No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Hornbill Systems Supportworks vs Zendesk comparison

Why PeerSpot?
Sponsored
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 3, 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

Automation Anywhere
Sponsored
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
668
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (2nd), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (2nd), Process Mining (1st), Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) (1st), Agentic Automation (1st), Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies (2nd), AI Legal & Compliance (1st), AI Finance & Accounting (2nd), AI Procurement & Supply Chain (1st)
Hornbill Systems Supportworks
Average Rating
7.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Help Desk Software (35th), IT Service Management (ITSM) (32nd)
Zendesk
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
70
Ranking in other categories
CRM Customer Engagement Centers (3rd), CRM (7th), Help Desk Software (3rd), IT Service Management (ITSM) (5th), Reporting (8th), Knowledge Management Software (3rd), AI Customer Support (10th), AI IT Support (4th)
 

Featured Reviews

Nadeem K. - PeerSpot reviewer
Rpa Developer at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
Automation has freed teams from repetitive finance and supply tasks and supports global operations
In the current organization, we had trouble initially because I think the documentation and support could be better than what it is now. This is one difference between Automation Anywhere and other RPA tools such as UiPath. In UiPath, if you have an issue, you go to the UiPath website and search for it, and you get lots of help materials. In Automation Anywhere, you do not get exactly what you are looking for. You get a very large number of results when you search for something, and from this large result set, you have to filter out what you need, or only partial information will be available. User handbooks are available for each product. In that regard, I would say Automation Anywhere is lagging compared to other RPA tools. It is difficult to get hold of their customer support team. I want to clarify that it is not a matter of us building logic on Automation Anywhere and it failing. When it is a product-related issue, they have to give us support because we only know how to develop within Automation Anywhere. We do not know how to fix Automation Anywhere itself. Whenever we have an issue, trying to get in touch with them always takes three to four business days.
it_user1262703 - PeerSpot reviewer
Service Desk Team Leader at a healthcare company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Excels in call logging and call flows but is limited in terms of scalability
I'd advise others to map their processes out before starting with the solution. Hornbill has recently generated a new version of its product and it meets some of the requirements that we would have been looking for. It's a bit more scalable, a bit more responsive to a customer-focused model for support, and they've improved a lot of things like process flow and self-service. In terms of rating the solution, it's difficult to grade. It really depends on the size of the organization that's trying to use it as that tool. One of the reasons why we're looking to shift is because we've grown quite a bit over the years that we've had it, which makes it difficult for it to meet our demands. However, for an organization the size of what we were when we started our journey with it, I'd rate it ten out of ten. Where we are now, with our company size and needs, I'd rate it six out of ten.
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

"Its integration with source control is very refreshing. There could be a little bit more maturity around how to do some of the features, but not having to go outside the app, not having a separate set of procedures, allows you to check in and check out right from within the app. You can make edits and uploads and undo your checkouts."
"Automation Anywhere has surely helped our organization to shape its Digital Journey - It was our first RPA tool which helped us to perform basic automation which created Point solutions but has added tremendous value at the early stage. We were able to scale-up fast using Automation Anywhere due to its user-friendly AI and later on IQ Bots provided the required edge to handle the unstructured data."
"The best features in Automation Anywhere that I really appreciate are found in the basic module for pure RPA, such as the recorder function, which helps in making automation even easier; no coding is required, you are just doing things, and the recorder records your movements and actions, creating the code out of that."
"Automation Anywhere has a uniqueness with respect to the IQ Bot."
"From my developer's point of view, the tool is pretty strong."
"The integration of RPA bots with other processes and documents is good. We don't have any issues there. We could have more connectors, but it's fine. I have used it for SAP and for direct API-to-API, and that went well."
"This RPA solution really stands out because of its functionality, scalability, and stability. It also offers very good technical support, and is always innovating with new features that speak to various operational use cases."
"One thing I appreciate about Automation Anywhere is that we do not need to run around with multiple platforms, because Automation Anywhere provides an end-to-end solution."
"The solution's business process flow is quite strong. Its reporting is quite good. The standard, basic ITSM functionality like call logging and call flow, for example, are areas the solution really excels in."
"We've definitely seen an ROI; we've had the system in place for eight years, and it's provided a solid platform for us to deliver our services during that period."
"It is quite user friendly to use and has a lot of very useful features that makes the analyst/technician's life easier."
"Zendesk has helped us to better connect and respond quicker to our clients."
"The ROI is amazing."
"One of the most valuable features is that Zendesk gives you a lot of configurability, and a lot of leeway in terms of customizing the look and theme. Zendesk offers you the facility to design your own landing page, as well as the look and feel of the entire knowledge base. At the same time, they offer themes that you can simply purchase and implement. Either way, it can really be turned into the right look and feel of the knowledge base required by our company, which is very important—if you have a bland-looking page, most of the time, people will lose interest. Zendesk also allows you to test the customizations before you publish it. It gives you a sandbox location where you can test everything new that you're trying to create and publish, which is very interesting."
"Largely, we have been happy with its capabilities."
"The feature to move over my customer experience team tickets for different specialists is very valuable for my team."
"As per my experience Zendesk is a very impressive, efficient and convenient web based help desk application."
"Zendesk Support has a lot of good APIs."
"We tried to find a solution better and cheaper than Zendesk locally and we have not found any solution so complete and flexible as Zendesk."
 

