Helpjuice vs Zendesk
A side-by-side comparison of Helpjuice and Zendesk on what each one charges, what it meters, and which plan every capability actually sits on.
The short answer
3 of the 19 capabilities tracked on both differ, mostly in Enterprise. Helpjuice starts at $249/mo, Zendesk at $19/seat/mo.
| Measure | Helpjuice | Zendesk |
|---|---|---|
| Starts at | $249/mo | $19/seat/mo |
| Charged per | The workspace | Each agent seat |
| AI billed at | $0.00 per credit | $1.50 per AI resolution |
| Included, where the other says no | 0 capabilities | 2 capabilities |
Capability by capability
3 of the 19 capabilities tracked on both products differ.
Channels
| Capability | Helpjuice | Zendesk |
|---|---|---|
| Not published | Included | |
| Live chat | Not published | IncludedSuite Team and above; Support Team is email ticketing only |
| In-app messenger | Not published | IncludedWeb widget and the iOS, Android and Unity SDKs are on every plan; the live conversation behind them is not. Messaging and live chat start at Suite Team, so on Support Team the widget submits a ticket rather than opening a chat. |
| Voice | Not published | Paid add-onContact Center add-on, $83/agent/mo. Not available on Support Team. |
| SMS | Not published | Paid add-onAn add-on from Suite Team. The "Text messages" row is unavailable on Support Team and an add-on on Suite Team and Suite Professional, with "Additional fees apply". Inbound texts create tickets automatically. |
| Not published | IncludedSuite Team and above, listed among the messaging apps in the social and business channels row, with additional fees. | |
| Instagram / Facebook | Not published | IncludedSuite Team and above, inside one "Social and business channels" row covering Facebook, Instagram and X alongside WhatsApp, Slack, WeChat and LINE. Unavailable on Support Team, and the row carries "Additional fees apply". |
| X / Twitter | Not published | IncludedSuite Team and above, same social row, with a published cap: "With Zendesk Suite, you can add up to five X handles. Additional fees apply." |
| Community forum | Not published | IncludedSuite Professional only. The whole community forums block (user profiles, integrated search, similar posts, escalate posts to tickets, moderator groups, moderation queue, AI spam protection, user badges) is unavailable on both cheaper plans. |
Ticketing
| Capability | Helpjuice | Zendesk |
|---|---|---|
| Shared inbox | Not published | IncludedAll plans. The unified agent workspace is the one row in its block available on Support Team. |
| Ticket queues | Not published | IncludedAll plans, as "Custom & group views": collections of tickets by status, assignee, group or condition, with pre-configured views shipped. |
| Business hours | Not published | IncludedSuite Professional only, and only one schedule: the row reads "Single" there and is unavailable on the two cheaper plans. Multiple schedules are not offered on any publicly priced plan. |
| Macros / saved replies | Not published | IncludedAll plans. Pre-defined responses (macros) are available on every tier. AI-suggested macros are a separate row and sit behind the Copilot add-on at Suite Professional. |
| Side conversations | Not published | IncludedSuite Professional only. Loops teammates in by email or Slack with the thread linked back to the ticket. |
| Custom fields | Not published | IncludedAll plans, for both user and organization fields, with workflows buildable on them. |
| Custom objects | Not published | IncludedGated by count: unavailable on Support Team, up to 3 objects with 5 lookup fields each on Suite Team, up to 30 objects with 10 lookup fields on Suite Professional. |
| Ticket forms | Not published | IncludedSuite Professional only. Multiple ticket forms and conditional ticket fields are both unavailable on Support Team and Suite Team. |
Routing & automation
| Capability | Helpjuice | Zendesk |
|---|---|---|
| Skills-based routing | Not published | IncludedSuite Professional only, and listed twice (under messaging and under workflows), unavailable on both cheaper plans. This is one of the three capabilities the vendor's own upgrade path leans on. |
| Load balancing | Not published | IncludedAll plans, but the basis changes: conversation routing runs "Based on agent status and capacity" on Support Team and Suite Team, and adds skill and ticket priority at Suite Professional. |
| Triggers | Not published | IncludedAll plans. Triggers run on ticket create or update; time-based automations sit in the same row set, both shipped pre-configured. |
