When you look at the market share of the top help desk and chat support companies around, Zendesk holds a commanding lead on market share. For many people, that means mission accomplished. You’re done doing your research. You pick the top one, don’t think about it, and don’t worry if there are any problems.
But what if Zendesk isn’t right for you?
If you want to build an effective help desk and live support system for your company, you’re going to have to pick the one that’s best for your company. And that’s not always the same answer as which company has the top market share.
But which is the best Zendesk alternative, and how will you know which one is right for you?
To help you decide, we’ve put together a list of key features to examine, as well as a list of some of the top names in help desk tools.
- Alternative #1: Intercom
- Alternative #2: LiveAgent
- Alternative #3: Freshdesk
- Alternative #4: Kayako
- Alternative #5: ThriveDesk
- Alternative #6: EngageBay
- Alternative #7: Kommunicate
- Alternative #8: Help Scout
- Alternative #9: HelpCrunch
- Alternative #10: Helpjuice
| Alternative | Quick rundown | Key feature(s) | Missing features, or key concerns | Lowest Pricing Available |
| Intercom | Optimized for sales | “Business Manager,” or Live Chat support system | Robust customer support features, or better for running sales? | Starter; $79/month for first user and $19/month for added seats |
| LiveAgent | Effective “starter” option | Building a robust help desk off the bat | Live chat support and email marketing with minimum pricing tiers? You have to buy to add more | Ticket; $15/agent/month. Free contact forms |
| Freshdesk | “Zendesk’s twin” | Live chat feature is robust and highly customizable | Could have a more robust unified dashboard for uniting your sales team | “Sprout” is free, offering email and social ticketing. $15/month/agent for the next pricing tier |
| Kayako | Long-time name gone omni-channel | Customer support tickets are comprehensive for small businesses | A dashboard that does a better job of unifying larger teams and simplifying things for growing businesses | Inbox: $15/agent/month |
| ThriveDesk | Create a user community | Community-enabled customer support features | Run-of-the-mill for broader features for a larger business with a lot of customer support needs | $25/month to sign up a team |
| EngageBay | Affordable alternative that’s good for startups | 1,000 emails sent out available with the free plan | For SMS marketing and features, may have to unlock paid versions | Free pricing tier; earliest paid tier starts at $8.99/user/month |
| Kommunicate | Easy to embed chat bot gets you up and running | Seamless integration between AI and real live chat | A free trial version, but less affordable than other Zendesk alternatives | “Start” is $40/month, one of the higher prices on our listings |
| Help Scout | Robust alternative helps you keep your fingers on the pulse | Customer trending items provide deeper analytics insights | Limited amount of mailboxes with the low pricing tiers, making it harder to grow | “Standard” at $20/user/month |
| HelpCrunch | All-in-one solution | Full customization allowed to help brand your help desk | Only three chat automessages allowed at one time with the lowest pricing tier | $12/user/month |
| Helpjuice | Sophisticated web editor makes building a help desk easy | Dragging and dropping files to create helpful content online | Less focus on the sales, live support aspect of the help desk; price | Starter: $120/month for up to 4 users |
Zendesk Alternative #1: Intercom
You should consider it if…
- You need to make more sales. The features for live chatting make it ideal for handling customer intake, which means that you can use Intercom if you want a way to boost the sales you make. Especially useful for companies with a lot of traffic but low conversion rates
- You want to unite a sales team. One of the key features here is the unified dashboard that brings your team together. You can use tags and office hours settings to run your dashboard like it’s a well-oiled machine. Also great for remote teams.
Key distinguishing features:
- Business manager. This is the Live Chat portion of Intercom, and one of the main features that attracts the people who try it out.
- Help center. Since we already mentioned the unified dashboard, it’s worth noting that you can update your help center right from that dashboard. And with your team united on that dashboard, you can make quick additions or notes to the help center that will help you build it out for future customers every time you notice something that needs to be changed.
Zendesk Alternative #2: LiveAgent
You should consider it if…
- You need to expand your features without going too “live.” We all know that if you pay someone to handle customer support for you, it can get expensive. Live Agent is a nice way to get some robust features for handling customer inquiries without quite taking that leap to a full-blown help desk with live chat and other “live” features.
