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PolyAI vs Zendesk comparison

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Executive Summary

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

PolyAI
Ranking in AI Customer Support
13th
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Conversation Intelligence Software (8th)
Zendesk
Ranking in AI Customer Support
10th
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 IT Support (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the AI Customer Support category, the mindshare of PolyAI is 1.0%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zendesk is 1.6%, down from 11.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
AI Customer Support Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Zendesk1.6%
PolyAI1.0%
Other97.4%
AI Customer Support
 

Featured Reviews

Harman Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
Devops Manager at Microsoft Ai
Automation has reduced routine inquiries while agents have gained time for complex issues
The best features PolyAI offers include its professional service as a software approach, which is a significant differentiator during initial onboarding, with the structured questionnaire process capturing our architecture, security constraints, brand voice, and API handshakes down the wire. They work instead of handling a raw, self-serve bot builder, allowing our platform engineers to avoid constant babysitting while PolyAI's dialogue engineers handle model fine-tuning, edge case routing, and continuous optimization. I also appreciate the low-latency, human-parity voice system, which helps the voice agent handle non-linear speech, sudden conversational pivots, background noise, and mid-sentence interruptions naturally, making audio latency practically imperceptible and eliminating the awkward pauses typical to traditional conversational IVRs. This is a game-changer. Finally, I appreciate how moving between chats and voice maintains context seamlessly, as conversations trigger or fallback or human handoff. State payloads transfer cleanly with zero loss of session context. The low-latency and human-parity voice system make a significant difference for our team, ensuring that interactions between AI and humans do not sound robotic. This capability makes the AI's responses clear, without context lagging or hallucination. Our end user experience has positively increased by 23.5%. Earlier, latency posed a challenge, but low latency ensures that we can achieve our end goals efficiently. The governance and security of PolyAI is really strong. It has not missed anything in terms of governance and AI, which I feel has been handled really well. The accuracy and reliability of PolyAI's AI output is exceptional, more than 200%, since it does not hallucinate, provides long answers without losing context, and utilizes low latency and advanced AI models. They have done a good job in this aspect.
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

"Overall, PolyAI has been a great addition to my customer service workflow, and its strong natural language understanding, voice quality, and automation have helped improve efficiency."
"The low-latency and human-parity voice system make a significant difference for our team, ensuring that interactions between AI and humans do not sound robotic."
"If their price is acceptable, I would recommend using Zendesk to all companies whose clients and employees need a simple way of raising issues."
"We have improved the service to clients, creating great support and managing relationships."
"We were able to get up and running with Zendesk in a very short time and build a robust web app including help desk functionality that makes the product owner and client very happy."
"This feature allowed our team organize and assign certain members to a particular group."
"Even though I haven't tried other solutions, I think this product is very useful and easy to use."
"Zendesk is a very good product."
"Users can create their own tags, and they have their own views which are very nicely organized so they can see what is happening at any given time."
"The JIRA integration has helped tremendously with bug tracking and timely resolution."
 

Cons

"One area where PolyAI can be improved is in deeper integrations with existing systems and more configuration on how to handle complex scenarios."
"It is easy to use, however, it is not quite as powerful as many other ticketing systems out there."
"The licensing model needs to be more customer-friendly."
"The reports could be more fine tuned to enable better handling of tickets by individual agents and teams."
"They have something called Zendesk Explore, which isn't as good as what they had in place previously."
"Reporting by Tags – this is not as effective as allowing reps to disposition tickets themselves."
"There is an option, I would like to see, the ability to group my requests into different states."
"The look and feel could use a little more polish."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"From what I hear, Zendesk's pricing is a little expensive."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
24%
Educational Organization
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Construction Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
 

Company Size

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

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PolyAI?
PolyAI's pricing and licensing were competitive for my use case.
What needs improvement with PolyAI?
One area where PolyAI can be improved is in deeper integrations with existing systems and more configuration on how to handle complex scenarios. An area for improvement with PolyAI would be more fl...
What is your primary use case for PolyAI?
My main use case for PolyAI is to build a solution for customer service, particularly automating common queries efficiently. I use PolyAI to handle common customer service calls such as account bal...
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 other customer management software. The setup is pretty simple as well, but if ...
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 some time to load information. Most of the time, if a particular candidate has ...
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 securely, and this is not only limited to documents but also to images and reports. ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Zendesk Support, Zendesk Guide, Zendesk Sell
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Mailchimp, Tesco, Vimeo, Instacart, Mediaocean, Slack, Uber
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