Zendesk vs. Help Scout
Don’t get stuck with a basic ticketing system. Instead, try a solution that grows with you. See why brands choose Zendesk over Help Scout.
Zendesk vs. Help Scout: Which is better for you?
Laatst gewijzigd November 5, 2024
To meet expanding business demands, CX teams need support software built for growth. While Help Scout offers a basic ticketing system, it’s missing critical capabilities to set you up for success both now and in the future. Unlike Help Scout, Zendesk offers a complete customer service solution designed to absorb new teams, divisions, and global customer bases. Here's a deeper look into the three pivotal reasons why businesses prefer Zendesk over Help Scout.
Scalability
With Zendesk, there's no need to change solutions as you grow. It’s designed to scale up with your customer base and business needs so you have a long-term partner. But this isn’t the case with Help Scout—according to reviews on G2, growing businesses can struggle to get everything they need out of the system. As a result, they’re forced to migrate to a more mature solution, which can increase costs.
Quality support and CX expertise
We empower you with our thought leadership and community of CX experts. From Uber and Lush to Four Seasons and Tesco, Zendesk helps 160,000+ businesses deliver great CX and provides an array of support resources—such as training and dedicated account management—solidifying our status as a trusted leader in the market. On the other hand, Help Scout has a customer base of approximately 12,000 and lacks a customer community.
More complete solution
Zendesk offers the most complete customer service solution for the AI era. With our industry-leading omnichannel agent workspace, CX teams can provide support over any channel while AI-powered insights guide agents through resolutions. Teams also get advanced analytics tools to monitor and report on service level agreements (SLAs) and operational level agreements (OLAs). However, Help Scout has limited native channel support, lacks a native voice solution, and doesn’t offer a dedicated SLA feature.
More in this guide:
- At-a-glance comparison: Zendesk vs. Help Scout
- Help Scout vs. Zendesk: Features comparison
- Pricing plans: Help Scout vs. Zendesk
- Brands that chose Zendesk over Help Scout
- Frequently asked questions
- Ready to try Zendesk?
At-a-glance comparison: Zendesk vs. Help Scout
See how Zendesk compares to Help Scout on critical CX capabilities in the chart below.
| What you need to deliver the best customer experience | Critical capabilities | Zendesk | Help Scout |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vendor performance | Analyst rating | Leader | Visionary |
| Focus | Customer service | Customer service | |
| High customer satisfaction at scale | ✓ | ✕ | |
| Fast time to value and low cost of ownership | Easy to use | ✓ | ✓ |
| Low implementation cost | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Long-term value | ✓ | ✕ | |
| Low long-term TCO | ✓ | ✕ | |
| Unified omnichannel experience | Unified omnichannel status + workflows | ✓ | ✓ |
| Unified omnichannel customer experience | ✓ | ✕ | |
| Unified omnichannel analytics | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Native voice solution | ✓ | ✕ | |
| Real-time agent workspace | ✓ | ✕ | |
| Native custom dashboards | ✓ | ✕ | |
| Powerful workflow/automation tools | Sophisticated automation + workflows (SLAs, OLAs) | ✓ | ✕ |
| Flexible agent routing | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Intelligent triage | ✓ | ✕ | |
| AI-powered self-service content gap identification | ✓ | ✕ | |
| Sophisticated self-service content management + workflows | ✓ | ✕ | |
| Robust integrations | Broad apps marketplace | 1,700+ | 100+ |
| Broad set of API endpoints | ✓ | ✕ |
Help Scout vs. Zendesk: Features comparison
Here are five features to consider when choosing between Help Scout vs. Zendesk. Our research is based on extensive analysis by the Zendesk product team and what we’ve seen based on our customers’ experiences with our software.
Reporting and analytics
Use AI-powered reporting and analytics software to monitor operations in real time.
Zendesk reporting and analytics empowers you to measure your entire customer experience in real time. Our AI-powered quality assurance (QA) tools assess 100 percent of customer interactions, flagging churn risk and identifying areas for improvement. Additionally, AI-powered workforce management (WFM) tools forecast staffing needs based on activity trends and historical data, ensuring optimal agent coverage and minimizing wait times.
Although Help Scout provides a few standard dashboards, it doesn’t provide real-time reporting capabilities. The absence of custom dashboards, metrics, and reports forces users to manually input data and download reports. Additionally, Help Scout doesn’t have QA or WFM tools, making it more challenging to allocate resources properly and coach agents.
AI and automated workflows
Zendesk AI comes pre-trained on the industry’s largest dataset, built from over 18 billion real customer interactions. It understands the complexities of CX right from the start, allowing you to deliver fast, personalized, automated support—no technical expertise needed.
Zendesk also offers a highly customizable approach to designing automated workflows, including intelligent routing and defining SLAs in a no-code interface.
Help Scout's workflows focus on internal tracking, organization, and automating responses or notifications. However, as previously mentioned, Help Scout doesn’t offer SLAs, and users can’t customize views.
Let Zendesk AI help you handle growing service volumes.
Knowledge base
Scale smarter with an AI-powered knowledge base.
Zendesk makes it easy to share articles in support tickets with AI-powered recommendations, see which content serves customers best with Content Cues, and offer in-context self-service with the Web Widget and Mobile SDK. You can also use generative AI to write new articles—or rewrite old content—and then update it everywhere if it lives across multiple articles and help centers with content blocks.