| Workflow builder | Not published | IncludedAll plans as Action builder, metered rather than gated: up to 40K actions a month on Support Team and Suite Team, 100K on Suite Professional, with extra credits at $200 per 100K actions per subscription term. |
AI resolution
| Capability | Helpjuice | Zendesk |
|---|---|---|
| Autonomous resolution agent | Not published | IncludedAll plans, with the allowance stepping 5, 5 and 10 automated resolutions per agent per month and a hard ceiling of 10,000 a year. Beyond that, $1.50 per AR committed or $2.00 pay-as-you-go. |
| Resolution over knowledge base | Not published | IncludedAll plans. Generative search answers from the knowledge base at the top of help centre results, and the AI agent resolves against the same connected knowledge. |
| Action-taking (API calls) | Not published | IncludedAll plans through Action builder, which automates "multi-step action flows across Zendesk and third-party systems" with prebuilt connectors. Copilot's Auto assist can additionally "take approved actions across systems", but that is a Suite Professional add-on. |
| Guardrails & citations | Included$449 and above, with the chatbot. Swifty answers from the customer's own articles, respects reader permissions ("If a user is not signed in, they will receive responses based on public articles"), returns a customisable no-results message when it cannot answer, and cites what it used when Show Sources in Responses is enabled. Training is ruled out in writing: "We do not train our AI on your data. Your data is not stored within the AI." Custom instructions shape presentation only: "Custom instructions don't affect what search results are retrieved." | Not publishedNot published. The matrix describes what the AI agent resolves and how resolutions are verified, and says nothing about citation of sources or configurable guardrails on answers. |
| Multilingual AI | IncludedAll plans for article translation, which is the metered part at $0.00015 per character. Swifty itself "supports over 50 languages" for reader conversations and arrives with the AI Suite at $449. | IncludedAll plans: "Automatically translate AI agent responses into 80+ supported languages". The agent-facing UI is separately localised into 28 languages. |
AI assist
| Capability | Helpjuice | Zendesk |
|---|---|---|
| Reply drafting | Not published | Paid add-onCopilot add-on at $50 per agent per month, and only from Suite Professional: suggested first replies are unavailable on the two cheaper plans. |
| Tone rewrite | Not published | Paid add-onCopilot. "Rewrite in Your Tone" and "Communication guidelines" are both Add-on at Suite Professional. Basic writing tools are included there at 5 uses per agent per month, pooled across the team and capped at 500 per instance. |
| Summarization | Not published | Paid add-onCopilot writing tools and ticket summaries at Suite Professional, metered at 5 uses per agent per month, pooled: "10 agents = 50 total uses", capped at 500 a month however large the team. |
| Translation | Not published | IncludedSuite Team and above. Conversations are auto-translated in the dashboard via Google Translate, and knowledge base articles have a generative translate action. |
| Next-best-action | Not published | Paid add-onCopilot's Auto assist, an add-on at Suite Professional and unavailable below it: proactive guidance that "suggests next steps, drafts accurate responses grounded in your procedures and knowledge" and walks agents through complex workflows. |
| Auto-tagging | Not published | Paid add-onIntelligent triage at Suite Professional, and only partly even there: the row gives "Classifications only" and is unavailable on the two cheaper plans, with the triage dashboard unavailable on all three. |
AI voice
| Capability | Helpjuice | Zendesk |
|---|---|---|
| Voice agent | Not published | IncludedAI agents run on voice, and the billing documentation is where that is confirmed: the automated-resolution tiers article defines the end of a voice conversation as "immediately upon hangup", alongside email and messaging. |
| IVR replacement | Not published | IncludedSuite Professional only. Multi-level IVR phone trees are unavailable on Support Team and Suite Team, as are priority numbers, callback requests and call monitoring. |
Knowledge base
| Capability | Helpjuice | Zendesk |
|---|---|---|
