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Talkyard — a ZenDesk alternative

  • If you want direct one-to-one interactions with your customers, pick ZenDesk (www.zendesk.com).
  • If you're looking for an internal discussion tool, then that's Talkyard.
  • Otherwise, see below.

Talkyard overlaps with ZenDesk's ticketing functionality, but Talkyard also (and optionally) lets your customers talk with each other, so you can build a community around your products, at your website.

ZenDesk, on the other hand, has more advanced tickting features: It lets you chat with your customers in "all different ways": email, chat, social media, and phone, from a single dashboard. And you can track customers in interactions in a CRM (Customer Relationship Management tool).

If you use ZenDesk already​

Then, you can add a Talkyard community to your website, talk with your customers, and let them talk with & learn from each other.

And, connect Talkyard to your ZenDesk dashboard, so you'll get notified about new posts & comments, and can reply as usual to everything from one place (that is, the ZenDesk dashboard). — However, you can't, not yet: Ty + Zendesk integration not yet created.

Zendesk Community Forum​

ZenDesk has something called Zendesk Community Forum Software, which you can use instead of Talkyard to create a community for your customers. It is, from what I can tell, a bit like phpBB or Discourse, but pretty basic & limited, compared with them. The benefit is convenience? It integrates automatically with the rest of ZenDesk. There's not that much information about it, mostly this:

https://www.zendesk.com/service/community-forum/

It's in ZenDesk's Support Suite Professional plan, for $115 USD per month and agent of yours (as of Nov 2023).

To do: Add comparison matrix.