Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Everbridge IT Alerting vs Zendesk comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Everbridge IT Alerting
Average Rating
8.8
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
IT Alerting and Incident Management (9th)
Zendesk
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
59
Ranking in other categories
CRM Customer Engagement Centers (5th), CRM (21st), Help Desk Software (11th), IT Service Management (ITSM) (9th), Sales Force Automation (7th), Reporting (13th), Knowledge Management Software (2nd), Community Platforms (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Systems Management solutions, they serve different purposes. Everbridge IT Alerting is designed for IT Alerting and Incident Management and holds a mindshare of 13.5%, up 8.6% compared to last year.
Zendesk, on the other hand, focuses on CRM Customer Engagement Centers, holds 7.2% mindshare, down 14.1% since last year.
IT Alerting and Incident Management
CRM Customer Engagement Centers
 

Featured Reviews

CQ
Nov 11, 2019
We have seen substantial savings with its usage as it drives down our MTTR
The automated escalations are the most valuable feature. We program in our escalation chains for each individual IT group. Being able to go out and request a resource from that team, and if they don't respond, that automated escalation makes it very hands off. So, our major incident managers and our network operations center can focus more on the other work that they need to do rather than chasing down those resources. They can rest assured that somebody will be answering. Another valuable feature is the ease of integration into our ServiceNow platform, where we are doing all of our work between two teams. They are able to make requests from within the tickets that we can manage rather than having to use another portal or logging into Everbridge directly. Reliability is their biggest value.
Ahmed Nassar - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 17, 2023
Stable tool, making it reliable for handling tasks but difficult initial setup
It has a huge problem regarding the price. The price increases every year. Every year, they raise the price of the licenses, which makes a lot of limitations, and you have to pay more. So that's some conditions. Actually, most of the companies that use Zendesk need a customer experience or customer care department. However, Zendesk only works with chatbox or emailing services, but it can also use Genesys, VoIP, or voice sensors. Additionally, Zendesk needs the administration panels to be easier because it's a very complex panel. You need to search for a lot of things to do, like a small job. So you have to do a lot of setup regarding the integration, and it's a little bit challenging to integrate any software in the vendor.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most important features are the scheduling capability and the integration with ServiceNow."
"You can configure the tool to escalate if no action is taken within a certain time period. That avoids sending off an alert that nobody deals with and where nobody knows that nobody has dealt with it."
"You can program in rotations, shifts, and scenarios of different kinds and it allows you to page multiple people, or people in sequence, or a group of people simultaneously."
"Even in the first few months, we realized some of those benefits around shortening the time to resolution."
"The most important feature, from our perspective, is the integration with our ticketing system. That eliminates wasted motion and time in drafting and sending and finding the right distribution list."
"People are able to join a bridge with one press of a button. It gives us the ability to contact the correct people via rules, based on conditions."
"Valuable features include incident management and ease of integrations."
"The post mortem reports are descriptive, indicating who joined the call and when."
"Zendesk Support has a lot of good APIs."
"The initial setup is simple and straightforward."
"What is cool about Zendesk Guide is how it works together with others Zendesk products. Especially with support and with the analytics. Put those together for a small or medium-sized company and it's a really powerful tool."
"The most valuable features of Zendesk Support are collaboration, reports, and a self-service portal. The customer and team can see all the information needed from the portal."
"One of the most valuable features is that Zendesk gives you a lot of configurability, and a lot of leeway in terms of customizing the look and theme. Zendesk offers you the facility to design your own landing page, as well as the look and feel of the entire knowledge base. At the same time, they offer themes that you can simply purchase and implement. Either way, it can really be turned into the right look and feel of the knowledge base required by our company, which is very important—if you have a bland-looking page, most of the time, people will lose interest. Zendesk also allows you to test the customizations before you publish it. It gives you a sandbox location where you can test everything new that you're trying to create and publish, which is very interesting."
"Its agility and simplicity are the most valuable features. This tool is very user-friendly."
"It has good management, the ability to sign tickets based on content, the multi-channel support, the self service portal, the integration with Salesforce, the setup process, and the product features as we are currently using them."
"The most valuable feature is the trackability of incoming requests. The system keeps a comprehensive history of work requests, making it a useful tool for our internal processes."
 

