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IBM Maximo vs Zendesk comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

IBM Maximo
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) (1st), Billing Software (4th)
Zendesk
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
60
Ranking in other categories
CRM Customer Engagement Centers (7th), CRM (20th), Help Desk Software (9th), IT Service Management (ITSM) (7th), Sales Force Automation (7th), Reporting (13th), Knowledge Management Software (3rd), Community Platforms (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

IBM Maximo and Zendesk aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. IBM Maximo is designed for Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) and holds a mindshare of 28.7%, up 26.7% compared to last year.
Zendesk, on the other hand, focuses on CRM Customer Engagement Centers, holds 5.4% mindshare, down 11.3% since last year.
Enterprise Asset Management (EAM)
CRM Customer Engagement Centers
 

Featured Reviews

Jose Pedro Muñoz - PeerSpot reviewer
A very strong and powerful tool in the market preferred by a variety of industries
I rate the technical support a seven out of ten. Three levels of support in IBM. The first one is a fixed level, while levels two and three are very good. Here, level one is not very good, as it takes time to go from level one to level two and from level two to level three. So, level one is of low capacity.
JohanSkibdahl - PeerSpot reviewer
Automating customer support with advanced AI capabilities and seamless communication
Zendesk has been invaluable in automating communications such as email and phone calls. It allows us to handle more support cases with fewer people due to its advanced artificial intelligence capabilities. This intelligent tool can manage complex queries before users even realize they are interacting with a non-human. Additionally, we have integrated Zendesk with Datto and Klaviyo ( /products/klaviyo-reviews ), enhancing our workflows.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Reliable, very configurable, and it's all integrated in the same database."
"The most valuable feature is asset management maintenance as well as asset management overall."
"The incident management feature is good because it allows you to keep track of and classify issues."
"We can manage, organize, and track incidents, claims, jobs, tasks, preventive and corrective maintenance, locations, and assets."
"Preventive maintenance management."
"I have found Work Order management the most valuable feature. Additionally, it is a very robust and powerful solution."
"Its capabilities let us organize our work."
"Has a powerful audit combination that helps achieve high accuracy."
"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."
"The product offers very good management. It has a great ability to assign tickets based on content."
"It is very easy to connect back and forth between the requester and the person fulfilling the ticket."
"Zendesk Support has a lot of good APIs."
"The initial setup is simple and straightforward."
"The stability has been very good."
"It is a scalable solution."
"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."
 

Cons

"Vendor management needs enhancement."
"The standard reports that shipped with the package need to be enriched with more advanced reports, especially for the Inventory Management sections."
"The mobile solution has a lot of room for improvement, especially in geopositioning capabilities, tracking capabilities, and configuration capabilities, in order to let the tech operate online and offline.​"
"The solution is not stable. We can have one day when it is stable and another day it is not. Sometimes it crashes or becomes very slow, and there are times we are not even able to download all the databases. Without the database, we cannot work on that application. These are the small glitches, and stability issues we are facing."
"Revision management of file attachments."
"The pricing model of the solution has room for improvement as well as the after-sales support."
"It needs full-service visibility. There are a lot of things that are hard for users to find out. For example, the Service Catalog is not too friendly. You really have to know what you're looking for."
"I feel that the interface is a little too complicated with a large number of fields to enter."
"The solution itself wasn't easy to set up."
"They have something called Zendesk Explore, which isn't as good as what they had in place previously."
"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."
"Zendesk's stability on inbound calls could be improved as compared to Talkdesk."
"The support team is time-consuming, and they don't find the answer to our problem."
"Zendesk Guide could be improved by allowing us to put our assets in one location. What happens now for each article, for example, is we have to upload the images for that article to that location, so the image reuse is still not something that they have perfected. If they could allow us to update all the images in one location, and then pull the image from there, it would be easier when working on Multibrand projects. There are no Multibrand updates available—we have to update each brand manually. For my company, I have come up with an API tool which allows me to push the content to multiple brands together, but if you don't have something like that, you have to manually do it."
"One of the drawbacks of Zendesk is that it doesn't provide a secure way for us to send data. So, we usually use a secure SharePoint folder link. We put that in the Zendesk ticket so that the requester has a secure way of getting to their data."
"The price of the solution should be reduced."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of IBM Maximo could reduce, it is expensive."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is low and ten is high, I rate the pricing a nine. The price is very high."
"I do not know about the price of the solution. However, this has been an expensive project overall."
"Where available, concurrent licenses can be more cost efficient and provide more flexibility."
"IBM has changed the licensing policy. As I understand now, they are going from a complex way of licensing to a more simple way of licensing."
"IBM Maximo offers a licensing application, and you have to comply with the license."
"The concurrent user license is much more effective in management and cost-wise, as it is more suitable for maintenance management."
"$USD700 per agent user."
"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."
"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."
"From what I hear, Zendesk's pricing is a little expensive."
"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."
"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."
"The price is very competitive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
29%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Energy/Utilities Company
9%
Government
9%
Computer Software Company
24%
Educational Organization
11%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Manufacturing Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about IBM Maximo?
It can be particularly useful for power line operations, enabling linemen in the field to gather information and send it across the country as well as different parts of the world.
What needs improvement with IBM Maximo?
Though I liked it a lot, I think it was lagging a lot. It was very slow due to the lagging issues. So that was kind of frustrating, considering how slow it was while functioning. The aforementioned...
What is your primary use case for IBM Maximo?
It can be particularly useful for power line operations, enabling linemen in the field to gather information and send it across the country as well as different parts of the world. With IBM Maximo,...
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?
Zendesk's pricing is reasonable. It is not the cheapest solution nor the most expensive, but it provides value for money.
What needs improvement with Zendesk Support?
There could be improvements in integration, which can be achieved with APIs or tools like Zapier ( /products/zapier-reviews ). However, easier integration could enhance the usability. Multilingual ...
 

Also Known As

Maximo
Zendesk Support, Zendesk Guide, Zendesk Sell
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Royal Boskalis Westminster N.V., DTE Energy, Swedish Match, Projetech, Fingrid, East Coast
Mailchimp, Tesco, Vimeo, Instacart, Mediaocean, Slack, Uber
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM, Infor, IFS and others in Enterprise Asset Management (EAM). Updated: April 2025.
849,600 professionals have used our research since 2012.