HubSpot vs Zendesk: The ultimate comparison for 2025
Kenneth Pangan
Last edited September 25, 2025
Choosing the right customer service platform feels like a huge deal, doesn’t it? It’s one of those choices that can either make your team’s life a whole lot easier or leave you tangled in data silos with frustrated agents. Get it right, and everyone’s in sync and customers feel the love. Get it wrong, and, well, you’re in for a headache.
Two of the biggest names in the game are HubSpot and Zendesk, but they come at the problem from completely different angles.
The real question is: do you go for HubSpot’s all-in-one approach, where support is just one piece of a larger sales and marketing puzzle? Or do you pick Zendesk, which puts customer support center stage as the star of the show?
It’s less about which one is "better" and more about which philosophy clicks with your business. Let’s break it down and figure out what makes the most sense for you.
Defining HubSpot Service Hub and Zendesk
At a glance, HubSpot and Zendesk might seem similar since they both help you handle customer support. But their origins tell a different story, and that story shapes everything about how they work and who they’re for.
What is HubSpot Service Hub?
HubSpot Service Hub isn’t a standalone tool; it’s a piece of the massive HubSpot CRM platform that includes their well-known Marketing, Sales, and Operations Hubs. The big promise here is a single, unified view of every customer. Your support team can see the entire customer story, from the first marketing email they clicked to their most recent sales call, because it all lives in one database.
This is a huge plus for businesses already in the HubSpot ecosystem or for any company where sales and support absolutely must be on the same page, working from the same information.
What is Zendesk?
Zendesk, on the other hand, is a pure customer experience (CX) platform. It was built from day one with a single mission: to be the best tool out there for customer support. You can see this focus in its seriously powerful ticketing system, its detailed workflow automation, and its ability to handle huge volumes of customer requests without breaking a sweat.
Zendesk is the go-to for teams that treat customer service as a core part of the business, not just another department. If you need a robust, specialized tool to manage complex support scenarios at scale, Zendesk was pretty much built for you.
Core focus and ideal use cases
Digging a little deeper, you can see each platform is really designed for a different kind of team. Figuring out which group you belong to is the first real step to making a decision.
Who should use HubSpot Service Hub?
HubSpot is all about the all-in-one experience. It’s a great fit for businesses where the lines between marketing, sales, and support are a bit blurry and everyone needs to work together.
It really shines for:
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Startups and small businesses that want a free or affordable CRM they can grow with. You can start with the free tools and bolt on paid Hubs as you expand.
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Marketing-focused companies that view support chats as valuable touchpoints in the customer journey. With HubSpot, a support ticket can kick off a marketing workflow as easily as a web form submission.
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Teams that just want simplicity. If you prefer having one solid tool for everything instead of trying to juggle three different specialized apps, HubSpot’s unified dashboard is a massive win.
Who should use Zendesk?
Zendesk is for the specialists. It’s for companies with large, dedicated support teams that need all the power and flexibility they can get.
It’s often the top choice for:
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E-commerce and SaaS companies managing a high volume of tickets every single day across email, chat, social media, and phone.
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Organizations with tricky support needs. If you’re juggling multi-level service agreements (SLAs), building complex ticket routing rules, or need deep, support-focused reporting, Zendesk has the power you need.
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Businesses that build their tech stack with "best-of-breed" tools. Zendesk integrates smoothly with other top-tier platforms. Its connections with tools like Salesforce and Jira make it a reliable hub in a larger, specialized software ecosystem.
A quick comparison
So, let’s boil it down. HubSpot is your all-in-one player. Its main job is to be an integrated CRM and service platform, making it a dream for teams that need sales and support to be perfectly aligned. It’s built for simplicity. Zendesk, on the other hand, is the specialist. It’s a dedicated support tool through and through, designed for teams handling tons of complex tickets.
