Whether you're on the "assisting" or "being assisted" end of customer service, you know how painful a three-and-a-half-hour live chat about a software glitch that takes an entire SWAT team of reps to figure out can be. Nobody has time for that.
To save your organization resources (and your customers a headache), you need an intuitive customer service software that streamlines ticket management and—to put it bluntly—makes your agents not hate their jobs.
Zendesk for Service and Zoho Desk are two of the most popular customer service platforms on the market. I spent a lot of time testing both options to determine which is best for who, and based on that experience, here's my breakdown of Zendesk vs. Zoho.
Zendesk vs. Zoho Desk at a glance
Both Zendesk and Zoho Desk offer valuable customer service tool features like ticketing, a knowledge base, a community forum, live chat, automations, macros (pre-saved actions), collaboration features, cross-platform support, and reporting options. Really, their starkest difference is in quality vs. price:
Zendesk is better equipped to serve organizations with a larger budget that need advanced reporting, a help center, and integration features.
Zoho is better positioned to serve organizations on a budget that are willing to overcome a learning curve to enjoy a solid customer service solution.
| Zendesk for Service | Zoho Desk |
|---|---|---|
Customization | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Highly customizable bots, help center, and reports | ⭐⭐⭐ Relatively minimal customization options for knowledge base and reports |
Integrations | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 1,200+ integrations; integrates with Zapier | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 550+ integrations; integrates with Zapier |
Automation | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Customize automated replies | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Customize automated replies |
User-friendliness | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Simple, user-friendly interface; built-in tutorial with helpful demo videos | ⭐⭐ Cluttered, difficult-to-navigate interface; no built-in tutorial |
Help center | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Help center is highly customizable; can set permissions for moderators | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Knowledge base isn't very customizable, but offers SEO features |
Advanced features | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Advanced reporting, automatic language translation, and more | ⭐⭐⭐ AI-powered virtual assistant; features are generally less advanced than Zendesk's |
Price | ⭐⭐⭐ Far steeper price point than Zoho Desk (pricing below is for annual billing)
Team: $19/user/month Professional: $49/user/month Enterprise: $99/user/month | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Very affordable customer service solution (pricing below is for annual billing)
Free: $0/user/month Standard: $14/user/month Professional: $23/user/month Enterprise: $40/user/month |
Security | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Credit card number redaction; data encryption both at rest and in motion | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ GDPR compliance |
Zoho's broader suite of tools is much larger
An apples-to-apples comparison of Zendesk and Zoho isn't exactly fair. Zoho has a pretty massive suite of over 70 cloud-based tools that span categories like sales, marketing, HR, finance, security, project management, and more (I'm getting dizzy).
Zendesk, on the other hand, offers two tools: Zendesk for Service (for customer service) and Zendesk for Sales (its CRM).
This article will compare each company's customer service tools—Zoho Desk and Zendesk for Service. If you're more curious about CRM options than customer service solutions, check out Zapier's post covering the best CRMs.
Zendesk is the more user-friendly option, whereas Zoho is the AI champ
When it comes to usability, Zendesk and Zoho Desk each have distinct bragging rights—Zendesk provides a far better user experience, but Zoho's AI features assist agents in some powerful ways.
User-friendliness
Zendesk's setup tutorial experience is superb. It guided me through the platform's standard and advanced features, using a combination of pop-up boxes, previews, and even demo videos to help me find my way around the interface and know what's possible with the platform.
Plus, despite it having a lot of different features and views, Zendesk keeps everything clean and organized. Just navigate to the top bar to hop from the Support channel for agent ticket management to the Explore channel for reporting to the Talk channel for voice communication, and more.
Zendesk also offers intuitive side-conversation features and a clear view of interaction history with customers to make your agents' lives easier.
My experience with Zoho Desk's busy interface, on the other hand, was quite different. When I opened my first ticket, the sheer number of options (many of which are represented by tiny icons and hyperlinks) made my eyes gloss over a bit.
When I navigated to the setup page to hunt for some helpful features and resources, the decision fatigue followed.
Ultimately, your team is far less likely to run into a learning curve with Zendesk, despite its advanced features.
AI functionality
Zoho may not be the easiest platform to navigate, but it certainly is ahead of its time when it comes to AI. Zoho offers an AI-powered virtual assistant called Zia, and she does far more than swing from a chandelier (sorry).
