We compared JIRA Service Management and Zendesk across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
Ease of Deployment: Opinions on the initial setup of JIRA Service Management vary. Some users found it uncomplicated, while others found it to be more complex and time-consuming. Zendesk's setup process was considered to be straightforward and effortless.
Features: JIRA Service Management is praised for its ticketing system, compatibility with Confluence, customization options, and reliable performance. Zendesk is highly regarded for its flexibility, strong security measures, user experience, and collaborative features.
Room for Improvement: Jira Service Management could add customization options, improve its time-based automation, and enhance the integration of its modules and DevOps tools. Zendesk could offer better asset centralization and implement an image-resizing tool. Users would like a better knowledge base and more analytics.
Pricing: JIRA Service Management is generally considered to be reasonably priced, but some users say the solution can become expensive when scaling up. Zendesk is considered expensive, particularly for the Enterprise plan. Users noted that additional services require extra payment and have suggested reducing the overall price.
ROI: JIRA Service Management provides financial advantages, reduced communication volume, improved productivity, enhanced transparency, and cost-effectiveness. Zendesk minimizes customer inquiries and delivers immediate ROI for small businesses.
Service and Support: JIRA Service Management users reported mixed experiences with technical support, whereas Zendesk's support is generally deemed satisfactory, with prompt response times.
Comparison Results: JIRA Service Management earned high marks for its ticketing system and user-friendly interface. Zendesk is praised for its customizability and robust security. The pricing of JIRA Service Management has received mixed reviews, with some finding it reasonable and others suggesting it could be more affordable, whereas Zendesk is considered expensive by certain users. The customer service and support for both products have received mixed feedback.
"The links between the help desk and Jira issues and between Confluence and Jira issues are most valuable. I can write requirements in Confluence and link them to user stories in Jira and test cases. I can see my test coverage and all that kind of stuff. The integration between these three is very useful. It is pretty customizable, and it integrates well. There are a lot of add-ins and a lot of connectors to third-party products. In my last company, we used Test Royal for managing all the tests, and it integrated perfectly with that. For any issue or bug, we could see what tests have been run and the complete history of the tests."
"Service Management is great if you're an Atlassian shop already using JIRA for the development team and you want another tool for help desk ticketing. When it's all under the same umbrella, I can easily take a ticket from the help desk and move it to the development team. You can't beat that integration between two products."
"Jira lets us customize the workflow to meet our requirements. The email and alert features are also handy."
"The simplicity is good for our clients. The price is good."
"Jira gets the basics right in terms of the product backlog and a scrum board teams can use to manage sprint backlogs."
"This service management solution has a good user interface. It helps improve your IT request requirements and makes tracking requests easier."
"The product is not lacking anything that a QA will want to use."
"With Jira Service Desk, the simplicity of setting up a quick form and getting the service desk running quickly is very helpful."
"The feature to move over my customer experience team tickets for different specialists is very valuable for my team."
"It's a very stable tool, very powerful."
"One of the most valuable features is the ease of use. If you take the standalone product, it is so easy to use, but if you want a tailor-made Zendesk Guide, you can't do it yourself. However, you can use a template that already exists—they have a lot, and they're very cheap, around 300-400 euros—and use it on all your brands. It's a very easy product to use."
"It is very easy to connect back and forth between the requester and the person fulfilling the ticket."
"We rarely had issues with Zendesk."
"It's very convenient to use."
"Its agility and simplicity are the most valuable features. This tool is very user-friendly."
"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."
"At times you will need add-ons or additional software, so built-in features would be helpful."
"It has change management and incident management, but CMDB is not there. It's also not as user-friendly as ServiceNow."
"The product does not have the capability to sort queued tickets by product. This would be useful in making workflows more efficient."
"The documentation needs improving, it's difficult to find specific procedures."
"If JIRA were more of a substantial stand-alone product that covered more needs for project management, we wouldn't be using a suite of products."
"The initial setup of JIRA Service Management can be complex for new users. There is a lot of configuration."
"JIRA protects the end-user, but for the configuration, more rules could be added to improve the workflow."
"If I need a new feature, JIRA requires me to pay for all users when only specific people use that add-on. I should not have to pay for everyone, so this is an area for improvement."
"The dashboard could be better."
"Zendesk Guide's customization could be improved. I would like it to be easier and maybe open-sourced, so that if you have a developer in your company, you can do it yourself. Right now, that isn't allowed, so you need to have it done via the integrator. Another improvement—this is nit-picking—is that it could be less easy to make changes. Some things are so easy that they sometimes look a little amateur-ish. Most of the templates are built-in so they can be used directly, so they are very simple."
"The support team is time-consuming, and they don't find the answer to our problem."
"They have something called Zendesk Explore, which isn't as good as what they had in place previously."
"The price of the solution should be reduced."
"You couldn't give administrative access to new hires."
"Sometimes if there was a way to just flag the actual issue out of those email chains - that would be really helpful."
"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."
JIRA Service Management is ranked 2nd in Help Desk Software with 73 reviews while Zendesk is ranked 10th in Help Desk Software with 57 reviews. JIRA Service Management is rated 8.2, while Zendesk is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of JIRA Service Management writes "Customizable, stable, and integrates well". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zendesk writes "Straightforward, very transparent, and very well organized". JIRA Service Management is most compared with ServiceNow, ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, BMC Helix ITSM, Freshdesk and Freshservice, whereas Zendesk is most compared with ServiceNow, Atlassian Confluence, Freshservice, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Moveworks. See our JIRA Service Management vs. Zendesk report.
See our list of best Help Desk Software vendors and best IT Service Management (ITSM) vendors.
We monitor all Help Desk Software reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
