Zendesk competitors and alternatives, and what the AI costs

Zendesk bills you three times for the same conversation. There is a price for every agent seat, a second meter for the questions its AI settles without a person, and Copilot is sold separately again on top of both.

So you go looking for Zendesk alternatives, and every list of competitors you find hands you another helpdesk. That is the right answer if you have a support team. It is worth knowing before you start that the second meter tends to come with them.

Deacon is ours. It is an AI support agent you add to your site with one line of HTML, it answers from your own help pages, and it has a free plan with no card. It is in the table with the rest, and it is not a helpdesk, which is what the last section is about.

Every figure here was read from the vendor's own pricing page on 21 September 2026, and each section links the page it came from. Where a vendor does not publish something, that is what we say instead of guessing.

One thing worth knowing before you compare anything. Zendesk, Freshdesk and Zoho Desk all price by country and will show you the currency of wherever you are sitting. Zendesk's UK page reads £15 where its US figure is $19, and those are not a conversion of each other. The dollar figures below come from the plan data every one of those pages carries for all of its markets at once.

Zendesk competitors, side by side

What one AI answer actually costs

This is the number the comparison lists leave out, and it is the one that decides your bill once the AI is doing real work.

Four times the price from one end of the published range to the other, and that is before you count what each vendor decides is billable. Freshdesk looks cheapest until you read what it calls a session. Gorgias looks cheap until you notice the same answer also eats a ticket from your monthly allowance. Front's five cents is the lowest number on the page and the least useful, because it is a starting price with a Talk to Sales button under it rather than a rate you can act on.

Zendesk, and what you are leaving

Worth being precise about the thing you are moving away from, because some of it is genuinely good.

Support Team is $19 an agent a month billed annually, or $25 month to month. The Suite plans run $55, $89 and $115 an agent a month on annual billing, and Suite Enterprise carries $169 in the page's plan data while its own card shows only a Talk to Sales button. Ticketing, routing, service levels and a rota are all real, and if you have people answering full time you will use them.

The AI is the second meter. Every plan includes some automated resolutions, counted rather than priced as a pot of money. The comparison table's row is headed "Included automated resolutions (up to 10k per year)", and it gives five an agent a month on Support Team and Suite Team, ten on Suite Growth and Suite Professional, and fifteen on Suite Enterprise, under that annual ceiling for the whole account.

Past the allowance, Zendesk publishes a pay-as-you-go rate of US$2.00 a resolution and a lower committed rate it sets per market. Copilot, which drafts for your agents rather than answering your customers, is a third line at $50 an agent a month on Professional and above.

Zendesk for Startups gives six months free for up to 50 agents, and some companies get longer. If you qualify, take it, and read the section below before the six months are up. Figures from zendesk.com/pricing.

Freshdesk

The closest like for like on price, and the one whose free AI allowance is easiest to misread.

Growth is $19 an agent a month billed annually, $23 monthly. Pro is $55 and Enterprise is $89 on annual billing. So far, the same plan ladder at the same price.

Freddy AI Agent is where it differs. The plan page says the first 500 sessions are included, which reads like a monthly allowance. Freshdesk's own FAQ on the same page says something narrower. The 500 sessions are offered on Growth, Pro and Enterprise "to try out Freddy AI Agent", and it is "limited to once per account". After that it is $49 per 100 sessions.

Read the unit before you compare that 49 cents to anything. The same FAQ defines a session as "a 72-hour window starting from the customer's first email", and says every AI reply inside that window counts as one session no matter how many there are. So 49 cents buys a three-day conversation rather than a single answer, which makes it the cheapest thing on this page by some distance and not really the same unit as anybody else's.

Connector app tasks and MCP actions are metered separately again. Figures from freshworks.com/freshdesk/pricing.

Help Scout

The one on this list a small team is most likely to be happy on, and one of the two here with a free plan.

Standard is $25 a user a month billed annually, Plus is $45 and Pro is $75. Underneath those is a free plan with five users, one inbox and one Docs site, which none of Zendesk, Freshdesk, Front or Gorgias offers.

AI Answers is an add-on at $0.75 a resolution, billed monthly, with a three month free trial. It is priced per resolution rather than per seat, so a quiet month costs you nothing extra. It is also the only tool here that lets you put a ceiling on that. Its own FAQ answers "Can I set caps on AI resolution spending?" with yes, and says AI Answers switches itself off for the rest of the cycle when you hit the cap. Figures from helpscout.com/pricing.

Front

Front is the one to look at if the problem you are solving is several people sharing an inbox, and it has the most add-ons of anything here.

Starter is $25 a seat a month and caps you at 10 seats. Professional is $65 a seat and caps at 50. Enterprise is $105 a seat. All three are annual-billing rates, marked "Billed Annually, save 24%", and the page carries no monthly toggle, so what a month-to-month plan costs is not published.

