The software your customer support team relies on has a huge impact on your customers, your team’s productivity, and the types of support you can provide. Making the right choice can make or break your customer experience.
I’ve worked extensively with both Zoho Desk and Zendesk, and I’ve experienced the pros and cons of each tool.
Zendesk is a longstanding market leader in customer support, offering comprehensive solutions for scalability. It’s highly customizable, so you can adapt it to various needs — although that requires effort and time. Zendesk excels in custom analytics and dashboards. It’s an optimal choice for medium to-large companies that can allocate resources to both software implementation and learning the tool.
Zoho can be a bit challenging to learn and brings a slightly clunkier interface. However, it’s still suitable for larger teams, especially if the company already uses some of the other 50+ tools in the Zoho suite and wants to consolidate everything within one platform. Zoho's investment in specific features like AI sets it apart from Zendesk. For organizations with limited budgets, Zoho provides a cost-effective solution.
Here’s a detailed breakdown and comparison of their features.
Let’s start with an overview of Zoho Desk’s and Zendesk’s top features. We’ll analyze these in more depth below to see what these features look like in each tool.
Many companies provide support across at least two channels, and many more go far beyond that. The essential channels for support software include email, phone, and chat — but expanding into social media, SMS, or WhatsApp is also valuable.
Having queries from all channels fed into the same system makes it significantly easier to track and maintain an overview of your workload, setting the stage for a great experience across the board.
Zoho checks all the boxes when it comes to omnichannel support. You can set up a web form and receive emails, calls, and chats. You can also connect with all the main social media platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Zendesk has been investing in omnichannel support for a long time. They offer a similar set of core support channels and similar integrations, enabling you to also create tickets from social media.
Winner: Zoho
Zendesk covers almost everything you need as a support team, but some of its integrations aren’t quite as easy to set up, and they have some quirky limitations. For example, comments from Facebook posts and ads don’t get sent to Zendesk. This sounds minor, but in practice it means an agent regularly needs to open your Facebook page to respond to those users.
Zoho offers all of that and more. For instance, Zoho allows you to set keyword alerts on platforms like Twitter to get notified if you’re receiving more tweets. You’d have to do some custom development work to achieve that if you were on Zendesk.
We give Zoho a score of 10 and Zendesk a score of 9. While both platforms provide what’s necessary, Zoho is a little more convenient.
Related Reading: Best Zendesk Competitors
Having a great knowledge base transforms how your support team operates.
Zendesk’s own research shows that 91% of customers would use a knowledge base if it met their needs. Offering a help center feature is essential for customer support software. Both of these tools include knowledge base components, but there are major differences in their feature set.
Like all basic help centers, Zoho allows you to create articles and structure these in categories and subcategories. It also includes built-in reports and dashboards, letting you measure how your help center performs over time.
Zoho also includes a community feature, meaning your customers can ask and receive help from each other. And it comes with some extra SEO features, providing additional control over optimizing your help center.
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Zendesk’s knowledge base is called Zendesk Guide. It’s similar to Zoho Desk, but is far more customizable. You can edit everything about the appearance of your help center by creating or downloading a theme. Just like Zoho Desk, Zendesk Guide also includes a customer community feature.
This is what a help center built using Zendesk looks like.
Winner: Zendesk
Both tools automatically suggest articles to agents working on tickets and to customers when they create tickets. Both allow you to expand your self-service options by adding a user forum. Neither offers comprehensive reports for the help center, but they each provide the basics.
The main difference between the two platforms is in the ability to customize. This is mostly cosmetic, but Zoho feels restrictive when you’re building out your help center, forcing you to follow a specific hierarchy for help articles. Zendesk offers thousands of pre-built themes, along with endless customization (if you’ve got the technical know-how and resources).
We give Zoho a score of 8 and Zendesk a score of 10.
Test drive Zendesk for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
An efficient customer service team needs a good routing system. Ticket routing automatically assigns support tickets to the appropriate agent or team. It’s usually based on factors such as skill level, workload, and priority level.
Most customer support software allows you to set up triggers and other automation.
Zoho lets you create assignment rules to decide which tickets should be assigned to whom. You can create departments to group agents who work on different types of tickets.
Zoho also has a built-in round-robin assignment system. Round-robin is a method of randomly assigning tickets to available agents with certain criteria. It can be an effective technique for teams who have to combat cherry-picking or who need to ensure they have a good level of shared knowledge across the whole team.
