Why choose Zendesk?

Customers and employees are more than just interactions—they're human. With AI designed to enhance human connection, Zendesk empowers you to deliver fast, seamless, personalized service. Our best-in-class customer service software combines intelligence, ease of use, scalability, speed, and cost transparency, providing everything you need to offer exceptional support.

More in this guide::

• Zendesk competitors at a glance
• Zendesk vs. competitors
• Zendesk customer stories
• Frequently asked questions
• Try Zendesk for free

Use the comparison chart below to see how Zendesk compares to Freshworks and Salesforce Service Cloud.

What you need to deliver great CX	Zendesk	Freshworks	Salesforce Service Cloud
CX expertise	High	Moderate	Moderate
Ease of use	High	Moderate	Low
Total cost of ownership	Low	High from outgrowing, buying fixes, or implementations	High from expensive setups, maintenance, and hidden costs
Scalability	High	Low	High
Operational agility	High	Moderate	Low
360-degree customer view	✓	✕	✓

Unlike other solutions, Zendesk combines cutting-edge AI with ease of use and scalability. It also offers a unique blend of speed, expertise, and cost transparency. Here’s how partnering with Zendesk empowers you to create meaningful customer connections that drive loyalty and revenue.

Leverage AI purpose-built for service teams

In a world where poor experiences can cost you customers, having AI specifically designed for CX is crucial. Trained on the industry’s largest dataset, Zendesk AI understands the nuances of CX, enabling you to deliver better, faster, and more personalized customer experiences. With no training or lengthy setup required, you can provide seamless AI-powered experiences from day one.

For over a decade, Zendesk has been at the forefront of AI innovation for service teams, starting with the launch of the first CX bots in 2015. Today, our AI agents are the most autonomous in the industry, automating over 80 percent of customer interactions and resolving even the most complex requests—all on their own.

Related customer story: Sports wearables and analytics company Catapult Sports uses Zendesk AI copilot to save agents time and make their work easier. The tool helped trim first reply time by 50 percent, with a 21 percent decrease in resolution time and a 14 percent dip in average handling time.

“We have different tiers of customers and different solutions for each, all requiring different levels of support,” shares Thomas Powers, vice president of product support at Catapult.

“[Our high-impact clients] frequently travel all over the world, so we need to be available to them 24/7. We started looking for a solution that would help us prioritize customers in the appropriate way and help us become more efficient … Because Zendesk is customizable, we were able to choose where and how we wanted to deploy AI.”

Benefit from AI in service of humans

Delivering exceptional customer experiences requires the right blend of AI and the human touch, ensuring every interaction is efficient and empathetic. Achieving this balance can be challenging, which is why the Zendesk omnichannel Agent Workspace seamlessly integrates AI-driven automation with human expertise.

Our agent copilot assists your support team during customer interactions by anticipating next steps, providing suggestions, and taking action on behalf of the agent. Additionally, Zendesk AI automates workflows, optimizing your entire service operations for greater efficiency.

AI-assisted native voice takes contact center operations further regarding personalization and satisfaction. In the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2025, we discovered that 64 percent of consumers say they’re more trusting of AI agents that are friendly, engaging, and embody human-like traits.

Zendesk uses natural language understanding (NLU) and machine learning to create empathetic, intelligent responses to a wide range of customer inquiries. It perfectly balances AI and human agents to meet your unique business needs.

Related customer story: U.K. retailer Liberty London leverages Zendesk AI to identify and label incoming tickets so they get routed to the right team at the right time. This blend of AI and human expertise decreased first response time by 73 percent and increased CSAT by 9 percent.

“Liberty is all about delivering a personal service,” says Ian Hunt, director of customer services at Liberty London. “I see AI enhancing that personal service because now our customers will be interacting with a human who’s being put in front of them at the right time with the right information.”

Scale effortlessly with ease of use

CX teams are under pressure to deliver more value quickly and cost-effectively, so they need software that is both easy to use and powerful enough to scale.

Zendesk is designed with the end user in mind, embedding CX best practices to unlock significant productivity gains. Its intuitive design minimizes navigation, automates routine tasks, eliminates clutter, and delivers accessible, contextually relevant data. Beyond its user-friendly interface, Zendesk is robust enough to scale with your business's complexity. Every user can harness AI to enhance customer engagement, solve complex issues, and drive growth.

Related customer story: Limeade switched to Zendesk for its customer service solution after struggling with Salesforce’s complexity and needing specialist developer resources to make changes. Zendesk empowered the team to innovate as rapidly as the rest of the business and scale efficiently. The results speak for themselves: Limeade increased its user base by 60 percent without adding to the customer support headcount.

Get started right away, and make it your own

In a rapidly changing market, there’s no time to waste on lengthy implementations or solutions that are hard to adapt to evolving needs. With Zendesk, you can move at the speed of your business.

