| Functionality | 3 <p>Ada’s positioning as an AI agent for customer support does mean that its overall feature set as a stand-alone customer support platform is lacking. Though Ada’s AI agent acts as a strong and easy to configure first line of defence, you’ll still need to manage handoffs to real agents elsewhere (which often means paying separately for other helpdesk platforms such as Zendesk). Additionally, you’ll find other common features, such as the ability to build your own help centre/knowledge base, missing in Ada. It’s something which you’re expected to build elsewhere, and provide as a source of training material into Ada. </p> | 10 <p>Zendesk packs all the essential support tools most SMBs—and even enterprises—could ask for. It stands out with the most comprehensive range of support channels in our curation, making it easy to manage seamless cross-channel communication with customers within a single ticket. Plus, its advanced automation, AI capabilities, and robust reporting features are hard to beat.</p><p>In our experience, Zendesk tends to be the go-to platform for companies looking to level up their customer support as they grow.</p> | 8 <p>Front offers most of the support functions that small and medium-sized businesses need, including live chat, email, and integration with channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Telegram. It also features a help center, comprehensive AI, automation, and reporting tools. However, it lacks advanced features like the extensive chat customizability and automation of the likes of Intercom and Zendesk.</p> | 7 <p>Help Scout is a lightweight tool that offers some support functionality that most SMBs will need. Help Scout allows you to offer support via live chat, email, social channels, and create your own Help Centre. It also has some basic automation, reporting and AI functionality.</p><p>However, it lacks support for phone, SMS and WhatsApp and a no-code chatbot builder to automate chat-related workflow.</p> |
| Ease of Use | 3 <p>Given its AI-centric focus, we found Ada to be relatively easy to use on initial set up. It would take an average SMB employee a few hours to be complete the initial configuration and create a functional AI chatbot. However, when progressing to more advanced features, such as setting up processes for an AI agent to execute, we found Ada to be filled with unclear terminology and often confusing UI. Whilst this may be a byproduct of the relative novelty of configuring AI chatbots, we find Ada unintuitive to use if you’re looking to get the most out of the platform.</p> | 2 <p>Zendesk has one of the steepest learning curves we’ve seen. The interface can feel overwhelming, with settings spread out across different areas like Zendesk Chat and the Admin Center. If you don’t have an admin with prior experience configuring and managing Zendesk, getting up to speed can quickly become frustrating.</p> | 9 <p>Front is one of the most beginner-friendly and intuitive support platforms we've tested. There were many things that stood out to us. It's clear Front uses simple language as opposed to industry jargon. "SLA" is "reply time goals". Automation templates come with graphics to show you exactly what's happening.</p><p>From an agent perspective, replying to tickets is exactly the same as replying to emails, making the learning curve extremely gentle. The onboarding is also excellent, offering clear, step-by-step guidance for setting up the system.</p> | 8 <p>Help Scout is easy to pick up, even for beginners. Its inbox feels just like an email inbox—clean, simple, and intuitive. In fact, it’s one of the most user-friendly interfaces we’ve seen.</p><p>That said, there are some pain points: Unlike most customer support tools, Help Scout doesn’t have a sidebar for quickly navigating to other tickets. Setting up custom views isn’t straightforward. Instead of filtering an existing view, you have to build a new workflow, which feels unnecessarily complicated.</p> |
| Look and feel | 5 <p>We find Ada’s high-level navigation to be modern and easy to use. However, chatbot configuration interfaces were often confusing and unclear with a less modern, dated feel to them. Additionally, whilst the web app was generally fast, some pages take 2-3 seconds to load.</p> | 4 <p>From both an agent and admin perspective, Zendesk’s interface feels plain, and some pages can come across as cluttered and overwhelming. But on the bright side, page load times are quick.</p> | 8 <p>Front offers a visually appealing interface that is fast to load. The design is clean and modern, making it pleasant to use on a daily basis.</p> | 9 <p>Help Scout’s interface is clean, colorful, and easy on the eyes. It’s fast, responsive, and pleasant to use.</p> |
| Customisability | 7 <p>At present, Ada’s primary customer facing feature is its AI chatbot. Within which you can configure basic elements such as logos, buttons and colours. However, there are additional layers of customisation available in terms of the tone, greetings and responses of the chatbot itself. These are deeply customisable and offer businesses a way to set their chatbots apart from the typical responses you’d expect from first time interactions with non-AI chatbots from competitor platforms.</p> | 10 <p>Zendesk offers a high level of customization for both internal and external pages. Externally, you can deeply customize the style and layout of your Help Center (supporting over 40 languages), even using custom code to make it uniquely yours. Internally, the agent workspace is also highly flexible—you can tailor the layout and how information is displayed, with dynamic updates based on the content of each ticket.</p> | 7 <p>Front offers a good level of customisability. Users can create custom fields, views, and reports. The live chat and help centre have standard customisation features, and there's a chatbot builder.</p><p>However, it lacks some advanced customization options like custom objects and custom actions. The level of customization available should be sufficient for most SMBs users, but power users might find it somewhat limiting. </p> | 3 <p>Customization is where Help Scout falls short. Without code, you can only make very basic adjustments to the live chat widget and help center. Automation workflows are limited, and creating custom reports from scratch isn’t possible. If you need heavy customization, you’ll likely find Help Scout restrictive.</p> |