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Zendesk’s routing functionality is very similar. You can create triggers that assign tickets to groups or agents.
Skills-based routing is a feature available only on their higher-priced tiers — but it’s also only relevant for much larger teams — that lets you define certain skills and assign tickets to agents that have those skills enabled.
As an example of automated routing, this ticket was escalated to a manager based on a tag:
Winner: Zendesk
There’s some tight competition here.
Zendesk’s functionality makes it capable of handling very complex use cases, which is great if that’s what you’re looking for. Zoho’s round-robin feature is compelling too, for both larger and smaller teams. In my experience, just experimenting with round-robin can dramatically change the culture of a support team.
We give Zoho a score of 9 and Zendesk a score of 10. Zoho is capable of a lot, but Zendesk offers a slight edge when it comes to ticket assignment.
Test drive Zendesk for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
When you want to know how your support team is performing, you need to track and analyze metrics such as response time, resolution time, customer satisfaction scores, and ticket volume.
Zoho Desk
Zoho has a decent set of dashboards that cover the most important metrics, such as volume, average handle time, and customer satisfaction. You can build your own dashboards with their advanced analytics features as well.
Zoho is especially good at real-time data. You can get a snapshot of how your team is doing right now with almost no effort.
It’s also great at tracking time spent per ticket. This is an essential metric for teams handling tasks out of the queue and trying to improve their efficiency by, for example, investing in automated deflection.
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Zendesk
Zendesk has built-in dashboards with some basic reports and filtering capabilities in their analytics tool called Zendesk Explore.
Zendesk Explore is one of the most powerful and comprehensive analytics tools in the customer support space. You can create any visualization or report you like — if you invest the time in learning how to use it. Zendesk Explore can do virtually everything, but it comes with a fairly steep learning curve and its interface is not intuitive.
Winner: Zoho
Zoho isn’t trying to be the world’s deepest support analytics platform. Its reports aren’t the most comprehensive, but they’re strong where Zendesk is weak. Real-time analytics are a pain in Zendesk. Measuring time per ticket out-of-the-box sounds small, but it’s a quality-of-life improvement that can make a tremendous difference to some support teams.
We give Zoho a score of 8 and Zendesk a score of 7. While Zendesk Explore is far more powerful under the hood, it’s not user-friendly and takes effort to get usable data from. If it was more intuitive and accessible, Zendesk would definitely be the better option. As it stands today, Zoho wins because it gives most support teams the analytics they need far more easily.
Tagging lets you organize support tickets based on categories such as issue type, product, or customer segment.
Not only does it help you understand why customers are creating tickets, but it’s essential for routing tickets accurately. It also adds an extra layer of information to your reports — if you know which types of tickets lead to unhappy customers, you can target and improve those.
Zoho Desk
Similar to most customer support software, Zoho lets you tag tickets manually as an agent or automatically using triggers. But Zoho has a game-changing feature here: they have an AI bot called Zia that automatically tags tickets for you.
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Zendesk
Zendesk also enables you to add tags manually or automatically. Zendesk also offers ticket forms that let you create custom fields for tickets, like a date, topic, or any other type of information.
Winner: Zoho
We give Zoho a score of 10 and Zendesk a score of 8. Zendesk’s functionality is enough to do what you need, but automatic categorization using AI is a massive win for Zoho.
Deflection is all about preventing tickets from being created when they can be solved via self-service. One simple and common way to do that is to suggest relevant articles or resources from the help center to customers.
Zoho Desk
Zoho has invested a lot in ticket deflection.
The Zoho bot, Zia, does more than just tag tickets. It suggests articles from the knowledge base, collects data about potential knowledge gaps, analyzes the sentiment of every ticket, writes responses to save your agents time, and even identifies anomalies — such as a sudden surge in incoming tickets or an extremely unhappy customer.
It also offers guided conversations, which is a feature that lets you design your own conversation flows on top of Zia’s basic suggestions.
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Zendesk
Zendesk’s equivalent is Answer Bot. It automatically suggests articles for a customer based on the content of their ticket, and it also tracks how helpful these suggestions are. Zendesk also recently made it possible to use Answer Bot proactively, leveraging certain triggers. It’s possible to build your own bot on Zendesk, but the functionality is still relatively basic.