| Public help center | IncludedAll plans. Four accessibility levels per article or category: Public ("anyone can access it. No login is required"), Internal for logged-in users, URL Only for sharing internal content externally by secret token, and Private restricted to named users or groups. Nesting rules are enforced downward, so an Internal category cannot contain Public content. | IncludedSuite Team and above. The entire help centre block is unavailable on Support Team, which is email and ticketing only. |
| Custom domain | IncludedAll plans. CNAME mapping with step-by-step setup docs, listed on the feature page as "CNAME branding and custom domain mapping" and backed by SSL certificate encryption. No custom certificate charge is published. | IncludedAll plans, as host mapping: point a subdomain of your own domain at the help centre with an SNI-based SSL certificate. |
| Multi-brand | NoOne subscription runs one knowledge base. The documented route to a second is a second account with its own subdomain, created through a fresh signup: "To add a new Helpjuice account you need to first sign up for a new account. If you receive the issue that the email is already in use just add a new email or '+1' to your existing email." Account linking then lets people switch between them from one login. Whether the second account is billed as a second subscription is not published, but nothing in the pricing page bundles more than one. | IncludedGated by count: unavailable on Support Team, 1 help centre on Suite Team, up to 5 on Suite Professional, all inside one account. |
| Versioning | IncludedAll plans. Version history, compare versions, restore previous versions, scheduled publishing, publish approval and expiration dates are all listed under the shared Powerful Editor block. The gap is on the way out rather than in the product: version history is absent from the backup zip enumeration. | IncludedSuite Professional only. Content and revision history with restore of deleted articles. Approval and publishing workflows and scheduled publishing are unavailable on every publicly priced plan. |
| Localization | IncludedAll plans, and one of the stronger implementations in this category. Language variants live inside one knowledge base with a front-end language switcher, per-language article versions, translation reports and manual review. The marketing site claims 300+ languages while the pricing card says 40+ for one-click AI translation, so the ceiling depends on whether a human or the model does the work. Content can be copied between languages in an all-or-nothing operation. | IncludedGated by count: unavailable on Support Team, one default language on Suite Team, 40+ languages on Suite Professional. A single-language help centre on the $55 plan is easy to miss. |
| Article analytics | IncludedAll plans, with no retention ceiling published, which is unusual in this category. Five dashboard tabs cover Overview, Searches, Articles, Categories and Users/Groups, tracking views, readings, seconds spent, likes and dislikes, dead-end searches that returned nothing, and a spam checker for search logs. Swifty conversations get their own tracking view. Everything is reachable through the Analytics API with date filters. | IncludedSuite Team and above, via the Google Analytics integration for the help centre rather than a first-party article report. |
| In-product widget | Included$449 and above. The Swifty chatbot and Helpbar embed inside the knowledge base with a toggle or on any external site with a copied snippet. One documented limitation: on an embedded knowledge base "only public articles will be used", and changing settings requires re-embedding the snippet. | IncludedSuite Team and above. Contextual self-service embeds the help centre and suggests articles through the web widget and mobile SDK. |
| SEO controls | Not publishedClaimed in marketing and undocumented in the help centre. The features page lists "SEO-FRIENDLY STRUCTURE", "METADATA MANAGEMENT", "INTERNAL LINKING STRATEGY" and "SEO optimized", and the pricing comparison table has no SEO row at all. No article anywhere in the help centre covers sitemap generation, robots.txt, canonical tags, per-article meta descriptions or an llms.txt for AI crawlers. Full Liquid control over the page templates means a team could add most of this itself, which is a different answer from the product providing it. | IncludedSuite Team and above: structured markup so search engines can parse articles, plus a generated sitemap. |
