Zendesk vs. Salesforce

Whether you’re choosing a customer service solution or are moving on from Salesforce, Zendesk has the tools you need to increase agility and reduce your total cost of ownership while not compromising on the 360 view of the customer.

Zendesk and Salesforce are some of the most popular names in customer service, but there’s a reason why industry leaders prefer Zendesk. Thanks to the faster speed with which companies can get up and running and the lower total cost of ownership (TCO), Zendesk is a trusted partner for delivering the best customer experience possible.

Shortest time to value

One main difference between Zendesk and Salesforce is that Zendesk delivers immediate value with out-of-the-box functionality that requires minimal configuration. Teams can implement and start seeing results within days, not months. The intuitive design means agents can quickly adapt and utilize the software's full capabilities without extensive training or technical expertise.

Salesforce's implementation process is complex and often requires specialized consultants. Zendesk offers streamlined deployment, so businesses can improve customer satisfaction almost immediately.

Lower total cost of ownership (TCO)

Zendesk provides transparent pricing that includes essential features, which would cost substantially more as add-ons with Salesforce, dramatically reducing the total investment required. The solution's ease of maintenance eliminates the need for dedicated administrators or developers, allowing companies to operate efficiently without expanding their technical teams.

Zendesk customers typically spend less time on implementation and ongoing management than Salesforce users. The intuitive admin interface enables business users to make changes, eliminating costly professional services engagements that are standard with Salesforce implementations.

No hidden costs

Zendesk offers straightforward pricing that includes all core customer service capabilities in a single subscription, avoiding the surprise costs that plague many Salesforce implementations. All the essential features come standard with Zendesk, like:

• Knowledge bases and self-service customer portals
• Human-centered AI assistance
• Native AI-assisted voice
• Omnichannel support

Meanwhile, Salesforce charges premium fees for these same capabilities.

Predictable pricing from Zendesk scales logically with your business growth, eliminating the common Salesforce experience of unexpected charges for exceeding API limits or storage quotas.

Pay for success

Zendesk uses a success-oriented pricing model that ensures you only pay for what you use, with clear paths to upgrade as your needs evolve. You’re not forced into expensive enterprise packages for basic functionality. Zendesk delivers measurable ROI through improved efficiency and customer satisfaction, with companies regularly reporting double-digit customer satisfaction (CSAT) score increases after implementation.

Salesforce has a complex licensing structure that often leaves features unused. You pay for the pleasure of having features that don’t guarantee resolutions. Zendesk ensures every dollar spent contributes to tangible improvements in customer experience operations.

Strategic partnership and support

Zendesk treats every customer as a valued partner, regardless of size, providing personalized support and strategic guidance that Salesforce typically reserves for its largest enterprise clients. The implementation team works collaboratively with your business to ensure successful deployment. 

You’re never left struggling with technical issues thanks to comprehensive resources like:

• An intuitive help center
• A broad community forum
• An accessible support team

On the other hand, many Salesforce customers can feel overlooked despite significant investments.

More in this guide:

• Zendesk vs. Salesforce comparison chart
• Features comparison: Zendesk vs. Salesforce
• Pricing plans: Salesforce vs. Zendesk
• What customers think: Zendesk vs. Salesforce
• Frequently asked questions
• Ready to try Zendesk?

Features you need	Zendesk	Salesforce
Human-first AI built for CX	Intuitive, pre-trained on billions of service interactions, and ready from day one	Not ready out of the box
Fast deployment	Ready out of the box	Must be built from scratch
Improved agent productivity and experience	Build ticket workflows, easily view conversations, and promote collaboration—all in a unified place	Agents work in separate systems
Low total cost of ownership	Low TCO with intuitive point-and-click configuration and easy customization options	High TCO that requires expensive technical resources and partnerships
Modern architecture	Modern architecture that enables innovation and shortens time-to-value	Legacy, proprietary platform that is difficult to adapt and change
Strategic partnership	Built-in, tailored success resources help companies adopt CX best practices	Success resources cost extra and have a broad focus
Seamless omnichannel conversations	Natively supports seamless conversations across channels like voice, chat, messaging, and social media	Requires third-party vendors for voice
Native WEM solutions	Autonomously optimizes staffing and adjusts for fluctuations in demand	Depends on third-party vendors for WEM
Built-in QA solutions	Automatically evaluates the quality of all support interactions for prime insights	Requires third-party vendors for QA
AI agent pricing based on resolutions	Pay for resolutions, not for wasted time	Based on consumption

Zendesk beats Salesforce in several key areas for both customer and employee service. Let’s explore nine features and qualities that make Zendesk the perfect solution to supercharge your support operations.

