Zendesk pricing plans begin from just $5 per user, per month for the Zendesk Support Essential tier – making Zendesk, on the surface, one of the best value CRM providers a small business could choose. But, prices rise depending on the features you want – pick a Suite of add-ons and you'll be looking at costs of $89 per user, per month for Zendesk.

Though costs can rise depending on the options you're after, Zendesk is undoubtedly a great value CRM system. There's even a brilliant free trial for Zendesk to let you try the software out for yourself.

In this guide to Zendesk pricing, we'll walk you through the various price plans for each tier of Zendesk, plus what features you'll get for your buck. We also compare Zendesk to other CRM providers to help you decide which is the best CRM for your business.

The Zendesk Suite bundles Support, Guide, Chat, and Talk. It comes in two plans, Professional and Enterprise, with Enterprise offering an expanded feature set and 24/7 support.

Zendesk Support, the most commonly used single-serving app, has its own five-tier set of pricing plans, starting at just $5 per user, per month if billed annually. In our guide below, we've included an overview chart of each set of plans, along with a section further explaining what features each plan will give you, and which type of business will benefit the most from them.

First, here's the chart for the two Suite plans:

Zendesk Suite Professional

Professional is available for $89/month/user if billed annually and $109/month/user if billed monthly. This suite includes Support, Guide, Chat, and Talk, all accessible through a unified agent workspace.

Support features include reporting, dashboards, multiple ticket forms, and tools for email, Facebook, Twitter, and social messaging apps, as well as a web widget and the mobile software development kit (SDK) agents can use to create and modify apps. Guide features include an agent-only knowledge base, the Knowledge Capture App for easily addressing questions, reporting, multilingual content, and an AI-powered Answer Bot. Chat features include unlimited chats, triggers and departments, plus custom widgets, conversion tracking, and public and private apps. Finally, Talk's call center features include IVR phone trees, automatic ticket creation, call recording, voicemail transcription, call monitoring, callback from queue, and reporting.

This is the most attractive bundle for the average small to mid-size business: It includes all the essential features needed for a full CRM at a reasonable price, as well as plenty of additional perks. If your operation has a high need for customer support or a rapidly growing customer base, Zendesk Professional Suite is a simple, fast way to start serving them across all channels.

Zendesk Suite Enterprise

The Enterprise suite is priced at $149/month/user, billed annually, and $179/month/user if billed monthly. It offers every single feature from the Professional suite, plus more features and AI abilities, 24/7 support, and greater customization.

The additional Support features include custom roles and permissions, business rules analysis, multibrand support, satisfaction prediction, and guided mode. Extra Guide features include the ability to run multiple help centers, content cues for identifying knowledge gaps, and article lifecycle management. New Chat features include real-time dashboards, widget unbranding, web SDK, skills-based routing, and role-based security permissions. Additional Talk features include monthly diagnostics, failover on demand, and a 99.9% Talk-specific uptime guarantee.

Enterprise is a great choice for a business with the same staff operating across multiple brands. As for company size, this plan will be attractive for both large companies and scrappy-but-growing ones. You can always upgrade, however, so many businesses may want to start with the Professional suite first.

That's it for the full suite. Next, let's take a deeper look at just Zendesk Support. Here's the overview for Support's five plans:

Zendesk Support Essential

This starter tier costs $5/user/month billed annually or $9/user/month if billed monthly. Like all Zendesk Support plans, Essential include the Lite versions of Guide, Chat, and Talk for free. You'll get limited Support features in this plan, along with chat support from the Zendesk team (no email support).

When it comes to support for your customers, Essential has these features: Email, Facebook, and Twitter support, a web widget for embedding support on your website, Support SDK for adding support to your apps, , an essentials card, pre-defined responses, ticket sharing with a max file size of 50MB, contact forms, device data logs for app widgets, an overview dashboard powered by Zendesk Benchmark, SSL encryption, digitally signed emails, Two-Factor Authentication, agent device management, disaster recovery, network access restriction, an API rate limit of 10 RPM, and contact, ticket and interaction history. Plus, for an additional charge, add-ons for chat and phone support.