When it comes to CRM, it’s baked right into HubSpot’s core. Zendesk has CRM capabilities, but they feel more like an add-on. For customization, Zendesk gives you a ton of flexibility, while HubSpot keeps things a bit more contained within its own system. And as for ease of use? HubSpot is usually easier for newcomers to pick up, whereas Zendesk has a bit of a learning curve but packs more punch under the hood.
AI and automation
AI isn’t just a buzzword anymore; it’s essential for scaling customer support. Both HubSpot and Zendesk have gone all-in on their own AI features to automate responses and help agents work faster. But these built-in AI tools have some real-world limitations you should know about.
The limits of built-in AI
Here’s the catch with the AI you get inside platforms like HubSpot and Zendesk: it’s stuck inside its own little world.
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Siloed Knowledge: Their AI can only learn from the data inside their own platform. This means it has no clue about the brilliant troubleshooting guide your team wrote in Confluence, the product specs in Google Docs, or all that wisdom buried in old Slack threads. If the answer isn’t in HubSpot or Zendesk, their AI can’t find it.
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Rigid Workflows: The automation is usually limited to actions within their own ecosystem, like updating a ticket field. That’s helpful, but it prevents you from building truly useful workflows that connect different systems, like automatically checking an order status in Shopify and creating a follow-up task in Jira.
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No Confident Rollout: One of the most nerve-wracking parts of launching an AI bot is the uncertainty. How will it actually perform with real customer questions? Most built-in tools make it hard to test before you go live, which means you risk deploying a bot that just makes customers angry.
A better way: Layering on a unified AI
Instead of boxing yourself into one platform’s AI, you can add an independent AI layer that works on top of your existing tools. This is where a tool like eesel AI comes in handy.
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Unify Your Knowledge: eesel AI breaks down those knowledge silos. It connects to your helpdesk (whether it’s HubSpot or Zendesk) and all your other knowledge sources. It learns from everything, past tickets, help centers, Confluence, Google Docs, to get a complete picture and resolve issues accurately.
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Total Control & Custom Actions: With eesel AI, you’re in charge. You can set specific rules for what the AI should handle and build powerful custom actions that reach beyond your helpdesk. This lets your AI do things like check an order status or escalate an issue directly to the right engineering team.
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Test with Confidence: This is a big one. eesel AI has a simulation mode that lets you test your setup on thousands of your own past tickets. You can see exactly how it would have replied, get an accurate forecast of your resolution rate, and tweak its behavior, all before a single customer interacts with it. It’s a risk-free approach you just don’t get with the native tools.
eesel AI's simulation mode lets you test your AI on past tickets to confidently predict performance before going live.Integrations and ecosystem: Choosing your stack
A platform is only as good as the tools it connects with. Both HubSpot and Zendesk have big app marketplaces, but they each reflect their core philosophies.
HubSpot’s ecosystem is deep but centered on its own products. The real magic is how seamlessly its Sales, Marketing, and Service Hubs work together. It’s designed to keep you happily inside the HubSpot world.
Zendesk’s ecosystem is broad and built for a mix-and-match strategy. It’s meant to be the support hub that connects to other best-in-class tools, whether that’s Salesforce for CRM or a specialized analytics platform.
The challenge today is that most companies use a bunch of different tools, and the thought of migrating everything from one system to another is enough to cause a panic.
This is where eesel AI offers a much smoother path. It provides a unifying intelligence layer that doesn’t force you to pick a side or undergo a painful migration. It offers a one-click integration that sits right on top of your existing helpdesk, whether that’s Zendesk, HubSpot, or something else. You can get it up and running in minutes, not months, making your current setup smarter without messing with your team’s workflows.
eesel AI integrates seamlessly with tools like Zendesk, HubSpot, and Slack to unify your knowledge without a complex migration.A full breakdown of pricing
Price is obviously a huge factor, and both platforms have pretty complex pricing tiers that can be tough to compare side-by-side. Here’s a straightforward look at what you can expect.
