Top Zendesk Alternatives For Small Business Service

We all want ‌customer service software that’s affordable, easy, and has every feature we need. Right? Easier said than done. You may have tried Zendesk, and while it’s a powerful customer relationship management (CRM) tool, it has its ups and downs for many startups and scaling businesses. Especially for those new to customer support tools, you may need something that helps save your small and medium business (SMB) from subpar service. And so, we’re here to help.

This guide will provide you with the top-researched alternatives to Zendesk for a customer service solution, and the features you’ll need to manage customer interactions without a steep learning curve or a high price tag.

What we’ll cover:

• Why small businesses need a CRM for service teams
• Features to consider when choosing a service CRM for small teams
• Why consider alternatives to Zendesk?
• Ten Zendesk alternatives for small and growing businesses

Why small businesses need a CRM for service teams

According to the State of the AI Connected Customer report, 43% of customers stopped buying from a brand due to their poor customer service. And you don’t want that. CRMs for service teams are designed to make your workload easier by organizing all your customer information and interactions in one place. Want information? Just log in and get it.

Here are a few benefits of having a service CRM for startups and SMBs:

• Better customer management: CRMs make it easy to track conversations, purchases, preferences, and history to make your communication personal.
• Increased team collaboration: With access to the same up-to-date customer data, teamwork is easier. It also prevents mistakes and missed follow-ups.
• More automated tasks: CRM can automate basic repetitive tasks. For example, it can route tickets directly to your platform from different sources.

Features to consider when choosing a service CRM for small teams

When selecting a CRM for your customer service, focus on qualities that support your unique challenges and growth plans. According to the latest Small and Medium Business Trends Report, 55% of SMBs use customer service software, with their top priority being to improve the customer experience. Here are some considerations for a customer service CRM:

• Cost and scalability: Be clear on pricing. Consider subscription costs, user limits, additional costs, and no hidden fees. Choose a CRM that grows with your business, handles new contacts, users, and support smoothly without slowing down.
• Ease of use and adoption: Your CRM should be simple and intuitive, so your team can use it quickly without confusion. It should also keep all customer data, emails, calls, and interactions organized in one place.
• Integration capabilities: A good CRM easily connects with the tools you already use, like email, accounting, marketing apps, ecommerce software, and calendars.
• Artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots: Look for AI-powered chatbots and automation features like follow-up reminders, categorizing tickets, workflow automation, and auto-responses. 
• Multichannel support: For remote or on-the-go teams, your service CRM should be mobile-friendly. It keeps your team updated and lets them respond from anywhere.

Why consider alternatives to Zendesk?

While Zendesk is a widely-used customer service CRM platform, several challenges make SMBs and startups consider alternatives. In fact, customers who switched from Zendesk to Salesforce saw a 26% decrease in customer support costs and a 34% increase in customer service return on investment (ROI).

Here are a few more reasons to look for Zendesk alternatives:

High costs: Zendesk’s pricing increases ‌from basic to advanced plans quickly, with core functionalities, such as automation and multichannel support, locked behind tiered plans. Even the basic plans lack essential features, requiring costly add-ons just to cover fundamental needs.

Complex features: Zendesk’s settings, configurations, workflows, and advanced tools can be complex and hard to handle. It can slow down onboarding and daily use.

Performance and uptime concerns: Customers have reported multiple platform outages. These outages have disrupted customer support and frustrated customers.

Limited integration: Zendesk supports numerous integrations, but it often struggles with specialized or industry-specific software. Workarounds or third-party services may become necessary.

Support responsiveness: Zendesk customers sometimes report slower response times from Zendesk support itself, especially on lower-tier plans.

Ten Zendesk alternatives for small and growing businesses

Here are the top Zendesk alternatives with an average star rating of 7 or above on the software comparison website G2. We’ve considered businesses’ future growth and rated each based on scalability in a 1-10 ranking.

1. Salesforce Starter Suite

Salesforce Starter Suite is a CRM for startups and growing businesses ‌looking for an affordable yet powerful platform focused on customer service, sales, marketing, commerce, and productivity through Slack.

For service, Starter Suite offers service tools like case management, knowledge management, and email support templates to keep your team productive and customers happy. It’s perfect for building a solid service foundation fast minus the complexities.