1. AI and automation

Zendesk AI models are purpose-built for CX and come pre-trained based on our own customer service data. Unlike most solutions on the market, Zendesk AI is also quick and easy to implement. Businesses get robust AI agents, advanced customer service chatbots with intuitive service capabilities, such as:

• Agent assistance and productivity tools
• Intelligent workflow automation
• Machine learning predictions

This saves teams’ time, money, and resources.

Salesforce AI is not ready out of the box and doesn’t come with pre-trained AI models specific to CX. As a result, it tends to demand a high level of technical skill or developer support to execute. This makes it challenging to realize value quickly.

2. Ongoing agility

Zendesk provides out-of-the-box services built around customer service best practices, meaning customers can hit the ground running. Zendesk has extensive documentation and easy-to-follow guides. Zendesk also delivers responsive support to organizations so they can make the changes they need to their platform when they need to make them.

Salesforce places the responsibility on its customers to build core customer service capabilities. That requires significant IT support to produce similar results as Zendesk, but at a greater cost in terms of time and money.

3. Agent experience

Customer service agents juggle many responsibilities, and their platform should give them an extra hand—or two. Zendesk improves the agent experience and makes project management easier by setting up side conversations and building ticket management workflows. It also facilitates team collaboration all in one place: the omnichannel Agent Workspace.

Agents benefit from a user-friendly interface, so they can devote more time to customer communication and improving workflows instead of navigating between different systems to find answers. Due to Salesforce being a highly technical platform, agents need to be reasonably skilled in setting up software to configure it. If they aren’t, you may need to hire a consultant to optimize the platform.

4. Total cost of ownership

Zendesk has all the key features of a great customer service experience ready from day one. Customers benefit from self-service portals, secure data storage, advanced support, and extensive knowledge base solutionsthat are already factored into the cost of their plans. Customers won't feel ambushed with hidden fees or charges. They receive accurate pricing that fits the size of their company.

The entry-level Salesforce Service Cloud plan only provides users with knowledge and case management tools. Its next plan adds app integration, computer telephony integration, and contract management, but removes knowledge management. You must subscribe to the top plan to receive all these features.

5. Modern tools

Zendesk prioritizes innovation, so its SaaS is streamlined and has modern functionality. It cuts out the baggage found in common legacy systems that can slow down performance or impede progress. Teams can build a self-service tool like a portal, help desk, orcommunity forum to relieve some of the burden from the ticketing system.

Salesforce has tools, like Einstein AI, to improve automations. While Salesforce Service Cloud is highly customizable, creating a product that fits the user is labor-intensive and may slow progress.

6. Strategic partnership

Part of what makes Zendesk the preferred help desk software for thousands of businesses is its commitment to a deep and long-term partnership with its customers. Zendesk offers resources on customer support best practices and ready-to-use templates so even small businesses can create best-in-class customer experiences.

Salesforce doesn’t offer the same level of support or training tools. Its primary focus is sales, so customer support guidance can take a backseat. If customer support is one of your goals, you’ll likely need to seek out other sources of knowledge.

7. Omnichannel conversation management

Zendesk understands the importance of a business being able to reach customers anywhere. To help, Zendesk gives team members the option of messaging, live chat, social media, email, voice, or self-service right out of the box.

In comparison, Salesforce requires telephony integrations and add-ons for chat and automation. That means you should factor added costs on top of the base prices of Salesforce into your operations.

8. Integrations

Zendesk aims to provide you with everything your team needs to succeed, but if there’s something your business can’t live without, Zendesk has you covered. Choose from over 1,800 integrations in the Zendesk Marketplace to give your support team complete control over customer experience. There are even multiple integrations with Salesforce.

Being one of the largest software providers on the market, Salesforce offers a wide range of integrations. The difference is that many of these integrations are required if you’re looking for features like automation or phone and chat support. This puts the responsibility—and the tab—for improving functionality on the customer.

9. Native AI-assisted voice

Zendesk offers a seamless native assisted AI voice solution that integrates effortlessly within your existing support ecosystem. Voice AI works intuitively right out of the box. It’s trained on more than 18 billion service-specific interactions and understands customer needs and agent workflows from day one. Your agents immediately benefit from AI-powered call transcription, sentiment analysis, and real-time assistance, helping them resolve issues faster while maintaining that crucial human connection your customers value.

