JIRA Service Management vs Zendesk comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Sep 21, 2023

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.

To learn more, read our detailed JIRA Service Management vs. Zendesk Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"One of the best features is that I can share tickets with team members, at which point any team member is able to pick one up and work on it.""Two features I like about Jira are its ticketing system and its compatibility with Confluence. Also, the Knowledge Base is one of the more valuable features that would really benefit us.""JIRA Service Management is a very user-friendly solution.""The dashboards in Jira have been the most useful feature.""The initial setup is easy and straightforward.""JIRA helps integrate Kanban Board features and for this reason what it does it does well.""Auditing team uses this solution to track audit findings and follow-up.""Jira gets the basics right in terms of the product backlog and a scrum board teams can use to manage sprint backlogs."

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"It is a scalable solution.""It's a very stable tool, very powerful.""It's very convenient to use.""I found the user experience with vendors on Zendesk to be straightforward, especially when it comes to understanding and searching for specific tickets. The search and navigation tools are easy to use, and I haven't encountered any issues with delays or communication gaps in ticket resolutions.""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.""It is very easy to connect back and forth between the requester and the person fulfilling the ticket.""The initial setup is simple and straightforward.""Zendesk Support has a lot of good APIs."

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Cons
"There is room for improvement in support.""The customizations in Jira could be improved by being simplified. They are currently very complex.""The price is a point of contention for me. It does overall work out as a significant amount of money that will be spent over a shorter period of time.""Field addition and removal features are not very intuitive in JIRA Service Management.""With Jira, we were unable to implement time-based automation in its ticketing system. We would like a feature where we can define tickets based on severity, then tickets are automatically escalated to the next level after a set period of time if they go unanswered.""There should be better connections with access management. They should improve the connectivity.""Every time there's a problem with JIRA Service Management, you have to have a look at how to solve it, and there's always a feature request or the feature request on the solution is too large and the development cycles are too slow.""This solution lacks features for project management."

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"The price of the solution should be reduced.""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.""It needs to improve in terms of its flexibility, price, and installation.""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.""The solution itself wasn't easy to set up.""The support team is time-consuming, and they don't find the answer to our problem.""It wasn't easy to set up so we're only using a third of all of the features,""You couldn't give administrative access to new hires."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Costs are about $50 per user per year. JIRA is sold in user tiers of 25, 50, 100, 250, 500, 2000, 10,000, and unlimited users. It is bad when you have 51 users then the price is based on that 100 user tier. Users at 100 will be the most cost effective."
  • "JIRA Service Desk has different pricing as it is based on agents. On average, the price is about $300 per agent."
  • "Do not forget to calculate add-on costs. These cost a percentage of the JIRA purchasing costs and are based on the number of JIRA users."
  • "Buying a software solution is only a half part of the solution (or even less). You need to optimize usage of the software by hiring professionals who will help you to make the most of the software, especially in the beginning."
  • "I would suggest to always buy licenses through an Atlassian partner, so you can also rely on their expertise."
  • "But about the plugins, I found one plug-in — its name is Actionable Metric I think — and it is $3000. That is very expensive for users in Iran."
  • "Actually in Iran we don't have copyright or intellectual property, so we can use JIRA for free."
  • "It's not really expensive, especially when you compare to ServiceNow or other solutions, and it's not expensive to maintain."
  • More JIRA Service Management Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "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."
  • "The price is very competitive."
  • "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."
  • "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."
  • "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."
  • More Zendesk Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:JIRA Service Management is a very user-friendly solution.
    Top Answer:It is one of the premium products on the market, but it is very costly, especially in the Indian market. Smaller organizations cannot afford it. We pay monthly licensing costs. We only have to pay for… more »
    Top Answer:It's a very stable tool, very powerful.
    Top Answer: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. The pricing is expensive. Back then, we were paying $51 per… more »
    Top Answer:It has a huge problem regarding the price. The price increases every year. Every year, they raise the price of the licenses, which makes a lot of limitations, and you have to pay more. So that's some… more »
    Ranking
    2nd
    out of 59 in Help Desk Software
    Views
    8,100
    Comparisons
    5,654
    Reviews
    36
    Average Words per Review
    550
    Rating
    8.2
    10th
    out of 59 in Help Desk Software
    Views
    3,419
    Comparisons
    2,193
    Reviews
    5
    Average Words per Review
    560
    Rating
    8.2
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    JIRA Service Desk
    Zendesk Support, Zendesk Guide, Zendesk Sell
    Learn More
    Overview

