Saying that effectively supporting customers is important for running a business is like saying that effectively frying eggs is important for making an omelet.
If you know enough about Zendesk and Intercom that you want to compare them, I don’t need to convince you that software for customer-centric tasks like ticketing, issue resolution, automation, and messaging is vital for growing your business. But is one easily better than the other?
I tested both options (using Zendesk’s Suite Professional trial and Intercom’s Support trial) and found clearly defined differences between the two. Here’s what you need to know about Zendesk vs. Intercom as customer support and relationship management tools.
Table of contents:
Zendesk vs. Intercom at a glance
Both Zendesk and Intercom offer baseline customer relationship solutions like live chat, help desk, and a knowledge base. They’re also both high-end products with a great user experience, solid customer support, AI integration, and moderate pricing. I’d say the main differences are about focus:
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At its core, Zendesk is better positioned for customer support than Intercom.
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Intercom‘s features give users a wider range of sales and marketing features.
Zendesk |
Intercom |
|
---|---|---|
Ticketing |
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Zendesk excels at ticketing, with easy collaboration, workflows, and triggers |
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Intercom has solid ticketing (and great automation features), but it’s not as purpose-built for it |
Messaging |
⭐⭐⭐⭐ All-in-one omnichannel dashboard is sleek, simple, and responsive |
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Very similar omnichannel messaging but with a more robust chatbot function |
Help center |
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Easily create and group resources and customize to fit branding |
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Help center content is also easy to create but not quite as customizable |
Automation |
⭐⭐⭐ Automation features are fairly limited out of the box |
⭐⭐⭐⭐ More automation features than Zendesk |
CRM utility |
⭐⭐⭐ Not as effective as a pure CRM, but users can enroll in Sell if they want a strong CRM |
⭐⭐⭐ Could work as a standalone CRM without needing a separate service, but may require a supplemental product for some users |
AI |
⭐⭐⭐ Provides extensive third-party app integrations for customizable AI-driven support solutions; advanced AI available as an add-on |
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Leverages built-in AI to enhance conversational support and automate customer interactions, offering a seamless and proactive user experience; AI is functional out of the box |
Reporting |
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Zendesk Explore offers robust reporting capabilities |
⭐⭐⭐ Reporting is pretty average but should be sufficient for most users |
Pricing |
⭐⭐⭐⭐ The lowest tier is still strong, but the highest tier brings lots of extra features; plans start at $55/agent/month; Advanced AI is an addition at $50/agent/month |
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Both transparency and pricing have improved significantly in the last year; plans start at $29/seat/month |
Zendesk is better for customer support; Intercom is better for managing customer relationships
Zendesk is among the industry’s best ticketing and customer support software, and most of its additional functionality is icing on the proverbial cake. Intercom, on the other hand, is designed to be more of a complete solution for sales, marketing, and customer relationship nurturing. You can use it for customer support, but that’s not its core strength.
Understanding these fundamental differences should go a long way in helping you pick between the two, but does that mean you can’t use one platform to do what the other does better? Nope! These are both still very versatile products, so don’t think you have to get too siloed into a single use case.
Keeping this general theme in mind, I’ll dive deeper into how each software’s features compare, so you can decide which use case might best fit your needs.
Zendesk has an edge when it comes to ticketing
Though Zendesk now considers itself to be a “service-first CRM company,” since its founding in 2007, its bread and butter offering has leaned much more heavily toward the “service” part of that equation.
The highlight of Zendesk’s ticketing software is its omnichannel-ality (omnichannality?). Whether agents are facing customers via chat, email, social media, or good old-fashioned phone, they can keep it all confined to a single, easy-to-navigate dashboard. That not only saves them the headache of having to constantly switch between dashboards while streamlining resolution processes—it also leads to better customer and agent experience overall.
What’s really nice about this is that even within a ticket, you can switch between communication modes without changing views. So if an agent needs to switch from chat to phone to email (or vice versa) with a customer, it’s all on the same ticketing page. There’s even on-the-spot translation built right in, which is extremely helpful.
The side conversations feature is also pretty clutch.

Using this, agents can chat across teams within a ticket via email, Slack, or Zendesk’s ticketing system. This packs all resolution information into a single ticket, so there’s no extra searching or backtracking needed to bring a ticket through to resolution, even if it involves multiple agents.
Zendesk also packs some pretty potent tools into their platform, so you can empower your agents to do what they do with less repetition. Agents can use basic automation (like auto-closing tickets or setting auto-responses), apply list organization to stay on top of their tasks, or set up triggers to keep tickets moving automatically.
Triggers should prove especially useful for agents, allowing them to do things like automate notifications for actions like ticket assignments, ticket closing/reopening, or new ticket creation. Their template triggers are fairly limited with only seven options, but they do enable users to create new custom triggers, which can be huge for agents with more complex workflows.
Intercom is better for communication, including a more robust chatbot
Intercom, on the other hand, was built for business messaging, so communication is one of its strong suits. Combine that with its prowess in automation and the addition of Fin AI, and you’ve got a really strong product that can handle all your customer relationship needs.

