Jira Service Management vs. Zendesk: a side-by-side comparison of top help desk platforms (2024)

Customer support in 2024 requires more than good intentions. It needs the right tools. The powerful service desk software can make all the difference and take your team’s efforts to the next level.

Yet, with so many options on the market, it’s hard to know where to start.

That’s why we’re taking a closer look at two leading players: Jira Service Management and Zendesk. In this article, you will find a curated list of their essential features, pricing options, and other key factors to help you make an informed decision for your business.

Jira Service Management is an IT service management (ITSM) tool developed by Atlassian, the company behind Jira, the popular project management software.

The platform combines Jira Service Desk with ITSM features to help organizations track, resolve, and improve their customer service and internal IT support. Its capabilities include managing customer inquiries, incidents, problems, changes, and assets. 

JSM offers two hosting options. The Cloud is for easy scaling and updates. The Data Center (self-managed) gives more control and customization options.

Zendesk is a cloud-based customer service software that helps businesses manage customer interactions and handle support issues. It offers a suite of products that enables companies to streamline help desk operations and better engage with customers through various digital channels.

Let’s dive into the heavyweight showdown between these two platforms. Firstly, we will compare the main features and benefits, highlighting similarities and differences. 

Jira Service Management (JSM) and Zendesk allow customers to submit support requests via the web/app and assign them to agents. Agents can track request details through flexible ticket fields and workflows. 

Jira Service Management presents services through a simple, intuitive service portal where customers can ask for help. JSM enables configuring queues to track, triage, and assign incoming requests and provides highly customized workflows for complex IT processes. The admins can establish different request types. They can also add participants, and create dynamic forms to surface relevant fields and gather information effectively.

Zendesk puts all customer communication in one hub. Thanks to it, teams see the full history of interactions for each customer. Zendesk offers built-in workflows and options for creating customized workflows. The platform emphasizes omnichannel customer experiences, offering extensive channel support via features like a help center, voice, chat, and messaging.

Minimizing downtime and ensuring smooth operations hinge on how effective incident management and problem management are. JSM and Zendesk enable logging incidents and outages, assigning them to tech support, providing status updates, and tracking details. What else?

Jira Service Management offers a comprehensive incident management system with features like managing alerts and built-in root cause analysis. It enables IT teams to swiftly identify and resolve underlying issues behind incidents. JSM escalates big incidents to speed up collaboration. It also records all actions with a detailed timeline. With AI-powered tools teams can update stakeholders on progress via SMS, email, and mobile push notifications.

Zendesk lets teams communicate with customers during an incident to keep them up-to-date. It enables teams to trace incidents and perform detailed root cause analysis and share this analysis with other teams and customers. Zendesk also offers reporting tools to analyze incident trends and recurring problems, helping prevent future incidents.

Change and release management help organizations maintain control over their IT environment and reduce risk. Both JSM and Zendesk support change and release management practices but to different extents. 

In Jira Service Management, you can use customizable workflows, detailed change request forms, change tracking, approval workflows, and integration with Jira software. Also, the platform has automated deployment pipelines. It also has detailed release tracking. This makes it ideal for complex, development-centric projects.

Zendesk focuses more on service request management and less on deep integration with development tools. Simpler workflows compared to JSM make it suitable for less complex environments. Zendesk prioritizes clear communication and documentation around releases. Its change management features include tracking changes, automating workflows, and creating a change request ticket that notifies relevant teams.

User-friendly self-service empowers customers to find answers to common questions and resolve issues on their own. It reduces the workload on customer support teams. Both JSM and Zendesk provide online knowledge hubs for users to search for solutions. Let’s see how they are designed. 

Jira Service Management’s knowledge base, built on Atlassian’s Confluence, offers extensive documentation and collaboration capabilities. It’s also integrated into self-service and ticket workflows. Yet users can search the base without opening a ticket. It auto-suggests relevant articles during ticket creation and facilitates troubleshooting without an agent. Moreover, service teams can track knowledge base usage to identify content gaps, optimize articles, and see which ones answer the most requests.

Zendesk offers a user-friendly personalizable service portal. Its knowledge base Guide has a searchable database of articles, FAQs and guides with AI-powered recommendations. It is separate from the core support flow but easy to access. 

SLA management improves service delivery. By tracking performance against defined targets, you keep your finger on the pulse. Both JSM and Zendesk offer tools such as dashboards and reporting features to monitor SLA compliance and service metrics. 

Jira Service Management’s SLA tools let teams define, track, and meet service-level agreements. For instance, you can use automated escalation rules to notify the right team members and prevent SLA breaches. It also provides real-time reports with customizable dashboards and built-in analytics with advanced filtering. 

Zendesk has a user-friendly interface with a straightforward process for setting up SLA policies, including defining conditions, metrics, and targets. It also offers reporting and analytics with a focus on ease of use. For example, Zendesk provides the ability to set targets for SLA metrics like reply time and resolution time.

Automation and AI-powered features help streamline workflows, cut tedious manual tasks, and boost service efficiency. Both JSM and Zendesk use these functions to make life easier for customer support professionals.

Jira Service Management offers extensive automation rules and integrations, customizable for complex workflows and processes. JSM uses artificial intelligence and machine learning for recommendations, predictive analytics, and automated ticket categorization. The features include smart ticket routing, predictive analytics, and intelligent recommendations.

