Zendesk vs Hubspot 2024 (Which is Better Customer Service Software?)

While Zendesk and Hubspot are both great customer service tools, they do have some key differences. In this comparison article, we’re going to dive into the features, pricing, and customer satisfaction of each software to help you to make the decision.

Which One is Better, Zendesk or Hubspot?

The help desk software market is growing more competitive by the day. Two popular options are Hubspot and Zendesk. Both have their pros and cons, but which one is better for your business? Here are our three use cases to see which one is better.

Zendesk vs Hubspot Pros and Cons

Both Hubspot and Zendesk have their pros and cons, but one may be a better fit for your company depending on your needs. In this section, we will compare and contrast the pros and cons of both platforms to help you make the best decision for your business.

Zendesk Pros & Cons

Hubspot Service Hub Pros & Cons

Zendesk vs Hubspot Service Hub Price Comparison

Let’s take a look at these two’s pricing plans to see which one offers better pricing.

Zendesk Pricing Plans

Zendesk’s pricing comes in three tiers: Suite Team, Suite Growth, and Suite Professional. Each tier offers various features such as messaging, support channels, AI-powered tools, and dashboards. Users can choose the plan that best fits their needs and budget. Higher tiers offer more advanced features for larger teams with increased support demands. All pricing is based on a per-user per-month cost.

Suite Team — $49 per user per month

• Industry-leading ticketing system
• Messaging across web, mobile and social
• Email, voice, SMS, and live chat support
• Help Center
• AI-powered automated answers

Suite Growth — $79 per user per month

• Self-service customer portal
• AI-powered knowledge management
• Customizable ticket layouts
• Service Level Agreement (SLA) management
• Multilingual support and content

Suite Professional — $99 per user per month

• Live agent activity dashboard
• Integrated community forums
• Private conversation threads
• Customizable and shareable dashboards
• Advanced voice capabilities

Hubspot Service Hub Pricing Plans

Hubspot Service Hub’s pricing comes in three tiers: Starter, Professional, and Business. Each tier offers different features, such as live chat, shared inboxes, ticket pipelines, and automation. The Starter plan starts at $25 per user per month while the Business plan is $120 per user per month. There are also options for add-ons such as SLAs and custom surveys.

Starter — $25 per user per month

• Live chat
• Shared inbox
• Ticket pipelines
• Simple ticket automation
• Conversational bots
• Calling

Professional — $100 per user per month

Self-service customer portal

• Help desk automation
• Ticket routing
• Knowledge base
• SLAs
• Custom surveys

Business — $120 per user per month

• Permission sets
• Hierarchical teams
• Standard CRM interface configuration
• Sandboxes
• Conversation intelligence
• Goals

Zendesk vs Hubspot Service Hub Features Comparison

While these tools share some similarities, there are also some key differences. In this section, we will compare these two software programs’ features and help you decide which one is right for you.

Zendesk Features

Zendesk makes customer service better. Zendesk builds software to meet customer needs, set your team up for success, and keep your business in sync. It’s everything you need, in one powerful package.

• Ticketing system
• Live Chat
• Help Center
• Voice (call center)
• AI and chatbots

Ticketing system

A great customer experience starts with a fully integrated ticketing system. It’s the go-to place for questions, requests, and concerns from customers. And it provides you with complete information about each customer so that you can offer personalized support.

• Email with unlimited addresses: Zendesk’s email integration is ready to use out-of-the-box, and you can create unlimited email addresses. Plus, their customizable HTML and text templates make it easy to brand your communications.
• Contact form: Place a contact form on your website so customers can reach out to you 24/7.

Live Chat

With Zendesk, you can get messaging that is personalized and engaging right out of the box or customize it to your own liking.

• Web widget: Support your customers by embedding support onto your website. This will allow them to take actions like submit a ticket or chat with an agent in order to get the help they need quickly and easily.
• Mobile SDKs: Support your app development for iOS and Android by utilizing Zendesk’s native software kits.
• Unlimited concurrent chats: Unlike some competitors, Zendesk’s agents can handle multiple chats at the same time.
• Automatic translation: The dashboard automatically translates conversations (powered by Google Translate).

Help Center

Not only is self-service quick and convenient for customers, but they actually prefer it! That’s why a knowledge base is such an important part of your customer experience strategy. Zendesk’s help center software organizes critical information and empowers both customers and agents with that data.

• Contextual self-service: With the web widget and mobile SDK, you can embed your help center and suggest relevant articles to your audience.
• Multilingual content: Give your customers the ability to receive help from you in their own language by localizing your help center into over 40 different languages.
• Theme customization: You can use themes to unify the look and feel of your help centers, no matter how many products or brands you have.
• Search: Allow customers to find the answers they need by expanding the help center search to include all relevant resources.

Voice (call center)

Even in this day and age of technology, sometimes the quickest solution is to talk with a real person. Zendesk’s integrated voice solution not only syncs with all other channels but also lets agents have access to customer information as soon as they receive the call. Now that’s what’s called convenience!

• Voicemail: With automatic voicemail-to-ticket creation, you can easily keep track of customers’ needs and follow up with them promptly. Enable optional voicemail transcription to get a quick overview of why each customer is calling.
• Text messages: With Zendesk’s easy-to-use messaging system, you can respond to customer inquiries quickly and easily. Automated alerts keep you updated on current issues, and proactive text messages help prevent future problems.
• Call routing: With Zendesk, you can ensure that your customers will always be able to reach a live agent by routing calls directly to a specific group of agents or sets of groups. You can also route calls received after business hours or when agents are busy to an alternate phone number.
• Call recording: Recording calls makes it easy to QA, saves time by reference, and shows when troubleshooting.

