Gladly vs Zendesk: CX Platforms Comparison + Better Options

Another late night. Another stack of unresolved tickets. Another round of frustrated customers.

You’ve tried it all: optimizing workflows, tweaking automations, training agents to work faster. 

Yet, some tickets still take forever to resolve—buried under endless clicks just to find a simple customer detail. Others keep bouncing between agents, leaving customers impatient and your team stretched thin. 

That’s why you’re here, trying to figure out whether Gladly or Zendesk is the answer.

• Zendesk is the veteran, known for its structured ticketing system and powerful automation. But the more you scale, the more it starts feeling like a clunky machine—forcing your team to work for the software instead of the other way around.
• Gladly flips the script, promising a customer-first approach where tickets don’t exist, and conversations flow naturally. Sounds great, until you hit its pricing model and realize it may not be built for every business. 

Now you’re left with two options: efficiency through automation or relationship-building through personalization. 

But is that really the trade-off you have to make? (We don’t think so.)

So, before you commit, let’s take a closer look. In this comparison, we’ll cover: 

• What Gladly and Zendesk actually deliver
• Their hidden limitations no one talks about
• The best alternative that might actually solve your CX headaches

Gladly vs Zendesk: General Overview

Gladly Overview

Gladly is a customer service software designed to streamline and enhance customer interactions through a people-centered approach. 

Unlike traditional ticket-based systems that prioritizes case numbers, Gladly unifies all communication channels (email, chat, SMS, voice, social media, and self-service) into a single continuous thread under each customer’s profile. 

This means agents have a lifetime conversation history, allowing them to understand past interactions without toggling between different screens or fragmented tickets. 

Gladly strengths: 

• Proactive Customer Engagement. Instead of waiting for customers to reach out, Gladly anticipates needs by analyzing past behavior and triggering automated responses or recommendations. This helps businesses increase retention and prevent service escalations before they happen. 
• Automated Workflows. Gladly automates ticket routing, prioritization, and escalations based on urgency, customer value, and past interactions. VIP customers, for example, can be automatically routed to senior agents, ensuring premium service levels for high-value clients. 
• Flexible Self-Service Options. Businesses can configure Sidekick to handle order tracking, FAQs, and simple issue resolution, reducing support volume while maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction. 

Related → The Top 16 Gladly Alternatives & Competitors Right Now 

Zendesk Overview

Zendesk is another helpdesk software that helps businesses manage support tickets, automate workflows, and provide omnichannel customer engagement at scale. 

With Zendesk, every customer inquiry (via email, chat, social media, or phone) is assigned a unique ticket ID that agents track through its centralized ticketing system. This structure ensures that customer issues are systematically logged, categorized, and prioritized based on urgency and business rules. 

For larger enterprises, Zendesk offers robust customization and integration capabilities through Zendesk Sunshine, an open and flexible CRM framework. Sunshine allows businesses to connect Zendesk with third-party applications, CRMs like Salesforce, and custom-built tools via APIs. 

Zendesk strengths: 

• Self-Service Capabilities & Knowledge Management. Businesses can reduce inbound support requests by leveraging Zendesk Help Center, which allows them to create FAQs, knowledge bases, and user forums where customers can find answers without agent intervention.
• AI-Powered Automation for Faster Responses. Zendesk AI enhances productivity by automating common inquiries, suggesting responses in real time, and analyzing customer sentiment to prioritize urgent tickets. This speeds up resolution times and improves overall service quality. 
• Advanced Ticket Routing. Automatically assigns tickets to the right agent based on predefined rules like issue type, customer priority, or sentiment analysis. Agents can also use Triggers and Macros to further automate repetitive tasks and save time. 

Related → Is Zendesk Worth It? Hmm... See The Pros & Cons 

Key Differences Between Zendesk and Gladly

Gladly:

• People Matching for Personalized Agent Assignments. Gladly’s People Match ensures that customers are assigned to the same agent whenever possible, maintaining continuity. Zendesk, in contrast, routes tickets dynamically, often leading to different agents handling different cases. 
• Built for High-Touch, Relationship-Heavy Support. Gladly is designed for brands that prioritize personalized customer relationships, such as luxury retail and e-commerce brands. Zendesk, while offering automation and efficiency, is more focused on structured, high-volume support workflows rather than high-touch interactions.
• No Ticket System. Unlike Zendesk, which relies on tickets with case numbers, Gladly structures support around customer profiles, where all interactions exist in a single, continuous conversation thread. This makes customer interactions feel more personal rather than transactional.