This is a great starter plan, offering just-the-basics support at a very low cost compared to every other plan, and will be the best option for a small bootstrapping company that needs to address customer support needs.

Zendesk Support Team

The Team plan costs $19/user/month billed annually and $25/user/month if billed monthly, and offers 8/5 email support from the Zendesk team.

Team includes everything in Essential, plus granular ticket grouping, custom business triggers and automations, custom user and organization fields, the ability to group contacts by a single organization, performance dashboards, public apps and integrations, an API rate limit of 200 RPM, and subdomain mapping, with access to over 90 computer-telephony integrations available as an add-on.

While still priced fairly low, this is a noticeable price hike, ostensibly justified by the additional features which offer grouping tools to help a business operating a single brand better track both customers and agents. That said, Team doesn't have a lot of extra customization for its price, and you might want to consider jumping straight to the next tier, Support Professional.

Zendesk Support Professional

Support's Professional plan costs $49/user/month billed annually and $59/user/month if billed monthly, and offers 24/5 phone and email support from the Zendesk team.

Features include everything in Team, plus: Dynamic ticket content that matches each user's language preference, the ability to define support business hours, SLA management, customer satisfaction ratings and follow-up surveys, automatic redaction, dashboards and reporting powered by Zendesk Explore (customizable with an add-on), an API rate limit of 400 RPM, and private custom apps and integrations.

Additional paid add-ons include extra storage, multiple ticket forms, conditional ticket fields, customer lists based on tags and user fields, and a collaboration add-on that gives agents greater messaging and commenting flexibility.

The Professional plan is a top option for businesses with a large group of customers that will need to be grouped by factors including tags, language used, and business hours.

Zendesk Support Enterprise

The Support Enterprise plan costs $99/user/month billed annually and $125/user/month if billed monthly, coming with guaranteed 24/7 phone and email support from the Zendesk team.

Features include everything in the Professional plan, plus: Skills-based routing, Guided Mode for automated ticket sorting, up to 20 active contextual workspaces, custom roles and permissions, a sandbox environment, multibrand support for up to five brands (or up to 300 brands with an add-on), an AI-powered Satisfaction Prediction, an email compliance archive, ticket rules analysis, audit logs, and an API rate limit of 700 RPM. Paid add-ons include a 99.9% uptime SLA, a specific data center location, the ability to configure for HIPAA, and a premium production sandbox (separate from the test environment, which is included).

Enterprise's features are powerful but only worth it if you have a team that knows how to use them and an operation large enough to benefit from implimenting them at scale. It's worth looking into if you have a global business operating multiple brands, and is likely the best Zendesk offering for a truly large company.

Zendesk Support Elite

Lastly, the Elite plan costs $199/user/month, billed annually — there's no monthly billing option.

Features include everything in the Enterprise plan, as well as a few add-ons that you'd have to pay extra for under Enterprise: Multibrand support for up to 300 brands, 99.9% uptime SLA, a specific data center location, and an ability to configure for HIPAA.

You won't get any additional features beyond those perks, however, despite paying twice as much as the closest plan. The Elite plan looks suspiciously like an overpriced option added solely to make the Enterprise option look like the cost-effective choice in comparison. We'd recommend taking a long look at Enterprise before considering Elite, if you look at it at all.

Zendesk Connect and Free Trials

Pricing for Zendesk Connect depends on the number of users your business will message each month, but charges $153/month for 2,000 users, billed annually. Businesses can sign up for a free trial of the Zendesk Suite or the Professional Zendesk Support plan, and Connect will be free for the first 14 days.

Zendesk Support Features and Benefits

The Support service is a software solution for managing a business's customer support tickets. It allows agents to create, prioritize, and track tickets from a single interface that meets customers wherever they are.