She can intelligently tag customer tickets with related keywords, fetch relevant information from your knowledge base to answer a user's question, notify you of strange ticket responses, and even perform sentiment analysis (essentially poking your shoulder and saying, "Hey human, I think the customer is mad").
Granted, it took me a minute to figure out where to find Zia. You'd think one of the platform's biggest differentiators would be automatically enabled and have bright flashing arrows pointing to it, but I had to dig into Zoho's settings just to make the thing appear on my interface at all. Plus, it's only available with Zoho's most expensive Enterprise plan.
While Zendesk also offers bots, it would be more accurate to say they're powered by automation than by AI. Sure, they can recognize that "Yeah" means the same thing as "Yes," but they have a long way to go to get to Zia's level of intelligence.
Zendesk is more feature-rich, but at a much higher price point (and with a more complex pricing structure)
Apart from its AI shortcomings, Zendesk is pretty clearly the more robust customer service platform. But you might just find you're getting charged up the wazoo to add on features one by one—the same features that Zoho Desk already has incorporated into its plans.
Customization
Zendesk's flexibility is reflected in just how many features you can customize. Take bots, for example. Not only can you create detailed decision trees informing bots exactly how to respond to customers (and when to transfer them to a human agent), but you can also customize your bot's name and color scheme to give them some (cute?) character.
Likewise, I was really impressed with how much Zendesk allows you to customize your help center—it almost felt like I was building a blog or a website. You can choose a theme, set a hero image, enable/disable features like recently viewed articles, and more.
On the other hand, if I had to describe Zoho Desk's knowledge base customization options in one word, it would be basic.
The platform offers very few customization options to make your help center visually appealing or to otherwise meet your users' needs. That said, I was impressed to find that it allows you to customize some of your articles' SEO features like title tag and meta description—a feature that Zendesk lacks.
Advanced features
Both Zendesk and Zoho offer some unique features, but Zendesk's advanced features take the W. For example, it offers accessibility features, like automatic language translation, and security features, like credit card number redaction and data encryption both at rest and in motion.
Its data and reporting options are also top-notch. It tracks highly specific metrics from every channel, including the efficacy of your bots and ticket escalations over time. Plus, all of these metrics are plotted on charts and graphs in Zendesk Explore.
Zoho's dashboards aren't necessarily unhelpful or difficult to understand—in fact, I found them quite visually appealing. They just aren't nearly as granular as Zendesk's, providing far fewer insights than many customer service teams likely want to visualize.
Lastly, let's talk about integrations. Zendesk boasts over 1,200 apps and integrations for everything from time tracking to eCommerce, making it difficult to find something you can't do. Plus, Zendesk offers a local development tool (Zendesk Command Line Interface) for developers to create their own custom Zendesk apps. So, correction—there's truly no limit to what you can do (assuming you or someone on your team can code).
While Zoho Desk doesn't offer nearly as many third-party integrations, you can integrate it with other tools in the Zoho suite. Plus, both Zendesk and Zoho Desk integrate with Zapier, so you won't have to worry about either option failing to cooperate with the other tools you use.
Pricing
Don't think Zendesk will let you snag those advanced features at no cost. Unlike Zoho, Zendesk doesn't offer a free plan, and its plans get significantly more expensive than Zoho's. When billed annually, its most basic plan (which only covers foundational support) costs $19 per user per month. Meanwhile, Zoho Desk's Standard plan costs $14 per user per month.
The two apps' Enterprise-level plans differ even more dramatically, with Zoho Desk's plan costing $40 per user per month, and Zendesk's costing $99 per user per month.
Zendesk also charges for some of its added advanced features. For example, only five help desk themes are free—the rest are paid. Some of them even hit over $1,000. While I couldn't dream of spending that much on a template, hey—to each their own.
Zendesk vs. Zoho: Which should you choose?
Unless having a virtual assistant powered by AI is really important to you, the decision between Zendesk and Zoho may be a simple budget question: can your organization afford the option with more advanced features and a better user interface? Choose Zendesk, you'll almost certainly be satisfied.
If not, Zoho Desk is still a great customer service software that has some pretty cool perks of its own—and it'll save you a massive amount of money.
Take a look at how Zendesk stacks up to similar apps in our showdowns: Zendesk vs. Freshdesk, Zendesk vs. Intercom, Zendesk vs. Jira, and Zendesk vs. Salesforce.
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