Intercom vs Zendesk, what you pay for seats and AI

Zendesk suits you if support already runs as a team, with queues, service levels and a phone line. Suite Team brings messaging, live chat, social channels and voice into one place, and Suite Professional adds IVR phone menus, callbacks, skills-based routing and community forums. Its marketplace lists more than 1,800 apps. Before a busy month, you choose whether the AI agent keeps answering past its allowance or hands the work to your team. And if your company is under 10 years old, with no more than a Series B and fewer than 50 employees, or up to 249 if a partner refers you, Zendesk for Startups can give you the Suite free for 6 months, or up to 2 years through a partner.

Intercom suits you if you want Fin to answer most conversations and a small team to take the rest. Fin is billed only for outcomes, never when it can’t answer or the customer asks for a person, at most once a conversation, and refunded when a conversation is reopened. Essential includes the Messenger, a shared inbox, ticketing and a public help centre, and Workflows and custom reports start on Advanced. If you’ve raised up to $10M, have fewer than 15 employees and are new to Intercom, Early Stage makes the first year of Advanced $65 a month for 6 seats, with 300 Fin outcomes a month.

Both are helpdesks first, built for a team working through a queue. If you’re a founder answering support between building, you may not need a helpdesk at all, and there’s a third option.

A helpdesk organises a team’s work. When support is just you, what you need is for the same questions to stop landing on you. Deacon answers them on your site in seconds, at any hour, from your own docs and in each customer’s language, with no flows to build. When your docs don’t cover a question, it says it doesn’t know instead of inventing an answer, and asks for the visitor’s email. You get an email when they leave one or ask for a person, and you reply from Deacon’s dashboard, straight into their chat if it’s still open. There are no tickets, queues or rotas.

Each answer you write makes it better. A question your docs missed gets an Answer this button, and what you write becomes part of what Deacon knows, so it can answer the next person who asks. Save & check then asks Deacon the question again, shows you what it now says and tells you how many other open questions your answer covers. The more you answer, the less Deacon needs you.

You also see what customers are stuck on and what they want next. Every conversation is saved and searchable by what visitors asked. Topics group the questions, count the people behind each one and label most of them, for example as a bug report, a feature ask or a how-to. That’s on every plan, free included. On Intercom, the Topics Explorer needs Pro, an add-on from $100 a month, and on Zendesk, intelligent triage starts on Suite Professional. The script behind Deacon’s widget also runs your website analytics, with visitors, sources, goals and funnels.

And the AI isn’t a second bill. Deacon counts its own replies, so what you pay never depends on a vendor judging whether a conversation was resolved. Every feature is on every plan, the plans differ only in answers, knowledge, pages from your website and seats, and nothing is billed past a plan’s answers. No plan upgrades itself, and none shows a “powered by” line. Intercom removes its branding only on Advanced and Expert, and Zendesk hides its logo from the messaging widget only on Suite Enterprise. The free plan needs no card, has no end date and deletes nothing for inactivity.