A guide to the top Zendesk products in 2025

If your company uses Zendesk, you know it’s a beast for customer support. But let’s be real, navigating the massive world of different Zendesk products can feel like a full-time job. Are you using the right tools? More importantly, are you paying for a bunch of features your team doesn’t even touch?

This guide is here to cut through the noise. We’re going to pull back the curtain on the main Zendesk products, breaking down what each one does, who it’s for, and the honest pros and cons.

Because while the Zendesk suite is powerful, the biggest challenge isn’t just picking the right apps. It’s getting them, and all the knowledge trapped inside them, to actually work together. Stick around, and we’ll get to that, too.

What are Zendesk products?

First off, Zendesk isn’t a single tool. It’s a whole family of software built for customer service, sales, and pretty much any customer conversation. The main idea is to give you one central place to manage every single interaction your business has with its customers.

You can usually buy these tools in two ways: as individual products (like the basic "Support" plan) or bundled together in "Zendesk Suite" plans. The suites combine multiple products for a more all-in-one experience. Knowing the difference is pretty important when you start looking at features and what you’re paying for.

The main Zendesk products at a glance

Before we get into the nitty-gritty, here’s a quick cheat sheet. This table gives you a high-level look at the key players in the Zendesk universe.

Product	Primary Use Case	Best For	Included in Suite Plans?
Zendesk Support	Centralized ticket management	Teams needing a solid system for tracking and solving customer issues from email and social media.	Core features are in all plans.
Zendesk Guide	Self-service knowledge base	Businesses that want to let customers find their own answers and reduce common questions.	Yes, in all Suite plans.
Zendesk Messaging	Real-time chat and social DMs	Teams who want to offer instant, conversational support on websites, apps, and social media.	Yes, in all Suite plans.
Zendesk Talk	Integrated voice and call center	Support teams that get a lot of phone calls and need features like call routing and IVR.	Yes, in all Suite plans.
Zendesk Sell	Sales CRM	Sales teams needing a tool to manage leads, track deals, and see their sales pipeline.	Nope, this is a separate product with its own plans.
Zendesk Explore	Analytics and reporting	Managers who need to measure performance, spot trends, and make data-backed decisions.	Yes, with features that scale up with the plan.

The 6 core Zendesk products your business should know

Alright, let’s dive in. Here’s a detailed breakdown of the most important Zendesk products, what they actually do, and who they’re really for.

1. Zendesk Support

What it is: This is the heart and soul of Zendesk. At its core, Zendesk Support is a ticketing system that pulls in customer conversations from email, web forms, and social media, and then neatly organizes them into one shared inbox for your agents.

Pros: It’s a workhorse for tracking customer issues from the moment they come in until they’re solved. You can set up all sorts of automated workflows with triggers and automations, and use Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to make sure your team is hitting its response time targets.

Cons: It’s mostly built for reactive support. The biggest headache for agents is that they constantly have to click away from a ticket to hunt down information. One minute they’re in Zendesk, the next they’re digging through a separate knowledge base, internal wikis, or old Slack threads. That tab-hopping is a huge time-waster and often leads to slower, inconsistent answers.

Pricing: You can buy Zendesk Support as a standalone "Support Team" plan, starting at $19 per agent/month (billed annually). The main ticketing features are also included in all the bigger Zendesk Suite plans.

Who it’s for: Just about any company that needs a reliable, central system to manage and answer customer questions.

2. Zendesk Guide

What it is: Zendesk Guide is the platform’s knowledge base and self-service tool. It lets you create, organize, and publish a help center filled with articles, FAQs, and how-to guides for customers or your own internal team.

Pros: It’s great for deflecting all those repetitive questions that eat up your support team’s time. By giving customers a place to find answers 24/7, you free up your agents to tackle the trickier problems. It also connects with Zendesk Support to suggest relevant articles to agents as they work on tickets.

Cons: A knowledge base is only as good as the information inside it. Keeping Guide up-to-date takes a lot of manual work. If your content is old or missing key details, it just makes customers more frustrated. Plus, the information in Guide is often separate from the knowledge floating around in your team’s other tools.

Pricing: Zendesk Guide is included in all Zendesk Suite plans.

Who it’s for: Any business looking to scale its support by letting customers help themselves.

3. Zendesk Messaging

What it is: This is Zendesk’s tool for real-time, conversational support. It combines live chat for your website and mobile apps with integrations for social messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram.

Pros: It lets you meet customers where they already are and offer instant, personal help. The built-in Flow Builder also lets you create simple chatbots to grab basic info from customers before an agent even joins the chat.

Cons: Live chat really depends on having agents ready to respond right away. The native bots are also pretty basic, they follow a strict script and can get tripped up by complex questions, which often leads to a clunky handoff to a human agent and a bad experience.

Pricing: Zendesk Messaging is included in all Zendesk Suite plans.

Who it’s for: Companies that want to provide immediate, chat-based support and connect with customers on their favorite messaging platforms.

4. Zendesk Talk

What it is: Zendesk Talk is a cloud-based call center software built right into the platform. It allows your agents to make and receive phone calls from the same screen where they handle all their other tickets.

