In a time of ever-evolving customer expectations, the number of tools business leaders use for sales, marketing, and service is growing. Every day, teams access software to help them automate marketing campaigns, generate new leads, close deals, and provide excellent customer service.
Unfortunately, in the past, the disconnected nature of these tools has led to knowledge gaps and data silos between teams. Companies have struggled to bridge the gap between sales professionals, marketing experts, and service reps, leading to disjointed and inconsistent experiences for end users.
HubSpot and Zendesk are two SaaS leaders working to address this problem. With a unified platform of tools for every customer-facing professional, both Zendesk and HubSpot hope to unify the experience landscape once and for all. The question is, which CX solution is best?
Zendesk vs HubSpot: The Zendesk Portfolio
Zendesk is a comprehensive SaaS solution provider committed to improving customer service. The product portfolio offered by Zendesk comes with solutions for enhancing the employee experience, crafting conversational experiences, and tracking customer insights.
Delivered via the cloud, Zendesk’s toolkit covers three main areas:
Zendesk for Service
The Zendesk service platform is an omnichannel communication and customer support platform built to unify and align customer conversations. The platform supports live chat, messaging, social media, email, and voice. Companies can also build self-service help centers and community forums, custom AI apps and bots.
Alongside omnichannel communication tools, Zendesk’s service platform includes access to intelligent routing, AI insights, knowledge management tools, built-in collaboration tools, and a completely customizable agent workspace. Users can integrate the platform with their existing tools, analyze crucial metrics, and monitor results in real time across every channel.
Zendesk for Sales
Zendesk Sell is a modern sales-focused CRM solution designed to help companies maximize growth and unlock new opportunities. The comprehensive platform includes contact and deal management tools, activity tracking, as well lead generation and qualification.
Full 360-degree customer profiles allow agents to track critical customer information cross sales and service in one platform. There’s also a full reporting and analytics section for tracking the outcomes of the sales pipeline. Additionally, Zendesk Sell integrates with numerous existing tools, and has its own dedicated API, so developers can create custom, automated workflows.
Zendesk Sunshine
Finally, Zendesk Sunshine is the all-in-one platform solution, created by Zendesk to help companies create their own unique customer service strategy. Using open standards and common languages, Sunshine ensures companies have the freedom to build the solutions they need.
With Sunshine, companies can maximize agent productivity, creating AI-enhanced workspaces with no code tools and automation. What’s more, the end-to-end platform can connect with multiple sources of data, to help businesses create a comprehensive view of their target audience.
The Sunshine platform also integrates directly with more than 1200 popular apps in the Zendesk marketplace, including Shopify, Salesforce, Slack, and Zoom.
HubSpot vs Zendesk: The HubSpot Portfolio
Like Zendesk, HubSpot has taken a unified approach to address the various needs of today’s sales, service, and marketing experts. The SaaS platform from HubSpot offers modular access to a range of different tools or “hubs” built for specific user needs. Every hub comes with access to a selection of free tools, including a free version of the HubSpot CRM.
The core hubs include:
HubSpot Marketing Hub
An end-to-end marketing platform designed to help companies attract the right audience and convert more of their visitors. The comprehensive toolkit includes social media tools, blog and content creation capabilities, and SEO solutions. Companies can even build their own websites and automate their marketing campaigns using pre-set triggers and rules.