- You’re on a budget. One of the key features here isn’t something you’ll find on a list of features; it’s the pricing. It’s affordable to start up at only $15/month/agent, which means you can add on what you like as your business grows.
Key distinguishing features:
- Help desk. You might not know it from the name, but the help desk is the bread and butter of LiveAgent. You can, of course, buy additional channels to have more interactive communication with customers via social media and live chat, but for LiveAgent, it’s all about routing customers to that friendly help desk first.
Zendesk Alternative #3: Freshdesk
You should consider it if…
- You want a near Zendesk “twin.” What if you want something that has the features of Zendesk but aren’t sure that you want to change the style of the software you’re willing to use? Consider Freshdesk your best alternative here. It will essentially give you the Zendesk experience without having to use Zendesk.
- You want to automate your customer service. Where Freshdesk really shines is that it offers all sorts of opportunities to automate every aspect of your customer service.
Key distinguishing features:
- Live Chat widget. This is one of the more advanced live chat features you’ll see on this list. It’s easy to tweak it to suit your needs and customize it to make sure that it fits your brand.
Zendesk Alternative #4: Kayako
You should consider it if…
- You’re open-minded. What’s that? Open-minded? Well, Kayako is one of those names that goes back quite a long way. And it’s possible you’ve even tried it yourself in the past. But big updates in more recent years have landed it an omnichannel presence that may not resemble the Kayako that you tried once upon a time.
- You need to organize a small company. This isn’t the kind of option you might want if you’re looking for big business Zendesk alternatives. But Kayako can help you streamline your customer support if you have a small operation. One of the major features here is that it gives you complete ticket histories so you know exactly who you’re talking to—even if you don’t remember.
Key distinguishing features:
- The tickets we mentioned. You’ll get some of the basics here, like the ability to build a foundational help desk. But the tickets are probably the standout feature for a small business because they’ll also serve as a CRM of sorts. You can use these tickets to check on customer history and make sure that you don’t end up repeating yourself too often.
Zendesk Alternative #5: ThriveDesk
You should consider it if…
- You want to drive user engagement. You can use ThriveDesk (and its WordPress-friendly features) to create a “community” style approach to your customer support. Comment on what customers say, reply to posts, keep it public—it really is a good way to introduce transparency to a process that can get frustrating for customers when they feel that they’re all alone.
- You already run WordPress. We briefly mentioned the WordPress integrations. What are they exactly? In this case, ThriveDesk can run live chat, reporting, and more within the WordPress application, giving you the freedom and flexibility to launch customer support if you’re already using WordPress for a store based on, say, WooCommerce.
Key distinguishing features:
- Price. While the bottom-tier pricing is higher on our list than others, you have to consider what you’re paying for. It’s easy to upload a team onto ThriveDesk’s main functionality for the price of $25/month, which makes it ideal for small businesses who are working on a limited budget.
Zendesk Alternative #6: EngageBay
You should consider it if…
- You want efficiency and minimal muss and fuss. Sometimes it can be frustrating looking up Zendesk alternatives because you’re not sure which services are lopsided; if you emphasize a help desk on one service, for example, does it mean that they don’t care as much about live chat?
- Money is an object. One of the nice things about EngageBay is that it has a free version that serves as an alternative to the more expensive pricing tiers you’ll see on our list. With that free tier, you’ll get 1,000 contacts and branded emails (1,000 of each), while the paid tiers will start unlocking extra features like SMS marketing.
Key distinguishing features:
- We hate to repeat ourselves, but price. If you’re not sure you’re going to have a lot of help desk needs to start out with, then an option like EngageBay makes an effective Zendesk alternative. There’s no reason you should have to pay to dip your toes in the water. And if you find yourself enjoying EngageBay’s features, then you can quickly move up to its higher pricing tiers, which are still reliably affordable.