Pros: It’s totally integrated with the ticketing system, so every call automatically creates a ticket with a recording and transcript. It has all the standard call center features you’d expect, like IVR (those "press 1 for sales" menus), call routing, and call recording.

Cons: Setting up complicated call routing and IVR menus can be a pain to get right. And just like with email or chat, if an agent doesn’t know the answer, they have to put the customer on hold while they scramble to find information in other systems.

Pricing: Zendesk Talk is part of all Zendesk Suite plans, but you’ll have to pay usage costs for your phone numbers and per-minute calling.

Who it’s for: Support teams that offer phone support and want a complete record of every conversation, calls included, in one place.

5. Zendesk Sell

What it is: Zendesk Sell is a sales CRM designed to help your sales team manage their pipeline, track customer interactions, and automate parts of their outreach.

Pros: It has a clean, easy-to-use interface and a solid mobile app for reps who aren’t at their desks. One of its best features is its link to Zendesk Support, which lets your sales team see a prospect’s support ticket history. That context can be incredibly valuable during a sales call.

Cons: It’s a completely separate product from the main Zendesk Suite. Even though it integrates, it’s another tool and another database that your teams have to manage and pay for. This separation can sometimes make it harder to get a truly unified view of a customer’s entire journey with your company.

Pricing: Zendesk Sell is not included in the Zendesk Suite. It has its own pricing, starting with the "Sell Team" plan at $19 per agent/month (billed annually).

Who it’s for: Sales teams that want a dedicated CRM but also need to collaborate with the support department to understand their prospects and customers better.

6. Zendesk Explore

What it is: This is Zendesk’s analytics and reporting tool. It lets you build custom dashboards to measure all the key support metrics you care about, like first response time, resolution time, and customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores.

Pros: It’s a very flexible and powerful tool for digging into your team’s performance data across all your other Zendesk products. It also comes with pre-built dashboards to help you get started quickly without having to build everything from the ground up.

Cons: It can take a while to learn how to build truly advanced, custom reports. Even more, its insights are limited to the data that lives inside Zendesk. It can’t analyze information from other places your team relies on, which means you’re only getting part of the story.

Pricing: Zendesk Explore is in all Zendesk Suite plans, but advanced features like customizable dashboards are only available on the pricier plans.

Who it’s for: Team leads, managers, and anyone who needs to monitor team performance and use data to improve the customer experience.

The big problem with Zendesk products: A powerful suite that creates info silos

So there you have it. Zendesk offers a fantastic set of tools. But here’s the catch: the more of these Zendesk products you use, the more your company’s knowledge gets spread out and siloed.

All of a sudden, crucial information is everywhere. It’s in old Support tickets, carefully written Guide articles, agent macros, and probably a dozen other places outside of Zendesk, like Confluence or Google Docs. This forces your agents to constantly switch tabs and search multiple systems just to find one simple answer. It’s a huge drain on their time and the number one reason for inconsistent support.

This infographic illustrates how using multiple Zendesk products can lead to information silos and how a central AI platform can resolve this.

How to connect your Zendesk products with AI

This is where a smart AI platform can make a massive difference. Instead of trying to patch together the limited, built-in features of each product, you can add an intelligent layer that sits on top of your entire Zendesk setup.

eesel AI was designed for this exact problem. It’s not another helpdesk you have to switch to; it’s an AI platform that plugs directly into the tools you already use.

Here’s how it works:

• Bring all your knowledge together: The eesel AI integration for Zendesk connects to all your Zendesk products, including Support tickets and Guide articles. But it also connects to your external knowledge sources like Confluence, Google Docs, Notion, and Slack. It learns from everything instantly, creating a single source of truth for your agents and your AI.

This image shows the eesel AI platform connecting to various apps, including Zendesk products, to create a unified knowledge base.

• Automation that’s actually simple: You can get eesel AI up and running in minutes. The entire setup is self-serve (no endless sales calls needed), and its simulation mode lets you test the AI on thousands of your past tickets. You can see exactly how it will perform and what your automation rate will be before you ever turn it on for customers. This takes away the risk and keeps you in control.

The eesel AI simulation mode demonstrates how the AI would have resolved past tickets, showing the potential automation rate for Zendesk products.

With a tool like eesel AI, your Zendesk products stop being isolated islands of information and start working together as one hyper-efficient system.

Wrapping up: Choose the right Zendesk products, then make them smarter

Understanding the core Zendesk products is the first step to building a great customer service operation. Zendesk Support is your foundation, Guide helps with self-service, and tools like Messaging and Talk open up new ways to connect with customers.

But the real goal isn’t just to have a lot of tools; it’s to make them work together. The biggest wins come from breaking down the knowledge silos that naturally pop up between these different products.

Once you have your Zendesk foundation in place, the smartest next move is to connect it all with an AI layer that unifies your knowledge and automates your workflows.

Ready to see how AI can tie your Zendesk products together and automate your support? Start your free eesel AI trial and see it in action in minutes.