Give customers access to your customer support team by embedding a customized widget onto your website.

• Zendesk enables you to natively embed Zendesk functionality—Help Center, Chat, or Tickets—into any app, website, or standalone device.
• Jira only lets your customers raise requests directly from your website by embedding a request form widget onto that site.

Winner: Zendesk

Customize your chat widget’s design, appearance, and messaging options to provide a personalized chat experience across platforms while also matching the look and tone of your brand.

• Zendesk provides numerous options for customizing the look and feel of the Web Widget. You can take a look at their advanced customization options here. 
• Jira does not include native live chat customization features.

Winner: Zendesk

Change the language of your chat widget.

• By default, the Zendesk Web Widget embedded in a website displays text in the language of the end user’s browser.
• You can meet your customers’ language preferences with Jira by selecting from a list of additional languages.

Winner: Zendesk

To manage customer communication at scale, organize customer questions from multiple channels, in a shared inbox that your entire team can access.

• Zendesk comes with a multichannel inbox to help your agents provide a seamlessly integrated support experience. However, Zendesk also comes with a unified agent workspace.
• Jira includes a comprehensive workspace that enables your agents to see your customers and their requests across multiple channels.

Winner: Zendesk

The helpdesk includes a system for managing, assigning, and prioritizing customer inquiries. This enables your agents to engage customers through various channels and easily convert queries into tickets.

• Jira ticket system allows you to move tickets from different channels to a centralized queue.
• Zendesk’s ticketing system can convert customer issues from any channel into tickets. The platform even comes with AI-powered ticketing.

Winner: Zendesk

This feature allows you to avoid an overload of customer inquiries and improve wait time. 

• You can assign predefined queues to your agents and groups based on products or ticket channels in Zendesk. You can also assign a Queue Manager (QM) function to an agent to handle the main queue and assign tickets to groups or agents.
• Jira‘s queue management allows agents can see how many issues are in each queue, and switch between queues to work on the right issues at the right time.

Winner: Both

You can build customized searches to help you organize everything from customers to companies. 

• Using Zendesk’s search tool, you can look for information such as ticket properties, user properties, comments, tags, Help Center articles, and so on. Compared to Jira, Zendesk comes with advanced search capabilities. 
• Jira comes with a search box at the top right of your screen. The platform even comes with Jira Query Language, which is the most powerful and flexible way to search for your issues in Jira. 

Winner: Jira

• Jira Service Management uses a built-in processor to receive and process issue requests from emails. You can even add additional mail servers based on your team’s requirements.
• You can also configure your version of Zendesk Support to provide customized email channel support. Zendesk wins because of its extensive customization features, triggers automation, and so on.

Winner: Jira

• By default, Zendesk includes triggers to send out notifications to your customers for specific events. 
• Jira lets you set up email notifications for customers, agents, and administrators to get notifications about activity on requests.

Winner: Both

Ability to segment by sentiment changes of a specific product, Geo, data range to drive actions for a group of customers.

• Jira, unfortunately, does not natively come with this feature.  
• Zendesk allows you to organize customer groups based on behavior (such as purchasing habits) or demographics (like age or location).

Winner: Zendesk

• Zendesk integrates SMS and voice channels into your helpdesk to improve the customer relationship experience.
• Jira, unfortunately, does not natively come with these features.  

Winner: Zendesk

You can set up custom IVR trees using all of your customer data to deliver support even before connecting with your agent.

• Jira, unfortunately, does not natively come with this feature.  
• Zendesk allows you to create multi-level interactive voice response (IVR) or phone trees to route customers to the appropriate agent or department and provide recorded responses to frequently asked questions (FAQs).

Winner:  Zendesk

Integrate the helpdesk directly into your website, as well as a large number of third-party stores and apps.

• Jira comes with over 3,000 software integrations, apps, add-ons, and plugins that can be custom-tailored. 
• With Zendesk, you can select the best apps for your company from over 1,200 available on their Marketplace.

Winner: Jira

• Jira‘s mobile app allows your team to get notified instantly on breached SLAs and requests that are assigned, reported, watched, and @mentioned.
• Zendesk‘s support mobile app is designed to let your team quickly work with support tickets on a mobile device. It even comes with different features such as ticket views, creating tickets, commenting, etc. 

Winner: Both

• Jira, unfortunately, does not natively come with this feature.  
• Zendesk converts the messages received on your Facebook Messenger to tickets. Your agents can easily view and reply to the messages through the dashboard without switching tabs.

