Zendesk review: An honest look for 2025

You’ve probably heard of Zendesk. It’s a huge name in customer service software, and for good reason. Tons of businesses use it to keep their support operations running. But if you start looking at what real users are saying, the story gets a bit more complicated.

Despite its popularity, a growing number of customer concerns show that while Zendesk is a powerful tool, it can also be held back by high prices, slow support, and an AI that doesn’t always deliver. So, is Zendesk the right choice for you in 2025? This honest Zendesk review will walk you through its features, pricing, and what real people are saying to help you make a smart decision ,and show you how to get more out of it if you’re already a customer.

So, What is Zendesk Anyway?

At its heart, Zendesk is an AI-powered customer service platform. Its main job is to pull all your customer conversations ,from email, chat, phone, or social media ,into one tidy ticketing system. This gives your support agents a single screen to track, manage, and solve every customer problem.

The whole system is built around Zendesk for Service, which includes tools for ticketing, reporting, and letting customers help themselves. It’s made to grow with your business, but as you’ll see, that growth often comes with a steep price and a lot of setup headaches.

A Zendesk review of its core features: What works and what doesn’t

Zendesk’s biggest strength is its massive list of features, but honestly, that can also be its biggest weakness. Let’s break down the main parts based on what users are actually experiencing.

Ticketing System and Agent Workspace

The good: The platform does a great job of pulling all your requests into one place. It creates a single source of truth for every customer interaction, which is a huge win for any support team. The unified Agent Workspace lets agents handle conversations from different channels in one view, helping them stay organized without constantly switching between tabs.

The not-so-good: While it’s powerful, the interface can feel clunky and not very intuitive, especially for new team members. Feedback on Quora often mentions that just getting the system set up takes a lot of time and technical skill. One user even said it felt like "something developed 15 or 20 years ago." Ouch.

Multichannel support and self-service

The good: Managing all your support channels in one spot is a huge help. Zendesk also gives you a knowledge base tool, Zendesk Guide, so you can build help centers and FAQ pages. The goal is to answer common questions before they even become tickets, which is great for lightening your team’s load.

The not-so-good: Here’s the catch: important features like the knowledge base are often only available on the more expensive plans. On top of that, users on TrustRadius have pointed out that the self-service tools can be a pain to keep up-to-date, with some complaining about bad search functionality and no way to track article versions. This means your help center can become stale and useless, which just frustrates customers more.

Customization and integrations

The good: Zendesk gives you a ton of options to customize things with triggers, automations, and custom fields. Its marketplace also has over 1,800 third-party apps, so you can connect it to almost any other tool you use, from Shopify to Slack.

The not-so-good: This is a classic double-edged sword. All that flexibility is great, but making any real customizations usually means you need a dedicated IT person, a decent budget, and some serious technical chops. For smaller teams, that’s a huge hurdle. As one reviewer put it, this can make the platform "extortionate for non-enterprise business" once you add up the costs of making it fit your workflow.

A critical Zendesk review of its AI and automation

These days, you can’t talk about a help desk without talking about AI. Zendesk has its own built-in AI, but user reviews suggest this is one of the platform’s biggest weak spots.

What Zendesk’s built-in AI does

Zendesk’s AI tools are meant to make support easier. They offer intelligent triage to automatically sort and send tickets to the right person, AI bots that answer simple questions using your help articles, and suggested replies to help agents work faster. On paper, it all sounds fantastic. In reality, it often doesn’t quite hit the mark.

The real-world limitations

Feedback from sites like TrustRadius consistently points out where Zendesk’s AI falls short.

• Users find it pretty basic. One person bluntly said the AI was "not much better than an FAQ page." That’s because Zendesk’s AI mostly just pulls from your public help articles, which are often incomplete. It doesn’t learn from the most valuable information you have: the thousands of past conversations your team has already had.

• It can get expensive and confusing. AI features are usually stuck in the more expensive plans or sold as pricey add-ons. Some users have mentioned confusing pricing based on "resolution credits," where you pay for each AI interaction. This makes it really hard to guess your costs and see if you’re actually getting your money’s worth.

