| Functionality | 4 <p>Missive’s positioning as a more generalised tool for customer facing teams means that its overall feature set as a dedicated customer support tool is relatively lacking. To be more specific, Missive is best suited to smaller teams with low ticket volume who manage customer interactions across a range of social and email channels. That being said, its omni-channel support is well rounded, with only a native Slack integration being a possible major drawback of teams. Additionally, its rule based ticket routing and analytics filtering features are deep and offer room for a lot of customisability. </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 | 7 <p>We find Missive’s self-serve onboarding to be simple and intuitive. It would take an average SMB employee less than a day to become proficient in using the platform. Additionally, its web app is fast to load and easy to navigate for new agents.</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 | 8 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">We find Missive's interface to be modern, sleek, and fast to load. Both its light and dark themes are well designed and easy to navigate with clear accent colours applied to core features and buttons. </span></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 | 4 <p>At present, Missive lacks many customer facing features that you might expect from a customer support tool, such as a help centre. Additionally, it's live chat widget only allows for limited customisability focused on themes and colours.</p><p>That being said, there are some areas where customisability is a core strength for Missive. For example, the ability to centrally manage email signatures for all agents with the ability to add interactive surveys into them - or the ability to create rich, rules based workflows to route tickets.</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 | 8 <p>Missive offers a simple self-serve free trial for their platform. We found the initial setup to be very simple, taking less than 10 minutes. Setting up your first channels is also a simple process - for example connecting your email can be done with just a couple clicks instead of needing to set up email forwarding manually. </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 | 5 <p>Missive offers a dedicated customer support email which we find helpful and responsive (reply times were typically >24 hours). Additionally, its 'help' documentation is rich and answers most common issues and queries. However, we would have liked to see the addition of a live chat widget for support on more urgent queries.</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 | 5 <p>Missive provides a number of integrations with popular CRMs (Salesforce, Hubspot) automation platforms like Zapier. Additionally, it offers an API through which users can interact with data directly. </p><p>That being said, we found it missing some key integrations natively that we would like to have seen, such as a native Slack integration and integration with common project management systems (such as Jira and Asana). </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 | 5 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Users can export key data across a range of categories including past conversations, customer profiles etc. through self-serve.</span></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> |
