monday Service vs Zendesk: How Are They Reshaping Customer Support Strategies? [2025]

monday Service vs Zendesk

Imagine this: Your team is overwhelmed trying to deal with the numerous customer tickets and queries. As a result, your client's satisfaction scores are plummeting.

If that sounds familiar, your business is in dire need of a service management tool like Zendesk or monday Service. This market is expected to grow at a 15.9% CAGR, proving the popularity of such SaaS platforms.

The monday Service vs Zendesk debate isn't simply about choosing the right software. It's also about rescuing your team's sanity and transforming chaos into customer delight.

Both platforms promise to be your service team's support, but which one can actually deliver? Let's find that out!

monday Service vs Zendesk: A Look at the Basics

A 2023 Forrester survey highlights that customer health score has become a top priority for most CMOs. There was a 17% increase in dashboards that included this.

About 83% of businesses believe that making customers happy should be at the top of their priority list. That's most important if you want to experience growing revenue.

As a result, having a service management tool like monday Service or Zendesk has become crucial. According to G2 reviews, Zendesk has a rating of 4.3/5 stars. Compared to that, monday Service is rated 4.5/5 stars.

Zendesk or monday Service

Here's a quick feature comparison to help you understand the basics.

Features

Zendesk

monday Service

Workflow automation and ticket management

Ticket routing with advanced trigger-based automations, escalation workflows, and SLA management.

Customisable automation recipes and status tracking with visual project–style ticket boards.

Multi-channel support

Email, chat, WhatsApp, phone, SMS, social media, and other omnichannel integrations.

In-app messaging, email, and chat integrations with a comprehensive and unified inbox view.

Self-service and knowledge base tools

Basic knowledge base with community forums, AI-powered answer suggestions, and advanced search.

Robust documentation sharing in a collaborative workspace and the monday Service portal.

Reporting and analytics

Custom dashboards, customer satisfaction metrics, pre-built reports, and other analytics.

Visual and customisable dashboards with widgets, team performance metrics, time tracking, reporting, and more.

Integrations and third-party connectivity

An extensive marketplace with 1,200+ apps like Jira, Slack, Salesforce, etc.

200+ integrations with Zapier, CRM tools, Mailchimp, and more.

Fruition as a monday Service Expert

Fruition's Verdict: If you ask us which tool wins the monday Service vs Zendesk debate, we'd say it all depends on perspective and service management needs.

Even as monday.com experts, the team at Fruition isn't biased towards the platform. When it comes to monday Service, we understand that it's fairly new to the market.

For instance, monday.com Service is best for teams wanting integration, project and service management capabilities in a visual and collaborative platform. However, Zendesk will cater to your dedicated service operations if you want a traditional and comprehensive tool.

monday Service and Zendesk: Explained

Service Management

According to a monday.com blog post, service management entails all activities your team engages in to deliver exceptional quality assistance to clients. One can say it's a systematic approach to improving customer satisfaction and value by offering and creating service-related processes.

Salesforce reports that 88% of service professionals have noticed that customer expectations are higher than ever. Businesses must invest in a robust service management platform to help deal with this.

Scalable tools like monday Service and Zendesk can help centralise information, offer collaboration across departments, automate processes, and more. Let's learn more about these tools individually.

What is Zendesk?

This is a cloud-based customer service SaaS tool. Founded in 2007, the platform has already hosted over 100,000 clients worldwide, ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies.

Zendesk helps businesses manage all customer support interactions across multiple channels. Similar to monday Service, it comes with a suite of tools like:

• Live chat.
• Knowledge bases.
• Ticketing systems.
• Analytics dashboards.

This is a unified interface to streamline customer communications that uses self-service portals, email, social media, and phone. It connects with numerous third-party applications to provide reporting features that help your support team improve efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Revenue: Zendesk secured USD 1.93 billion after 17 years of operation and is expected to reach the USD 3.4 billion mark in 2025.

What is monday Service?

Unlike Zendesk, this is a customer service platform built within the monday WorkOS ecosystem. Introduced in 2024, monday Service gained popularity because it combined traditional ticketing systems with visual project management and AI capabilities.