JSM also provides an AI-powered virtual agent that automates support interactions from Slack to free up agent time.

With simplicity and usability in mind, Zendesk offers easy-to-set-up automations and macros for common tasks. It uses AI to generate suggestions, automated responses, and sentiment analysis to gauge customer satisfaction. Zendesk also introduced an AI agent that automates and resolves customers’ issues across service channels.

Supporting multiple channels is essential for improving customer service and accessibility. It provides smooth interactions across many platforms. Knowing the abilities of different tools can help you pick the best one for your needs.

Jira Service Management supports integration with various channels, but it focuses heavily on email and portal-based requests. It integrates with other Atlassian products like Confluence and Slack for better team collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Zendesk provides a seamless experience for both customers and agents, ensuring efficient handling of queries across multiple channels. The platform is distinguished by native support for a wide range of channels including email, chat, phone, SMS, and social media. It also offers a unified interface so agents can view and respond to tickets from different channels like Twitter, email, and live chat without switching platforms.

Jira Service Management user interface is highly customizable. It has a robust, feature-rich interface. However, this can be overwhelming for new users and its complexity can lead to a steep learning curve. It’s well-suited for technical teams familiar with Jira’s ecosystem. 

The platform is clean, modern, and intuitive, designed with simplicity. It is friendly for non-technical users, making it easy to get started quickly.

Conclusion: Zendesk is easier for beginners and non-technical users. Jira Service Management offers more power and customization for those who know its system.

The platform allows detailed workflow configurations, custom fields, and automation rules. JSM is also distinguished by high scalability and is capable of handling complex projects and large teams.

Zendesk offers customization through themes, branding, and custom ticket fields, though less granular than Jira. It scales well for customer support teams. Plus, it has features tailored to growing support operations. For instance, you can customize the support portal to reflect company branding and integrate with CRM systems.

Conclusion: Jira Service Management provides deeper customization and scalability for complex, large-scale projects. Zendesk offers sufficient flexibility and scalability for growing teams.

It integrates well with other Atlassian products, like Confluence and Trello. It also gives access to 5,000+ Atlassian Marketplace apps.

For instance, JSM integrates with Confluence for knowledge management and Bitbucket for version control. This enables streamlined project workflows.

It has many integration options for third-party apps and systems. These include CRMs, social media, and communication tools.

For example, you can integrate the platform with CRM for customer relationship management and tools like Slack for team communication to make customer support more effective.

Conclusion: Jira Service Management excels with deep integrations in the Atlassian ecosystem. Zendesk offers wide-ranging integrations with many external applications.

We already compared all essential features, ease of use and pricing of JSM and Zendesk. Now let’s extract functionalities that make them different from each other.  

Jira Service Management pricing depends on the number of agents and the feature set. The Free plan supports up to three agents. The Standard plan brings core features for growing teams. The Premium plan includes advanced features like unlimited automation rules and premium support. The Enterprise plan has custom pricing for large organizations with advanced security needs. 

Jira Service Management offers both Cloud deployment, managed by Atlassian with automatic updates, and Data Center deployment, which is self-managed for enterprises requiring high availability.

Here’s an example of monthly pricing for different plans for four agents.

Zendesk pricing is also based on the number of agents and feature complexity. The pricing is divided into support plans for a ticketing system for managing emails alone and suite plans regarding a complete solution for ticketing, messaging, help center, voice, and AI.

The Support Team plan provides basic support features. The Support Professional plan offers additional business rules and integration capabilities. The Support Enterprise plan offers advanced workflow management and analytics. The Suite plans combine support and sales features, depending on the feature set. 

Zendesk is available only as a Cloud deployment, fully managed with regular updates.

Here’s an example of monthly pricing for different Suite plans for four agents.

It’s time to summarize the results of the Jira Service Management vs Zendesk duel. Deciding between Jira Service Management and Zendesk can be tough. Both are best-in-class tools for managing customer support and service requests. However, they have some key differences that make them better suited for certain teams and use cases.

Before you set down to study the specifics of each tool, think about your team’s needs and priorities. Here are some key factors worth considering.

Based on our testing and analysis, Jira Service Management is a great fit for:

On the other hand, Zendesk is a great choice for:

So which tool comes out on top? In our analysis, it depends on your team’s specific needs and use case.

For IT teams and organizations with complex ITSM requirements, Jira Service Management is the clear winner. Its advanced features and Jira integration make it a powerful solution for managing IT services at scale.

Zendesk seems to be a perfect match for customer support teams and smaller organizations. Its omnichannel support, user-friendly interface, and accessible pricing make it a great choice for delivering excellent customer experiences.

So if you need strong ITSM functionality and already use other Atlassian products, Jira Service Management may be your superpower. If omnichannel support and ease of use are top priorities, Zendesk could be your way to go.

As you see, Jira ticketing system and Zendesk are not necessarily direct competitors. Merging their strengths might work magic, especially for organizations that look to skyrocket their customer support and development workflows. 

Connecting support teams using Zendesk with development teams using Jira can boost cross-functional collaboration.

For instance, a customer reports a software bug through the Zendesk ticketing system. The team logs the issue in Jira Service Management, where developers can prioritize and resolve it. Then, the status updates are sent back to Zendesk for contacting customers.

Benefits of Zendesk and Jira Service Management integration: