HubSpot Live Chat vs. Zendesk: Which software is better?

Discover the key differences between HubSpot Live Chat vs. Zendesk with our comprehensive guide. Get insights to make an informed decision.

In the world of customer support solutions, the competition between HubSpot Live Chat and Zendesk is fierce. 

Our analysis reveals Zendesk as the standout winner, thanks to its extensive feature set catering to diverse business needs. 

However, for smaller enterprises seeking cost-effective options, HubSpot Live Chat shines. 

Dive into our in-depth evaluations of HubSpot Live Chat and Zendesk to understand the intricacies of these platforms and which will be the best fit for you.

HubSpot Live Chat vs. Zendesk: At a Glance

Criteria	HubSpot Live Chat	Zendesk	Winner
SMB Guide’s Rating	8.5/10	8.6/10	Zendesk
Real-Time Messaging and Canned Responses	✅	✅	Zendesk
Live Chat AI and NLP	✅	✅	Tie
Customizable Chat Widgets	✅	✅	Zendesk
Visitor Tracking and Analytics	✅	✅	Tie
Multichannel Support	❌	✅	Zendesk
Multilingual Support	❌	✅	Zendesk
Offline Messaging and Availability	✅	✅	Tie
Handoff and Escalation to Human Agents	❌	✅	Zendesk
Security and Compliance	✅	✅	Tie
User Experience and User Interface	Easy-to-use	Modern and sleek	Tie
Integrations and Compatibility	Library of integrations	100+ integrations	Tie
Customer support	✅	✅	Tie
Pricing	Free – $90/user/mo	$25/user/mo – $149/user/mo	HubSpot Live Chat
Scalability	✅	✅	Tie

HubSpot Live Chat: Key Features, Pros, Cons, & Pricing

HubSpot helps businesses handle customer contacts, lead acquisition, workflow automation, and sales closure, alongside offering add-on tools for content creation to enhance inbound marketing efforts.

It’s best for both small-scale enterprises and large corporations. 

With its features covering a suite of tools like live chat, contact management, and sales automation, HubSpot emerges as a unified solution for enhancing client relations.

Pros & Cons

Pricing

HubSpot offers a free plan offering features such as form creation, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp integration, live chat, and email campaign capabilities for up to 1000 contacts across ten lists. 

Plan	Price per month	Price per month (billed annually)
Free	$0	$0
Starter	$20	$18
Professional	$1,780	$1,600
Enterprise	$5,000	$5,000

For businesses focused on sales, the Marketing Hub provides three tiers: Starter, Professional, and Enterprise, enabling live chat, landing page creation, email campaigns, multi-channel marketing, social media integration, and SEO support.

Zendesk: Key Features, Pros, Cons, & Pricing

Zendesk is a customer service solution hosted in the cloud, empowering businesses to provide tailored and smooth assistance to their clientele.

With Zendesk, you can interact with your customers through various channels such as email, phone, chat, social media, or self-help options, efficiently addressing their needs.

Pros & Cons

Pricing

Zendesk provides a selection of four subscription plans for its customer service software, priced between $55 and $115 per agent per month.

These plans vary in their offerings, catering to the diverse requirements and financial considerations of remote enterprises.

Plan	Price per month	Price per month (billed annually)
Suite Team	$69	$55
Suite Growth	$115	$89
Suite Professional	$149	$115
Suite Enterprise	Custom	Custom

Additionally, Zendesk extends a 14-day trial period for all its plans and offers a freemium option supporting up to three agents.

Real-Time Messaging & Canned Responses

HubSpot’s live chat feature allows seamless integration of the widget into your website and social media platforms, offering extensive customization capabilities.

Whether creating chat flows for direct visitor interaction or setting up automated bot responses, HubSpot provides flexible options to suit your needs.

Additionally, the platform offers snippets for efficient pre-written replies and chat labels for easy contact identification, enhancing the efficiency of your customer communication process.

Zendesk offers instant messaging features for quick customer communication via chat, ensuring reliable performance without delays.

The software includes canned responses, pre-defined templates for efficient chat replies.

These can be managed and customized from the Zendesk dashboard, with options for personalization using dynamic variables like the visitor’s name or location.

Integration with collaboration tools like Slack and Teams ensures co workers receive notifications even outside the CRM environment.

✅ Winner: Zendesk

Live Chat AI & NLP

HubSpot’s Live Chat feature facilitates real-time engagement with website visitors, allowing prompt responses to inquiries and seamless navigation assistance.

Included within the platform is a chatbot builder, enabling automated initial interactions with visitors to gather information about their queries before directing them to a live chat agent.

Additionally, HubSpot offers AI-powered email writing through its CRM, streamlining the creation of engaging email content and saving valuable time and effort for users.