Who it’s for: Small businesses, entrepreneurs, startups, and those looking to get started with a CRM for service

What it can do:

• Multichannel support: Manage all your cases on a single platform. Automatically create cases from web or mobile, send auto-responses, and route a case to the right person or queue.
• Better business view: Unified sales and customer service give you real-time insights through dashboards and reports. This helps you understand customer trends and business health.
• Increased productivity: Integrate Slack to enable team collaboration from within the platform.
• Knowledge management: Create and manage knowledge base articles with your service teams ‌to help them resolve customer queries faster, and allows customers to find answers on their own through ‌self-service.
• Email support: Capture case details from emails, trigger automatic response to the change the status, and use email templates to respond consistently.

How it benefits SMBs: Starter Suite helps you deliver personalized and consistent customer service while aligning sales and marketing efforts to nurture leads and accelerate deals. It will give you step-by-step guidance, data import, customizable dashboards to track performance and all customer data in one place.

How it scales business: (1-10): 10

What it costs: $25 per user per month and a free 30-day trial.

2. Salesforce Pro Suite

Salesforce Pro Suite has everything Starter Suite offers and more. It comes with advanced tools for growing businesses and mature startups. For customization, it offers custom fields, custom objects, and custom apps so you can tailor your CRM exactly to their unique workflows and data needs. Plus, you can automate complex business rules and tasks with its advanced process automation with Flows.

Who it’s for: Growing midsize businesses, startups competing with large enterprises, and small businesses scaling fast

What it can do:

• Omni-channel routing: Improve customer service consistency with omni-channel routing that directs cases regardless of their origin (email, chat, social media).
• Automate workflows: Free-up your time and automate business workflows and process approvals with Pro Suite.
• Optimize and customize: Greater customization options for building tailored workflows and processes within the CRM.
• In-app and web messaging: Provide your customers a personalized experience of messaging from app or mobile directly to your CRM.
• Unified communication: Facilitate unified team communication and faster customer responses via Slack integration and macros for common replies.
• Self-service center: Knowledge powered help centers and customers portal unlocks the self-service option for Pro Suite customers.

How it benefits SMBs: Pro Suite enables you to handle larger, more complex customer service processes with smart service automation. Custom email templates, macros, and omni-channel routing ensures that your customers requests get to the right service representative, improving response times. If you’re working remotely, you can easily resolve customer issues from the Salesforce Mobile App.

How it scales business: (1-10): 10

What it costs: $100 per user per month and a free 30-day trial.

Pro Tip: Head to Trailhead, Salesforce’s free online learning platform and get hands-on learning or learning modules on various service-related courses like incident management, customer service strategies, communication skills, team engagement, and more.

3. Freshdesk

Freshdesk is a modern customer service platform providing simple yet powerful omni-channel engagement. It helps startups deliver fast customer service across email, chat, voice, and social media from one platform.

Who it’s for: Small businesses, and startups looking for ‌customer-service-focused CRM

What it can do:

• Self-service: Branded help center where customers can browse resources, join the community, explore frequently asked questions (FAQs), and raise tickets on their own.
• Ticketing system: Categorize, prioritize, and route tickets from emails and social media in one dashboard, making it easy to track and respond quickly.
• Reports and Dashboards: Prebuilt basic reports to help you track ticket trends and team performance so you can spot issues early and improve customer service.

How it benefits SMBs: Freshdesk offers affordable plans that scale with business growth and provides an intuitive, easy to use interface, reducing onboarding time but offers limited integrations outside its own ecosystem. Reporting and analytics help you ‌track response times and ticket trends.

How it scales business (1-10): 6

What it costs: $18 per user per month and a free trial.

4. HubSpot Service Hub

HubSpot Service Hub is a CRM platform ideal for combining customer service, deal stage, and marketing tools, with a focus on usability and free-tier accessibility. While less feature-dense for advanced customer service automation than Salesforce, it’s approachable to prioritize marketing with support.

Who it’s for: Early-stage SMBs

What it can do:

• Integrated smart CRM: Unified CRM with sales pipeline management, marketing automation, and customer service tickets.
• Shared inbox: Keep all customer emails and messages from various sources in one place to prevent missed replies.
• Live chat: Engage customers instantly through real-time chat on your website or app, providing quick answers to common questions.