• It doesn’t really learn from your team’s past work. Since the AI can’t effectively learn from your team’s resolved tickets, it struggles with tricky or detailed questions. This leaves your agents to clean up the mess, which kind of defeats the whole point of automation.

A Better approach: Adding a smart AI layer

The good news is you don’t have to throw out your entire help desk to get AI that actually works. A modern tool like eesel AI acts as an intelligent layer on top of your current Zendesk setup, fixing these exact problems without forcing you through a painful switch.

• It knows more. eesel AI trains on all your company knowledge. That includes your help center, but more importantly, it learns from your past tickets, saved replies, and internal docs in places like Confluence or Google Docs. This lets it give much more accurate and relevant answers than a simple FAQ bot ever could.

• No need to start from scratch. You keep your Zendesk setup and all the workflows you’ve already built. eesel’s AI Agent plugs right in to handle frontline support on its own, while the AI Copilot helps your human agents by drafting replies that sound just like them.

• Clear and simple value. eesel’s pricing is based on interactions, so it’s straightforward and predictable. It’s designed to give you an immediate positive return by handling tickets automatically, making your team more efficient, and letting you handle more customers without hiring more people.

Here’s a simple look at how it works:

Pricing, plans, and the real cost

If there’s one complaint that pops up in almost every Zendesk review, it’s the price. Let’s look at the pricing plans and talk about whether it’s actually worth it.

Its Pricing Plans

Zendesk’s pricing is split into tiers, and you have to pay more to unlock better features. Here’s a quick look at their plans, based on their pricing page in 2025.

Plan	Price (per agent/month, billed annually)	Ideal For
Suite Team	$55	Small teams just getting started
Suite Growth	$89	Growing teams that need more customization
Suite Professional	$115	Bigger teams that need analytics & AI
Suite Enterprise	Custom	Large companies with complex setups

The Big Question: Is It Worth the Money?

For many small to mid-sized businesses, the answer is often no. Users frequently call the pricing "extortionate," especially since the per-agent cost adds up fast as your team grows. Even worse, important tools for AI, security, and custom agent permissions are only available on the most expensive enterprise plans, which leaves smaller customers feeling left out.

Calculating the Real Return with AI Automation

This is where you can flip the script on Zendesk’s high costs. Instead of thinking about hiring another agent for $115/month, think about what an AI agent could do instead. By automatically handling 30-50% of your incoming tickets, an AI layer doesn’t just save you salary costs ,it makes every expensive Zendesk seat you’re already paying for way more productive.

When you frame a tool like eesel AI not as an extra expense but as something that makes your existing software more powerful, it’s much easier to see the positive return.

The final Zendesk review verdict

After all that, where do we stand? Zendesk is a solid platform with a lot going for it, but it’s not without its flaws.

Criteria	Our Verdict
Usability	🟢 Good for pros, but can be tough for newcomers.
Features	🟢 Excellent for core ticketing and handling multiple channels.
Native AI	🟠 It’s there, but pretty basic. You’ll likely outgrow it fast.
Pricing	🔴 The biggest complaint. It’s expensive and the plans can be confusing.
Support	🔴 User reviews consistently say it’s slow and unhelpful.

The bottom line: Boost your Zendesk, don’t ditch it

Our Zendesk review shows it’s a powerful but imperfect tool. Its main ticketing and multichannel features are strong, but the overall value gets dragged down by high costs, notoriously poor support, and an underwhelming AI that just can’t keep up with what modern support teams need.

But moving away from Zendesk is a huge, expensive, and disruptive project that most businesses can’t justify. The smarter, faster, and cheaper move is to make it better. By adding a dedicated AI layer, you can automate your workflows, cut down resolution times, and free up your agents to focus on what they do best: solving the tough problems for your customers.

Ready to see how much more you can get out of your Zendesk team? Start your free trial of eesel AI or book a demo to see it for yourself.