

Zoho CRM and Zendesk compete in customer relationship management and help desk solutions. Zoho CRM appears to edge out Zendesk in customization and affordability, while Zendesk shines in ticket management and communication capabilities.
Features: Zoho CRM is known for extensive customization options, seamless app integration, and robust reporting. Its API supports advanced data manipulation, adding to its appeal. Zendesk offers impressive ticket management, integrates with various third-party applications, and provides strong analytics tools with flexible communication channels.
Room for Improvement: Zoho CRM can enhance its social network and email campaign integrations, refine its user interface, and improve mobile app capabilities. There is also a need for better data organization, automation, and quicker support response. Zendesk faces challenges in customization flexibility, reporting, and interface simplicity. Users also seek more intuitive ticket handling, better merging capabilities, and improved cross-platform communication.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Zoho CRM uses a public cloud model and offers extensive self-help resources, though quicker support responses could enhance user experience. Zendesk provides hybrid and private cloud solutions but has inconsistent support, with room for improvements in service availability. Users commend Zendesk's setup assistance despite occasional needs for more structured support.
Pricing and ROI: Zoho CRM offers cost-effective solutions, often seen as more affordable compared to competitors like Salesforce. It delivers significant ROI through productivity enhancements and automation, with transparent pricing options. Zendesk, though sometimes costly, provides comprehensive functionality justified by efficiency improvements. Its pricing model varies by the number of agents and service level, requiring businesses to align features with needs to control costs.
I can tell you that we probably saved at least three employees full-time with the ticket management and the automation and the macros and the user follow-up being built in.
Time saved is definitely a benefit because it puts all of our tickets in one spot.
I feel that Zendesk helped us set up our platform for providing support way faster than other platforms due to its easy configuration.
There appears to be a lack of connection between the bot and the agents, making it feel scripted rather than helpful.
The technical support provided by Zendesk has been very satisfactory.
Their support team from Zendesk is excellent, similar to what you have in Freshdesk.
Sometimes, they don't understand what my actual needs are.
The 1.5 deduction from 10 is due to cultural communication differences based on where we're getting the support, as sometimes it takes a couple of times to communicate clearly enough for them to understand the issue.
There are multiple blogs and articles available online for self-help.
We have not hit a peak or a turn yet that Zendesk has not been able to go with us or been able to grow with us in the process, change or pivot that the company is making.
Zendesk can scale from very small companies to very large ones.
Zendesk's scalability is excellent.
The system is easy to understand, implement coding, and conduct training.
Zoho CRM is quite scalable; I have worked with clients who started with ten companies and have scaled up to managing 500 employees effectively within Zoho CRM.
The platform's global data centers across regions such as the US, EU, and India ensure data security and privacy through ISO certification and strong role-based security, which is essential for handling sensitive customer data.
They are always informing us with a status update and an ETA, and the turnaround time is usually within the same day with no extended downtime that would cause a detriment to our company.
Zendesk is quite stable; we experience major outages only once or twice a year, making it very reliable.
The stability has been quite reliable.
Zoho CRM guarantees 99% uptime, with downtime incidents being very rare.
I find Zoho CRM to be 100% stable and reliable as far as I know.
It is usually compliant with data regulation laws and is HIPAA compliant.
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.
Zendesk is missing an AI aspect that could help provide quick answers based on the knowledge housed within the platform.
Zendesk is amazing, and because they are always working on a new upgrade or a new integration, they are very forward-thinking from an engineering perspective.
The platform does not save code versions similar to GitHub, where you can compare new versions with previous ones.
Some organizations may prefer not to have their data on the internet since Zoho CRM runs as a cloud service.
The main improvement needed for Zoho CRM is introducing SQL code for reports, similar to what's in Zoho Analytics.
It is not the cheapest solution nor the most expensive, but it provides value for money.
The experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Zendesk was quite expensive.
Zoho CRM and all of Zoho's software are quite affordable because they are specifically designed for small and medium businesses.
In terms of my experience with the price and licensing cost, as with setup cost for Zoho CRM, it might not be quite affordable because there are cheaper solutions available.
It allows us to handle more support cases with fewer people due to its advanced artificial intelligence capabilities.
Zendesk is way cheaper than other ITSM platforms such as ServiceNow, providing a good platform at a lower price so we could offer good support with a low budget for the license.
Being able to put response counters on certain tickets and have certain ones that are high priority and have a tighter SLA than lower priority items, being able to categorize them as a question versus an urgent request, and being able to bucket them as feature requests or product enhancements.
The most valuable aspect of CRMs, including Zoho CRM, Salesforce, and Microsoft Dynamics, is automation capabilities.
The most valuable feature I have found in Zoho CRM is custom functions. You can achieve anything with it. From integrations with other applications, it is instant.
You can customize everything—what you sell, be it products, services, or projects.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Zoho CRM | 1.5% |
| Zendesk | 1.2% |
| Other | 97.3% |


| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 36 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 21 |
| Large Enterprise | 11 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 44 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 6 |
| Large Enterprise | 10 |
Zendesk Support is intuitive, and it's built with support agents in mind. Everything they need lives in a single, dynamic help desk interface so it's easy to be productive and manage customer interactions.
Zoho CRM empowers organizations with a complete customer relationship lifecycle management solution for managing organization-wide Sales, Marketing, Customer Support & Service and Inventory Management.
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