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Five9 vs Zendesk comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 27, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
7.8
Five9 improves efficiency and cost savings through automation, workforce optimization, and seamless cloud transition, reducing payroll expenses.
Sentiment score
7.3
Zendesk offers cost efficiency and improved productivity, with ROI influenced by alignment with operational needs and process integration.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.4
Five9 support is generally responsive, but complex issue resolution can be delayed, with varying user experiences reported.
Sentiment score
7.0
Zendesk receives praise for responsiveness and ease of use, but some users desire better chat features and human interaction.
The technical support for Five9 has been exemplary.
Five9 offers multiple support options.
The technical support provided by Zendesk has been very satisfactory.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Five9 offers robust scalability for thousands of agents, with manageable capacity adjustments despite a non-multi-tenant structure.
Sentiment score
7.5
Zendesk is praised for scalability and customization, although some face initial setup challenges and structural integration issues.
We face scaling issues, especially when trying to scale up bigger contact centers.
Zendesk can scale from very small companies to very large ones.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
Users rate Five9 as reliable but note occasional outages; they appreciate its quick recovery and server redundancy.
Sentiment score
7.9
Zendesk is stable with minimal downtimes, reliable performance, occasional minor issues, and high reliability ratings, especially for smaller businesses.
In my experience, I have not encountered major downtime.
During training and demos, resiliency tests failed, which was not ideal.
The stability has been quite reliable.
 

Room For Improvement

Five9 users report issues with call quality, UI design, reporting, integration, pricing, and require better support and omnichannel management.
Zendesk faces challenges with data management, flexibility, integration, user-friendliness, and customer communication, while users are dissatisfied with support and pricing.
I would like a feature where reports such as AHT or workforce-related reports can be generated automatically without starting from scratch.
Five9 should provide free training resources for end users, including agents, supervisors, and admins.
The solution lacks versioning in scripting, making it crucial to manually back up scripts to prevent rollbacks from causing issues.
There could be improvements in integration, which can be achieved with APIs or tools like Zapier.
 

Setup Cost

Enterprise buyers value Five9's flexible, cost-effective pricing, allowing scalable features and reducing upfront investment compared to on-premises solutions.
Enterprise buyers find Zendesk's pricing high but valuable, with costs varying by agent count and business needs for tailored solutions.
They just rent the specific resources they need, which reduces high costs from hardware, software licenses, and operating systems.
It is not the cheapest solution nor the most expensive, but it provides value for money.
 

Valuable Features

Five9 offers robust CRM integration, AI tools, and customization, enhancing call center productivity and efficiency with strong support.
Zendesk offers user-friendly ticket management, seamless integrations, multi-channel support, and robust security for efficient and productive customer service.
Five9 provides powerful CRM integration capabilities with platforms like Salesforce, Zendesk, and Oracle Service Cloud, making it highly valuable for large companies.
The ability to automatically populate borrower details when the call comes in using the Loan Pop feature enhances call efficiency dramatically.
It pre-fills variables from a form and routes to the correct agent, reducing handling times and increasing single-call resolution.
It allows us to handle more support cases with fewer people due to its advanced artificial intelligence capabilities.
 

Categories and Ranking

Five9
Ranking in Sales Force Automation
4th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.8
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Contact Center Platforms (2nd), Workforce Engagement Management (2nd), Contact Center Infrastructure (1st), Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) (1st)
Zendesk
Ranking in Sales Force Automation
7th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
60
Ranking in other categories
CRM Customer Engagement Centers (7th), CRM (20th), Help Desk Software (9th), IT Service Management (ITSM) (7th), Reporting (13th), Knowledge Management Software (3rd), Community Platforms (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Sales Force Automation category, the mindshare of Five9 is 1.3%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zendesk is 1.8%, down from 3.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Sales Force Automation
 