HubSpot Service Hub pricing
HubSpot is known for its free tools, which are a fantastic starting point. Just be aware that costs can climb quickly on the higher tiers, which often require you to pay for a minimum number of users.
| Plan | Price (Billed Annually) | Key Features |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Basic ticketing, live chat, shared inbox |
| Starter | Starts at $15/user/month | Removes HubSpot branding, simple automation |
| Professional | Starts at $90/user/month (min. 5 users) | Knowledge base, SLAs, advanced reporting |
| Enterprise | Starts at $150/user/month (min. 10 users) | Custom objects, field-level permissions |
Zendesk pricing
Zendesk doesn’t have a free plan, and its pricing is aimed squarely at professional support teams. Keep in mind that many of the cool features, especially for AI, can be pricey add-ons or are only included in the top-tier plans.
| Plan | Price (Billed Annually) | Key Features |
|---|---|---|
| Suite Team | $55/agent/month | Ticketing system, messaging, 50 AI-powered bots |
| Suite Growth | $89/agent/month | Customer portal, SLAs, 100 AI-powered bots |
| Suite Professional | $115/agent/month | Skill-based routing, advanced analytics |
| Suite Enterprise | Custom Pricing | Custom roles, advanced security, sandbox |
An alternative pricing model
It’s interesting to compare these models to the approach from eesel AI. Our pricing is all about being transparent and predictable. You won’t find any sneaky per-resolution fees that punish you for doing well. Instead, our plans are based on a clear monthly interaction volume, and we offer flexible month-to-month plans you can cancel anytime. This makes it a scalable and predictable investment, without the surprise bills.
This video offers a detailed comparison to help you decide which platform is better for your business in 2025.
Choosing the right path for your team
At the end of the day, the HubSpot vs Zendesk decision really comes down to your business strategy. If you want a CRM where support, sales, and marketing all live together under one roof, HubSpot is the way to go. If you believe customer support is a specialized craft that deserves the most powerful tools on the market, then Zendesk is the clear choice.
But no matter which helpdesk you choose, the next logical step is to make it smarter. Relying only on the built-in AI tools can be limiting and lock you into a single ecosystem.
A more flexible and future-proof solution is to add an AI platform that works with the tools you already love. eesel AI enhances your existing helpdesk, brings all your scattered knowledge together, and gives you the confidence to automate support in a way that actually works.
Ready to make your helpdesk truly intelligent?
Don’t just pick a platform; pick an AI strategy. eesel AI plugs into HubSpot, Zendesk, and more in just a few minutes.
See how our simulation engine can predict your automation success today.
Frequently asked questions
HubSpot Service Hub is part of a larger CRM, offering an all-in-one platform for sales, marketing, and service, providing a unified customer view. Zendesk is a dedicated customer experience platform, purpose-built for robust, high-volume customer support at scale.
HubSpot is ideal for startups, small businesses, and marketing-focused companies seeking a unified CRM experience. Zendesk is better suited for e-commerce, SaaS companies, or organizations with large, specialized support teams handling complex, high-volume ticket management.
Both platforms’ built-in AI is limited to their own internal data, leading to siloed knowledge. Their automation is often restricted to their ecosystem, making it difficult to connect with external systems or confidently test AI performance before rollout.
HubSpot offers a free tier as an entry point, with costs escalating for professional and enterprise features, often requiring a minimum number of users. Zendesk does not have a free plan and targets professional support teams with tiered pricing, where advanced AI features are often add-ons.
HubSpot’s ecosystem is deeply integrated and centered around its own product suite, promoting an all-in-one approach. Zendesk offers a broader ecosystem, designed to connect with other best-of-breed tools, positioning itself as the central support hub in a diverse tech stack.
HubSpot’s CRM is foundational to its platform, providing a unified customer view across all departments, encompassing sales, marketing, and service. Zendesk includes CRM capabilities, but they are generally more focused on the support interaction history rather than a comprehensive, organization-wide customer profile.