Winner: Zendesk

• Jira, unfortunately, does not natively come with this feature.  
• Zendesk allows your agents to easily view and reply to Instagram messages through the dashboard without switching tabs.

Winner: Zendesk

• Jira, unfortunately, does not natively come with this feature.  
• Zendesk offers native WhatsApp integration.

Winner: Zendesk

• Jira, unfortunately, does not natively come with this feature.  
• Zendesk offers native Twitter integration.

Winner: Zendesk

• Zendesk also allows you to convert your most frequently asked support questions into a knowledge base of help articles, allowing customers to help themselves. 
• With Jira, you can create a knowledge base where your team can write and share helpful articles such as how-tos, FAQs, and support questions, and allow customers to self-serve instead of raising a request.  You can even add a free plan of Confluence to your site.

Winner: Jira

• Zendesk’s customer portal allows your customers to track their support requests and conversations in one place.
• Jira also includes an online portal through which your customers can communicate with your support team. 

Winner: Both

A Community or Forum enables customers to interact and help each other by answering questions and sharing best practices.

• Jira, unfortunately, does not natively come with this feature.  
• However, on Zendesk-powered forums, a customer can start a new discussion and request a new feature by commenting on the forum. Also, Zendesk provides admins with moderation features.

Winner: Zendesk

Portal customization is yet another important feature that you should look for, as it helps you come up with logos and custom themes that best match the look and feel of your brand.

• Zendesk’s customer portal provides the option to customize most of the portal right from your brand logo, the portal color, themes, knowledge base, help center, and layout of the article pages.
• In Jira, you can change the following components on the customer portal: name, welcome message, logo, and announcement.

Winner: Zendesk

The helpdesk allows you to deploy custom chatbots. With conversational assistants, you can collect relevant customer information, increase agent productivity, and streamline the support experience. 

• Jira, unfortunately, does not natively come with chatbots
• Zendesk allows you to set up an Answer Bot on a variety of support channels such as chat, messaging, email, Slack, and others.

Winner: Zendesk

• Jira, unfortunately, does not natively come with this feature. 
• Zendesk lets your team easily add new information with integrated knowledge management and leverage that content themselves to respond to customers faster and more accurately. 

Winner: Zendesk

• Zendesk also enables you to develop multiple, automated workflows based on your business goals. You can learn more about Zendesk’s automated workflows here. 
• Jira comes with the following preset rules you can use to set up automation. Some examples include – urgent issue alerts, triage email requests, prompt customers for comments, etc. You can have a look at the automation rules here. 

Winner: Both

• In Zendesk Explore, you can create reports and dashboards, or even a collection of reports.
• Jira lets you edit an existing custom report or create your new custom report.

Winner: Zendesk

These reports help businesses monitor the status of their support teams.

• Zendesk comes with a Support dashboard with 8 different metrics including Efficiency, Agent Updates, Unsolved Tickets, etc.
• Jira comes with default reports such as Workload, Satisfaction, Requests resolved, etc.

Winner: Both

These reports give agents the option to analyze their productivity and improve upon it accordingly to provide a better customer experience.

• Zendesk comes with a prebuilt dashboard displaying your Zendesk Chat engagement data. 
• Jira does not natively provide chat reports. 

Winner:  Zendesk

By analyzing the voice reports, your agents can work on areas where they fall short and provide an overall better customer experience.

• Zendesk offers a dashboard with the following voice metrics: Calls, Efficiency, Agent Activity, Quality, etc.
• Currently, Jira does not come with voice reports since the Service Desk does not offer any telephony support. 

Winner: Zendesk 

The customer portal reports give you the analytics that helps you monitor the views of your knowledge base or guide. It also informs you whether people found your articles useful or not.

• Jira, unfortunately, does not natively come with portal reports.
• Zendesk, however, offers 2 customer portal reports: Knowledge Base, and Search.

Winner: Zendesk

The bot reports help you monitor the performance of the automated bots in your helpdesk. 

• Jira, unfortunately, does not natively come with bot reports 
• Zendesk offers a dashboard with the following metrics: Suggestion Rate, Click-through Rate, Resolution Rate, Rejection Rate, etc.

Winner: Zendesk

• Jira, unfortunately, does not natively come with revenue reports 
• Zendesk help desk includes a Performance Dashboard with a revenue widget and report that displays total revenue in a given timeframe.

Winner: Zendesk

Also Read: 6 Free Zendesk Alternatives You Need To Know!