Cons

"I swapped two people's weeks, and at least from what I saw, I had to do each day individually. It would be nice if I could swap two people's weeks without having to do it each day."
"Their integration capabilities are still progressing, but not quite where we'd like to see them yet. They're moving there with that orchestration capability where they're seeing the potential of an API-first mentality. So instead of trying to build custom connections into everything, you open up APIs to allow other systems to talk to IT Alerting and allow IT Alerting to talk to other systems. There is room for improvement, but they get it."
"A key area for improvement - and I think they are working towards these things - is analytics. If I want to do sophisticated reporting and analysis of the data that's being captured in IT Alerting, at the moment, the reporting interface is immature."
"It could use more enhancement type integrations, but no improvements to functionality are needed."
"You have to create schedules in Everbridge. It would be better if it could tie into an existing solution, such as Microsoft Exchange or Google Calendar, so that you don't have to create it in both places. That's one thing it lacks right now. You can't just say, "Hey, look at this Microsoft calendar. That's what we want to use." You have to create it in Everbridge."
"One thing that could be improved would be to enable the mobile app to more easily display published calendars via the Member Portal. Currently, it is quite difficult."
"There is some room to improve the initial-rollout functions which are a little bit painful."
"The initial setup was very complex. We did not have a very good experience with our initial deployment. Most of this was due to customizations in our ServiceNow instance."
"The price of the solution should be reduced."
"It wasn't easy to set up so we're only using a third of all of the features,"
"The support team is time-consuming, and they don't find the answer to our problem."
"Zendesk's stability on inbound calls could be improved as compared to Talkdesk."
"Report generation is still slightly tricky and not very customizable as per my inquiries."
"Zendesk Guide's customization could be improved. I would like it to be easier and maybe open-sourced, so that if you have a developer in your company, you can do it yourself. Right now, that isn't allowed, so you need to have it done via the integrator. Another improvement—this is nit-picking—is that it could be less easy to make changes. Some things are so easy that they sometimes look a little amateur-ish. Most of the templates are built-in so they can be used directly, so they are very simple."
"The solution could integrate better with QR codes from some websites such as Facebook."
"There is always a network issue with Zendesk. But we don’t know whether it is managed. The network issue is that when I call, it does not let us."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The end result is that we have driven down our MTTR by an average of about 45 minutes across all major outages. That is very substantial considering the cost of every minute of outage can be thousands of dollars lost."
"The annual cost is $125,000 USD. That is for everything. It includes the 11,000 mass notifications. Technically, we have 500 licenses for IT Alerting."
"They are one of the top three most expensive products. I also understand if you are going to use them for IT alerting, it is worth it. They are competitively priced, but the IT alerting is the differentiator. The way that they market it and push it out. That is their premier function."
"They are one of the cheapest solutions on the market. We looked at all of the major competitors in the space. Everbridge was one of the most affordable for what they are offering."
"This product has helped us save $200,000 from being able to get rid of vendors and consolidate functionalities to doing incident reporting."
"It saves us a lot of time."
"When we did our contract, we did a three year contract with fixed pricing. We locked in the pricing for three years. As we have grown, we locked in pricing for additional units of employees."
"Everbridge is not an inexpensive tool, but as the adage says, you get what you pay for."
"From what I hear, Zendesk's pricing is a little expensive."
"You have to pay extra for better support. So it's not only the license that you pay for, but you have to pay extra for the support as well."
"There are different plans that are offered. We are using the entry-level plan. The overall price of the solution should be reduced. The price is too high."
"We pay for the solution on a yearly basis and my understanding is that the cost is about $30,000. That's the cost for 24 to 25 agents."
"The price is very competitive."
"Zendesk's licensing is not cheap. For Enterprise, we are paying $200 per agent. It's a per-month cost, so it's pretty steep. There are some services you need to pay extra for. For example, with Zendesk Guide, we had to buy the most expensive offering in order to get Multibrand and everything. We also had to pay a lot of money for themes."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which IT Alerting and Incident Management solutions are best for your needs.
814,763 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Healthcare Company
10%
Government
10%
Computer Software Company
22%
Educational Organization
11%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Everbridge IT Alerting?
It's mainly for mass notification and pooling of contacts. Pooling of customers is valuable.
What needs improvement with Everbridge IT Alerting?
The solution's non-targeted communication with external parties could be enhanced.
What do you like most about Zendesk Support?
I found the user experience with vendors on Zendesk to be straightforward, especially when it comes to understanding and searching for specific tickets. The search and navigation tools are easy to ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zendesk Support?
From what I hear, Zendesk's pricing is a little expensive. One of the reasons for shifting from Zendesk to Talkdesk was cost efficiency.
What needs improvement with Zendesk Support?
Sometimes, the calls do not record, and your conversation is cut midway. When you want to do a call calibration, you realize that the call is incomplete. Zendesk's stability on inbound calls could ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Zendesk Support, Zendesk Guide, Zendesk Sell
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Choice Hotels, Alexion, Navy Federal Credit Union, EastWest Bank, IBM, Core Logic, Paypal, Charter Communications, Lowes, Express Scripts, Finastra, Worldpay
Mailchimp, Tesco, Vimeo, Instacart, Mediaocean, Slack, Uber
Find out what your peers are saying about PagerDuty, Atlassian, Splunk and others in IT Alerting and Incident Management. Updated: October 2024.
814,763 professionals have used our research since 2012.