| AI answers over KB | Included$449 AI-Knowledge Base and above. The $249 card lists AI Writer, AI Search, AI Chatbot, the Chrome extension and the tutorial builder under "AI Suite Not included". Above that line the suite is bundled with no usage allowance published at all. | IncludedAll plans. Generative search surfaces answers above the article list, drawing on connected knowledge sources. |
QA & workforce
| Capability | Helpjuice | Zendesk |
|---|---|---|
| Conversation QA scoring | Not published | Paid add-onRequires the Quality Assurance add-on on all three publicly priced plans, and the add-on carries no published price. |
| Automated QA coverage | Not published | Paid add-onSame QA add-on, described by the vendor as "automatic human and AI agent scoring". Unpriced. |
| Agent scorecards | Not published | Paid add-onPart of the same unpriced QA add-on rather than the Suite. The Agent Productivity Dashboard is separate again and sits behind Copilot at Suite Professional. |
| Forecasting | Not published | Paid add-onWorkforce Engagement Bundle at $50 per agent per month, one of only four add-ons Zendesk prices publicly. |
| Scheduling | Not published | Paid add-onSame Workforce Engagement Bundle: "Forecast, staff, and manage agent schedules with AI-powered precision". |
Reporting
| Capability | Helpjuice | Zendesk |
|---|---|---|
| Prebuilt dashboards | Not published | IncludedAll plans, with the refresh rate as the real gate: 24 hours on Support Team and Suite Team, 1 hour on Suite Professional. |
| Custom reports | Not published | IncludedSuite Professional only. Custom data exploration builds metrics, charts, filters and dashboards point-and-click; scheduled delivery and sharing arrive at the same tier but only to Zendesk users. |
| Raw data export | IncludedAll plans, gated by role rather than price. The Backup & Restore zip is Super Administrator only; Settings > Export Data produces Answers, Questions, Categories, Users, Searches and Activities as XLS or CSV for administrators, delivered by email with recent exports also downloadable in-app. A published data dictionary names every column in every report, which is rarer than the export itself. | IncludedAll plans for report output in CSV, Excel, image or PDF. This is not the same thing as the account data export, which must be enabled by a support ticket and is unavailable on Team plans entirely. |
| Data warehouse sync | Not published | Paid add-onAWS Events Connector, Suite Professional add-on only, streaming Zendesk events into AWS in real time. Carries a hard floor of 10 agent seats to purchase. |
| CSAT / NPS | Not published | IncludedSuite Professional only. CSAT ratings and follow-up surveys are unavailable on Support Team and Suite Team, so satisfaction measurement cannot be bought below $115 per agent per month. |
| Real-time reporting | Not published | IncludedSuite Professional only, and partially: the live agent activity dashboard is limited to a default view and prebuilt live dashboards are included, while customisable live dashboards and visual alerts are unavailable on every publicly priced plan. |
Collaboration
| Capability | Helpjuice | Zendesk |
|---|---|---|
| Internal notes | Not published | IncludedAll plans. Private comments are the mechanism light agents use, and whisper mode lets several agents collaborate silently during a live conversation from Suite Team. |
| Assignment | Not published | IncludedAll plans, through groups, views and conversation routing on agent status and capacity. |
| Approvals | Not published | IncludedSuite Professional only. Approval requests are made and tracked from the ticket interface for compliance. The broader approval workflows row is unavailable on every publicly priced plan. |
Enterprise
| Capability | Helpjuice | Zendesk |
|---|---|---|
| SAML SSO | Included$449 and above. SSO is one of the four things the vendor says separates the tiers and it is absent from the $249 card. SAML is the main path with documented setups for Okta, Azure AD and ADFS, plus JWT, LDAP and Active Directory, and Google Sign In. Auto-Create Users provisions accounts on first login and group names map from a SAML attribute. Two caveats the docs state plainly: SSO users can still sign in with a Helpjuice password ("It's not possible to do prevent them from using their Helpjuice credentials at this time"), and auto-provisioned accounts count against the plan's user cap. | IncludedShown on Support Team, Suite Team and Suite Professional |