Winner: Zoho
Zoho went all in on offering a native AI feature that touches multiple areas across support, whereas it seems like Zendesk is only slowly moving in that direction. There are countless third-party tools that integrate with Zendesk for additional functionality, but its native feature set is limited.
We give Zoho a score of 10 and Zendesk a score of 6. Zoho is the undisputed winner here.
Most support teams use many different tools. These range from CRM systems to QA software to project management tools.
You can think of these as the tech stack for your support team. Integrating these tools with your support software is a great way to streamline your processes and improve your customer and agent experience.
Zoho Desk
Zoho Desk is part of a giant suite of cloud software for businesses, including CRM, marketing, finance, HR, and more. If your company’s already using any of these Zoho tools, its integrations with those are a plus. Zoho even offers Flow, which lets you automate actions across multiple tools.
Their marketplace offers an additional 1000+ integrations which you can install and use.
Zendesk
Zendesk offers a huge number of integrations through their marketplace as well, with about 1500 apps in total. The Zendesk marketplace includes tools across virtually every category, from agent assist to knowledge management to QA software.
Winner: Zoho
Comparing integrations is always challenging because it really depends on the specific apps your team needs. It’s very possible that what you’re looking for is much better on Zendesk than it is on Zoho, so we always recommend checking out your individual needs against each tool’s integrations.
That being said, we give Zoho a score of 10 and Zendesk a score of 9. Since both offer such a massive selection, you’re likely to find what you need with either tool. Zoho gets an extra point simply for creating its own integration tool on top of their large marketplace.
There are different perspectives to consider when it comes to ease of use.
Each of these requires a different set of features.
Zoho Desk
Zoho has some cool features for agents, such as work modes. They provide different ways to organize tickets, so you can tackle what’s most urgent or work based on status.
The rest of Zoho’s interface, however, is cumbersome (especially during the setup process). They haven’t invested enough into their onboarding experience. As a new user, Zoho Desk can feel overwhelming, and there’s little in-app guidance to help you learn its features. Even Zia, a big competitive differentiator, is hidden and hard to find.
Zendesk
Zendesk isn’t the world leader in simplicity, either. While learning to use it as an agent is quick and simple, using it as a manager takes some time and experience. If you need anything more than Explore’s basic dashboards, you’ll also need to set them up yourself. Keeping an eye on a new agent means creating even more personal views.
Setting Zendesk up is where it gets really complex. Zendesk implementation often requires real expertise and a lot of testing to make sure everything works as expected. If you’ve ever had the experience of discovering 100 old and open tickets that you accidentally filtered out of your main view, you can imagine how annoying making mistakes with Zendesk can be.
Winner: Zendesk
Neither tool performs super impressively in this category.
We give Zoho a score of 5 and Zendesk a score of 6. Zendesk wins by virtue of being somewhat simple to use as an agent, whereas Zoho can be overwhelming across the board.
Test drive Zendesk for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
Every support team’s budget has constraints, but when it comes to tooling you often get what you pay for. Understanding how the price of a tool compares to the feature set is key to making a sound decision and investing in the right tool for your team.
Zoho has a free plan for very small teams. Zoho Desk’s starter plan is priced at $7/user per month, and their most expensive plan goes up to $40/user per month.
Zendesk follows a similar pricing model but at a much higher price point. It starts at $49/agent per month for their lowest plan and goes up to $99/agent per month. They also offer enterprise-level pricing, ranging from $150/agent to $215/agent per month (or more, depending on your needs).
Winner: Zoho
There’s no question that Zoho is a much cheaper option. For support teams operating on limited budgets, Zoho’s able to provide most of the core functionality you need with a significantly smaller price tag.
Zendesk is a market leader in the customer support space and has been for a long time. They offer almost everything you could need for supporting customers at scale. Because Zendesk is a highly customizable software, you can make it do almost anything — with some effort and time.
If customization, analytics, and flexibility are critical to you, Zendesk is the clear winner. If you’re a medium-to-large company with a decent budget to invest (both in the tool and in the expertise needed to tailor it for your use case), then Zendesk is probably the better option.
Zoho is a little clunkier and takes longer to get used to. You can still use it with a large team, but it probably makes more sense if:
Reviews are great, but there’s nothing like trying out tools yourself to get hands-on experience. Take these tools and more for a test drive today using TestBox Compare (it’s totally free!).
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