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

While Zendesk and LiveAgent 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 LiveAgent?

The help desk software market is growing more competitive by the day. Two popular options are LiveAgent 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 LiveAgent Pros and Cons

Both LiveAgent 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

LiveAgent Pros & Cons

Zendesk vs LiveAgent 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

LiveAgent Pricing Plans

LiveAgent’s pricing comes in three tiers: Ticket, Ticket+Chat, and All-inclusive. Each plan offers an array of features to meet the needs of any business. The Ticket plan offers basic ticketing support for $15 per user per month, while the Ticket+Chat and All-inclusive plans offer additional features such as chat buttons and call center support for $29 and $49 per user per month, respectively. All plans come with unlimited ticket history and email addresses, as well as advanced reporting and a customer portal for seamless communication with clients.

Ticket — $15 per user per month

• Unlimited ticket history
• Unlimited email addresses
• Advanced Reporting
• Customer portal + forum
• API + integrations

Ticket+Chat — $29 per user per month

• Unlimited chat buttons
• Feedback management
• Real-time visitors monitor
• Proactive chat invitations
• Chat satisfaction surveys

All-inclusive — $49 per user per month

• Call center support
• Video call
• IVR
• Call routing and transfers
• Hardware IP phone

Zendesk vs LiveAgent 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.

LiveAgent Features

LiveAgent is one of the best help desk solutions on the market, which makes ticket management easy. With their wide range of features and integrations, as well as excellent multi-channel support for smooth customer conversations, you can take advantage of everything they have to offer. LiveAgent’s key features include:

• Ticketing system
• Knowledge base
• Live Chat
• Social media support
• Call center

Ticketing system

Customer service can be a nightmare, but it doesn’t have to be. With LiveAgent, your emails, chats, calls, social media mentions and more will go into one inbox. Automation rules and integrations will help you take care of customer service with just the click of a button.

• Universal inbox: All of your customer’s communication in one place, on a single dashboard that is easily organized.
• Organized customer interactions: Keep all communication channels organized and efficient. Decrease response time for customers and provide faster replies. Easily find customer tickets to improve your workflow.
• Internal tickets and notes: Make a note to yourself and assign tasks to agents within the ticket. Write down any relevant customer information. Set reminders for yourself in the tickets so you don’t forget anything.
• Canned messages: LiveAgent’s pre-written answers will help you resolve common issues faster, so you can focus on other areas of your business. Their solutions are reliable and easy to implement, so you can get back to what’s important: growing your business.

Knowledge base

LiveAgent offers a self-service customer portal to provide the best customer experience possible. This will improve the daily routine of your customer support agents, and take advantage of LiveAgent’s knowledge base tools to provide relevant articles, how-to guides, and other useful information for customers.

• WYSIWYG editor: LiveAgent’s WYSIWYG editor can help you create articles, guides, how-tos, and information segments for your knowledge hub so that it can continue to grow.
• Forum: LiveAgent forum is an important part of your customer support platform. Customers and customer support team members can engage in conversations on the forum to share knowledge and help each other out.
• Feedback & Suggestions: If you take the time to read and respond to customer feedback, your business will not only improve its relationship with customers but also build a stronger knowledge base.
• User-friendly dashboard: Your knowledge base should not only be about helping your clients but also assist your employees with an easy-to-use platform.

Live Chat

LiveAgent offers a live chat platform that provides great customer experiences. The fast live chat widget and advanced features make any customer interaction easy. With real-time support, you can turn website visitors into customers and solve customer queries quickly. Improve customer engagement with the LiveAgent single chat application today.

• Proactive chat invitations: Invite website browsers to chat with a customer care agent in order to catch their attention.
• Website monitoring: With Chat overview, you can see how many website visitors you have, as well as the number of active agents and chats. This is a helpful way to keep track of where your visitors are spending their time on your site.
• Real-time typing view​: By getting your answers ready before the customer sends you a message, you can be proactive instead of reactive. The Real time typing view allows you to see what customers are writing before they send it so that you’re always one step ahead.
• Multilingual chat widget: No matter where your customers are from, LiveAgent can bridge the language barrier. With support for over 40 languages, you’ll be able to provide them with the help they need regardless of location.

Social media support

With LiveAgent, you can connect your social media channels and have all customer service requests organized in one efficient solution. The ticketing system allows you to manage tickets from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Viber- all in one place. Keep your social interactions high with a fully featured communication platform that doubles as a help desk tool.

• Universal inbox: With the universal inbox, social media messages from any platform are sorted and easy to find. Not only that, but the universal inbox also helps you manage communication from all channels in one place so you can keep track of customer conversations more easily.
• Automation rules: By adding custom rules for automation, you can take your customer service to the next level by being faster and more efficient with interactions while Automation takes care of repetitive tasks.
• Departments and tags: Your customer support team’s success lies in its ability to be divided into departments, each with its own specialization. This way, you can ensure that your customers are always getting help from the right expert.
• Macros, attachments and notes: Improve customer service today by using canned messages and predefined answers to speed up response times. With LiveAgent, you can also support various attachment types when replying to a ticket.

Call center

LiveAgent’s cloud-based call center software, LiveAgent, makes it easy to engage with your customers across all channels. LiveAgent’s VoIP (voice over internet protocol) call center phone system is equipped with advanced features such as IVR, call back requests, ACD, smart call routing, call transfers, unlimited call recording, and HD video calls — and that’s just the beginning. With LiveAgent you can provide reliable and personalized service to your customer easily!

• Internal calls: Internal calls enable you to speak with other employees who are working their shifts, as well as transfer calls.
• Call transfers: LiveAgent’s call center has attended and consultative transfers. Attended transfers allow for happier customers, by tieing them to an agent before their call is terminated.
• VoIP call center phone system: With LiveAgent call center, you have the ability to integrate with over 99% of VoIP providers that use SIP Trunk. If your preferred VoIP partner isn’t listed, please contact LiveAgent and they would be more than happy to add them.
• Outbound call center software: Improve customer relations by optimizing outbound interactions through their manual call center.
• Native and third-party CRM integrations: You can ensure your contact center agents provide personalized service at all times with one of LiveAgent’s three CRM integrations, or you can use their native CRM tools.

People’s Choice: Zendesk vs LiveAgent

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.

LiveAgent Reviews

LiveAgent has an average of 4.6-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 LiveAgent 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: LiveAgent 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.