| Ease of Setup | 4 <p>It's clear that though Ada does provide a self-serve free trial, that the product is designed to be experienced via a demo call. As such, we found the initial setup to be a little confusing, taking around 15 minutes or so. However, given its AI focus, we did appreciate the ease of certain features, for example, adding base knowledge is just a matter of pasting in links and Ada will parse and extract the relevant information.</p><p>To really get the most out of the platform, users will need to spend some time on configuring everything from tone to greetings of the chatbot - as such, full customization can take a week to put together.</p> | 3 <p>We found Zendesk's onboarding process to be clunky and a bit overwhelming. Configuring even a basic setup can take over 30 minutes, largely because the interface feels disjointed, with settings scattered in different places. Connecting your first channels can be especially frustrating—for instance, linking external emails requires manual configuration unless you’re using Gmail. And because the platform is so customizable, it’s easy to spend an entire week fine-tuning everything to fully unlock its potential.</p> | 8 <p>Despite it's power, we find Front to be one of the easiest tools to get started with in the sector. It offers a simple, self-serve free trial for their platform. Once in, the initial setup is very brief, taking less than 5 minutes. Connecting your first channels is a one-click process too across many core providers from social media sites like Facebook/X to email platforms like Gmail and Outlook.</p> | 6 <p>Help Scout offers a simple self-serve free trial for their platform. We found the initial setup to be slightly longer than necessary, taking around 10 minutes. Setting up your first channels may take some time though - with no easy one-click email connect option, you’ll have to setup email forwarding manually. When it comes to richer customisation options - the platform is fairly limited when compared to peers meaning it won't take long to get the most out of it.</p> |
| Customer Support | 7 <p>You can get support for Ada in two ways. The first, is via their own AI support agent. In testing we find it helpful for basic queries but ofte overy cautious in its responses and readily opts to hand off to a real agent. The second is via email - when tested, Ada's real agents were quick to reply (< 2 hours), knowledgeable and helpful.</p> | 2 <p>Multiple users we’ve spoken to have raised concerns about Zendesk’s customer support. A common frustration is the support team’s tendency to provide unhelpful responses, often redirecting users to irrelevant Help Center articles and requiring far too much back-and-forth. We also found navigating Zendesk’s Help Center to be a challenge—it’s missing the clear visuals and video guidance that other platforms do so well.</p> | 4 <p>Front's customer support is somewhat limited. Unless you pay for the "Scale" plan ($100 per seat per month, minimum of 20 seats), you only get access to email support. However, when tested, we've found the Front support team to be helpful and responsive.</p> | 8 <p>You can email Help Scout’s support team directly from the app during U.S. business hours. Their responses are generally quick (within a few hours), and Help Scout's agents always go above and beyond. The AI chatbot however, is weak point, offering unhelpful and generic responses.</p> |
| Integratability | 5 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">When tested, Ada doesn't yet have an extensive set of integrations compared to other CS tools. That being said, the majority of key integrations for larger businesses such as with Salesforce, are present.</span></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">We notice that whilst it's older rules based product offering did support a much wider array of integrations, these have yet to be ported over to its AI agent product.</span></p> | 9 <p>Zendesk boasts a massive ecosystem of pre-built integrations that cover most of the tools startups rely on. This includes popular CRMs like HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Salesforce, email marketing tools like Mailchimp, and project management platforms like Asana, Jira, and Trello. Beyond that, it offers an extensive marketplace for even more integrations, plus a robust API for building custom connections.</p> | 8 <p>Front offers over 110 pre-built integrations. These cover a wide range of commonly used apps including CRMs (Pipedrive, HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho), Project Management tools (Linear, Jira, Trello), and more. It also has an API for custom integrations.</p> | 8 <p>Help Scout offers pre-built integrations with over 100 apps, including commonly needed integrations such as CRMs, calling systems, project management tools, and email marketing platforms. It also has an API for custom integrations.</p> |
| Ease of Migration | 5 <p>Whilst Ada does not offer a self-serve data export feature, it's data export API is rich and well documented and covers all the core areas of data you'd want and expect to export.</p> | 8 <p>Zendesk allows you to self-serve export key data with ease. For most other data, exports are available either through the API or by making a request to their support team.</p> | 5 <p>Front's data export capabilities appear to be limited. While reports can be exported directly from Front, users need to contact support to export other data (e.g. conversations).</p> | 3 <p>Help Scout's data export capabilities are somewhat limited. While reporting data for selected reports can be exported directly from within Help Scout, most data can only be exported via API.</p> |