How it benefits SMBs: HubSpot’s free tier provides a powerful starting point for startups, reducing upfront costs to enable growth. It also involves email reply tracking, and audience segmentation so your team can find cross-selling or upselling opportunities wherever possible. For Starter Hub, it allows you to remove HubSpot branded design for live chat and get more features like simple ticket automation, conversation routing, and 1:1 technical support through email and in-app chat.

How it scales business (1-10): 7

What it costs: $20 per user per month and a free 14-day trial.

5. Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk is a customer service help desk primarily for sales-focused SMBs. It has multichannel support and automatic ticket assignment that helps your teams ‌balance workload. It’s budget-friendly and is best for SMBs that are already using Zoho tools and seeking basic service capabilities.

Who it’s for: Sales-focused SMBs and startups

What it can do:

• Contextual support: Give service teams easy access to customer history and conversation threads in a chronological order.
• Multichannel support: Reply to customers across email, chat, and social media without switching tools.
• Custom domain: You can connect your support subdomain of your business to Zoho Desk.

How it benefits SMBs: If you get sales from multiple sources, Zoho Desk offers basic features at an affordable price as well as for free up to three users. Your service teams can resolve cases faster with multi-level escalations and a private knowledge base. Talking about your customers, they can submit tickets from social media, forms, or any web page, giving them the flexibility and ease of getting a solution to their problem.

How it scales business (1-10): 6

What it costs: $7 per user per month and a 15-day free trial.

6. Help Scout

Help Scout is a simple support platform if SMBs want straightforward, shared inboxes and personalized email support. You get one shared inbox in the free version and two in ‌the standard plan. You can decide your plan as per your requirement. It’s fast to set up and offers affordable plans with limited automation and multichannel support.

Who it’s for: Small businesses and startups

What it can do:

• Customer profile view: Respond fast to your customers with an eye on detailed information in an autopopulated and editable sidebar. 
• AI functions: Recap long threads in easy-to-read bullet points, edit and translate replies, or even create a first draft with one tap.
• Organize and prioritize: Set up automated workflows to organize, assign, or reply to conversations.

How it benefits SMBs: It’s easy to set up making it great for you if you want to set-up fast and focus on delivering personalized, friendly support. With its standard plan, you can also get short-form surveys, net promoter score (NPS) and customer satisfaction score (CSAT) ratings of our customers and view results in reports.

How it scales business (1-10): 5

What it costs: $55 per user per month and a free trial.

7. Intercom

Intercom is a customer engagement platform known for its AI real-time chat with help desk features to deliver superior customer service for SMB. It has a versatile Messenger for live chat across websites and apps, making it easy to engage customers in real-time. 

Who it’s for: Software as a service (SaaS) startups and growing SMBs 

What it can do:

• Help desk customization: Intercom allows you to brand the help desk with your visual identity. You can also publish and categorize help articles, if needed. 
• Basic chatbots and automation: You can use chatbots for categorizing conversations, qualifying leads, and gathering customer information.
• Single self-improving system: Intercom’s AI learns from human conversations, and their human support teams learn from AI, which makes their customer service support more accurate and consistent.

How it benefits SMBs: Intercom offers real-time engagement, helping businesses reach customers at the right moment and reduce response times. To keep teams informed and data-driven, it comes with pre-built reports that deliver essential insights on customer interactions. You get a consolidated view of customer service, giving visibility into customer interactions that you can use to identify trends and improvement areas.

How it scales business (1-10): 6

What it costs: $39 per user per month and a free 14-day trial.

8. BoldDesk

BoldDesk provides a customer service platform tailored for early-stage startups with its basic ticketing and multichannel support. It’s an easy option for teams that want strong service tools without extra complications. It offers single service-level agreement (SLA) management to help you deliver great customer service.

Who it’s for: Startups and SMBs

What it can do:

• Knowledge base: It has a centralized repository of information and resources for customers where you create and manage search engine optimization (SEO)-friendly self-service content.
• Omni-channel support: Unify support channels across multiple channels like email, chat, and social media.
• Unlimited ticket management: Turn customer emails into tickets for organized reply and keep tabs on ticket volumes and response times to monitor team efficiency.