Zendesk Alternative #7: Kommunicate
You should consider it if…
- You want a responsive chat bot. Kommunicate succeeds by merging its AI-enabled chat bot services with the ability to reach out to a human at your company. The combination is near seamless, once you get it up and running, and that means front-end results that your users will love. In fact, you can make yourself appear like a much larger company even if you don’t have a lot of people working in your customer service department.
- You emphasize customer satisfaction. Because Kommunicate does so well in emphasizing the customer experience, it’s an ideal Zendesk alternative for anyone who doesn’t care about how it’s used on your end, but rather how things appear to the customer.
Key distinguishing feature:
- Embedding your custom chat bot. You don’t have to be a Fortune 500 company to pretend to look like one. And that’s thanks to Zendesk alternatives like Kommunicate, which make it easy to embed the custom chat bot onto your web site, set it, and forget it. You will pay a little bit more for that right, but you might also consider this an investment in the quality of your customer support.
Zendesk Alternative #8: Help Scout
You should consider it if…
- You love knowing what’s on customers’ minds. Help Scout offers all of the regular features you might expect. Embed chat bots on your site. Build a help desk. This won’t surprise you. But what differentiates Help Scout from other items on our list of Zendesk alternatives is that it lets you view trending topics with your customers. If you have a lot of customers and you want to lick your finger and gauge which way the wind is going, Help Desk makes that possible in a flash.
- You need to tie in a lot of other programs. Apps like MailChimp might be a critical part of your customer experience. That’s why it’s important to use a Zendesk alternative that integrates with them. Help Scout can integrate with plenty of them in a seamless way, ensuring that your customers don’t notice the gears turning behind the scenes.
Key distinguishing feature:
- Trends. We were tempted to point to the shared inbox, which makes it much easier for a team to manage everything that’s going on within the customer support infrastructure. But those customer-facing trends are a neat way to see what customers are thinking about—and also spot potential issues as they become more important in the customers’ minds.
Zendesk Alternative #9: HelpCrunch
You should consider it if…
- You value the all-in-one experience. Sometimes searching for a Zendesk alternative isn’t about identifying one with a particular feature. Sometimes you just want to try something else without sacrificing all the help desk capabilities you’re looking for. HelpCrunch is a nice solution if you want that “all-in-one” experience.
- You like to remain hands-off. You can use automation features like scheduling messages, which help you handle customer messaging at odd hours, even if your website/business is just a one-person operation for now. If you like to remain hands off, you’d be surprised at how much you can get away with in terms of customer support and still look like a Fortune 500 company.
Key distinguishing feature:
- Full customization. One of the key issues for anyone using a Zendesk alternative is they want to use a solution that doesn’t look like it’s a Zendesk alternative. In other words, you want your help desk solutions to look like they originated from your company, not a third-party service. With HelpCrunch, you get full customization with the bottom pricing tier, which helps you to look your best even if you’re just paying $12/month. (Note: you do have to pay for the $20/month pricing tier if you want to remove the HelpCrunch branding completely).
Zendesk Alternative #10: Helpjuice
You should consider it if…
- You have a team. Helpjuice’s pricing structure is designed for businesses with a team already in place, so be ready for that. Yes, you can always grow “into” a team, but it’s worth mentioning before all the other features here because it’s such a key point. This is particularly true if you’re running a one-person operation and aren’t sure when you’ll add a customer support team just yet.
- A WordPress-like interface. Building customer-facing messages is fun and intuitive with their WordPress-like interface. If you’ve ever used WordPress before and like how easy it is to create your messaging, there’s a good chance you’ll like how Helpjuice manages things.
Key distinguishing feature:
- Dragging and dropping files to a Helpjuice article. If you’re the kind of offering that has a lot of customers who love to read their customer support content, Helpjuice is probably the ideal Zendesk alternative. Editing features like dragging and dropping files into your articles will help you demonstrate how to solve frequent customer problems. And since it’s so efficient, you’ll find it easier to build a massive help desk in less time.
Picking a Help Desk You Can Use
Of course there are all sorts of options for building your help desk. The question isn’t which one is the right answer. This isn’t a pop quiz. The issue is how you can find a solution that will work best for you. And once you can identify that, you can build a customer-facing help desk that will have your company’s website more proactive and useful than ever.