    JIRA Service Management is Atlassian’s IT service management (ITSM) solution. It unlocks all teams at high velocity by:

    1. Accelerating the flow of work between IT teams, development teams, and business teams

    2. Empowering teams to deliver their service more quickly

    3. Bringing visibility to their work

    Built on JIRA, JIRA Service Management enables best practices across request, incident, problem, change, knowledge, asset, and configuration management so that teams can streamline collaboration between themselves. More than 30,000 customers of all sizes rely on JIRA Service Management to deliver service.

    JIRA Service Management Features

    JIRA Service Management has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Request management: Allows businesses to manage work across teams with one platform so employees and customers get the help they need quickly.
    • Problem management: To minimize the impact of incidents, this feature groups incidents, fast-tracks root cause analysis, and records workarounds.
    • Change management: IT teams are empowered by richer contextual information around changes from software development tools. This helps them minimize risk and make better decisions.
    • Asset management: Manage inventory efficiently, track lifecycles and ownership, and reduce costs.
    • Configuration management: Attain visibility into the infrastructure that supports critical services and applications. Understand service dependencies to minimize risk.
    • Incident management: The solution brings development and IT teams together to rapidly respond to, resolve, and learn from incidents.
    • Knowledge management: While fostering team collaboration, the solution enables self-service, deflection of more requests, and management of knowledge articles.

    JIRA Service Management Benefits

    There are many benefits to implementing JIRA Service Management. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • The solution empowers all teams across IT, development, and business with intuitive, flexible workflows.
    • Work is made visible through the open and collaborative JIRA platform.
    • Connect IT and development on a single platform to accelerate workflow.
    • Gain significant ROI with competitive pricing on useful features.
    • Benefit from faster time to value by implementing a full ITSM solution in just a few months.
    • Lower total cost of ownership without expensive ongoing maintenance and upgrades.
    • Enjoy a broad ecosystem of more than 4,000 best-in-class apps and integrations.

    Reviews from Real Users

    JIRA Service Management stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Some of these include its stability, its easy customization, and its seamless integration with other solutions. PeerSpot users take note of the advantages of these features in their reviews:

    Abhishek S., a Program Lead at PureSoftware, writes of the solution, “You can scale the solution whether it is deployed to the cloud or the data center. While we might have up to 5,200 people using the solution, we do not require that many licenses, as only those dealing with the tickets are required to be licensed.”

    Andrew B., a Technical Engineer at a consultancy firm, notes, “One of the valuable features is that an automatic response or action can be taken on tickets. We can have certain responses for tickets that contain keywords or are logged and tagged with certain labels.”

    Zendesk Support is intuitive, and it's built with support agents in mind. Everything they need lives in a single, dynamic help desk interface so it's easy to be productive and manage customer interactions.

    Sample Customers
    mgm technology partners, Telestream, Build.com, Zend Technologies, OfficeDrop, PGS Software, American Diabetes Association, NEPTUNE Canada
    Mailchimp, Tesco, Vimeo, Instacart, Mediaocean, Slack, Uber
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company35%
    Comms Service Provider12%
    Retailer9%
    Transportation Company6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company18%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    Government7%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company24%
    Financial Services Firm14%
    Construction Company10%
    Non Profit7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company21%
    Educational Organization10%
    Financial Services Firm6%
    University6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business38%
    Midsize Enterprise28%
    Large Enterprise35%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise59%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business46%
    Midsize Enterprise35%
    Large Enterprise19%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise56%
    Buyer's Guide
    JIRA Service Management vs. Zendesk
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about JIRA Service Management vs. Zendesk and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    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, BMC Helix ITSM, Freshdesk and Freshservice, 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.

    We monitor all Help Desk Software reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.