We performed a comparison between IBM SmartCloud Control Desk and Zendesk based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow, Atlassian, BMC and others in Help Desk Software."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 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."
"The solution has been stable."
"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."
"The solution is very easy to work with."
"SLA integrations, reports, and integration with other applications are the most valuable."
"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 initial setup is simple and straightforward."
"What is cool about Zendesk Guide is how it works together with others Zendesk products. Especially with support and with the analytics. Put those together for a small or medium-sized company and it's a really powerful tool."
"We rarely had issues with Zendesk."
"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."
"Zendesk Support has a lot of good APIs."
"The stability has been very good."
"It is very easy to connect back and forth between the requester and the person fulfilling the ticket."
"The most valuable features of Zendesk Support are collaboration, reports, and a self-service portal. The customer and team can see all the information needed from the portal."
"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."
"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."
"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 reporting in relation to updating could be improved upon."
"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 solution lacks a graphical user interface."
"It could use more facility or flexibility for reporting, and business intelligence in the tool."
"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."
"They have something called Zendesk Explore, which isn't as good as what they had in place previously."
"It needs to improve in terms of its flexibility, price, and installation."
"There is always a network issue with Zendesk. But we don’t know whether it is managed. The network issue is that when I call, it does not let us."
"The support team is time-consuming, and they don't find the answer to our problem."
"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 dashboard could be better."
"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."
"The price of the solution should be reduced."
IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is ranked 22nd in Help Desk Software with 9 reviews while Zendesk is ranked 10th in Help Desk Software with 57 reviews. IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is rated 7.6, while Zendesk is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of IBM SmartCloud Control Desk writes "Stable but clunky and lacks a user interface". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zendesk writes "Straightforward, very transparent, and very well organized". IBM SmartCloud Control Desk is most compared with ServiceNow and SymphonyAI IT Service Management, whereas Zendesk is most compared with ServiceNow, JIRA Service Management, Atlassian Confluence, Freshservice and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
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