Zendesk’s live chat AI and NLP capabilities intelligently understand and respond to user queries using natural language, managing complex conversations including information collection, issue resolution, and human agent escalation.

Professional and Enterprise plan users can access advanced AI features such as industry and organization-specific customization, AI intent automation, intelligent triage, and macro suggestion for administrators.

Built on the Zendesk platform, these chatbots seamlessly integrate with other Zendesk products like Support, Guide, and Chat, as well as third-party applications via APIs.

✅ Winner: Tie

Customizable Chat Widgets

HubSpot’s Live Chat widget facilitates real-time interactions with website visitors, allowing customization of appearance and behavior for an enhanced user experience.

From modifying chat headings to adjusting widget triggers, users can tailor the widget’s display through the Display tab of the live chat settings.

Additionally, customization options extend to email settings, enabling changes to accent colors and widget placement on the page.

Users can also create personalized welcome messages and adjust chat widget functionality, leveraging the HubSpot API for further customization.

This includes tailoring widget appearance based on visitor data or specific page URLs, and combining targeting options for a personalized browsing experience, enhancing visitor engagement and satisfaction.

Zendesk enables users to tailor their chat widgets, the chat windows displayed on their website or mobile app, to match their brand and website design.

With higher-tier plans, users gain extensive customization options, including personalized live analytics, customized agent roles, and private custom integrations.

Professionals and Enterprise-level subscribers can personalize user dashboards with pertinent information, aiding sales staff in understanding clients before engagement.

Additionally, users can adjust chat widget attributes like colors, fonts, logos, and positioning.

You also get automated greetings and pre-chat forms which can be configured to collect visitor information such as name, email, and phone number, allowing segmentation and targeted engagement based on visitor attributes or behavior.

✅ Winner: Zendesk

Visitor Tracking and Analytics

HubSpot facilitates comprehensive monitoring of traffic, visitor behavior, and campaign performance, alongside lead management and tracking at every sales stage.

The platform also offers Custom Reports for specific insights and a feature to restore deleted reports within a 14-day window, ensuring efficient lead nurturing and customer retention strategies.

Zendesk includes reporting features for monitoring customer support metrics like response times and satisfaction rates, enabling businesses to identify areas for improvement and optimize support processes.

These insights aid in understanding visitor needs, preferences, pain points, and expectations, facilitating better customer service.

Businesses can customize support and marketing strategies and identify potential leads for proactive engagement.

✅ Winner: Tie

Multichannel Support

It’s important to note that Hubspot Live Chat is primarily designed for website integration. While it excels in facilitating interactions on websites, it does not extend its capabilities to other channels such as apps, social media platforms, or other communication tools.

Users seeking multichannel interactions will need to explore alternative solutions that offer broader integration capabilities.

However with chatflows, users can create customized workflows to connect visitors directly with the appropriate team members based on their needs or the page they’re on.

For example, visitors on the pricing page can be connected to a sales representative, while those browsing knowledge base articles can be linked to a support team member.

Zendesk provides extensive multichannel support, allowing businesses to connect with customers across various platforms seamlessly. 

• Zendesk enables businesses to add messaging capabilities to their website or mobile app. 
• Zendesk supports integration with popular social channels such as WhatsApp and Facebook. 
• Zendesk integrates with business productivity tools like Slack, facilitating seamless communication and collaboration within the organization. This ensures that agents have access to all the necessary tools and customer context directly within their workflow, streamlining support processes and enhancing efficiency.
• Zendesk uses a centralized approach that ensures that agents have a comprehensive view of customer interactions across channels, enabling them to provide personalized service effectively.

✅ Winner: Zendesk

Multilingual Support

Hubspot Live Chat offers the flexibility to create chat flows tailored for multi-language regions, websites, or pages, allowing businesses to provide support in different languages.

However, it doesn’t inherently come with built-in chat capabilities for different languages. This means that businesses utilizing Hubspot Live Chat for multilingual support will need to manage language-specific interactions independently.

The onus falls on the business to ensure that its agents are equipped to handle inquiries in multiple languages. This may involve employing bilingual or multilingual agents, implementing translation tools, or integrating with third-party language support services.

Zendesk Chat allows businesses to send proactive messages tailored to visitors’ locations or languages. For example, businesses can send chat messages in visitors’ native languages or customize messages based on their location, such as offering promotions specific to certain regions.

You can also route chats to different agents or departments based on visitors’ locations or language preferences such as to agents fluent in specific languages or familiar with the nuances of certain regions, enhancing the quality of support provided.

Lastly, Zendesk Chat offers options for providing multi-language chat support through the Dynamic Content app and integration with Google Translate.