How it benefits SMBs: BoldDesk is great when it comes to provide a straightforward interface that makes it quick to set up with basic support features like smart ticket assignment and a help desk that you can rebrand as your own help desk.

How it scales business (1-10): 6

What it costs: $18 per user per month and a free trial.

9. ServiceNow CSM

ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM) offers customization and connects people, data, and information together in one ecosystem. It automates customer service tasks throughout the business to make teamwork smoother and provide quick, personalized support at scale.

Who it’s for: SMBs transitioning to enterprise.

What it can do:

• Accelerated self-service: ServiceNow CSM offers customers online access to FAQs, knowledge articles, and guided journeys to help customers find answers and act independently.
• Digital portfolio management: With this, you get a unified view of services, apps, and products that can help you make better decisions.
• Walk-up customer service experience: It also offers in-person help with reception guides linking online and in-store customer service.

How it benefits SMBs: ServiceNow helps businesses ‌deliver smart and proactive service to achieve value faster. It gives you a holistic view of your customers with a single workspace that can be configured across channels. 

How it scales business (1-10): 9

What it costs: Available upon request through consultation.

10. Gorgias

Gorgias is a help desk platform designed specifically for ecommerce SMBs using Shopify. It offers help desk and automation tightly integrated with ecommerce workflows. And basic reporting tools help you track support metrics and your service team’s performance.

Who it’s for: Ecommerce businesses hosted on Shopify or WooCommerce

What it can do:

• Deep Shopify and WooCommerce integration: Edit Shopify and WooCommerce orders, get real-time product info, and run promotions, all while keeping order and customer support tickets in sync, without leaving the platform.
• Automate with macros for replies: Save time with pre-written responses, intent and sentiment detection, and rule templates for common questions and speed up ticket resolution.
• Measurement tools: You can measure support performance statistics, track live statistics, or conduct a satisfaction survey to gauge performance and improve accordingly.

How it benefits SMBs: Gorgias can reduce your team’s workload while providing a customer experience directly linked to Shopify activity. It can be integrated with 100+ other ecommerce tools, too. You can get Gorgias’ AI agent at an additional cost, if you need to solve support tickets in your business’ brand voice.

How it scales business (1-10): 6

What it costs: $10 per month with a 7-day free trial.

Your go-to resources to make better choices

Searching for the right CRM tool for customer service on your own is tiring. But several trusted resources can guide you toward the best decision.

State of Service Report: If you want to know what’s happening in SMB service teams other than your own, the State of Service Report is your best bet. Get insights from 5,500 service professionals globally, highlighting trends like the shift from cost-cutting to revenue generation and the growing role of AI in customer service.

5 AI Tips to Level Up Your Service for SMBs Guide: Want to level up your service game? Watch 5 AI Tips to Level Up Your Service for SMBs, a short and practical video about actionable AI strategies for SMBs. It covers topics like automating repetitive queries, improving your team’s efficiency, using AI-powered insights to anticipate customer needs, and more.

CRM Buyer’s Guide: The CRM Buyer’s Guide provides step-by-step advice on evaluating CRM platforms based on your business size, industry, and goals. It helps you crack ‌CRM jargon, explains key functionalities in a simple manner, and offers practical tips for implementation and user adoption.

Guide to AI for SMBs: Our Guide to AI for SMBs breaks down AI concepts and applications in simple terms, showing how SMBs can use AI to run their business without huge investments or technical expertise.

Trailblazer Community: Do you believe you can achieve greater heights with a group of people? Then join a community like Salesforce Trailblazers. It connects you with other SMB leaders, experts, and partners through community groups like Customer Success and Serviceblazer Community Group. You can get tips, best practices, real-life advice, and resources related to customer service and CRM.

Salesforce — your best Zendesk alternative for small business

Now you’re armed with information to make a decision about your customer service solution. Zendesk may be the right fit or you may want to try a simple and easy to use CRM service dedicated to SMBs and startups. Salesforce gives you a unified platform to manage your service, sales, commerce, and marketing without switching to any other tool. It has everything from integration to automation, necessary to deliver outstanding customer services. 

Get started with Starter Suite — the CRM made for your SMB needs. Looking for more customization? Explore Pro Suite. Already a Salesforce customer? Activate Foundations and try out Agentforce 360 today. 

AI supported the writers and editors who created this article.

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