Then the AI is four separate products. Autopilot, the agent that answers, starts at $0.05 a conversation and the page sends you to sales rather than printing a rate. Copilot is $20 a seat a month, Smart QA is another $20 a seat, and Smart CSAT is $10 a seat. All three are included on Enterprise, which is one way of reading why Enterprise costs $105.

A five person team on Starter with Copilot is $225 a month before a single AI conversation. Figures from front.com/pricing.

Gorgias

The ecommerce answer, and the only one here that does not charge per agent at all.

Starter is $10 a month, monthly billing only, with 50 tickets included and 40 cents a ticket after that. Basic is $50 a month for 300 tickets, Pro is $300 for 2,000, and Advanced is $750 for 5,000, all three billed annually.

Seats are capped rather than priced, at three on Starter and 500 on everything above it. That is a real difference from the rest of this page, where a fourth person is a fourth bill, though three is a low ceiling if support is something your whole team dips into.

The catch is in how the AI is counted. The comparison table prices an automated interaction by plan, at $1.00 on Starter, $0.90 on Basic and Pro and $0.85 on Advanced, rising to $1.50 once you pass the allowance your plan includes, which is 30 interactions on Starter and Basic, 190 on Pro and 530 on Advanced.

And in Gorgias's own words, "each automated interaction also counts as one helpdesk ticket". The AI answering a question spends your ticket allowance as well as your interaction allowance. Nobody else on this list bills the same answer twice. Figures from gorgias.com/pricing.

Zoho Desk and Intercom, briefly

Zoho Desk has a free edition too. It gives you three user licences with email ticketing, at no cost and with no trial clock. Its cheapest paid plan, Express, lists AI agents among its features. Zoho prices in your local currency with no dollar figures served outside the US, so read zoho.com/desk/pricing for your own market rather than trusting a converted number.

Intercom, now trading its AI as Fin, is the name that turns up on every one of these lists. It is sold two ways, and only one of them charges for seats. Fin on a helpdesk you already run is $0.99 an outcome with a 50-outcome monthly minimum, so about $49.50 to have it switched on. Fin on Intercom's own helpdesk is that same $0.99 plus $19 a helpdesk seat a month, per fin.ai/pricing. We have written that one up twice already, in Intercom alternatives for startups and in Fin AI alternatives, so it gets a line here rather than a third telling.

Deacon

Ours, and the one on this page that is not a helpdesk.

You add one line of HTML to your site. Deacon reads your help pages, your documentation and any files you upload, and answers visitors from that and nothing else. When it has no answer it says so and offers an email field, and if the visitor leaves an address the conversation reaches you with the question attached. It groups what people asked into topics, so you can see what your documentation keeps failing to explain.

Answers are the only thing you are charged for. There is no seat price underneath them, no separate charge when the AI is the thing that answered, and no overage to allow or refuse. A plan caps four things, the answers, the knowledge size, the pages crawled a month and the seats, and passing one of those does not produce a bill. The free plan needs no card.

What it does not have is the helpdesk half. There is no ticket queue, no routing, no rota, no service levels and no shared inbox. If three people need to divide a hundred emails a day between them, buy one of the tools above. Deacon is for the case where nobody is doing that job at all.

Do you actually need a helpdesk

Worth asking, because every list of Zendesk alternatives assumes the answer is yes.

A helpdesk is software for a support team. It exists to divide work between people, to say who owns what, and to prove the reply went out inside the time you promised. Routing, rotas, service levels and ticket ownership are all answers to the question of who picks this one up.

If the honest answer is that you pick all of them up, between other work, then most of what you are paying for on this page is the part that divides labour you do not have. That is not an argument against Zendesk. It is an argument that the thing you actually need may be the answering, not the queue.

The test is simple enough. Count last month's support email. If most of it is the same handful of questions asked in different words, and the answers are already written down somewhere on your site, a helpdesk will file those questions more neatly and you will still be the one replying to them. We wrote up what to do about that in how to reduce support tickets.

If your volume genuinely needs dividing between people, go back to the table.

Four things to check before you move

What counts as billable. A ticket, a conversation, an interaction and a resolution are four different amounts of work and every vendor here picks a different one. Gorgias counting an AI interaction as a ticket as well is the sharpest example, and to its credit the line sits on its own pricing page rather than in a help article.

Whether the AI allowance renews. Freshdesk's 500 sessions are once per account, not monthly. That distinction is the difference between a free tier and a trial.

What the price does at your size. Per-agent pricing punishes adding people, per-ticket pricing punishes growth, and per-resolution pricing punishes the AI working well. Price the plan you will be on in a year, not the one you are joining.

Whether you are buying the queue or the answering. They are separable now, they are priced separately by almost everyone on this page, and only one of them is the reason most founders go looking in the first place.