Zendesk vs. LiveAgent

The quality of your customer support can make or break a customer’s day. No, really.

According to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2023, 2 in 3 consumers admit that a bad customer experience (CX) can ruin their day. Because of this, 81 percent of business leaders see customer experience and support as a growing priority.

We believe good customer service hinges on the tools of an end-to-end customer service solution. Zendesk and LiveAgent are two popular choices. In this guide, we compare Zendesk vs. LiveAgent, covering key features and pricing.

Spoiler alert: In the comparison of Zendesk and LiveAgent, Zendesk comes out on top for three main reasons.

Scalability

We built Zendesk to last, providing a long-term customer service solution that can grow alongside your business. Every Zendesk plan includes ready-to-use email management software with unlimited email addresses, ensuring you won’t need to switch plans as you scale your business. LiveAgent users, on the other hand, have to jump from plan to plan as support teams grow. For example, its “Small business plan” only supports three email addresses, so you’ll need to switch to a more expensive one if you need a fourth email address.

Ease of use

Zendesk deploys quickly and works out of the box. Thanks to its ease of use and intuitive interface, agents can get up and running fast, so they don’t miss a beat. However, LiveAgent is a different story. For example, one user noted there was a steep learning curve, which made it difficult to understand and configure the software.

Customization

With 1,500+ integrations, Zendesk is customizable and extensible, enabling your team to work seamlessly across apps. Zendesk also provides the tools to build custom apps and integrations. Alternatively, LiveAgent offers significantly fewer apps and integration options, with less than 300 listed on its site. One user noted that while LiveAgent offers a range of features, it may have a lower level of customization compared to more specialized customer support solutions.

More in this guide:

• At-a-glance comparison: Zendesk vs. LiveAgent
• Zendesk vs. LiveAgent: Features comparison
• Pricing plans: LiveAgent vs. Zendesk
• Customer stories on using Zendesk vs. LiveAgent
• Frequently asked questions
• Ready to try Zendesk?

When selecting customer service software, it's best to prioritize the features—from live chat software to AI and automation— that matter most to your business. To help determine which software comes out on top, let’s compare the features of Zendesk vs. LiveAgent.

Live chat and messaging

Zendesk is a complete messaging solution that allows your support team to provide personalized customer support. With Zendesk, you can use AI chatbots to deliver fast customer service around the clock. Bots can answer common questions, which saves your agents time and reduces support costs. Plus, our live chat software gives you the tools and context to proactively send customers timely messages, strengthening your customer relationships.

LiveAgent pricing plans come with varying numbers of live chat buttons. It typically offers only two to five live chat buttons for basic plans. Moreover, it doesn’t offer proactive chat invitations with the basic plan for small businesses.

Omnichannel support

With Zendesk, your support agents can deliver seamless omnichannel customer service. Using our Agent Workspace, your team can respond to emails, chats, phone calls, and social media messages in real time without switching between countless dashboards. Additionally, Zendesk enables agents to collaborate and use contextual workspaces in one unified location.

LiveAgent offers a universal inbox support agents can use to respond to emails, live chat messages, and support phone calls in a single place. Even though users can centralize their communication channels, one user noted that there isn’t a large enough selection of communication tools to connect with, and the platform currently lacks popular integrations like Telegram and Google Chat.

Self-service and knowledge management

Zendesk offers a smart knowledge base that businesses can use to provide self-service options for their customers. Additionally, Zendesk offers tools that help your support team easily lend their expertise and create and update helpful content for your customers. Additionally, Zendesk intelligently recommends articles to agents so they spend less time searching and more time providing meaningful support.

LiveAgent includes a knowledge base tool that allows agents to organize and share helpful information. However, LiveAgent’s knowledge base solutions don’t seem to be AI-powered, requiring agents to manually surface helpful content to assist them with customer support interactions.

Ticket management

Zendesk features a fully integrated ticketing system that helps agents manage support tickets across channels—including email, social media, community forums, help centers, and more—in one central hub. Zendesk also keeps agents on track by intelligently routing conversations to the right agent based on skill, channel, priority, and availability, enabling agents to solve more issues faster.

LiveAgent offers ticket management functionality via its universal inbox, allowing support agents to manage support tickets from email, chat, and other channels in one place. Despite this feature, one user stated that LiveAgent is clunky and sometimes misses the mark as a ticketing software.

Another user noted that support tickets don't allow you to link to knowledge base articles internally. This requires users to open the knowledge base in a separate window, find the article, and then paste the URL into their reply. Additionally, one user stated you cannot assign more than one predefined answer to a ticket. Whenever the user tried to select another answer, LiveAgent would erase the first one.

