers.

Luckily all three are compatible with Glances to unify your workplace platforms in one location. Rather than wrangling multiple one-to-one connections with traditional integrations, you can modernize your workflow by adding your workplace apps to Glances with all the power of conventional connections. Using Glances, you can empower your support team to view customer details across your CRM, marketing, internal databases, etc. as well as provide them access to complete key tasks, like creating invoices or updating customer information.

Customization and scalability

Even when you start small, you need confidence in a platform that can change and adapt to your needs for long-term success. When evaluating for customization and scalability, it’s key to consider factors such as automations, custom fields, and triggers, but also ease of configuration and how long your admins will spend learning and setting up the platform.

Zendesk

Zendesk has extensive options for customizations, including a variety of automations, triggers, and field options. While Zendesk likely offers the most robust customization options, the time to learn and complete such work is steep.

Help Scout

Help Scout provides some basic templates to get you started, but you customize tags and workflows to keep work moving. Their main selling point is that you can learn the platform and put these options into place within an hour.

Intercom

Intercom provides a lot of options for targeted engagement based on user behaviors. Their new AI-first technology seeks to use AI language to personalize experiences.

Support and training

As a customer support professional, you know that customer support and training resources is vital for maximizing the value of any service.

Zendesk

Zendesk has a large repository of support resources, from online documentation, user community, and direct in-product chat support. They consistently update related support articles as new features become available.

Help Scout

Help Scout offers online resources, easy-to-access messaging, and live classes. They rely on the simplicity of the product to actually do the work, but they also provide lots of industry-focused information on elevating your customer support game.

Intercom

Intercom offers support articles to address most common issues and they offer direct messaging.

Key takeaways

Customer support teams provide crucial support for your company and it’s important to evaluate the team needs and budget when selecting the platform they spend the most time in. In short, Zendesk is commonly the best choice for large or more complex teams, offering robust features to manage multi-faceted operations. Help Scout is a more ideal choice for those looking to save on cost while still maintaining a high quality customer experience. Intercom, if you’re an AI-first kind of brand, excels in chat and future-proofing customer experiences. In summary, you should consider using:

✔️ Zendesk for large or more complex teams or for multi-brand businesses

✔️ Help Scout for businesses on a budget

✔️ Intercom for when chatting is the star of your customer experience

Want more software comparisons? Check out our Martech Showdown and CRM Showdown, or learn more about selecting the best CRM that works for your team in our two-part series.

Glances makes all your business apps work together

Glances securely connects all of your business apps, empowering you and your team with a 360-degree view of customer and personal data while working anywhere online. Built with patented, no-code technology and backed by 5-star support, Glances has reimagined software integrations with all of the convenience and none of the data-syncing, downtime, and maintenance costs. You can find and connect support software like Zendesk, Help Scout, Intercom, and many others when you are logged in to your Glances account.

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More helpful steps

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If you need to connect a specific app or platform with Glances that is not currently available on glances.com, please send your requests to hello@glances.com.

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