by In this blog, we compare the two biggest players on market – HubSpot vs Zendesk – so you can make the choice that suits your company. A good customer experience is paramount! It is constantly shown in studies that it is the highest priority for consumers and the focal point for growing companies. Your choice of customer service software is fundamental to this.
What can HubSpot do?
HubSpot is a CRM platform that helps companies grow by bringing together sales, service, marketing, website (CMS) and operations in one and the same system. It provides a lot of synergies across the company.
What is the HubSpot Service Hub?
HubSpot Service Hub is built on top of HubSpot’s CRM system. This means that you have the best conditions to provide fantastic customer support. You already have all customer data available when a support inquiry comes via chat, email or phone. This is coupled with functionalities that support onboarding, support and customer success.
What can Zendesk do?
Zendesk is a CRM platform that offers solutions for sales and service teams. It is primarily known for being a hardcore focused service tool.
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What is Zendesk Suite & Zendesk Support?
Zendesk was originally a customer service only tool – however they have expanded to cover sales as well. Zendesk focuses on help desk tools, and is more specialized in service. Their strongest function is their help desk, around which the platform is built.
Functionalities
Your service software is the foundation of your customer experience. Below we compare HubSpot and Zendesk across the most fundamental functionalities.
CRM Platform & total solution
HubSpot’s CRM platform was developed by them with software that supports sales, service, marketing, web and operations – in addition to hundreds of integrations.
The platform combines the market’s strongest “engine” with ease of use for a complete overview of the customer journey and a fluid connection between marketing, sales and customer service teams. The result? A complete experience for customers.
Zendesk’s CRM platform, Zendesk Sunshine, brings together Zendesk Sell, which is their product for sales departments, and Zendesk Suite, which is the solution for customer service teams.
It gives developers the opportunity to build and integrate software that can be used by the rest of your teams. It builds on Amazon Web Services and gives developers and administrators the tools they need to facilitate strong customer experiences. However, it has not been developed in-house like HubSpot’s CRM platform is.
Functions for the entire customer journey
In addition to essential help desk and support features, HubSpot Service Hub offers tools to support the onboarding process and reporting, measurement, and satisfaction scoring tools to facilitate retention, cross-selling, and upselling. These onboarding, support and success functions make Service Hub a fully comprehensive solution for the entire customer journey.
In keeping with its previous position as pure help desk software, Zendesk Support and Zendesk Suite offer features focused around a comprehensive set of tools for support workers. They include features like SLA management and customizable ticket layouts that are necessary for complex support teams. However, Zendesk lacks tools specifically geared towards customer onboarding, retention and growth.
Self-help function for your customers
HubSpot Service Hub offers features for a strong support area (Ex. FAQ & Helpdesks) in its Professional and Enterprise tiers, also with multilingual and SSO features. Help articles/FAQ items are built and structured to rank high in searches, and HubSpot’s built-in reporting dashboards measure the impact of each support article to ensure they meet customer needs, and can be improved over time.
Zendesk Suite offers knowledge base functionalities in all its tiers, allowing for multiple support databases in its Growth, Professional and Enterprise tiers.
Can it be adapted to your business?
With the ability to customize objects, customer attributes, surveys, dashboards and more in, for example, the professional and enterprise versions of the product, HubSpot Service Hub offers all the customization that customer service needs, while preventing unnecessary complexity by having to integrate with third-party solutions.
Zendesk is very strong in its ability to adapt its software in the major versions. While the customizations introduce complexity into the business process and place greater demands on the effort required to manage the system, these more complex configurations make Zendesk a leader in larger service solutions that do not need the visibility into sales and marketing activity that HubSpot offers.
Who has the best support and who is the easiest to be a customer with?
While both HubSpot and Zendesk have strong processes to ensure a good support and customer success experience, HubSpot consistently beat Zendesk on the “Quality of Support” and “East of Doing Business With” metrics on review site G2.com. HubSpot scored 8.9/10 for “Quality of Support” and 8.9/10 for “Ease of Doing Business With,” while Zendesk scored 8.4/10 in both categories.
Integrations and extensions
HubSpot offers over 800 applications in their marketplace, including over 100 applications dedicated to service. The most installed customer service applications are Facebook Messenger, SurveyMonkey and Intercom.
Zendesk offers over 1,200 applications in their app directory. The vast majority of these integrations are for Zendesk’s support functions, whereas they have fewer than 100 applications for their sales and chat functions.
For particularly complex configurations, companies also use HubSpot’s ecosystem with over 6400 different partners. Zendesk relaunched their partner program in 2019 and now has over 360 partners on the list.
What does it cost?
Depending on the configuration, the list prices for HubSpot Service Hub and for Zendesk are comparable. The monthly subscription price for the Growth tier of Zendesk Suite is $79/month. user per month, and for the HubSpot Service Hub’s Professional tier, the price is $80 per month/user per month, (starting with 5 users for $450 per month.)
Both providers offer access to all users, including those without a connection to the service platform. HubSpot calls these users “free users” and Zendesk calls these users “light agents”.
HubSpot offers an unlimited number of free users, while Zendesk limits the number of “light agents” according to the level. When using Zendesk with a separate sales tool, such as the HubSpot Sales Hub, additional Zendesk agent seats must be purchased for the sales department to access support data. This can increase the overall cost of Zendesk, while it is not a problem with HubSpot Service Hub due to the unlimited number of free users.
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