Zendesk:

• Better Scalability for Growing Teams. Gladly’s flat-rate pricing model makes it less flexible for small businesses or teams that scale up and down seasonally. Meanwhile, Zendesk’s per-agent pricing model allows businesses to scale without upfront seat commitments. 
• Extensive App Ecosystem & Integrations. Through Zendesk Marketplace, businesses can integrate with thousands of apps, including Salesforce, Jira, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and CRM tools. While Gladly integrates with e-commerce platforms, Zendesk offers a broader ecosystem for enterprise integrations.
• Ticket-Based Support for Organized Case Management. Zendesk’s ticketing system is ideal for businesses handling high support volumes, ensuring each issue is tracked, categorized, and assigned properly. Unlike Gladly, Zendesk enables detailed SLA tracking, custom ticket routing, and escalation workflows, making it more structured for enterprise-level support teams. 

💡Empower your business with AI that autonomously resolves customer issues, using advanced human-like decision-making and working with human agents.

Why Kustomer is a Better Option  

True Omnichannel Support Without Fragmentation

Compared to Gladly and Zendesk, Kustomer delivers a fully unified omnichannel experience where every customer interaction is centralized. This way, agents never have to jump between different tickets to understand a customer’s issue. 

Kustomer also features a flexible timeline-based system, allowing businesses to incorporate contextual data from CRMs, order histories, and past interactions into every conversation. 

Advanced Workflow Automation

Zendesk offers automation through triggers and macros, but it relies heavily on manual ticket categorization. This makes it inefficient for handling complex, multi-step customer journeys. 

Gladly, while offering proactive AI messaging, lacks the level of workflow customization that large enterprises need. 

Meanwhile, Kustomer provides AI-powered intelligent case routing, allowing businesses to: 

• Automatically assign inquiries based on agent expertise, past interactions, and urgency.
• Use predictive analytics to detect sentiment and escalate high-priority cases.
• Automate follow-ups, status updates, and proactive customer engagement. 

Transparent, Cost-Effective Pricing Model

Pricing is one of the biggest drawbacks of Zendesk, which follows a per-agent pricing model, making it expensive for businesses with growing teams. 

Gladly offers flat-rate pricing, which is an improvement over Zendesk but lacks flexibility for smaller teams or those with fluctuating support needs. 

However, Kustomer provides a more scalable and cost-effective pricing model that adapts to business needs. 

Businesses benefit from:

• No high per-agent fees. Costs remain predictable as teams expand.
• Built-in automation and AI tools without requiring expensive add-ons.
• Flexible pricing tiers that cater to businesses of all sizes, from startups to enterprises. 

Goodbye seat-based, hello conversation-based pricing—pay only for what you use 🎉

Gladly: Features, Use Cases, Pricing, Pros & Cons

Key Features

• People Match. Ensures customers are connected to the same agent whenever possible, creating a personalized and consistent support experience. 
• Hero AI. An AI-powered assistant that helps agents by suggesting responses, automating routine tasks, and generating conversation summaries to increase efficiency.
• Sidekick AI. Enables customers to find answers, resolve common issues, and interact naturally with AI before escalating to a live agent. 

• Liveboards. Offers real-time visibility into customer service performance, agent workload, and conversation statuses. Unlike static reports, these dashboards update dynamically, helping managers optimize agent efficiency and response times.
• Proactive Service. Uses customer behavioral data and history to anticipate customer needs and trigger proactive messages, helping businesses engage with customers before issues arise.

Main Use Cases

Luxury & High-Touch Customer Service

• Use Case: Luxury brands and premium service providers need to offer white-glove support, ensuring VIP customers get a personalized experience with the same agent whenever possible. 
• How Gladly Helps: People Match ensures that high-value customers are always routed to the same support agent, building relationships and improving customer loyalty. 