| Role-based access control | IncludedAll plans, on two axes. Roles set what a person can do; groups plus the Public, Internal, URL Only and Private levels set what they can see, with passes stored per category and article. Private categories inherit downward ("subcategories or articles must have the same or fewer users/groups than the parent category") and Super Administrators are deliberately exempt: "to avoid losing content, Super Administrators will always have access to private articles/categories, even if they are not in the allowed users list." | IncludedAll plans carry role-based access with IP restrictions, password complexity and session length controls. Defining your own roles is the gated part: custom agent roles are unavailable on all three publicly priced plans. |
| Custom roles | NoFive fixed roles, no role builder and no per-permission editing documented: Super Administrator, Administrator, Collaborator, Draft Writer and Internal Viewer. Granularity comes from groups and content accessibility levels instead of from custom roles. The features page confirms the ceiling: "Four levels of user roles". | IncludedSuite Enterprise + Copilot. Unavailable on all three publicly priced plans. |
| Audit logs | IncludedAll plans. The Activities section logs added, updated, published, reordered, read, opened and removed events across articles, categories, uploads, users, keywords and files, plus sign-ins, filterable by user and exportable to XLSX. It is also the undo mechanism for deleted content, and the two functions share a 90 day window. | IncludedSuite Enterprise. The row reads as unavailable on all three publicly priced plans. |
| IP allowlist | IncludedAll plans, under Settings > Accessibility & Privacy. Addresses are entered one per line and the failure mode is documented: "If a user tries to access your knowledge base from an IP that is not whitelisted, they will be redirected to a 404 error page." No CIDR or subnet range syntax is documented, so a large office network means listing addresses individually. | Not published |
| Sandbox environment | Not publishedListed on the pricing comparison table under API & Security as "Sandbox", alongside API Versioning and API Advanced Analytics, with no per-plan differentiation. Nothing in the help centre, the API v3 documentation or the MCP documentation describes a sandbox account, a test environment or a staging subdomain. The claim exists and the mechanism does not, so this stays Unknown rather than Native. | Paid add-onSuite Professional add-on, unpriced. Replicates configuration and metadata into a non-production space; additional sandboxes are a further purchase. |
| Multi-brand | Not published | IncludedGated by count alongside the help centre: unavailable on Support Team, 1 brand on Suite Team, up to 5 on Suite Professional, all centralised in one account. |
| HIPAA / BAA | Not publishedNo Business Associate Agreement, HIPAA page or healthcare compliance claim appears anywhere on the vendor's site. The compliance vocabulary Helpjuice uses is GDPR and nothing else. Unknown rather than No, because the vendor never addresses the question in either direction, but a healthcare buyer has nothing to work from. | Paid add-onTriple-gated: buy the Advanced Security or Advanced Compliance add-on, enable a set of security configurations, and execute a BAA. Suite Professional only of the three public plans. |
| SOC 2 | Not publishedNot claimed anywhere. There is no security page (helpjuice.com/security returns the vendor's 404), no trust centre, no compliance portal and no mention of an audit, a report or a Type II in the help centre, the terms or the privacy policy. The privacy policy commits only to "commercially reasonable technical and organizational measures". | IncludedNot plan-gated. Type II, available on request under NDA. |
| ISO 27001 | Not publishedNot claimed anywhere on the marketing site, in the help centre or in the terms. | IncludedNot plan-gated. ISO 27001:2022, plus 27017, 27018, 27701 and 42001. |
| GDPR | IncludedAll plans. A GDPR compliance statement covers the information audit, DPIA procedures, consent mechanisms and subject access rights, and names Eldin Hajric as Data Protection Officer. A DPA is available rather than published: "If you would like a GDPR Data Processor DPA, please contact us via email at support@helpjuice.com." Contact form emails are relayed through SendGrid and not stored by Helpjuice. | IncludedNot plan-gated. DPA plus Binding Corporate Rules approved by EU DPAs. |
