There are competitors but their general idea is “we’ve rethought support from the ground up (and Zendesk is not it).” Intercom for example, support through chat. The basic idea of the competitors is that you’re “not just a ticket” (another Zendesk zinger) - that any customer message should be part of a holistic strategy for communication, and also strategizing, upselling, etc.

Can you give some examples?

https://www.superagent.com/ is interesting

Sums up enterprise tooling in a nutshell. If it’s somewhat better than the last tool and more efficient in some ways then good enough is good enough.

For what it's worth, I evaluated all the obvious offerings about two years ago and settled on Help Scout and like it quite a bit.

My use case is pretty low volume so I could probably have succeeded with anything but it's been sophisticated and fast and easy to use so far.

I've been happy with Request Tracker for over two decades, but the scope of RT is also a lot smaller than ZenDesk. Just email-first ticketing, little more.

I agree. I used RT years ago when I was in IT and quite liked it. I’ve used plenty of the competitors over the years and they seems to be mostly worse versions of it.

However RT is really just a request tracker and doesn’t do some of the fancier pseudo PM stuff zen desk does. That’s a plus in my book since when I’m tracking tickets I don’t want a JIRA clone but worse.

Also it’s worth noting I haven’t used it in 10 years so it might have changed substantially since then.

Agree, anyone have a link to and/or list of competitors?

I've used https://www.enchant.com/ for two small companies over the last decade, and have been happy with them. Cheaper than Zendesk, and just much simpler to use.

Helpful, thank you!