Considering SupportFu for a more personal email experience → SupportFu
“a support conversation looks exactly like a very classic email conversation to your customers (no issue number in the email's subject”
Zendesk alternatives: where its users went, and why they left
Zendesk (zendesk.com) has 17 sourced reports on Friction, drawn from 55 public source threads (as of 2026-10-15), 12 of them describing a move away. This page reads them for one question: if you are leaving Zendesk, what do its users say they moved to, and what pushed them out?
Get started free with your email Open Zendesk on Friction
Where Zendesk users say they went
Switching reports that name a destination. A count is the number of reports naming it, not a market share: Friction only holds what people say in public.
| Named alternative | Reports naming it | Newest report |
|---|---|---|
| A self-built or in-house tool | 3 | 2025 |
| Help Scout | 3 | 2016 (over 5 years old) |
| Barawave | 1 | 2025 |
| Full Help | 1 | 2019 (over 5 years old) |
| Groove | 1 | 2017 (over 5 years old) |
| SupportFu | 1 | 2016 (over 5 years old) |
| Intercom (compare) | 1 | 2016 (over 5 years old) |
| Freshdesk | 1 | 2014 (over 5 years old) |
In their words
Zendesk chat script slows website loading
“Zendesk for example is by far the largest and longest-loading script on my website”
High ticket volume bogged down Zendesk’s infrastructure → In-house ticketing system
“we were processing tons of tickets and bogging down their infra”
Left Zendesk for Groove → Groove
“We switched to Groove from Zendesk (which was awful)”
What pushes people away from Zendesk
The most-reported open problems, worst severity first. Each links to the item with its source.
Unauthenticated tickets enabled spam email abuse · Permissions & security · Blocks work
“Zendesk would “helpfully” send the “author” the contents of the ticket, becoming in effect an open relay for spam emails”
Support articles cannot use Markdown · Documentation · Annoyance
“support articles didn’t work off markdown”
Zendesk MCP search returns oversized API responses · API & developer experience · Annoyance
“returns the entire API response in search results”
Repeated Zendesk ticket notifications flood the inbox · Reliability & bugs · Annoyance
“I'm getting a new “request received” or other new-support-ticket email every minute or two, from all sorts of different ZenDesk customers”
Zendesk price increases after PE acquisition · Pricing & plans · Annoyance
“their insane price increases after the PE acquisition does not inspire hope”
Other customer support and messaging tools on Friction, and what their users struggle with
Switching trades one set of problems for another. The same evidence, for each tool Friction covers in this category:
Intercom
16 reports · 64 source threads · most-discussed area: Pricing & plans
Chatwoot
14 reports · 66 source threads · most-discussed area: Integrations
Counts and reports reflect people who post in public (developers and technical buyers are over-represented). A tool with fewer reports is not a better tool; it may only be discussed less. How the data is built.