| Data residency | NoSingle region, no choice, no enterprise tier to negotiate one on. "Data Stored Securely in the USA" is the only hosting statement the vendor makes, and the privacy policy confirms transfers into the United States for everyone else. No EU, UK or APAC region is offered at any price. | Paid add-onData Center Location add-on. US, EEA, UK and APAC. Unavailable on Support Team and Suite Team. |
| Data retention policy | IncludedFixed windows with one configurable dial. Automated backups run every 12 hours by default and "are stored for 7 days", and the frequency can be set to every 12 hours, daily, weekly or monthly. Deleted articles sit in Activities for 90 days. AI prompts and responses are "generally deleted from our AI interaction logs after 24 hours". None of these is adjustable by the customer beyond backup frequency, and no post-cancellation retention period is published at all. | IncludedSuite Enterprise only. Advanced data retention policies are unavailable on Support Team, Suite Team and Suite Professional alike. |
| Right-to-erasure tooling | Not published | IncludedSplit across tiers. Credit card redaction arrives at Suite Professional. Advanced redaction of email, phone and card data, data masking and advanced encryption are all unavailable on every publicly priced plan. |
Developer
| Capability | Helpjuice | Zendesk |
|---|---|---|
| REST API | IncludedAll plans. REST and JSON over an account-specific base URL, authenticated by an API key in a header or query parameter, with a documented user impersonation header so a proxy can serve permission-scoped content. V2 endpoints still ship alongside v3. A first-party MCP server at helpjuice.com/mcp exposes "around 53 tools organized across 10 categories" over the same key, which is further than most vendors in this directory have gone. | IncludedAll plans, and the vendor's stated route out for accounts that cannot use the export UI: "customers on all Zendesk plans can use the Zendesk REST API to export data". |
| Webhooks | IncludedAll plans, with thirteen enumerated events across users, articles, comments and categories, including question_archive and question_publish. Each payload carries the activity id, action, actor and an automatic flag for scheduled publishing or expiry. Webhooks are managed entirely through the API, including a test endpoint and a toggle, and last_response_code is returned for debugging. | Not publishedNot published as a matrix row. External events ingest third-party activity and the AWS Events Connector streams events out at Suite Professional, but outbound webhooks are not named or gated anywhere on the pricing page. |
| SDKs | Not published | IncludedAll plans. iOS, Android and Unity SDKs for embedding support natively in an app, plus the web widget. |
| App framework | Not published | IncludedBuilding your own apps is Suite Professional only, capped at 5 App Builder conversations, using App Builder or the Channel Framework. Consuming the 1,800+ Marketplace apps is not gated. |
| Published rate limits | Included"We limit our API requests to 100 requests per minute." A hard published number rather than a soft threshold. No burst allowance, per-endpoint variation or 429 handling is documented. Collections return 25 records by default and the analytics endpoints accept up to 1,000 per page with results cached for an hour. | IncludedPublished per plan and unusually specific: 200 requests a minute on Team, 400 on Growth and Professional, 700 on Enterprise, 2,500 on Enterprise Plus, against a 100,000 a minute account ceiling. Incremental export endpoints are the exception at 10 a minute, or 30 with the High Volume add-on. |
Both entries last checked Sep 9, 2026.
What Helpjuice costs
$249/month
3 published plans, billed monthly- Billing unit
249 /mo" for a single account - Free tier
No, 14-day trial - AI pricing
$0.00 per credit - Vendor calls it
character - Human handoff
Not published - Reopened chat
Not published - AI billing window
Not published - Data export
Self-serve - Automation export
Partial
3 of 9 not published by Helpjuice, checked
What Zendesk costs
$19/seat/month
3 published plans, billed annually- Billing unit
Seat (agent) + usage hybrid - Free tier
No, 14-day trial - AI pricing
$1.50 per AI resolution - Vendor calls it
Automated Resolution (AR) - Human handoff
Not billed - Reopened chat
Not published - AI billing window
2h of inactivity - Data export
Support ticket required - Automation export
Not offered
1 of 9 not published by Zendesk, checked