Subscription & Membership-Based Businesses

• Use Case: Companies offering subscription-based services, such as streaming platforms or SaaS products, need proactive engagement to reduce churn and improve retention. 
• How Gladly Helps: With Proactive Service, businesses can anticipate potential churn signals and reach out with personalized offers, renewal reminders, or troubleshooting assistance before customers cancel.

Hospitality & Travel Customer Support

• Use Case: Hotels, airlines, and travel companies need a centralized system to manage bookings, cancellations, and customer inquiries across email, phone, and chat.
• How Gladly Helps: Gladly Voice integrates call and messaging support into a single interface, ensuring agents have full visibility into a customer’s history, itinerary, and past requests without switching platforms. 

Pricing Plans

• Hero Package. $180 per user/month (10-seat minimum)
• Superhero Package. $210 per user/month (45-seat minimum)

Potential Concerns with Gladly’s Pricing Structure:

• High Entry Cost for Small Businesses. The minimum buy-in of 10 seats means businesses must commit at least $1,800 per month, making it a huge upfront investment for small to mid-sized teams. For startups or companies with only a few agents, this forces them to pay for more seats than needed, making it an inefficient spend. 

• No Pay-As-You-Go or Monthly Flexibility. Unlike competitors that offer per-agent, pay-as-you-go models, Gladly requires businesses to commit to an expensive minimum. Also, no monthly billing options mean customers are locked into an expensive structure, reducing flexibility.
• Limited Appeal for Seasonal Teams. Businesses that operate on a seasonal basis (e.g., e-commerce during holidays) can’t easily scale up or down without committing to a minimum of 10 or 45 agents. 
• Expensive Compared to Competitors. Competitors like Kustomer, Gorgias, Zendesk, Freshdesk, and Intercom offer more affordable plans (starting at $19–$99 per agent/month) with similar omnichannel support. 

Pros of Gladly

• Enhanced Interaction Management. Gladly allows easy access to previous interactions and follow-up tasks, with new features like call timers to prepare for incoming calls and visibility into coworkers’ activities [*]. 

• Comprehensive Admin Tools. Gladly enables users to handle multiple communication forms without switching screens. It also offers detailed conversation notes, and provides extensive data access for in-depth interaction analysis [*].
• Integrated Customer Database. Gladly organizes all customer interactions from different channels in one place, creating a complete picture of each customer. It also features a Grammarly integration, which helps teams respond faster and write more in a professional tone. The spell-check feature is particularly valuable for international team members who use English as their second language [*]. 

Cons of Gladly

• Technical and Functional Glitches. Users occasionally face issues with customer profile linking, email visibility, and loading of macros or templates [*]. 

• Problems in Availability Settings. The design occasionally obstructs the ability to go unavailable for calls and chats, complicating task management during active conversations [*]. 
• Interface and Usability Issues. Problems include simultaneous chat and call handling, small font sizes, and lengthy timelines, which affect the user experience [*]. 

💡Alternative to Gladly: Kustomer

Gladly’s ‘people, not tickets’ approach is great and makes conversations feel personal. But it doesn’t give complete context when conversations move across different channels. 

Kustomer, on the other hand, offers the ‘Customer Timeline’ feature, giving agents a comprehensive historical view of all customer interactions in one unified thread.

For example, Kustomer can display a conversation that started via email, continued through chat, and concluded with a phone call in a single timeline view. 

You’d be saving about 15-20% of handle time that would have been spent piecing together conversation fragments. 

“We pull every omnichannel customer touchpoint into Kustomer, which gives our agents a complete view of our customer. So, whenever someone reaches out with an issue, our agents can quickly see what’s going on and solve the problem.”  — Michael Ludwig, Head of Customer Experience, Hexclad. [Read Case Study]

👀 Did you know? Kustomer offers interactive voice response (IVR) capabilities, allowing businesses to manage inbound phone support. 
Calls can be routed to the right agent or self-service options based on pre-set rules. Checkout AI Agent for Voice.

Zendesk: Features, Use Cases, Pricing, Pros & Cons

Key Features

• Agent Workspace. A unified interface that consolidates email, chat, phone, social, and self-service requests into a single view, enabling agents to switch between channels seamlessly. 
• Zendesk AI. AI-powered automation engine that provides response suggestions, chatbot-driven self-service, and sentiment analysis to improve efficiency and reduce agent workload. 
• Flow Builder. No-code automation tool that allows businesses to create conversational workflows for chatbots and self-service experiences. It enables drag-and-drop functionality to design automated responses and guide users through support resolutions. 
• Zendesk Help Center. Self-service knowledge base where businesses can publish FAQs, articles, and community forums to enable customers to find answers on their own.
• Side Conversations. Collaboration tool that allows agents to bring internal teams (like IT, finance, or legal) into conversations without disrupting the main customer interaction. 

