7 Best Zendesk Alternatives & Competitors in 2025

But before we go into describing the alternatives, let's have a quick look at why Zendesk is a very popular solution for ecommerce customer service.

What is Zendesk?

Zendesk is a multi-billion dollar SaaS company that helps organizations with customer support software. Zendesk comes with an exhaustive set of features, integrates with almost all the apps in your stack (e.g. TimeCamp, which allows Zendesk time tracking reports), and caters to industries across the board. If you think of customer service software as an industry, Zendesk would be at the top. 

Pros:

• Zendesk is famed to have one of the top live chat tools available in the market. This chat tool comes with an extensive set of features like behavioral triggers, live visitor tracking, chat ratings, file sending, etc.
• It comes with a powerful FAQ building feature where you can store your visitor’s most asked questions, relevant information about your ecommerce store, and likes. 
• Besides that, it’s with a unified communications interface where you can answer your customer queries natively. Some of the platforms they support are WhatsApp, WeChat & Facebook.

Cons:

• Zendesk is boring, heavy, and not intuitive. It can be really difficult to get navigate without a demo from a sales rep. 
• It’s NOT built for ecommerce brands. Ecommerce brands have very specific needs & their customer support requirements are very distinct and different from other industries. Zendesk doesn’t cater to that as they’re a generic tool. 
• It is quite expensive. Their support suite Professional plan costs $89/month/user. 
• You just can’t collaborate with your teammates on Zendesk easily. They have basic collaboration features but that doesn’t facilitate having a seamless conversation.

You may also want to check out how Zendesk compares to DelightChat.

Now that you know about Zendesk, let’s take a look at some of its alternatives and how they fare against it. Keep in mind that not all alternatives are better (or worse) than Zendesk. It also depends on your requirements to manage customer service effectively.

DelightChat

DelightChat is an ecommerce customer support tool built for SME brands that enables them to deliver out-of-the-box customer service. It’s designed with a conversation-first approach that enables you to manage your store’s support & painlessly resolve customer queries - all from a single screen. 

Pros:

• Omnichannel inbox that helps you manage WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Emails & Live Chat.
• DelightChat enables you to respond to customer queries & collaborate with your team, all from a single screen.
• DelightChat offers great value for money being significantly cheaper than the other options on this list. 
• DelightChat doesn’t penalize you when you add more users to scale up your customer support operations. 
• Most importantly, you can collaborate with your team right within the app itself. There is no need to toggle between tabs, which leads to a loss in productivity & loss of work hours. 

Cons:

• For now, DelightChat only integrates with Shopify that allows it to access your Shopify admin dashboard data. However, it will soon be available for other ecommerce platforms like BigCommerce, WooCommerce & Magento. 

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Richpanel

Richpanel helps ecommerce businesses to manage their customer service seamlessly. With Richpanel, you can easily track, manage & resolve queries in no time. You can manage all your support channels, viz., live chat, email, WhatsApp, Facebook & Instagram. This saves a lot of time & helps the support reps be more productive. 

You might still have to use an additional tool to collaborate with your teammates such as ProofHub for day-to-day activities

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Pros:

• Richpanel saves you countless hours by bringing the most used support channels onto one dashboard. This includes live chat, email, Facebook, Instagram & WhatsApp. 
• Its self-service feature can help you eliminate up to 30% repetitive support requests. It offers a personalized experience where customers can view/track orders, peruse FAQs, and start a new conversation too.
• They integrate with top ecommerce platforms like Shopify, Magento & WooCommerce.
• In Richpanel, you can create self-service workflows to resolve the commonly occurring scenarios for your support.

Cons:

• According to a lot of customers, Richpanel can be quite difficult to navigate. To put it simply, it’s not exactly intuitive. 
• Even though Richpanel is slightly cheaper than Gorgias, it's still considered expensive, starting at $249/mo for just 1000 customer conversations.
• You’d ideally want a tool where you can seamlessly collaborate with your team. Richpanel isn’t built for that. You might still have to use an additional tool to collaborate with your teammates for day-to-day activities. 
• Richpanel caps the number of orders you can process on the platform. In their lowest plan, you can process a maximum of 1000 orders per month.