• Reporting and Analytics — Agents can track and manage metrics including tickets, response times, and customer satisfaction.
• Email — Support integrates easily with agents' inboxes.
• Facebook and Twitter — Customer interactions over these social networks can be quickly turned into tickets.
• Web Widget — Businesses can embed a widget in their site to send an alert, prompt a live chat (if using the Chat service), or guide customers to a help center (if using Guide).
• Mobile app — Support is available on Android or iOS mobile apps.
• Multi-language interface — Agents can operate on Support in 28 different languages.
• Device data log — Automatically log which device or app version a customer is using.
• Integrations — Popular CRM solutions that can be integrated include Salesforce, HubSpot and Zoho.
• Security — Two-factor authentication, SSL encryption, and digitally signed emails are standard.

The Support service is the backbone of what Zendesk has to offer: Purchase a Support plan, and you'll get Lite versions of Guide, Chat and Talk as well. Purchase the Suite, and you'll get a bundle of all four. Whatever the choice, a business interested in Zendesk's CRM tools is likely to start with Support.

Is Zendesk a good CRM system?

Zendesk provides the full services of a traditional CRM, but it also offers a suite of support apps that each allow a business to focus on one function of customer service. These can all be accessed under a single user interface, for businesses that choose to bundle multiple Zendesk services. Notably, the Enterprise price plan includes Zendesk Sunshine, the company's developer platform, which can serve as a complete CRM.

As a result of this segmented suite of services, Zendesk apps are easy to integrate with other CRM tools, such as Salesforce, or web apps including SurveyMonkey and MailChimp.

The raft of Zendesk CRM services includes Support, Guide, Chat, Talk, and Connect. The first four are sold together as a bundled suite that provides a basic customer support network for a business. This suite helps the business manage support tickets and talk to customers in real time with a messaging app and telephone, or through an AI.

This review doesn't cover all the apps or its competitors, but does take a look at the features of the five main apps and the Sunshine platform, as well as the support and pricing options available from Zendesk. Plus, you can get an accurate price for your business today by filling out our simple pricing quotes tool for CRM software.

Zendesk Guide, Chat and Talk

These services all help businesses fulfil tickets in additional mediums: Guide enables help centers, Chat enables messaging widgets, and Talk enables telephone call support.

Guide — This service helps businesses build a customized knowledge base for their agents and/or their customers.

• Customer Portal — allows customers to find solutions to their own requests
• Knowledge Capture app — allows agents to build and refer to a knowledge base to quickly resolve their tickets

Chat — This service lets agents chat with customers through a website widget.

• Pre-chat form — asks customers pre-set questions before connecting them to a live agent
• Shortcuts  — allows agents to set keystroke shortcuts to chat more quickly to common concerns
• Integrations — The chat widget can be conencted to WordPress, Shopify, Salesforce or JIRA.
• Chat history — Chat logs only last 14 days on Chat Lite, but are unlimited on every other tier of Chat's service plans.

Talk — This service helps businesses create online call centers built into Zendesk. 

• Local or toll-free numbers — chose a number or port in an existing one.
• Voicemails — customer voicemails can be easily turned into tickets or tied to a workflow trigger
• Answer in browser — Agents can take inbound or make outbound calls from within the Zendesk interface.

These features are all available in Lite versions, but can be more readily customized with fewer limitations by businesses that buy Professional or Enterprise service plans.

Zendesk Connect

Zendesk Connect is more difficult to explain than the other services, as it's an AI-powered solution that changes itself to address unique situations. Here's a list of example of how it helps keep customers happy:

• Automated Push notifications — Connect automatically identifies when to send needed reminders to customers
• Customized emails — Connect can craft better welcome emails by tailoring them to match individual customer's histories.
• Pop-ups — If customers tend to get stuck at certain spots on the onboarding process, agents can set up helpful explaining pop-ups from within Connect.
• Integration — Connect's segmentation allows agents to trigger workflows in a third-party system when needed.

A business can add as many users to a Connect account as they want without paying more, since the price for Connect depends entirely on the number of users that a business sends messages to per month. If a business has Connect but hasn't sent any messages, they won't be charged.

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