Main Use Cases

Enterprise Customer Support

• Use Case: Large businesses with high ticket volumes need a structured support system to handle inquiries efficiently while maintaining SLAs.
• How Zendesk Helps: Zendesk Agent Workspace centralizes all interactions into trackable tickets, and Skills-Based Routing ensures that each issue is assigned to the most qualified agent. The SLA Management feature also helps teams meet response and resolution time commitments. 

E-Commerce & Retail Order Management

• Use Case: Online stores and retailers need a fast, automated way to handle customer inquiries about orders, shipping, and returns.
• How Zendesk Helps: With Zendesk Help Center, businesses can create self-service options for customers to check order statuses. Zendesk AI and Flow Builder power automated responses and chatbot-driven assistance, reducing the need for live agents. 

Internal IT Helpdesk & Employee Support

• Use Case: Companies managing internal IT support, HR inquiries, and facilities requests need a streamlined way to handle employee tickets and technical issues.
• How Zendesk Helps: With the Help Center, businesses can create internal knowledge bases and self-service portals for employees, reducing IT and HR workloads. Side Conversations also enables IT teams to collaborate with other departments without disrupting ticket resolution. 

Pricing Plans

Zendesk offers three different pricing plans: Support Plans, Suite Plans, and Sell Plans. 

Zendesk Support:

Designed for businesses focusing on customer service through email, tickets, and basic integrations.

• Support Team. $19 per agent/month
• Support Professional. $55 per agent/month
• Support Enterprise. $115 per agent/month

Zendesk Suite:

Tailored for businesses that need an omnichannel customer support solution across multiple communication channels. 

• Suite Team: $55 per agent/month
• Suite Growth. $89 per agent/month
• Suite Professional. $115 per agent/month
• Suite Enterprise. $169 per agent/month
• Suite Enterprise Plus. Custom pricing (requires a quote)

Zendesk Sell Plans:

Tailored for sales teams aiming to enhance customer relationship management and sales tracking capabilities

• Sell Team. $19 per agent/month
• Sell Growth. $55 per agent/month
• Sell Professional. $115 per agent/month
• Sell Enterprise. $169 per agent/month

Add-ons: 

• Advanced AI. $50 per agent/month. 
• Zendesk Workforce Management. $25 per agent/month
• Zendesk Quality Assurance. $35 per agent/month
• Zendesk Workforce Engagement Bundle. $50 per agent/month
• Advanced Data Privacy and Protection. $50 per agent/month

Potential Concerns with Zendesk’s Pricing Structure:

• Forced Bundling in Suite Plans. If a business only needs ticketing and live chat, they are forced to pay for other bundled tools (e.g., help center, messaging, AI) even if they won’t use them. 
• Lack of Flexibility in Agent Pricing. No pay-as-you-go model – businesses must commit to per-agent pricing, even if agents work part-time. Plus, the Agent Months add-on (which allows temporary agents) is only available for Enterprise customers, making it difficult for seasonal businesses to scale up or down. 
• Overlapping Plans with Similar Features. Zendesk offers multiple pricing tiers across its Support, Suite, and Sell plans, and some features appear to overlap between them.
  • For example, the Suite Team ($55/agent) and Support Professional ($55/agent) seem similar in pricing but cater to different needs, making it unclear which one is better for a particular business.  
• Complex API Pricing. Businesses needing high API limits must purchase the High Volume API add-on, which requires at least 10 agent seats. This restriction makes it less attractive for small teams that want to automate their workflow. 

Pros of Zendesk

• Customizable and Supportive. Zendesk offers customizable options for enterprise organizations, making it easy to integrate with existing systems like SaaS cloud authentication, supported by helpful engineering assistance [*]. 