You may also want to check out how Richpanel compares to DelightChat.

Gorgias

Gorgias is a customer service software designed for ecommerce stores. They integrate with Shopify, BigCommerce & WooCommerce. They have an amazing integration with Shopify that help support agents to dole out great customer support seamlessly. 

Pros:

• Gorgias integrates with Shopify like no other. This enables them to pull customer data right into the dashboard. Additionally, it also helps in modifying an order, initiating refunds, and a range of things that you otherwise need to visit the Shopify admin dashboard to execute the same. 
• In Gorgias, you can use custom tags and use them to tag conversations for future reference. 
• Gorgias integrates with most of the channels (email, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) where you can potentially receive a support query. 
• The great thing about Gorgias is that you can create highly customized Macros to automate replies to commonly asked questions. 
• Last but not least, they have intent-detection which enables you to detect customer intents like shipping, refund, exchange, and many others. You can then set up automatic replies or route the tickets with tags.

Cons:

• Gorgias is not very easy to use. There’s a learning curve to draw value out of the product properly.
• It’s super expensive. The plan with all the features costs $750/month with a cap of 6000 tickets/month.
• Collaboration is not easy on Gorgias. It’s difficult to handover a conversation to a different support rep or asks someone for help when you need it. You might end up using another internal chat tool to collaborate within your team. 
• Although this depends on personal preference, a lot of customers say that Gorgias is more of a ticketing system than a conversation tool. In 2021, store owners love to converse with their customers as opposed to leaving them up like a lifeless ticket. 

You may also want to check out how Gorgias compares to DelightChat.

Reamaze

Reamaze is a brilliant ecommerce help desk. It’s often said to be the closest competitor to Gorgias & Richpanel. It helps your team resolve customer queries seamlessly. The live chat from Reamaze is its well-known feature.

Pros:

• Reamaze is known for its live chat feature owing to its customizable chat experience and instant ‘check order status’ bot. It also boasts other functionalities like FAQ-search, status page (you’ll know if your order’s delayed), pre-built bots, and more. 
• Cues is their chatbot feature that triggers messages based on URL/UTM, time on site, Shopify activities, etc. This equips you to personalize your customer’s experience at a deeper level. 
• The live dashboard enables you to see the users that are currently interacting with your site. Armed with this, you can try and send a personalized message to generate a sale or simply help them better. 
• It’s also one of those tools that integrate with almost all ecommerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, WordPress, Magento, and the likes. It’s also good with GDPR compliance that gives you a peace of mind while selling in the European market. 

Cons:

• The collaboration functionality within Reamaze isn’t exactly a walk in the park. To manage customer support seamlessly, you might need to collaborate on a completely different tool (Slack/WhatsApp) by sharing screenshots from Reamaze.
• Reamaze charges on a “per user, per month” model. This can turn out to be expensive when your support tickets grow and you’d need to add more reps to the team.
• It’s more of a ticketing tool than a conversational one. It doesn’t gear you to have a conversation with a customer and build a relationship.

You may also want to check out how Reamaze compares to DelightChat. 

Freshdesk

Freshdesk (from Freshworks) is a popular name in the customer service industry. Freshworks was named the only “visionary” on the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center. It comes with an exhaustive set of features that make it an all-inclusive customer service tool for companies across industries. 

Pros:

• Freshdesk flaunts omnichannel customer service. They integrate with pretty much all the channels through which a customer may contact you. This includes live chat, Apple Business Chat, WhatsApp, email, Facebook, and the likes. 
• Freshdesk integrates with over 600 apps besides the ones already in the Freshworks ecosystem. This makes it easier for someone to opt for Freshdesk if they’re already using a product. 
• Their chatbot called Freddy AI lets you deploy intent & behavior-based bots that trigger when it meets the requirements. 
• Freshdesk comes with several in-app collaboration features that make it easy for team members to work together and resolve tickets. 