Featured Reviews

Devan Baucom - PeerSpot reviewer
Has many features, provides good technical support, is scalable, and has no downtime
Five9 has a lot of AI tools, which I find valuable. It offers transcription services and a power dialer for outbound dialing. I like that Five9 is built for outbound and suitable for that purpose. Another valuable feature of the solution is the screen pop where, as a rep or agent, when your customer answers the phone, you'll immediately see customer details on your screen, which is helpful, especially if you have a lot of customers. Five9 also has the Intelligent Virtual Agent feature, which I find good, though there may be some legal implications. Still, I find Five9 a great solution that seamlessly helps customers engage with brands. Agent Assist is another good feature of Five9. That feature is useful because you can help agents in real-time while on the call. It's as if the manager is behind an agent, helping and telling that agent what to say and hearing what the customer says. Agent Assist lets you support every agent automatically, in a more scalable way, without listening to every call. Five9 also comes with WorkFlow Automation or Studio Flow, a nice feature because it's drag-and-drop, where even a non-engineer can build out a campaign and have different aspects to the campaign, for example, call routing. In the past, you had to be an engineer to build campaigns in Five9 or get on a call with the Five9 team and ask the team to make the changes, but nowadays, it's drag-and-drop, which is very helpful. I've also used the Workforce Optimization feature in Five9, though not as much. Still, I'm familiar with some of its capabilities, such as optimizing the time of day or days of the week when your team's the busiest, making optimizations when you don't need as many reps, or when you need more reps in place to match the bandwidth of calls coming in. Definitely, Workforce Optimization is beneficial and essential for my customers nowadays. Five9 can integrate with various CRMs, and I find that essential. The solution has an endless list of integrations for a reason, but I wasn't the guy who built the integrations. I heard that CRMs could be hard to work with, but the CRMs I've experienced with Five9, such as Salesforce and Hubspot, seem to integrate well. There was one really bad CRM built in-house on a platform called PPMS, but it's basically an internal tool, which was a little hard to work with and challenging to make changes, but it worked, though my Salesforce customers seem to be happy with the solution. The Omnichannel capability of Five9 is also essential, as the customer expects you to have chat, text, Facebook Messenger, and all other ways a customer can reach the reps. The omnichannel feature in Five9 is essential to customers.
JohanSkibdahl - PeerSpot reviewer
Automating customer support with advanced AI capabilities and seamless communication
Zendesk has been invaluable in automating communications such as email and phone calls. It allows us to handle more support cases with fewer people due to its advanced artificial intelligence capabilities. This intelligent tool can manage complex queries before users even realize they are interacting with a non-human. Additionally, we have integrated Zendesk with Datto and Klaviyo ( /products/klaviyo-reviews ), enhancing our workflows.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
5%
Computer Software Company
24%
Educational Organization
11%
Financial Services Firm
8%
University
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Five9?
I like the capability of call and screen recording. It has helped us to hold our agents accountable to the expectations for the role. It creates a clearer picture than giving feedback that is just ...
What needs improvement with Five9?
Five9 ( /products/five9-reviews ) should improve its omnichannel feature, allowing partners to manage all tenants with a single account rather than needing multiple accounts for each customer. Addi...
What is your primary use case for Five9?
We deploy Five9 ( /products/five9-reviews ) for our customers who use it as a contact center solution.
What do you like most about Zendesk Support?
I found the user experience with vendors on Zendesk to be straightforward, especially when it comes to understanding and searching for specific tickets. The search and navigation tools are easy to ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zendesk Support?
Zendesk's pricing is reasonable. It is not the cheapest solution nor the most expensive, but it provides value for money.
What needs improvement with Zendesk Support?
There could be improvements in integration, which can be achieved with APIs or tools like Zapier ( /products/zapier-reviews ). However, easier integration could enhance the usability. Multilingual ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Zendesk Support, Zendesk Guide, Zendesk Sell
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Agilysys, BISSELL, From You Flowers, SumUp, Kyndryl, PING, Alaska Airlines, Omaha Steaks International, NextRep, AdventHealth
Mailchimp, Tesco, Vimeo, Instacart, Mediaocean, Slack, Uber
Find out what your peers are saying about Five9 vs. Zendesk and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.