• Unified Communications Hub. The user interface simplifies managing all customer interactions (email, chat, phone) in one place with automated workflow tasks [*]. 
• Enhanced Productivity Tools. Zendesk offers comprehensive reporting through their Explore feature, with customizable dashboards to track key metrics. It also simplifies knowledge base creation and provides a professional customer portal for clients [*]. 

Cons of Zendesk

• Inadequate Customer Support. Users criticize Zendesk’s account management and customer support team for their lack of responsiveness, with ongoing issues unresolved despite upgrades and repeated communications [*]. 

• Slow Response Times. Response times from Zendesk support are slow, and account managers are difficult to reach, leading to frustrations in getting timely assistance [*].
• Complex Setup. Initial setup of Zendesk is time-consuming and complex, requiring significant customization to match company workflows and reporting needs [*]. 

💡Alternative to Zendesk: Kustomer

Zendesk excels as a platform built on the ticket—a system designed for processing discrete issues one at a time. Each customer interaction creates a separate ticket with its own number, status, and history.

While this approach works for simple, transactional support scenarios, it breaks down when:

• A customer has related questions spanning multiple tickets
• Issues persist or evolve over time
• Multiple users from the same company report similar problems

Kustomer eliminates these roadblocks by unifying all interactions from various channels into a single, chronological view. 

In addition, Kustomer offers Kustomer IQ, an AI-powered customer assistant for businesses to automate inquiries, intelligently route cases, and proactively engage customers based on real-time behavior. 

This means fewer repetitive tasks for agents and a smoother experience for customers.

Explore Kustomer IQ →

“On day one, Customer Assist handled 10% of chat conversations without any agent interaction and that number has been steadily increasing.”  — TJ Stein, Head of Customer Experience, Everlane [Read Case Study]

How to Choose the Right Customer Experience Platform for Your Needs

Understand Your Customer Journey Complexity

Before selecting a platform, map out your customer journey and identify:

• How customers interact with your business (email, chat, phone, social, self-service).
• Whether interactions are quick and transactional or complex and relationship-driven.
• How often customers reference previous interactions, and how critical historical context is for resolutions. 

💡Kustomer Desk → Track how often agents need to reference previous interactions to resolve current issues. If the score is high (e.g., 30%), look for platforms that offer persistent conversation history rather than ticket-based interactions. 

Prioritize Omnichannel Capabilities

Most platforms claim omnichannel support, but many still separate conversations by channel. This means an agent handling a chat may not see previous interactions from email or phone.

Instead of merely offering multiple channels, the right platform should:

• Automatically unify interactions from all touchpoints into one conversation.
• Allow agents to switch channels seamlessly without losing history.
• Maintain customer identity and conversation continuity across all channels.

Gladly, for example, offers conversation continuity but lacks deep CRM integration, meaning you will need a third-party integration platform to fully leverage its capabilities. 

💡Kustomer Desk → Analyze 50 recent customer interactions that spanned multiple channels. If agents had to manually connect information from separate sources, that’s a sign your current platform isn’t delivering true omnichannel support. 

Leverage AI and Automation for Efficiency

Not all AI and automation capabilities deliver equal value for customer experience. Analyze your support interactions to identify patterns that could benefit from intelligent automation. 

Here’s what to look for: 

• AI-driven chatbots that intelligently deflect common queries.
• Predictive intent detection to route cases accurately.
• Proactive messaging to engage customers before they even reach out.
• Automated self-service options that reduce agent workload. 

💡Kustomer Desk → Categorize support interactions into three groups:Fully automatable (FAQs, password resets, order tracking).Partially automatable (technical troubleshooting, returns).Human expertise required (complex cases, legal inquiries).If a large percentage falls into the first two, investing in an AI-driven CX platform will significantly improve efficiency. 

Evaluate Integration Compatibility

A CX platform shouldn’t operate in isolation. It needs to pull real-time data from CRMs, e-commerce systems, and backend tools to provide agents with the full customer picture.

Evaluate each platform’s integration approach:

• Do they offer pre-built connectors, rely on middleware, or require custom development?
• Does it just sync contact details, or does it also pull in behavioral and transactional data?
• Is the data exchange real-time, bi-directional, and accessible from within the agent interface?
• Determine whether the platform exposes the necessary webhooks, APIs, and SDK capabilities to support your specific integration requirements. 

