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Interactive Intelligence vs Zendesk comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Interactive Intelligence
Ranking in CRM
45th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Zendesk
Ranking in CRM
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
70
Ranking in other categories
CRM Customer Engagement Centers (3rd), Help Desk Software (3rd), IT Service Management (ITSM) (5th), Reporting (8th), Knowledge Management Software (3rd), AI Customer Support (10th), AI IT Support (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the CRM category, the mindshare of Interactive Intelligence is 0.6%, down from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zendesk is 1.6%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
CRM Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Zendesk1.6%
Interactive Intelligence0.6%
Other97.8%
CRM
 

Featured Reviews

MA
CX Team Lead
A customizable solution that can be integrated with almost anything
The best thing about this solution is the customizability because it can be integrated with pretty much anything. There are many solutions that are black boxes and we're unable to make any modifications to the call flows. With Interactive Intelligence, we can utilize APIs and variables. With the REST call, you can send a request and response. Elements can be incorporated into the workflow based on the response. This is the go-to thing with Interactive Intelligence. The Interactive Intelligence is quite user friendly. And Avaya, in that case, is not that great solution, on user friendliness. Basically, yeah, the same purpose I've used, but you need more expertise to manage the product. And Interactive Intelligence is one box. It contains a lot of features and we don't need to have much resources. But Avaya and others have many servers to be maintained with a single solution. It has a CN. You have to go for session manager and lots of other product servers. So, for a single solution, you need to maintain a lot of servers. This is more or less an easy environment to manage, but Avaya is very complex on the architectural level.
AmandaSanchez - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant and Startup Founder at AimHi Enterprises
Macros and automation have streamlined workflows and reduced manual effort across support teams
The ability to communicate on the Zendesk ticket through the actual user software, so TOPs, would have been helpful. Somehow seeing a user's ticket history within our app would have been beneficial. That is the only thing that I do not think existed at the time that might have been helpful. Some people struggled with Zendesk, but it was always easy enough to show them how to use it and what they were missing. The only times we really had people report concerns about it was when they did not understand that it could do that or how to use it in that way.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The stability is really good and it's a really powerful platform that is more powerful than Avaya or other kinds of vendors for contact centers."
"Being able to automate aspects such as outbound confirmation calls has saved us a lot of time and money."
"The social media integration is excellent."
"Interactive Intelligence is quite user friendly."
"The most valuable features of Zendesk Support are collaboration, reports, and a self-service portal. The customer and team can see all the information needed from the portal."
"Zendesk saves us over $50,000 per year and can be maintained in-house by our staff."
"Zendesk is a great product but find a software package that will work best for your team and company."
"Zendesk has positively impacted my organization because the interface is quite good, easy to use, and has a user-friendly UI."
"It works really well, is very seamless, and is very good software."
"As per my experience Zendesk is a very impressive, efficient and convenient web based help desk application."
"The outcome: Better workflows, more control, a better understanding of reports and numbers in general."
"Zendesk has had a positive impact on my company by increasing efficiency and also increasing customer satisfaction."
 

Cons

"The initial setup can be a bit difficult."
"We are not happy with the technical support. They take too long to answer."
"The problem with this current system is that the support is not great."
"There could be improvements in integration, which can be achieved with APIs or tools like Zapier."
"When we used this solution for sales it turned out to be very poor."
"I really wish they had a chat feature - like Olark for example."
"The licensing model needs to be more customer-friendly."
"Zendesk Guide's customization could be improved; I would like it to be easier and maybe open-sourced, so that if you have a developer in your company, you can do it yourself."
"Report Generator needs to be improved."
"Zendesk could actually support HTML on the tickets so we could format our text better than the current options such as size, bold, italic, or underscored, because the text processing is too simple."
"From what I recall, the experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Zendesk was quite expensive and that is what prohibited us from expanding usage of it into more users and using more of its capabilities."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"You have to pay extra for better support. So it's not only the license that you pay for, but you have to pay extra for the support as well."
"From what I hear, Zendesk's pricing is a little expensive."
"We pay for the solution on a yearly basis and my understanding is that the cost is about $30,000. That's the cost for 24 to 25 agents."
"There are different plans that are offered. We are using the entry-level plan. The overall price of the solution should be reduced. The price is too high."
"The price is very competitive."
"Zendesk's licensing is not cheap. For Enterprise, we are paying $200 per agent. It's a per-month cost, so it's pretty steep. There are some services you need to pay extra for. For example, with Zendesk Guide, we had to buy the most expensive offering in order to get Multibrand and everything. We also had to pay a lot of money for themes."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Comms Service Provider
16%
Construction Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Construction Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise22
Large Enterprise12
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zendesk Support?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Zendesk shows that pricing is really affordable compared to other customer management software. The setup is pretty simple as well, but if ...
What needs improvement with Zendesk Support?
Regarding my main use case for Zendesk, it is really easy to use, but one of the cons I have with it is that it takes some time to load information. Most of the time, if a particular candidate has ...
What is your primary use case for Zendesk Support?
On a day-to-day basis, I use Zendesk to track, manage, and work on my cases. I also use it to upload information securely, and this is not only limited to documents but also to images and reports. ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Zendesk Support, Zendesk Guide, Zendesk Sell
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ABC Financial, AFAS Software, Quality Bicycle Products, CryptoLogic & WagerLogic, SERVOData, Shinsei Bank, TENAQUIP, MCAP, Visaya Knowledge Process Outsourcing Corporation, Allianz-Tiriac Asigurari, Memira
Mailchimp, Tesco, Vimeo, Instacart, Mediaocean, Slack, Uber
Find out what your peers are saying about Interactive Intelligence vs. Zendesk and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.