Cons:

• Freshdesk is not a tool you can start using in minutes. You need a demo and a few hours to understand how everything works. Bottom line, it’s not self-serve.
• It is NOT built for ecommerce brands. Ecommerce brands have specific needs such as deep platform integrations, customer information, modifying order data, and more. 
• They're not exactly affordable, especially if you want to unlock the main features. Their omnichannel Shopify helpdesk costs $77/user/month. It’s not a good fit for SME brands who are striving to do their best and need an extensive set of features. 
• Although Freshdesk comes with in-app collaboration features, it’s not very helpful to have a seamless conversation with your teammates. 
• It’s designed as a ticketing system that treats a customer as a soleless ticket number. This triggers a mentality of “resolving tickets” and not “having a conversation”. 

You may also want to check out how Freshdesk compares to DelightChat.

Help Scout

Help Scout is a clutter-free customer service software that helps companies have meaningful conversations with customers. It’s another one-size-fits-all solution that matches your expectations when it comes to managing customer service. It has all the features that can greatly enhance your productivity and save countless business hours.

Pros:

• Help Scout offers a shared inbox. This is a unique feature that lets you group email inboxes by teams, functions, etc. For example, you can have the customer support inbox shared across 5 team members and the Operations inbox with 2 team members accessing it. 
• They also come with a knowledge-base feature along with a doc site that hosts all the FAQs which your customers can refer to when they need immediate assistance.
• You can send intent & behavior-driven messages with its in-app messaging feature whenever someone’s on the website and they meet the conditions.
• It integrates with a host of tools including Shopify. So, that’s a plus. 
• Last but not least, Help Scout’s reporting feature is second to none. Track SLAs, number of conversations, happiness score, and the whole shebang. 

Cons:

• Even though Help Scout is an awesome software, it’s not made for ecommerce. It lacks the features and the design that’s meant for ecommerce stores. Plus, its Shopify integration isn’t up to the mark.
• To manage all the customer queries across different channels, it’s easier to have everything on one screen. That’s not the case with Help Scout. You need to navigate around to find stuff that makes it work. 
• Help Scout’s basic plan starts at $25/user/month which quickly becomes EXPENSIVE if you have a large support team of 10+ agents.
• You can’t add more than one store to the same account if you run multiple ecommerce stores. It’s a huge loss in productivity when you’re logging in/out of different accounts. 

You may also want to check out how Help Scout compares to DelightChat.

Front

Front is a customer communication software built to help teams easily communicate with their customers while combining emails, apps, and team members into a single view. It’s more of a horizontal tool that can be used for a multitude of purposes; one of which is ecommerce customer support. With Front, you can serve your customers across multiple platforms, viz. email, calls, SMS, Live Chat Facebook & WhatsApp. 

Pros:

• Front is a shared inbox that enables you & your team to get better visibility into all the customer email accounts from one screen.
• You can seamlessly collaborate within the app - tag team members to certain tickets, assign tickets, snooze/close tickets, etc.
• Integrate with any & every tool that you use in your daily workflow. Front integrates with pretty much all the top business software. 

Cons:

• Front is neither full-fledged a customer support tool nor is it built for ecommerce. This is a big disadvantage since ecommerce store owners have a specific set of requirements that can’t be met using this tool.
• A lot of times emails that are being archived, sent, or deleted aren’t being synced correctly with Gmail. 
• The notifications system on Front isn’t that great. It is very easy for emails to get lost between emails from technical support and emails from the company.
• Take a lot of time to set up as the settings aren’t intuitive enough. 
• The plan with the bare minimum features is $24/user/month but since you need to sign-up with at least 2 users (licenses), it’s $48/month. This can get costly as you scale up your support team.

You may also want to check out how Front compares to DelightChat.

Well, those are the main competitors of Zendesk. And we hope this comparison helps you in your search for the right ecommerce support software. Each one is unique and has different features that can map to different use-cases.  So as an ecommerce business owner we hope you've found the best fit for your store.