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 initial setup is pretty easy."
"The most valuable features are the flexibility of defining your own workflows and automation around the workflows, and the integration with the gate or any repository."
"The customer portal with connection with our knowledge base has been most valuable."
"It's easy to set up the solution."
"Customizations are most valuable. The customization of workflows is the main power of the Atlassian tools in general."
"It is much more controlled and allows for different kinds of customization that we can plan and implement based on the project requirements."
"The solution offers lots of information on the website to assist with technical queries. There are also many community sites to help you troubleshoot any problems."
"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."
"It is a scalable solution."
"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."
"The initial setup is simple and straightforward."
"Zendesk Support has a lot of good APIs."
"The feature to move over my customer experience team tickets for different specialists is very valuable for my team."
"It is very easy to connect back and forth between the requester and the person fulfilling the ticket."
"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."
"The stability has been very good."
"It has change management and incident management, but CMDB is not there. It's also not as user-friendly as ServiceNow."
"JSM's ability to handle large volumes of emails isn't great."
"I would like to see the user interface changed, it is not very user-friendly, and it transitions workflows."
"Integration possibilities with other products that are not Atlassian would be helpful. Support should also provide separate installation guides for each product even though they are easy to install."
"A lot of users have said that they want a feature that was on the on-prem version of Jira and the vendor can't deliver. They're either unwilling or unable to give feature parity."
"Cost has prohibited us from switching entirely to this solution."
"If we can have an easier way to deploy this solution without the help of a consultant and a more reliable way of deploying procedures, it would be quite helpful."
"It would be useful to be ale to link tickets across different gantt charts in Jira and Confluence."
"The support team is time-consuming, and they don't find the answer to our problem."
"As per me, there arent much significant issues or areas for improvement with Zendesk, as my usage of it is limited. I appreciate its ability to organize tickets effectively based on tags, allowing me to easily gather and analyze customer feedback and requests."
"You couldn't give administrative access to new hires."
"It wasn't easy to set up so we're only using a third of all of the features,"
"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."
"The solution could integrate better with QR codes from some websites such as Facebook."
"The data you get when logged in to Zendesk Support differs from the data you get when you programmatically query Zendesk Support through its API because of a sync time delay."
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, Freshdesk, BMC Helix ITSM and IBM Maximo, 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.
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