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Zendesk pros and cons

Vendor: Zendesk

4.1 out of 5

66 reviews
92% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

Zendesk offers agility and simplicity with effective ticket management, multi-channel support, and a self-service portal that enhance productivity. Its powerful collaboration and configurability are optimal for teams, yet flexibility and pricing remain issues. Integration with QR codes and third-party tools needs improvement, as do customization options in Zendesk Guide. Network stability and costs for setup and licensing pose challenges to wider adoption by businesses seeking enhanced user experience.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Zendesk offers agility and simplicity, making it very user-friendly with effective ticket management and assignment capabilities.

It provides strong integration, multi-channel support, and a self-service portal beneficial for both customers and teams.

The collaboration features and the ability to manage customer experience team tickets enhance team productivity.

Zendesk's configurability allows for easy customization and testing through a sandbox environment to fit company needs.

Its APIs, collaboration, and scalability have proven powerful for small to medium-sized companies and have streamlined processes.

CONS

Zendesk needs improvements in flexibility, pricing, and installation.

Integration with QR codes and third-party tools like APIs and Zapier requires enhancement.

Customization options in Zendesk Guide, including managing assets in one location and using HTML for text formatting, are limited.

Zendesk's network and stability on inbound calls have issues, impacting user experience.

The cost of pricing, setup, and licensing is a barrier to wider adoption and usage of Zendesk features.

Zendesk Pros review quotes

Consultant en organisation & chargé de mission à l'international at a consultancy

Jun 4, 2017

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

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reviewer1434366

Project Manager/Product Owner at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Dec 10, 2020

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

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reviewer1434366

Project Manager/Product Owner at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Dec 13, 2020

It has good management, the ability to sign tickets based on content, the multi-channel support, the self service portal, the integration with Salesforce, the setup process, and the product features as we are currently using them.

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JB

CEO at Finanblue

Jan 10, 2021

The feature to move over my customer experience team tickets for different specialists is very valuable for my team.

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AR

Senior Application Support Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Apr 8, 2021

It's very convenient to use.

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Customer Success Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

Apr 22, 2021

The initial setup is simple and straightforward.

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reviewer1627962

Sr. HR Reporting Manager at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

Sep 1, 2021

It is very easy to connect back and forth between the requester and the person fulfilling the ticket.

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AJ

Abha Jhunjhunwala

Staff Technical Writer at Netradyne

Nov 29, 2021

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.

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LL

Customer service manager at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Dec 3, 2021

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.

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CC

FinancialForce FFA and Salesforce CPQ Consultant at Cloudteam

Dec 8, 2021

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.

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Zendesk Cons review quotes

Consultant en organisation & chargé de mission à l'international at a consultancy

Jun 4, 2017

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

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reviewer1434366

Project Manager/Product Owner at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Dec 10, 2020

The solution itself wasn't easy to set up.

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reviewer1434366

Project Manager/Product Owner at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Dec 13, 2020

It wasn't easy to set up so we're only using a third of all of the features,

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Free Report: Zendesk Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Zendesk. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2025.

879,768 professionals have used our research since 2012.

JB

CEO at Finanblue

Jan 10, 2021

The solution could integrate better with QR codes from some websites such as Facebook.

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AR

Senior Application Support Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Apr 8, 2021

They have something called Zendesk Explore, which isn't as good as what they had in place previously.

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Customer Success Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

Apr 22, 2021

Sometimes if there was a way to just flag the actual issue out of those email chains - that would be really helpful.

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reviewer1627962

Sr. HR Reporting Manager at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

Sep 1, 2021

One of the drawbacks of Zendesk is that it doesn't provide a secure way for us to send data. So, we usually use a secure SharePoint folder link. We put that in the Zendesk ticket so that the requester has a secure way of getting to their data.

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AJ

Abha Jhunjhunwala

Staff Technical Writer at Netradyne

Nov 29, 2021

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.

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LL

Customer service manager at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Dec 3, 2021

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.

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CC

FinancialForce FFA and Salesforce CPQ Consultant at Cloudteam

Dec 8, 2021

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.

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