IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs Zendesk comparison

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 1, 2024

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk and Zendesk are competing products in the IT service management and customer support solutions category. IBM's comprehensive suite for complex IT environments may give it an edge in detailed IT management, while Zendesk is favored for its efficient customer support capabilities.

Features: IBM SmartCloud Control Desk offers strong asset management, change management, and end-to-end IT service management capabilities, suitable for enterprise-level settings. Zendesk, on the other hand, is recognized for its robust ticketing system, user-friendly interface, and extensive integration options with third-party applications that enhance customer interaction.

Room for Improvement: IBM SmartCloud Control Desk could improve its user interface, streamline its complex deployment process, and enhance user accessibility for non-technical staff. Zendesk may need to enhance its IT management capabilities, offer more customization for advanced users, and expand its feature set for larger, complex organizations.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM SmartCloud Control Desk requires a more complex deployment with specialized knowledge, potentially leading to longer setup times. Zendesk offers an easy, quick implementation, making it ideal for varied IT environments, and is praised for its prompt, efficient customer service that minimizes downtime.

Pricing and ROI: IBM SmartCloud Control Desk involves a higher setup cost due to its extensive feature set, affecting short-term ROI but proving beneficial for large-scale needs. In contrast, Zendesk's more affordable pricing and cloud-based model offer better immediate ROI, especially beneficial for small to medium-sized businesses prioritizing customer support efficiency.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs. Zendesk Report (Updated: September 2025).

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs. Zendesk

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Helped 868,759 peers since 2012

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

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

Ranking in Help Desk Software

26th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Zendesk

Ranking in Help Desk Software

8th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

CRM Customer Engagement Centers (6th), CRM (18th), IT Service Management (ITSM) (7th), Sales Force Automation (8th), Reporting (14th), Knowledge Management Software (4th), Community Platforms (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Help Desk Software category, the mindshare of IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is 1.1%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zendesk is 4.6%, up from 4.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Help Desk Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Zendesk	4.6%
IBM SmartCloud Control Desk	1.1%
Other	94.3%

Help Desk Software

Featured Reviews

Jose Pedro Muñoz

Director of operations at Vetasi

Helps standardize our workflow, track client tickets, and it's very flexible

Initially we used HPE Service Desk. Then, Remedy (IBM SmartCloud Control Desk) version 5. When selecting a vendor, the most important thing for us is the flexibility of the tool. It must be very flexible to change the workflow or to add new workflows for the clients. It must have stability and scalability as well.

Read full review

JohanSkibdahl

CEO at Etcetera Networks

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, enhancing our workflows.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The workflow capability is useful. It's not a manual helpdesk operation. It's fully automated, even when an alarm has occurred. It covers the complete cycle of initiation to resolving the events. This is its most strong feature that is easily integrable with a monitoring solution. It creates tickets, and the workflow feature is the most important one."

"In the early stages of our company, all requests were done in notebooks, and none of it was centrally managed. But now we have a central tool which is an entry point for all requests that come in."

"SLA integrations, reports, and integration with other applications are the most valuable."

"A feature I found most valuable in IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is the service request. Another feature I like most about the solution is IT asset management, which tells you who owns a specific asset in the company and from which date."

"The solution is very easy to work with."

"The brand name is the most valuable aspect of this solution for me. It's IBM. It's a global company that supports this product, it's not something open source or something like that."

"The most valuable are its flexibility and agility. It's quick to change it, to adapt it to your needs. That's the most important for us."

"What I like about the Control Desk is that everything is centralized. You have all the requests in one place, you know which ones are for whom and who is working on them."

More IBM SmartCloud Control Desk pros

"Its agility and simplicity are the most valuable features. This tool is very user-friendly."

"It's very convenient to use."

"Zendesk has been invaluable in automating communications such as email and phone calls."

"The product offers very good management. It has a great ability to assign tickets based on content."

"I love how the tickets would auto-populate very quickly in Zendesk, especially when a call comes in."

"The initial setup is simple and straightforward."

"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 use, and I haven't encountered any issues with delays or communication gaps in ticket resolutions."

"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."

More Zendesk pros

Cons

"The user interface is not very interesting. If you look at other products like JIRA and ServiceNow, they have made it much easier for the end-users. Maybe not ServiceNow, but JIRA is quite flexible. From a presentation point of view, IBM should make more user-friendly interfaces."

"The time calculations can be improved. While working on reports, it was taking the time only in seconds, which was hard for me to work out. While creating some dialogs in the service portal, you have to use certain data types in some fields. It was very tricky to make them work. I was testing a certain type of input, and it didn't work. It didn't show me the domain that the fields have to show. I had to make the change to the database, and only then it worked. It was a tricky thing to make them work with the dialogs. Their technical support can also be improved in terms of response time."