AI and chatbots

With Zendesk’s AI capabilities, your support team can get answers to customers quickly and efficiently. Whether or not agents are logged in, the bot will always be there to help.

• Answer Bot AI-powered bot solution: Answer Bot provides instantaneous responses to customer questions by using machine learning to reply immediately with available, relevant information. Answer Bot can deliver answers via email, ticket form, live chat, messaging channels such as Slack or API and/or SDK.
• Automate interactions: The key to setting up your bot lies in Flow Builder. This tool allows you to direct the conversation between a bot and your customers. Furthermore, you can publish flows in multiple languages without needing any coding knowledge.
• Intelligent triage: With Zendesk’s advanced AI, you’ll barely have to lift a finger to understand what customers need and how they’re feeling. This way, you can always connect them with the perfect agent for the job.

Hubspot Service Hub Features

This software package contains various conversational tools to make automated customer interactions easier. In addition, the CRM gives your business a unified view of each customer so you can get feedback, surveys, and reporting in one place.

Customer Portal

Empowering customers to get the help and information they need, when they need it, minimizes repetitive tasks for support reps and increases customer trust.

• Increase transparency: Your customers will be able to interact with your support and services teams in one central location, making it easier for them to get the help they need.
• Minimize repetitive tasks: The HubSpot CRM platform and shared inbox are closely integrated with customer portals to minimize the likelihood of any duplicate work.
• Your branding: Keep your branding consistent across all platforms by automatically applying your colors, logo, and favicon to your customer portal–no design experience necessary.

Knowledge Base

Having a well-organized website will mean that your customers can easily find the answers they need to their questions, freeing up time for your team so that they can help people who need more assistance.

• Help your customers: Empower your customers by building a library of helpful articles they can refer to whenever they need assistance. Turn commonly asked questions into searchable documentation so that anyone can find the answers they need quickly and easily.
• Improve efficiency: With Hubspot’s product, your support team will be able to answer questions more efficiently and focus on supporting unique cases. This will result in increased productivity for your team overall.
• Track: If you want your articles to actually help, take advantage of their reporting dashboard to see the impact of your pages and improve your knowledge base continually.

Omni-Channel Customer Service

By connecting with customers through multiple channels on Hubspot’s CRM platform, your agents will be able to provide the customer service experience they deserve.

• Deliver support on your customers’ preferred channels: Meet your customers’ need for asynchronous communication with the ability to switch from chat and Facebook Messenger to email, while preserving the conversation thread in one place.
• Have the context you need for every interaction: When teams don’t communicate with each other or work together effectively, customers become frustrated from having to explain their issues multiple times.
• Effortlessly switch between channels: Having to use different tools to fix various issues gradually wears down reps as they deal with an ever-growing number of tickets. Present your team with a central service platform that is easy to maneuver, lightening the load on them.

Live Chat

Real-time user connection on your website translates to more conversions, closed deals, and content customers.

• Connect with website visitors: Match the look of your live chat widget to that of your brand with easy customization, and create targeted welcome messages for different web pages or segments of your audience. This way, you can connect with engaged site visitors who matter most to you.
• Automate with chatbots: HubSpot’s live chat tool will make it much easier for your team to have an unlimited number of personalized conversations. The best part is that you can start using it for free, and no coding is required.
• Helpful for your chat team: By using HubSpot, you not only have a central location for all your live chat history, but also data from HubSpot’s free CRM. This way, everyone on your team is able to find the perfect response quickly and easily.

VoIP calling

Connect with your potential customers through VoIP phone calls that can be recorded and stored on HubSpot for future use.

• Full view of customers’ history during calls: HubSpot’s VoIP software provides the capability to call customers directly from their HubSpot CRM record. This way, you always have a complete view of their needs, activity and interactions with your company. With this kind of clarity, your customers will never need to explain themselves multiple times to different reps.
• Save call logs and notes on your CRM: Never worry about manually logging call details or maintaining records again. With HubSpot CRM, calls are automatically recorded and stored on contact profiles for future reference.
• Prioritize sales calls: Daily calls can easily become a monotonous and time-consuming task, but by utilizing the HubSpot CRM’s data on engagement and contact properties, you can set priorities for your most important calls.

People’s Choice: Zendesk vs Hubspot Service Hub

One key aspect when comparing these two services is to compare how other customers rate them. Both of the software has multiple trusted reviews so it’s easy to compare which one is better.

Zendesk Reviews

Zendesk has an average of 4.3-star 3rd party reviews (in legit sites like G2 and Capterra). Other customers seem to love it and consider it as a great option for their customer service software needs.

Hubspot Reviews

Hubspot Service Hub has an average of 4.4-star 3rd party reviews (in legit sites like G2 and Capterra). Other customers seem to love it and consider it as a great option for their customer service software needs.

Top 10 Customer Support Software

Now it should be clear which platform is better for your needs. In case you’re still not happy with either of them, take a look at this list of the top 10 customer support software that has similar features.

Zendesk vs Hubspot Wrap

Choosing the right help desk software can be tricky. There are a lot of factors to consider, and each product has its own unique set of features. In this article, we’ve compared two popular help desk software on the market: Hubspot and Zendesk. We’ve looked at both products from a variety of angles, including price, customer support, features, and more.

So, which one is the best? Well, that depends on your needs and budget. Ultimately, it comes down to what works best for you.