AI and automation

Zendesk leverages AI based on billions of data points from customer interactions to deliver fast, conversational AI support. With Zendesk AI and automation tools, you can provide 24/7 support using generative AI, offering chatbots that sound like humans—all with a few clicks. Additionally, Zendesk uses information from your existing knowledge base to deliver instant responses, so you don’t need to spend time developing custom answers or building bots.

LiveAgent lets agents create automation rules that trigger actions such as ticket transfers based on predefined conditions. While LiveAgent plans to add an AI assistant, the feature is limited to private beta users. So, LiveAgent users must rely solely on human agents to handle tickets and suggest solutions, which may impact the speed and availability of your customer service.

Zendesk and LiveAgent both offer pricing on a per-agent basis. Zendesk offers tiered pricing plans designed to scale with businesses of all sizes, from startups to enterprises. Support Professional and Support Enterprise plans provide additional features like customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores and the ability to create private, custom integrations that build on tools included in the Support Team plan.

LiveAgent offers four pricing plans as well as a free plan, but the free version lacks reporting and provides far fewer features than the others. For example, entry-level LiveAgent users are limited to three email addresses, have no reporting features, and must pay a monthly add-on fee to connect with social media platforms like Facebook and X (formerly known as Twitter).

With Zendesk, even our entry-level plans contain robust features, including unlimited email addresses, reporting and analytics tools, and the ability to engage with users over Messenger for business and X for business.

Now that we’ve broken down LiveAgent vs. Zendesk, read along to discover what our customers say about Zendesk.

Missouri Star Quilt Company

Missouri Star Quilt Company is a fabric and quilting supply company in the small town of Hamilton, MO. To help keep up with its rise from a mom-and-pop shop to one of the largest online retailers of fabric and quilting supplies, Missouri Star Quilt Company needed a customer service solution to help handle over 22,000 monthly service tickets.

At first, the company tried Help Scout and LiveAgent but didn’t find success.

“One of the biggest problems we had is we kept dropping calls. We weren’t actually able to get to all the calls, to reach people,” says Wendi Mills, customer service manager at Missouri Star Quilt Company.

Since adopting Zendesk, Missouri Star Quilt Company has seen the following benefits:

• 30% answer rate improvement for customer service calls
• 97% customer satisfaction rating

Liberty London

Liberty London is a high-end department store based in London. To help improve its customer service capabilities in the face of increasing online sales, Liberty swapped out its shared email inbox and switchboard for Zendesk.

To provide fast, friendly, and factual customer service, Liberty leaned on the AI capabilities of Zendesk to automatically route incoming tickets to the correct agent at the right time.

“Liberty is all about delivering a personal service. I see AI enhancing that personal service because now our customers will be interacting with a human who’s being put in front of them at the right time with the right information,” says Ian Hunt, director of customer services at Liberty London.

Since implementing Zendesk, Liberty benefited in the following ways:

• 73% improvement in first reply time
• 11% improvement in ticket resolution time
• 9% increase in CSAT score

Virgin Pulse

Virgin Pulse is one of the world’s largest global well-being solution providers, offering technology that helps promote positive lifestyle habits for employees across thousands of companies. Looking for a way to provide meaningful omnichannel support, Virgin Pulse partnered with Zendesk to deliver customer support through phone, email, chat, and social media.

“We pull in all of our member inquiries, concerns, and issues through the Zendesk platform. It enables us to ensure that our members are receiving accurate, timely responses, regardless of which channel they choose to contact us,” says Michael Pace, vice president of member services at Virgin Pulse.

Due to its partnership with Zendesk, Virgin Pulse experienced a:

• 6% improvement in CSAT score
• 2.5x increase in agent-to-self-service ratio
• 25% to 30% cost avoidance for the annual budget

Uber

The popular rideshare app Uber offers rides and food delivery worldwide. To help serve riders and drivers, Uber selected Zendesk as its customer service partner from the very beginning due to its strong focus on offering effective live chat support.

Uber utilized the live chat features of Zendesk to onboard new drivers and handle roughly 30,000 chats per week in the U.S. alone.

“Chat is great for onboarding new drivers, empowering agents to answer many questions in one interaction. It’s really fast,” says Ashley Bradford, global chat support program manager at Uber.

After partnering with Zendesk to deliver live chat support, Uber experienced the following:

• 95% chat CSAT score
• Less than 30-second chat first response time