"The main issue that we hear from our customers is that the self-service user interface is a little bit old, possibly due to the fact that IBM is such a large enterprise company. People say that they think they're in the year 2004, because you can very clearly see that the technology is lagging behind modern trends."

"Support has been the biggest problem for us. I understand that because we use the product of a global company, some changes are not quick to deploy."

"The reporting in relation to updating could be improved upon."

"What needs improvement in IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is its graphical interface because it needs to be more user-friendly. IBM is a big company, but this solution is a little bit outdated. The most common comment I get from customers is that IBM SmartCloud Control Desk looks old and needs a refresh. Its frontend needs a little bit of work. The solution needs to be more modern. In the programming world, you see a lot of new technologies, but this particular solution is still on Java. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk isn't like web-based service request tools, and that's an area for improvement. What I'd like to see in the next version of the solution is a more upscale technology. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk has small issues with document links and attachments, and those could bother you when you're using it for a long time. A more user-friendly GUI is also another improvement I'd like to see in the next version of the solution, plus a better user experience, and it would be great if IBM could resolve the current issues I've noticed in IBM SmartCloud Control Desk."

"Overall the user experience, as opposed to the system and databases, could be improved. It does work as it should and it's good, but they should invest more in the user interfaces to be less data oriented and more appealing for the user."

"The solution lacks a graphical user interface."

More IBM SmartCloud Control Desk cons

"Zendesk Guide could be improved by allowing us to put our assets in one location. What happens now for each article, for example, is we have to upload the images for that article to that location, so the image reuse is still not something that they have perfected. If they could allow us to update all the images in one location, and then pull the image from there, it would be easier when working on Multibrand projects. There are no Multibrand updates available—we have to update each brand manually. For my company, I have come up with an API tool which allows me to push the content to multiple brands together, but if you don't have something like that, you have to manually do it."

"The price of the solution should be reduced."

"The support team is time-consuming, and they don't find the answer to our problem."

"It needs to improve in terms of its flexibility, price, and installation."

"Zendesk's stability on inbound calls could be improved as compared to Talkdesk."

"If I write an article, and I have a team of 30 people, and they all have a Zendesk account, when I write an article, I send them an email. "Hey guys, I just wrote this article. It's one of the most popular topics this month on which we are not covered. Please check it and make sure that you include it in your resolutions". The issue is, once I send it to those 30 people, and they open it, the next morning, that article is the most popular article."

"There could be improvements in integration, which can be achieved with APIs or tools like Zapier."

"I'm going to piggyback on what I said regarding Freshdesk concerning what could be better in Zendesk: incorporate more AI."

More Zendesk cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's basically for a big company because of the costs. A small company can't afford the licensing cost. For medium and large companies, it's the best product. The price of the license is on the higher side compared to others."

"The license for IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is paid yearly and is on a per-user basis. You buy the product and pay for its license yearly. IBM is changing the licensing structure, but for now, it's a yearly license. There's no additional cost. It's just the license that you need to pay for to use IBM SmartCloud Control Desk."

"The licensing we have for IBM Control Desk is on a yearly basis. They have a concurrent license and an administrative license. And with these, you get all the products. There aren't any additional fees for extra add-ons or anything like that."

"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."

"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."

"From what I hear, Zendesk's pricing is a little expensive."

"The price is very competitive."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

No data available

Computer Software Company

21%

Manufacturing Company

Performing Arts

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Large Enterprise	3

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	29
Midsize Enterprise	20
Large Enterprise	11

Questions from the Community

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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 ...

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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.

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What needs improvement with Zendesk Support?

I'm going to piggyback on what I said regarding Freshdesk concerning what could be better in Zendesk: incorporate more AI. I know many CRM tools are already on the way to do that.

See all answers

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Product Reports

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk

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Also Known As

SmartCloud Control Desk

Zendesk Support, Zendesk Guide, Zendesk Sell

Overview

IBM Control Desk on Cloud offer an access to a user friendly self-service, automated service management, and seamlessly-integrated, best-practice based service desk capabilities. IBM Control Desk provides the IT service management (ITSM) needed to simplify support of users and infrastructure. It also offers a unified IT asset and service management software provides a common control center for managing business processes for both digital and physical assets and enables control, governance and compliance to applications, endpoints and assets to protect critical data and prevent outages. Control Desk is IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)-compliant, accessible through mobile devices and integrates with social media and development tools.

IBM

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.

Sample Customers

St Vincent's Health Australia, Kalibrate Pty. Ltd., Cognizant Technology

Mailchimp, Tesco, Vimeo, Instacart, Mediaocean, Slack, Uber

IBM SmartCloud Control Desk vs. Zendesk