✅ Winner: Zendesk

Offline Messaging and Availability

With HubSpot Live Chat, conversations are seamlessly integrated into the centralized inbox, providing agents with a unified platform to manage and respond to customer inquiries in real-time.

By default, incoming chat conversations are routed to this centralized inbox, where agents can promptly address them as they appear.

However, there may be instances where agents need to temporarily go offline or are unavailable to respond to live chats.

In such cases, HubSpot Live Chat provides the flexibility to adjust the reply method.

Agents can switch the reply method from live chat to email, temporarily disabling the live chat function and directing incoming inquiries to email instead.

When live chat is unavailable, Zendesk automatically converts incoming chat inquiries into tickets, allowing agents to address them via other channels.

However, Zendesk offers additional functionalities to enhance offline support:

• Zendesk enables businesses to create custom offline forms and greetings. When live chat is offline, visitors can be greeted with a personalized message and prompted to fill out an offline form with their inquiry. 
• Zendesk integrates with Facebook Messenger, allowing businesses to link their Messenger account with Zendesk Chat. This integration enables seamless communication between customers and agents via Messenger, providing an additional channel for customer support. 
• Zendesk also offers integration with X Direct Messages, formerly known as Twitter Direct Messages.

✅ Winner: Tie

Handoff and Escalation to Human Agent

HubSpot Live Chat is entirely managed by human agents from the outset. There are no chatbots involved in the initial conversation handling process.

If escalation or handoff is required during a chat session, human agents have the capability to reroute the conversation to a new contact or team member. 

Also keep in mind that Chat Bots are distinct from the live chat widget.

Zendesk offers better and more advanced hand-off features.

When a conversation needs to be handed off or escalated, agents are notified of the pending support request based on the established routing flow configured within the Zendesk platform. 

Once a conversation is handed off to a human agent in Zendesk, the bot can no longer respond to the conversation. The responsibility for further interaction and resolution shifts entirely to the human agent. 

Additionally, Zendesk provides the flexibility to hand back the conversation to the bot if necessary.

This feature allows for seamless transition between automated and human-assisted support, enabling businesses to leverage the strengths of both approaches as needed to deliver efficient and effective customer service.

✅ Winner: Zendesk

Security and Compliance

HubSpot entrusts its infrastructure to reputable cloud providers such as Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services.

These providers adhere to stringent security standards and maintain audited compliance with industry-leading certifications such as ISO 27001 and SOC 2. 

HubSpot Live Chat also guarantees uptime levels between 99.95% and 100%, ensuring reliable availability for users. It also implements a rigorous access control model to regulate infrastructure access. 

Access is restricted to authorized employees whose roles necessitate it so that only individuals with a legitimate need can access sensitive systems and data.

Privileges within HubSpot’s infrastructure are also only assigned based on the principle of least privilege. This means that employees are granted access only to the resources and functionalities necessary for their specific roles and responsibilities. 

In addition to network security measures, HubSpot also ensures physical security for its infrastructure.

Data centers used by cloud providers like GCP and AWS are subject to strict physical security controls to prevent unauthorized access and protect hardware and infrastructure from physical threats.

Zendesk implements a range of enterprise-class security features to safeguard customer data and ensure its protection at all times.

They also regularly conduct comprehensive audits of its applications, systems, and networks to validate the effectiveness of its security measures and identify any potential vulnerabilities or areas for improvement. 

Zendesk complies with several industry-specific security standards and regulations to meet the diverse security requirements of its customers.

This includes certifications such as Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) compliance, which is essential for businesses handling payment card data, and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance, which is necessary for safeguarding protected health information. 

Plus, Zendesk uses continuous monitoring and improvement practices to proactively identify and address security threats and vulnerabilities.

This includes real-time monitoring of system activities, regular security assessments and penetration testing, and ongoing security training and awareness programs for employees.

✅ Winner: Tie

User Experience and User Interface

HubSpot’s platform boasts a user-friendly interface, ensuring ease of navigation even within its intricate modular pricing structure.

Whether on the free plan or exploring its myriad features, users find accessibility paramount, with intuitive design enhancing usability without sacrificing functionality.

Additionally, the software centralizes client information, streamlining the organization and fostering deeper insights into client relationships.

With comprehensive step-by-step guides for onboarding, HubSpot simplifies user adaptation, catering to both novice and seasoned users alike.

Zendesk promotes seamless cross-departmental collaboration with its sleek and user-friendly interface.

The dashboard presents vital data, tickets, and tasks for easy access. Intuitive tools like ticket forms, macros, triggers, automations, and workflows aid agents in swiftly addressing client concerns.

Customization options, including branding removal (available on Professional and Enterprise plans), themes, widgets, and applications, allow users to personalize Zendesk according to their needs and preferences.