Although Help Scout provides knowledge base software, it lacks some advanced content management capabilities, making it difficult to scale your help center. For instance, it doesn’t support dynamic content, so you’ll spend more time customizing content for different customer segments. If you update an article in your English-language knowledge base, it won’t automatically update your French- or Spanish-language content.
Integrations
Zendesk provides 1,700+ pre-built apps and integrations in the Zendesk Marketplace, enabling you to scale to any use case and build a 360-degree customer view to personalize interactions. By centralizing customer data from various sources, Zendesk helps you create a comprehensive understanding of each customer, allowing you to tailor interactions and deliver personalized experiences. Additionally, Zendesk streamlines your data collection, providing valuable insights and enabling you to make data-driven decisions for greater efficiency.
In contrast, Help Scout offers around 100 pre-built apps and integrations in its marketplace, and some of these integrations come with limitations. For example, the Help Scout and Jira integration doesn’t permit ticket updates from within Jira. Additionally, some of these integrations are only available at higher subscription levels.
Scale your operations by seamlessly integrating additional tools in the Zendesk Marketplace.
Unified omnichannel experience
Deliver personalized support with ease using the AI-powered Zendesk ticketing system.
Zendesk offers the industry-leading omnichannel solution, unifying all your support channels within one AI-powered interface. For example, the Zendesk agent copilot can draw answers from your knowledge base or details from the customer’s purchase history and share them with the agent during the interaction. Agents can use the information to deliver fast, tailored support regardless of how the customer chooses to communicate. This streamlined approach eliminates the need to switch between systems or ask customers to repeat information, saving your team time and lowering costs.
In comparison, Help Scout falls short in delivering a comprehensive omnichannel experience. While the software provides native email support, it lacks a native voice solution or a fully integrated computer telephony integration (CTI).
Pricing plans: Help Scout vs. Zendesk
| Cost | Zendesk | Help Scout |
|---|---|---|
| Licensing plans |
|
|
| Cost to serve | Low | High (due to lack of integrated omnichannel support + robust self-service) |
| Cost of efficiency gaps | Low | High (due to lack of powerful agent + workflow automation tools) |
| Cost of customer experience gaps | Low | High (due to lack of omnichannel support + efficiency) |
| Cost of scalability gaps | Low | High (due to product + support gaps) |
| Total cost of ownership | Low | High |
Overall, Zendesk has a lower total cost of ownership than Help Scout. Unlike Help Scout users, Zendesk customers avoid switching costs thanks to our more mature software, a highly rated app marketplace, native integrations, and scaled support and success operations. But don’t take it from us—take it from Forrester. The Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study showed that Zendesk customers experienced a 286 percent return on investment over three years.
On the other hand, Help Scout isn’t as well-equipped to accommodate the needs of growing businesses. For instance, since Help Scout doesn’t natively offer voice or SMS, you would need to purchase additional services and integrate them, raising the total cost of ownership.
Brands that chose Zendesk over Help Scout
Challenges in scalability, difficulties in reporting, and insufficient visibility into customer interactions are just some of the reasons companies choose Zendesk over Help Scout. Here are three organizations that adopted Zendesk and experienced an enhanced return on investment as a result.
HeliosX
HeliosX desired a solution that could power its long-term growth, provide powerful reporting, and set up quickly and easily—prompting the company to choose Zendesk over Help Scout. This resulted in a 50 percent reduction in staffing costs and a seven percent CSAT increase.
“The way we could just create flows and automations was so much easier than it would have been through Freshdesk or Help Scout. I wanted to get the system up and running quickly, and Zendesk was the better tool for being able to make changes at speed.”
—Fabrice Dowling, global head of customer care at HeliosX
Missouri Star Quilt Company
Before Zendesk, Missouri Star Quilt Company had tried other customer service solutions—namely Help Scout and LiveAgent—but didn’t get the required results. Some of the biggest problems the business experienced before Zendesk were dropped calls and reporting visibility. To address these challenges and meet their goals, Missouri Star Quilt turned to Zendesk.
Missouri Star Quilt has since seen its customer service call answer rate improve by 30 percent to a rate of 95 percent, and its customer satisfaction rating regularly hits 97 percent.
“Zendesk has allowed us a better connection to our customers. It’s given us visibility into who’s talking to us [and] why they’re talking to us, and it enables us to capture that data and use it to see how we can be better.”
—Wendi Mills, customer service manager at Missouri Star Quilt Company
Thinkific
After months of evaluating options including Help Scout, choosing Zendesk was a “no-brainer” for Thinkific. Since our software is so easy to use, its customer service team worked faster and avoided the frustration they experienced using their old ticketing system.
Thinkific determined their agents resolved 2.5 more tickets per day and answered 96 percent of tickets in under eight hours using Zendesk.
“The first day we started using Zendesk, our fastest agent, who normally resolves twice as many tickets as anyone else, said immediately that she was now even faster. Zendesk’s workflows and UI are designed for efficiency.”
—Veronica Howes, director of customer success at Thinkific
Frequently asked questions
Ready to try Zendesk?
A basic ticketing system can only take you so far. Modern support teams need customer service software that can support ever-evolving customer needs and business growth. Our AI-powered self-service and automation tools, comprehensive reporting features, and versatile omnichannel Agent Workspace are just a few of the ways Zendesk helps businesses like yours deliver great customer experiences. See how easy it is to get started for free.
Zendesk vs. the rest: Compare the software
Explore these resources to deep dive into why users choose Zendesk vs. Help Scout.