| Functionality | 6 <p>Hiver turns your email inbox into a lightweight Customer Support platform. It supports multiple channels, including email, live chat, phone calls, and WhatsApp. You can also set up a help center, create chatbots, and use basic AI and automation tools. However, it falls short of being a true omnichannel platform—each channel requires a separate inbox, which limits its efficiency.</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> |
| Ease of Use | 8 <p>Hiver is refreshingly simple because it operates directly from your inbox. The learning curve is minimal, and setup is one of the most intuitive we’ve seen. Most users will feel comfortable navigating the platform within an hour.</p><p>That said, the interface can feel cluttered. The support inbox is filled with too many tabs and action buttons, making it harder to quickly access tickets at a glance. A sidebar showing all tickets would be a welcome addition.</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> |
| Look and feel | 4 <p>Since Hiver integrates with your inbox, its visual appeal really mainly depends on your email interface.</p><p>However, for the support inbox - while functional, the layout feels crowded with too many labels and tabs. Some design elements aren’t responsive, causing text to spill out when resizing the screen. On the plus side, page load times are acceptable at 2–3 seconds.</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> |
| Customisability | 5 <p>Hiver’s customizability is limited. You can make small adjustments to your help center layout and add custom fields or reports, but routing and automation are restricted to individual inboxes. There’s no option for advanced configuration or coding, which may disappoint users who want more flexibility.</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> |
| Ease of Setup | 7 <p>Hiver offers a self-serve free trial to its platform. Initial setup is fairly straightforward since the platform effectively operates out of your inbox and thus takes less than ten minutes if you're using either Gmail or Outlook. Additionally since, Hiver lacks many facets for customizability, it doesn't take long to fully configure the platform either.</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> |
| Customer Support | 10 <p>Hiver offers delightful cusotmer support. Their 24/7 in-app assistance connects you to a human agent within seconds during every test we ran. Agents are knowledgeable, responsive, and willing to go the extra mile by providing personalized screenshots and videos. The help center also offers decent depth and quality.</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> |
| Integratability | 2 <p>Hiver includes only 9 pre-built integrations with popular tools like Aircall, Jira, Salesforce, and HubSpot. However, it lacks key integrations for industries like e-commerce (e.g., no Shopify support). While it does offer an API for custom integrations, this might not be sufficient for teams relying on niche tools.</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> |
| Ease of Migration | 1 <p>Exporting data is a pain point. There’s no bulk export option for contacts or conversations—you’ll need to download them one by one. Reports also can’t be easily exported, which is a pain.</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> |