Cons

"Improvement areas will be there for everybody. I think one area which I would like to see improvement is in IQ Bot. Maybe it has improved a lot in version 11 X but I think that that's one area which definitely scope to improve."
"One day, there will be a message box saying that the application is down or not available on a weekend. The instructions will say read the information and click, "Okay." But a bot doesn't understand the instructions because it is not the IQ system."
"We would like Automation Anywhere to have a way to run a capacity check on machines and show us what is available."
"The basic features are acceptable, but advanced tools often require deeper technical expertise, which can slow adoption. Additionally, some users experience delays in customer support for complex issues."
"Citrix is only in the development stage. Automation Anywhere could put some time into improving this more."
"We could use more accuracy with IQ Bot."
"As a developer, I find Automation Anywhere's bot editor riddled with minor workflow issues that hinder productivity."
"The installation piece was sort of complicated because we are new to the business. We are new to installing Automation Anywhere services and the services that they are providing. So, we are sort of expected some kind of installation engineer to come onto our premises and provide the support, rather than remotely."
"It's worked well for us for a significant period of time. However, we are kind-of outgrowing it at the moment. We're struggling a bit with making it meet our requirements."
"Customer Service: I'd rate it as a 5/10 or 6/10."
"Merging tickets is very time consuming; maybe the system can automatically merge tickets that are related and on the same topic."
"We had to modify extensively the reporting features to be meaningful to our business."
"The solution itself wasn't easy to set up."
"The support team is time-consuming, and they don't find the answer to our problem."
"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."
"I would like to see more freedom when creating "Triggers" and "Automations"."
"An area of opportunity for Zendesk is probably just when there's a long email chain and everything gets forwarded to support, I know it can be time consuming for them to extract the important information from the email chain."
"The data you get when logged in to Zendesk Support differs from the data you get when you programmatically query Zendesk Support through its API because of a sync time delay."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"From my experience, I can say that the initial setup cost is easily recovered over a period of time once the bots start running in production."
"The pricing for Automation Anywhere is reasonable."
"As our team size increases, we may get some more licenses for the tool."
"My only suggestion in terms of pricing is very generic and that is to consider that as much as RPA saves cost and does automation, please get a realistic estimation done on whether you are really achieving any ROI over your investment with RPA."
"Automation Anywhere falls within a mid-range price point when compared to other RPA tools on the market."
"I'm not sure what the monthly licensing cost is, as that is taken care of by another team, but I would say it's around $100,000."
"Complaints are generally about the cost of IQ Bot, which is higher than its competitors. The base model’s pricing is comparable to other platforms with attended, unattended, and IDP capabilities as well."
"We were paying approximately $30,000 for a year license."
"Our organization pays about $40,000 annually. There are ongoing consultancy costs and if we want to change anything, we're charged a day rate. Other than that, there are no other extra costs involved in working with the solution."
"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."
"The price is very competitive."
"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."
"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."
"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."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions are best for your needs.
921,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
No data available
Outsourcing Company
10%
Construction Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business162
Midsize Enterprise86
Large Enterprise566
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business37
Midsize Enterprise22
Large Enterprise12
 

Questions from the Community

How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It depends on your use case. Is it simply to automate a couple of processes? Is it to augment a human team? AA is ver...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
From my experience using AA tool, it depends on the applications that you want to automate, because there some applic...
How good is Automation Anywhere for RPA processes?
It is a highly preferred RPA tool. You can check my Automation Anywhere Review to know more.
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...
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...
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 secu...
 

Also Known As

Automation Anywhere, Testing Anywhere, Automation Anywhere Enterprise, Agentic Process Automation System (Now Certified for WorkSpaces)
Supportworks
Zendesk Support, Zendesk Guide, Zendesk Sell
 

Interactive Demo

Demo not available
Demo not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Google, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks, DellEMC, Comcast, Mastercard, Quest Diagnostics
Aylesbury Vale District Council
Mailchimp, Tesco, Vimeo, Instacart, Mediaocean, Slack, Uber
Find out what your peers are saying about Hornbill Systems Supportworks vs. Zendesk and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
921,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.