💡Kustomer Desk → Map each potential integration against two factors:Frequency of use (how often agents rely on it).Impact on resolution time (how much faster it makes support).Prioritize platforms that seamlessly integrate with your most-used, high-impact tools.

Analyze Reporting & Analytics Capabilities

Beyond standard metrics (CSAT, response times, ticket volumes), you also need insights that connect customer experience to business outcomes. 

For example, your CX platform should be able to provide actionable intelligence on how customer experience impacts revenue, churn, customer lifetime value (CLV), and retention rates. 

Here’s what to look for:

• Real-time dashboards that allow supervisors to monitor agent workloads, active conversations, backlog trends, and SLA adherence. 
• Historical performance tracking that helps identify seasonality, peak support hours, and response trends over time. 
• A drill-down capability that allows managers to explore data by agent, department, customer segment, or support channel. 
• AI-powered sentiment analysis that can detect shifts in customer tone and flag at-risk customers before they churn. 

💡Kustomer Desk → List three key questions about customer experience you currently can’t answer with your current reporting. If the platform you’re evaluating doesn’t solve those gaps easily, it may not be the right fit. 

Consider Implementation and Ease of Adoption

A powerful CX platform is only as effective as its adoption rate. A system that requires months of onboarding, heavy IT involvement, or complex configuration can slow down operations, increase costs, and frustrate your team before delivering any real value. 

Key factors to consider: 

• Onboarding & Setup Time. Platforms with prebuilt templates, step-by-step setup wizards, and guided onboarding help teams go live faster.
  • Avoid solutions that require heavy IT involvement just to configure basic workflows. 
• Ease of Use & Learning Curve. An intuitive interface means agents can start using the platform with minimal training.
  • Look for user-friendly platforms with interactive tutorials, built-in tooltips, and role-specific learning paths to speed up adoption. 
• Customization Without IT Dependency. The ability to modify workflows, routing rules, and automation should be in the hands of managers, not just developers.
  • Go for low-code or no-code configuration tools to reduce reliance on IT. 
• Ongoing Support & Change Management. A vendor should offer dedicated success managers, comprehensive documentation, and real-time support to help teams adjust and optimize usage over time. 

💡Kustomer Desk → Before committing to a platform, set up a trial or pilot program with real customer interactions. Measure how quickly agents adapt, how many support tickets are resolved without additional training, and whether the platform reduces effort compared to your current system. 

Compare Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

Pricing models vary widely. Many platforms charge per-agent fees, while others include automation and AI in base plans. When evaluating cost, consider the following: 

• Hidden costs: API limits, storage fees, premium add-ons. 
• Does the cost scale per agent, per interaction, or per feature?
  • A rigid per-agent model can become expensive as your team grows, whereas a platform with automation can reduce the need for additional headcount. 

💡Kustomer Desk → Take your current monthly support cost (including agent salaries, software fees, and overhead) and divide it by the number of tickets resolved. Then, compare this to the projected cost with a new platform, factoring in automation and efficiency gains. If a platform reduces resolution time and agent workload, it’s often the better long-term investment—even if the upfront cost is higher.

Kustomer — The Ideal Alternative to Gladly and Zendesk

At the end of the day, customer experience is simply about solving problems without friction. 

You’ve seen how Gladly promises personalization but buckles under pressure. You’ve examined how Zendesk provides robust features but at the cost of complexity. 

Both leave you making costly compromises. 

We know all these because that’s what (you) our customers say before making the switch. 

For example, our friends at Glovo, a food delivery app, switched from Zendesk to Kustomer and resolved up to 84% of requests while maintaining high satisfaction ratings. 

“Kustomer is the only customer service solution that meets our needs as a global delivery app.” Sergi Mendez, Global Head of Live Operations, Glovo. [Read Case Study]

That’s why Kustomer is the smarter choice — a fully integrated AI customer service platform that treats customers like people, not case numbers. 

It gives your team everything they need in one place—a true omnichannel experience with AI-driven automation, seamless workflows, and a built-in CRM that eliminates the constant back-and-forth between systems. 

No more toggling between screens. No more apologizing to customers. No more complicated workarounds. 

Exceptional customer service shouldn’t be this hard. With Kustomer, it isn’t.

Still debating? We’ll make this easy—see Kustomer in action.