Like Zendesk, Intercom has that coveted omnichannel-ality (omnichannel-ness?) for streamlined messaging across platforms. If a customer emails an agent through your support address, the agent’s response automatically routes right back to the customer’s email. If they switch over to WhatsApp to continue messaging, your agent still sees the conversation in the same feed, and their response appears in WhatsApp.
Intercom has plenty of basic automation and organizational tools, like list segmentation, targeted messaging, and the ability to use events to set up triggers to help agents improve their workflows. But it also adds features like automatic meeting booking (in the Convert package), and the custom inbox rules and workflows just feel a little more, well, custom.
If you need live chat, Zendesk’s messenger is extremely easy to design and implement. Once you select your colors, the software generates code you can hand over to your dev team to add to your site. Answer Bot does pretty much what you expect answer bots to do: generating canned responses and relaying relevant articles for basic customer queries. If they need an agent, they get sent along with a new ticket.
But Intercom’s chatbot feels a little more robust than Zendesk’s. You can set office hours, live chat with logged-in users via their user profiles, and set up a chatbot. Customization is more nuanced than Zendesk’s, but it’s still really straightforward to implement. You can opt for code via JavaScript or Rails or even integrate directly with the likes of Google Tag Manager, WordPress, or Shopify.

The bot automation is also a major highlight. Intercom offers two different AIs that can be trained to support agents: Fin AI Agent and Fin AI Copilot. The AI Agent is an actual agent—it can handle frontline support using company knowledge bases to generate responses. This AI is super powerful, personalizing interactions and even performing tasks on behalf of customers.
AI Copilot is more what you would expect from a support chatbot. This AI functions as a personal assistant for support agents, providing relevant information during customer interactions. The implementation is really straightforward, allowing agents to easily program both bots to automate tasks like customer routing, requesting contact information, suggesting help articles, collecting additional issue information, and sharing typical response times.
Intercom’s AI is holistic, while Zendesk still uses case-by-case integration
Both Zendesk and Intercom have made significant moves to integrate AI in their platform in the last year—but in somewhat different directions.
Zendesk offers two options for using AI: third-party apps and the AI agent add-on available in Suite Team and higher plans. Third-party app integrations through the marketplace allow businesses to customize their support systems on a case-by-case basis—like a LEGO set where you can switch out pieces at will. While this provides flexibility and scalability, it definitely requires more manual setup.

Zendesk’s extensive integration options make it an attractive choice if you’re looking for a customizable support solution—but be prepared to put the legwork in.
Intercom, on the other hand, has fully committed to the bit when it comes to AI. Intercom offers AI-powered chatbots and automated customer interactions with their (multiple!) bots, making it a more intuitive and proactive platform for customer engagement. The AI integration is totally immersive and embedded into each screen, which helps streamline processes for both customers and support teams.

Intercom’s Fin AI Agent has an almost overwhelming number of customization options: you can adjust the bot’s tone, what content it sources from, and even who can see it on your website.
If AI capabilities are a deciding factor for your team, you may want to ask yourself how much time you want to spend building out those capabilities. Zendesk can do everything Intercom can do here—but only if you’re willing to spend the time setting it up.
Zendesk offers a CRM, but Intercom mimics some of those features out of the box
This may be a little unfair to Intercom since we’re talking about a separate service here, but if you prefer to keep your software consolidated, this could turn the needle for you.
You could technically consider Intercom a CRM, but it’s really more of a customer-focused communication product powered by AI. It isn’t as adept at purer sales tasks like lead management, list engagement, advanced reporting, forecasting, and workflow management as you’d expect a more complete CRM to be. Intercom does just enough that smaller businesses could use it as a standalone CRM or supplement it with a simpler CRM at a lower pricing tier, but bigger companies may not be satisfied with Intercom alone.
You could say something similar for Zendesk’s standard service offering, but they have Zendesk Sell, a capable CRM option to supplement it. You can use Zendesk Sell to track tasks, streamline workflows, improve engagement, nurture leads, and much more.

You can even improve efficiency and transparency by setting up task sequences, defining sales triggers, and strategizing with advanced forecasting and reporting tools. Starting at $19 per agent per month billed annually, it’s also on the cheaper end of the spectrum compared to high-end CRMs like ActiveCampaign and HubSpot.
That said, Intercom can do, out of the box, a lot of what you might do with a more traditional CRM. Its data utility and conversation integration are fully functional immediately, and it’s easy to get started with AI assistance. As with just about any customer support software, you can easily view standard user data within the messenger related to the customer journey—things like recent pages viewed, activity, or contact information.