Additionally, Zendesk offers streamlined onboarding with guided tutorials, videos, and webinars to help users get started promptly.

✅ Winner: Tie

Integrations and Compatibility

HubSpot has seamless integrations with over 100 third-party tools across sales, marketing, and customer support.

These integrations span live chat, advertising, CMS, email marketing, lead generation, SMS, video support, CRM, and survey tools.

Additionally, HubSpot offers API integrations and compatibility with Windows, MacOS, Linux, as well as dedicated Android and iOS apps.

Zendesk seamlessly integrates with a wide array of customer service tools and systems, including popular CRM, marketing, analytics, and support applications like Zendesk Sunshine suite, Slack, Jira, Mailchimp, Google Play, Zoom, and MS Teams.

Users can further enhance Zendesk’s capabilities by browsing and installing applications from the Zendesk Marketplace.Additionally, HubSpot offers API integrations and compatibility with Windows, MacOS, Linux, as well as dedicated Android and iOS apps.

Additionally, Zendesk offers APIs, pre-built integrations, and a marketplace featuring over 1,200 apps, enabling customers to connect Zendesk with other platforms and services effortlessly.

Integration processes are typically straightforward, requiring minimal preparation.

✅ Winner: Tie

Customer Support

HubSpot’s customer service stands out for its quality, accessible via phone, email, or live chat depending on your plan.

Additional services include onboarding strategies, interactive training, and 1:1 consultations, although these are reserved for subscription plans.

Yet, even with the free version, users benefit from access to a robust online knowledge base featuring guides, blogs, articles, and training resources.

Furthermore, HubSpot Support extends to social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter), offering helpful tips and tricks.

Zendesk offers 24/7 customer support with a 24-hour average response time via email, live chat, or phone. Users must first send a support request ticket through the Zendesk platform.

Self-help resources include documentation, FAQs, and community forums, with training courses and certifications available for skill enhancement.

✅ Winner: Tie

Pricing

HubSpot Live Chat’s pricing is built into the Hubspot CRM suite. It has a totally free option but to make the best of its features, you should opt for a pricing plan.

Plan	Price per month	Price per month (billed annually)
Free	$0	$0
Starter	$20	$18
Professional	$1,780	$1,600
Enterprise	$5,000	$5,000

Zendesk’s pricing can be broken down into the following.

Plan	Price per month	Price per month (billed annually)
Suite Team	$69	$55
Suite Growth	$115	$89
Suite Professional	$149	$115
Suite Enterprise	Custom	Custom

✅ Winner: HubSpot Live Chat

Scalability

Both HubSpot Live Chat and Zendesk offer powerful and scalable enterprise solutions to meet the diverse needs of businesses.

HubSpot offers a versatile approach to its products, allowing customers to purchase each product individually or bundle them together as part of the CRM Suite. 

Alternatively, customers can opt for the CRM Suite, which includes access to every Starter, Professional, or Enterprise product within the HubSpot ecosystem.

Bundling products together offers the advantage of discounted rates and ensures access to a comprehensive set of tools for marketing, sales, and customer service.

Zendesk offers a fully customizable enterprise plan tailored to meet the unique needs of businesses.

While specific pricing details for the enterprise plan may require discussions with sales representatives, Zendesk’s open and flexible architecture makes it easy to customize the platform according to specific requirements.

✅ Winner: Tie

Standout Features of HubSpot Live Chat

HubSpot Live Chat boasts cutting-edge AI-powered writing tools that adapt messages to both user and audience, ensuring precise tone adjustments and accurate recipient listings. 

Additionally, HubSpot offers integrated video marketing tools, enabling effortless inclusion and embedding of videos in email campaigns and landing pages.

With sophisticated video analytics, users can gauge the effectiveness of their marketing efforts by tracking metrics such as views, interactions, and exit points.

Standout Features of Zendesk

Zendesk enables users to oversee and monitor customer interactions across various channels like email, phone, chat, social media, and messaging apps.

This ensures a cohesive and seamless experience for customers across different touchpoints.

Plus, you get the Zendesk Sunshine suite which serves as Zendesk’s adaptable CRM platform, facilitating the connection and management of all customer data from diverse sources.

Users can tailor custom objects and events to track every facet of the customer journey, including products purchased, preferences, and feedback.

HubSpot Live Chat vs. Zendesk: SMB Guide’s Verdict

The final winner in our comparison is Zendesk.

With a fully developed solution for customer support, Zendesk is also far more scalable than HubSpot Live Chat which markets its solution as part of a comprehensive CRM suite rather than its own dedicated platform. 

While Zendesk wins overall, HubSpot Live Chat is a great starting point for beginners and existing users of the HubSpot suite who want an integrated solution.