Voice capabilities from Salesforce often feel bolted on as an afterthought, requiring extensive customization and potentially driving up your total cost of ownership. Unlike purpose-built CX voice AI from Zendesk, Salesforce's approach lacks pre-trained models specific to customer service interactions, creating a steeper learning curve and less accurate assistance during critical customer conversations.

Cost	Zendesk	Salesforce
Licensing + add-ons	Plans starting from $19 up to $249, including: Native AI-assisted voice Chat/messaging Help center Internal knowledge base CSAT *Plans are billed annually.	Plans starting from $25 up to $300 with available add-ons (excluding Unlimited Plan): Native voice Chat/messaging Help center (usage) Internal knowledge base Einstein (usage) Feedback Manager for CSAT
Implementation options and timeframe	Self implementation Zendesk professional services Third-party vendor On average, 3-6 month implementation timeframe	Third-party vendor Salesforce professional services (rarely) On average, 6-12 month implementation timeframe
Dedicated administration and maintenance resources	⅓ to 2 full-time administrators	1 to 6 full-time administrators, developers and architects

Delivering top-tier customer experiences comes with a price tag, but those numbers can be deceiving. It’s not as simple as comparing one to one since what you get for your money isn’t identical.

Businesses that use Zendesk benefit from a lower total cost of ownership thanks to comprehensive pricing that fits organizations of all sizes. Zendesk customers also see significant savings resulting from their lowered administration requirements. Companies save $250,000 per year on average just on licensing fees.

Compare that to Salesforce, which charges additional fees for self-service engagement. It also requires specially trained administrators to build and maintain your service solution, which results in additional costs—and often frustrating delays.

Zendesk has point-and-click configurations that can make even complex changes happen fast, so your team doesn’t miss a beat.

Don’t just take our word for it. Look at the success these customers have achieved after switching to Zendesk.

Limeade: Agile operations, scalable growth

Limeade is an employee well-being company that operates in over 100 countries. It has over 2 million users and implemented Zendesk in just three weeks. Since then, Limeade has seen a 30-percent decrease in first response time and a 35-percent decrease in technical ticket resolution time.

Limeade tried Salesforce before migrating to Zendesk but struggled with its complex interface. Limeade needed to spot trends to improve its customer experience, and it just wasn’t getting that from Salesforce’s limited metrics. Zendesk allowed Limeade to innovate on its own terms to keep pace with the rest of its business.

“One of the reasons that Zendesk was so appealing was the fact that it connects to a lot of other systems…it was crucial that we had the capability to be able to grow with other services.” —Ryan Putnam, director of customer operations at Limeade

Ideagen: Integrating new businesses at light speed

Ideagen offers software solutions to highly regulated industries like aviation, finance, and healthcare. As the company grew, it needed a support solution that could immediately streamline their existing workflows and processes. After adopting Zendesk, their new system went live in just nine weeks. That includes the time it took for migration and the training of 55 people. Since then, Ideagen’s CSAT improved by 20 percent, with a 25 percent increase in SLA adherence.

With no fewer than 20 products, Ideagen needs a platform capable of scaling and adapting quickly to change—all the while integrating seamlessly with its Salesforce hub. Zendesk emerged as the best solution and helped the team stay agile by turning data into actionable insights.

“Our business undertakes change every 6 months. Zendesk lets us adapt and integrate as things change.” —Dave Stott, head of customer experience and support at Ideagen

Prosper: Faster innovation and time to value

Prosper, America's first marketplace lending platform that enables people to invest in one another, found that using Salesforce led to significant downtime issues during a high-growth period. This disrupted business and cost them excessive fees as one of Salesforce's highest volume API users. Despite the high investment, Prosper felt like "small fish" to Salesforce, experiencing a complete lack of partnership and relationship.

Prosper ultimately chose Zendesk for its innovation, ease of deployment, and faster time-to-value compared to Salesforce and other competitors. After implementing Zendesk, Prosper reduced new hire training time by 50 percent, from two weeks to one week. Zendesk easily scaled as Prosper's team quadrupled, with no concerns about the software’s capabilities.

“The Salesforce problems weren’t just technical. We felt like small fish to them and were treated that way. I’m thinking, ‘I no longer have to pay for 1-2 Salesforce admins at $200K-$300K per year.’” —Brian Taylor, senior director of customer experience & head of call center operations at Prosper