It comes with intuitive features like:

• Boards with customisable status columns.
• Shared inboxes for collaborative customer support.
• Timelines for better service initiative management.
• Collaborative workflows that lead to unified systems.
• Ticket system integration in a comprehensive data source for efficiency.
• Automations and AI to automate responses and manage support requests.
• Solve tickets with full context and resources like directories, assets, inventory, etc.

Unlike traditional help desks like Zendesk, this platform leverages project management to offer a visual and collaborative approach to customer service. Since it's fairly new to the market, monday Service is continually evolving and introducing new updates.

Revenue: monday WorkOS reached a revenue of USD 972 million in 2024 and is projected to generate USD 1.2 billion this year.

monday Service vs Zendesk: Feature Comparison

monday Service vs Zendesk Features

The SaaS market witnessed rapid growth after the pandemic, reaching USD 3 trillion by the end of 2022. McKinsey & Company estimates that it could surge up to USD 10 trillion by 2030, proving its popularity and market demand.

Over the years, SaaS tools have introduced unique features that make work easier and smarter. Zendesk and monday Service also have a whole arsenal of features that can help elevate customer service.

Ready to dive into the nitty-gritty? Let's discuss the monday Service vs Zendesk features that matter most.

Zendesk Features: How Does It Help?

Zendesk Overview

Zendesk has helped customers achieve 286% average ROI with a USD 20 million net present value over three years. Anastasia Parris, the Marketing Operations Manager at Rain, mentioned that Zendesk is user-friendly and can set your business up for success.

This is a complete customer service solution that brings together customer conversations from all channels to give your agents the context they need. You can also access data and dashboards to enhance service quality.

Zendesk comes with service features like:

• AI agents to automate 80% of your work and solve customer issues faster.
• Help centre for customer self-service.
• Messaging, live chat, and social media support.
• Scale and maintain voice with Zendesk AI.
• Turn data into insights with analytics and reporting.
• Track, organise, and solve tickets.
• Send tickets to the right agents with routing and intelligence.
• See customer data in the agent workspace.
• Optimise agent staffing and performance with workforce management.
• Keep customers safe with protection and data privacy.

With these, quality service will be made simple. You'll get access to fast and personalised support on your channel. Your agents will also work smarter by easily automating tasks and getting insights that lead to action.

monday Service Features: How Does It Help?

monday Service Overview

Using any monday WorkOS product will help save 15,600 hours and enhance ROI by 288% every year. Andrew Marshall, the VP of Operations at Sewell Family of Companies, said that monday Service can streamline workflows in such a way that your team and customers will appreciate.

This platform uses AI in service management that empowers your team to deliver scalable and efficient services. It gives you visibility into service performances and flexibility to build or customise workflows.

monday Service comes with features like:

• AI Service Agent: This always-on service expert can resolve requests instantly, delivering personalised and accurate solutions using the knowledge base and ticket history.
• AI Suggestions: Solve tickets with confidence by empowering your service team to quickly get things done without issues using AI suggestions and one-click replies.
• Auto-Categorisation: Prioritise tickets and sort them instantly by urgency, sentiment, department, type, etc., for better consistency and security.
• Service Workflows: Use the frictionless drag-and-drop workflow builder that automates workflows like replies, follow-ups, approvals, actions, notifications, and more.
• Smart Routing: Speed up the response time by streamlining ticket handling to reduce manual work with automations in assigning relevant work to the team.

With the features offered, you can shape every aspect of service to your business needs. This platform enables you to benefit from holistic service management by transforming tickets into projects and resolving organisation-wide issues.

As monday Service consultants, the team at Fruition can help you build the portal your way to enhance and customise end-user experiences. We can also set up the monday dashboards for real-time service analytics powered by data. Feel free to reach out if you want to know more.

Zendesk AI vs monday Service AI: A Comparison

AI in SaaS

AI is no longer an optional feature for any SaaS tool. Churnzero reports that almost 70% of companies use AI in their operations.