Zendesk works out of the box and is easy to customize to your organization. With more than 1,800 pre-built applications, you can quickly adapt to change and unify data across systems for a complete view of the customer within the Agent Workspace—all while safeguarding your business with flexible security and privacy controls.

Related customer story: Degreed, an education technology platform, replaced Salesforce with Zendesk because it found the traditional enterprise solution too costly and difficult to implement. Zendesk enabled the team to build a best-in-class tech stack with seamless integrations.

“Zendesk was selected because we had champions on the team who knew that it would be easier to administer, and it would give our clients and internal teams a better service experience faster than another solution could,” says Kevin Barry, vice president of global technical services and support at Degreed.

Maximize your ROI and keep costs low

With Zendesk, there are no hidden costs—what you see is what you get. You’ll know exactly how much to budget for and what you’ll receive in return.

In a study by Forrester, Zendesk increased the ROI of interviewed businesses by 286 percent over three years. They were able to achieve this through:

• Cost savings from deflected tickets and reduced handle time
• Balanced staffing due to improved agent efficiency
• Faster integration and time-to-value savings
• Additional annual revenue

Learn how Zendesk can increase your ROI with our ROI calculator.

Related customer story: Lush realized a 369 percent ROI, recovering its initial investment in Zendesk in less than a year. With help from Zendesk, Lush also improved CX productivity, accounting for $434,000 in annual cost savings from avoided headcount.

Naomi Rankin, global CX manager at Lush, recalls the ways that Zendesk helped paint a clear picture of the customer experience. “KPIs come as standard, but our founders want us to report back and tell them how our customer is feeling. With Zendesk, we can do that.”

CX expertise and quality support

Zendesk is crafted from deep customer service expertise—best practices are embedded into our solutions to help you deliver world-class service. We also provide support and partnership to maximize your ROI.

According to Nucleus, Zendesk resources like our community support ecosystem have enabled Zendesk admins to reduce their technical workload by an average of 15 percent.

Related customer story: “We are extremely pleased with our partnership with Zendesk. Whenever we have questions, we receive prompt responses, demonstrating genuine customer care within Zendesk,” says Adam McPherson, customer experience manager at Universal Store.

Because of the seamless nature of integrating Zendesk, especially with intuitive generative AI, Universal Store has more time to focus on and coach its human agents. The company achieved a 92 percent CSAT and averaged first responses in just one hour.

Optimize team performance

As companies rapidly integrate AI, ensuring quality interactions and monitoring performance is crucial for building customer trust. Zendesk stands out as the only vendor offering native, AI-powered quality assurance functionality.

Our QA tools help drive revenue and manage costs by flagging customers at risk of churn, pinpointing knowledge gaps, and identifying coaching opportunities to enhance agent performance. CX leaders can use this automated solution to evaluate 100 percent of their customer interactions, including those with AI agents.

Meanwhile, Zendesk workforce management—also powered by AI—automates forecasting, schedules agents by shifts and focus areas, and provides real-time and historical reporting on team performance.

Related customer story: Buffer slashed the time spent manually reviewing tickets by half after implementing Zendesk QA. Ross Parmly, customer advocacy manager at Buffer, shares how seamlessly Zendesk transformed Buffer’s operations:

“Ticket reviews are one of those important factors in keeping a support team sharp, but often fall aside when the process is cumbersome or complex. Zendesk QA has made it easy for us to integrate these into the natural course of our work, and it’s exciting to have a tool that feels like it’s designed to make this process simple, easy, and repeatable.”

Whether you're upgrading your CX solution or implementing one for the first time, discover why these companies picked Zendesk over other options.

Zendesk vs. Salesforce

Businesses choose Zendesk over Salesforce because of our ease of use, agility, and ROI. Here are just a few examples of companies that made the switch for these reasons and more.

“Previously, an agent would do 80 emails in a day. Now, email agents can do 220 emails a day because of the one-click macros and other ways we made their work tool more effective. It’s very important that we’re efficient and effective so that we can get to customer needs as soon as possible.”

—Andrew Jensen, director of payment solutions at LendingClub

“In one of our first conversations with Zendesk, we heard, ‘We can help save you money and do this smarter and better.’ While we were talking, the Zendesk rep went to our website and copied all of our FAQs into articles and built a help center for us. Demonstrating that ease during a sales pitch is pretty amazing.”

—Brian Taylor, senior director of customer experience and head of call center operations at Prosper

Zendesk vs. Freshworks

Companies prefer Zendesk compared to Freshworks for our streamlined agent workspace, scalability, robust reporting capabilities, and excellent support and partnership. Explore these customer success stories to learn more.

“We serve up to 70,000 tickets per month with a very small group of people, so having an easy-to-use platform is important. Since moving to Zendesk, functionality became way more stable and we now answer 98 percent of our calls.”

—Chuck Courtney, support manager at Wyze Labs

“It has been really great to be able to have a tool that does everything that we need it to do. We’ll definitely be growing a lot with Zendesk in the future.”

—Katerina Graham, project manager at Thinkific