Intercom’s custom data also integrates data from multiple channels to help you take advantage of countless other metrics and deploy targeted marketing campaigns. By customizing data parameters and aggregating data from SMS, email, and other conversation channels, you can create custom funnels. You can also easily segment lists based on metrics like activity, how long they’ve been active, or how many purchases they’ve made. Use this information to send out automatic reminders, send list-specific emails, or prioritize high-potential users for premium offerings.
Zendesk has more native integrations, but both tools integrate with Zapier
Zendesk offers a robust integration ecosystem with a truly impressive 1,500+ integrations with third-party apps available through its marketplace—like Salesforce, Jira, Shopify, Slack, and Microsoft Teams. While Intercom only supports 450+ third-party apps when it comes to integrations—including important ones like Salesforce and Slack—it’s enough to get by.
And both Zendesk and Intercom integrate with Zapier so you can automatically connect your tickets and chats with the other tools you use most. Automatically route tickets to the right teams, connect to your CRM or email marketing app, or gather feedback and analyze conversations—creating a fully automated customer support system.
Learn more about how to automate Zendesk and how to automate Intercom, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.
Zapier is the leader in workflow automation—integrating with thousands of apps from partners like Google, Salesforce, and Microsoft. Use interfaces, data tables, and logic to build secure, automated systems for your business-critical workflows across your organization’s technology stack. Learn more.
Zendesk has more robust reporting features, but Intercom gets the job done
Zendesk’s reporting capabilities are pretty impressive. Right out of the gate, you’ve got dozens of pre-set report options on everything from satisfaction ratings and time in status to abandoned calls and Answer Bot resolutions. You can even save custom dashboards for a more tailored reporting experience.

If you want to build a customer report, you can take your pick of datasets by searching for them directly or browsing by support, guide, chat, talk, or Answer Bot. Once you’ve chosen your dataset, the available metrics are very extensive—as are the visualization types. You can go beyond the usual bars and pies and dig into your data via bubbles, gauges, treemaps, funnels, and even word clouds. If you need it, forecasting is built right into the reports. (I should note that custom dashboards, reporting, and analytics are available only at the Suite Professional tier.)
For its part, Intercom has good basic reporting capabilities. Its 20+ reports are attractive, dynamic, and integrated right out of the box—including one for tracking whether Fin AI is actually helping you resolve cases. You can even finagle some forecasting by sourcing every agent’s assigned leads.

For standard reporting like response times, leads generated by source, bot performance, messages sent, and email deliverability, you’ll easily find all the metrics you need. Beyond that, you can create custom reports that combine all of the stats listed above (and many more) and present them as counts, columns, lines, or tables.
For fancy, beyond-standard reporting needs, Intercom offers AI Analyst. The third of Intercom’s little AI friends, it provides reporting assistance for support team leaders with tools like a no-code visual builder and easy automation assistance. Personally, I found the suggestion feature when building new reports the most useful of AI Analyst’s features, as it helps you figure out what data to include in your shiny new report.
Basically, Intercom offers solid reporting functionality that does 90% of what you’ll ever need—and it has a bot to help you out—but if you’re into building custom reports and finely slicing data, Zendesk’s more robust solution may be what you’re looking for.
Zendesk vs. Intercom: Which is best for you?
Intercom has a wider range of uses out of the box than Zendesk—and a nearly intimidating array of AI assistants, including AI Agent, AI Copilot, and AI Analyst—though by adding Zendesk Sell, you could make up for it. Both options are well designed, easy to use, and share some pretty key functionality like behavioral triggers and omnichannel-ality (omnichannel-centricity?). But with perks like more advanced chatbots, automation, artificial intelligence, and lead management capabilities, Intercom could have an edge for many users.
And in many cases, companies opt to use both: Zendesk for customer support and Intercom for marketing and sales.
Zendesk vs. Intercom FAQ
What is the difference between Intercom and Zendesk?
Zendesk is billed more as a customer support and ticketing solution, making it best for businesses that need a comprehensive solution with robust customization. Intercom, on the other hand, excels in user-friendly conversational engagement and live chat features—all of which are powered by AI for instant responses and faster-than-thought assistance for customers.
Does Zendesk integrate with Intercom?
Zendesk can integrate with Intercom, and vice versa. You can integrate via app or pull existing content from one platform to the other. You can also connect them using Zapier.
Does Intercom have ticketing?
Intercom has a ticketing dashboard with omnichannel functionality, much like Zendesk. It offers features for managing customer inquiries and support requests, allowing teams to track and resolve issues efficiently. But Intercom is more focused on customer engagement and proactive support, so its ticketing capabilities aren’t quite as extensive.
Which offers more customization, Intercom or Zendesk?
Intercom has more customization features for bots, themes, triggers, and funnels—as well as aggressive AI assistance for all those features. Zendesk, however, has more robust custom reporting capabilities.
What is Zendesk best for?
Zendesk is best used to manage customer support operations. Its strengths lie in a powerful ticket management system, in-depth reporting capabilities, and a high degree of customization and integration options. If your business has intricate support workflows or you’re looking for seamless integration with your existing CRM systems, Zendesk may be a good choice.
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This article was originally published in February 2023. The most recent update, with contributions from Abigail Sims, was in January 2025.