According to Forbes, AI tools and services grew by 31% and can reach a value of USD 1 trillion by the end of 2031. As a result, service management tools like monday Service and Zendesk have also introduced exceptional AI features.

Let's find out more about that.

Zendesk AI

Zendesk AI powers service solutions to drive instant and personalised resolutions. It'll be on the front lines of every interaction with your client.

Let's say you've got a wide range of customers. Using Zendesk's AI agents can help resolve 80% of issues across any channel, making work more streamlined for employees.

Team productivity will also increase by 20% with Zendesk Copilot in your workflows. As a result, your agents can access full customer information to recommend next steps, delivering consistent service.

Zendesk users can streamline workflows and operate at scale to reduce agent workload. You can increase operational efficiency with complete visibility.

The capabilities of Zendesk AI include the following:

• AI agents to automate solving complex issues on any channel. This feature delivers 24/7 support that can reduce costs at scale.
• Copilot helps turn every agent into a top performer by providing proactive assistance that improves productivity. Examples include suggested replies, agent-approved actions, and agent insights with knowledge base training.
• AI admin tools to help get the entire business workflow in formation to anticipate customer needs, refine operations, automate processes, and generate content.

Zendesk AI

Apart from these, AI for employee service can set your internal teams free. For instance, you can assign repetitive requests to AI agents. They'll understand top interactions to enable faster solutions using automatic routing and consistent service.

monday Service AI

monday Service AI Example

AI-first products can resolve any work challenge at scale. With monday Service AI, your team can:

• Resolve countless requests without adding any headcount.
• Deliver fast and relevant support to your customers.
• Make interactions personal at scale.

You can automate service management with AI capabilities and take on unsolvable challenges. Moreover, monday AI offers a solution where Digital Workers can get tasks done. You can use this in workflows, automations, and columns.

monday Service

You can cut down manual work by 50%, making it easier to run a service-oriented business. monday AI learns from your inputs and predicts your team's needs.

It comes with features like:

• monday AI Blocks: With this, you can categorise tickets, detect sentiment from content, summarise messages, translate texts, and extract information from files. There's also a custom block that you can build from scratch.
• Digital Workforce: These are digital workers that'll handle your service management tasks based on initial prompts. Examples include monday Sidekick, AI Service Agent, SDR Expert, and more.

Another feature called Product Power-ups is coming soon. It'll deal with complex business challenges like resource allocation, risk management, etc.

As monday.com consultants, the team at Fruition will offer AI execution and strategy services to help your team drive ROI. We can help by workflow design and testing after opportunity identification, with team training and continuous improvement.

monday Service Portal vs Zendesk Self-Service

Statista reports that 88% of customers expect organisations and brands to have self-service support portals. This proves the importance of having a customised portal with answers to basic questions for any service management tool.

Even then, only 14% of issues are fully resolved in self-service. As a solution, you'll have to choose a platform that offers an extensive self-service portal.

When it comes to the monday Service vs Zendesk debate, understanding self-service features is important.

monday Service Portal

The monday Service Customer Portal is a centralised hub. It's capable of:

• Answering every business-related question.
• Submitting requests.
• Tracking updates.

This self-service portal combines request forms, ticket tracking, and helpful articles in an easy-to-navigate layout. It comes with a unique URL that opens directly in a browser with your organisation's branding.

monday Service Customer Portal comes with organised content groups that help everyone find information quickly. Resources will have clear titles, visuals, and short descriptions displayed in the groups. Here, monday Forms will open in a pop-up window.

monday Service Customer Portal

Zendesk Self-Service

Zendesk's client portal is similar to monday Service but boasts about being AI-driven and user-friendly. With it, your service teams can manage rising support volumes and increasing demands with efficiency and productivity.

This feature seamlessly integrates with AI, making it easy for you to create a scalable, brand-customised portal without technical knowledge. Your clients can navigate the portal to find answers instantly without the need for excessive clicking using AI search tools.

This feature enables your team to:

• Recognise a large increase in ticket volume.
• Identify the cause behind it.
• Create steps to mitigate problems.
• Let customers find answers themselves.
• Offer 24/7 support.

All that is possible because Zendesk's self-service portal unifies conversations with a centralised hub. It also helps you to gain insights from reports and analytics for continuous improvement.

Zendesk Self-Service Portal

monday Service vs Zendesk: Battle of Pricing Plans

SaaS pricing models include monthly, yearly, pay-as-you-go, and one-time use subscriptions. Both monday Service and Zendesk offer monthly and yearly strategies.

Let's discuss the pricing structure for both of these service management tools.

Zendesk Pricing Plans

Zendesk Pricing Plans

• Support Team: Get started with streamlined email support at just USD 19 per agent per month. Features include a ticketing system, a prebuilt analytic dashboard, a unified agent workspace, etc.
• Suite Team: Automate service management with AI and multichannel support at USD 55 per agent per month. Features include AI Agent, customer knowledge base, voicemail and call recording, etc.
• Suite Professional: Use customisations and business data to optimise operations that cost USD 115 per agent per month. Features include skill-based routing, SLA, self-service portal, and more.
• Suite Enterprise: You'll have to reach out to the Zendesk team to get a quote to access service safety using change management tools. Features include visual data alerts, sandbox, 300 help centres, etc.

It comes with add-ons. Copilot at USD 50 per agent per month. Workforce Management will cost USD 25 per agent per month.

monday Service Pricing Plans

monday Service Pricing Plans

• Standard: USD 26 per seat per month to automate and streamline communication with service processes.
• Pro: USD 38 per seat per month to gain insights and real-time analysis of your entire service operation.
• Enterprise: Reach out to a monday consultant at Fruition to get a quote. With this plan, you can manage service delivery at scale.

To know more about the monday Service features, feel free to read this blog post. We can also help determine which plan will best suit your service needs.

Remember, both monday Service and Zendesk offer 14-day free trials. You can sign up for both and test them out before making a decision.

monday Service or Zendesk: Which One to Choose?

monday Service vs Zendesk

Service management isn't the same as it was a few years ago. Recent updates have unleashed AI-powered autonomy and prioritised cloud-first service models.

Both monday Service and Zendesk have amazing capabilities that can help your service team. But which platform should you go for?

Choose monday Service if:

• You're already familiar with the WorkOS platform for seamless workflow integration.
• Your team prefers boards, timelines, and colour-coded status tracking for visual service management.
• You want to handle internal projects with customer support on a single platform.
• You don't need advanced-level customer service features because you have a moderate support volume.
• You need a vivid customer portal, dashboard, AI ticket triage, automations, and more.

Choose Zendesk if your team:

• Operates on a high-volume support centre.
• Offers customer service as a core business function.
• Requires extensive third-party integrations.
• Finds compliance and security to be critical.

Zendesk and monday Integration

Did you know? You can integrate Zendesk with monday Work Management to connect your support team to product, sales, and engineering. It'll streamline user requests by keeping track of issues, user feedback, and more.

In a way, neither Zendesk nor monday Service can be categorised as a 'better' option. It'll depend entirely on your specific service management needs and workflow preferences.

For example, monday Service is cheaper and offers integrated project management with customer support. However, Zendesk is a dedicated and high-volume customer service tool with advanced features.

FAQs

Is monday Service better than Zendesk?

It will depend on your needs. monday Service usually excels for teams who need a visual project management platform with integrated customer support. It will be best for smaller teams because of its automation, AI, integration, and drag-and-drop features. However, Zendesk is great for dedicated customer service operations with multi-channel support. It also comes with extensive and advanced service management features. As a business owner, you must choose based on your team's workflow needs and support complexity.

What are the differences between Zendesk and monday Service?

The main differences lie in specialisation and approach. Zendesk operates as a dedicated service platform with traditional ticketing systems. Whereas, monday Service combines customer support with project management in a collaborative workflow and seamless integration.

Is monday Service free?

monday Service doesn't have a free plan. But you can access its Standard and Pro plans in a 14-day free trial. You'll have to choose a plan based on team size.