Zendesk alternative
A Zendesk alternative for small teams
Zendesk’s pricing page sells no CRM and no marketing email, so a team that also sells needs a second and third product. Its phone menu is on Suite Professional, with numbers and minutes charged by use. ContactRoll puts support, a CRM, calling and marketing email in one product.
Zendesk and ContactRoll, need by need
Zendesk sells customer service software: tickets, a help center, messaging and voice, as Support and Suite plans priced per agent. Its sales CRM, Sell, retires on August 31, 2027, and Zendesk has named Pipedrive as the partner for Sell’s customers. [1]
| What a small team needs | Zendesk | ContactRoll |
|---|---|---|
| Contacts, companies and a deals pipeline | Not on Zendesk’s pricing page. Sell, its CRM, retires August 31, 2027. [1][2] | Every plan, Free included; Free has one pipeline. |
| Support email as cases in a shared queue | Yes, on every plan. [1] | Every plan, Free included: each email opens a case anyone can take. Free has one support address of your own. |
| Knowledge articles and a public help center | Suite Team and up. [1] | Every plan, Free included. |
| Calls in the browser, with recording and transfer | Suite Team and up: calls in the browser, recording, hold and warm transfer. Numbers and minutes are charged by use: $1 a month for a US number, $0.016 a minute answered in the browser, $0.003 a minute to record. [1][3] | Every plan, Free included, through your own Twilio account: call groups, voicemail, recording, hold and transfer. |
| A phone menu for callers | Suite Professional and up. [1] | Plus, from ready-made templates, with owner-first ringing and warm transfer. |
| Marketing email to about 2,000 people | Not on Zendesk’s pricing page. [1] | Every plan: 500 marketing contacts and 500 emails a month on Free, 2,000 marketing contacts on Standard, 10,000 on Plus. |
| Automation | Automations and triggers on every plan. [1] | Plus: automation flows. Standard and Plus: sequences started by what a customer does. |
| Roles and who sees what | Custom agent roles on Enterprise. [1] | Every plan: nine ready-made roles and scopes. Plus: roles of your own. |
| An API and webhooks | Yes. [1] | Plus. |
What it costs a team of five, and of ten
Zendesk Suite Professional for every person (tickets, the help center and calling with a phone menu), with Pipedrive — Zendesk’s named partner — for the CRM and its Campaigns add-on for marketing email to 2,000 people. List prices, per month, paid yearly, in US dollars, before tax.
| What the team buys | 5 people | 10 people |
|---|---|---|
| Zendesk Suite Professional, $115 an agent [1] | $575 | $1,150 |
| Pipedrive Lite, $14 a seat, for the CRM [4] | $70 | $140 |
| Pipedrive Campaigns, 2,000 subscribers [4] | $20 | $20 |
| Zendesk, about | $665 | $1,310 |
| ContactRoll Plus, $59 a person | $295 | $590 |
| ContactRoll Standard, $29 a person: the CRM, support cases, calling with call groups, recording and cold transfer, and marketing email to 2,000 | $145 | $290 |
Leaves out numbers, call minutes and recording minutes, which Zendesk charges by use, and taxes. Pipedrive Lite has no email sync or automations; its Growth plan adds them for $25 more a seat. ContactRoll’s calls are billed by Twilio to your own account, with no markup: for example, 2,000 minutes a month in the browser, half of them recorded, with one number, come to about $34 at Twilio’s published US rates (a call put on hold or transferred also pays Twilio’s conference minutes). Try your own numbers in the calling cost calculator.
For a team of 3 people or fewer, ContactRoll Free costs nothing: 1,000 contacts, one pipeline, one support address, calling through your own Twilio account, and 500 marketing emails a month (Free’s limits). Zendesk has no free plan; it offers a 14-day free trial. (Zendesk’s pricing page, read .)
Where Zendesk is strong
- A large marketplace: Zendesk says it has 1,800+ apps, partners and integrations. [1]
- AI agents on every plan, paid per automated resolution. [1]
- A mature voice product: phone trees, callback requests, priority numbers and call monitoring, with numbers in many countries. [1]
Switching from Zendesk
On Suite Growth, Professional and Enterprise, an administrator exports tickets, users or organizations from the Admin Center (Account, then Tools, then Reports). Exports are off until the account owner asks Zendesk Support to turn them on. [5]
The CSV export holds tickets only; users and organizations come out as JSON or XML. On Team plans, the export tools are not available and data comes out through Zendesk’s API. [5]
Then import the file into ContactRoll as a CSV file (save it as CSV first if it came out in another format). Each column is matched to a field by its name, and you can change any match before importing. ContactRoll shows, row by row, what the import would do before it writes anything, and people who unsubscribed stay unsubscribed.
Import your contacts from a CSV file walks through it, and the CSV contact cleaner merges repeated addresses first if your file has them.
Questions
Is ContactRoll a Zendesk alternative?
For a small team that answers support email and takes calls, and also sells and sends marketing email, yes: ContactRoll has a shared queue of cases, articles and a help center, calling through your own Twilio account, a CRM with deals and marketing email, in one product. Zendesk goes further for large support teams, with AI agents, a big marketplace and contact-center features.
Can I move my Zendesk contacts to ContactRoll?
Yes. Export your users from Zendesk, save them as a CSV file with an email column, and import the file into ContactRoll, matching each column to a field. ContactRoll shows what every row will do before it writes anything.
Sources
Every Zendesk figure above, with the page it was read from and the date. Prices change, so check Zendesk’s own pages before deciding. Zendesk and every other product named here are trademarks of their owners, named only to say which product is described.
- Zendesk, pricing: https://www.zendesk.com/pricing/, read 2026-10-14.
- Zendesk Help, announcing the retiring of Zendesk Sell: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/9591462550042-Announcing-the-retiring-of-Zendesk-Sell, read 2026-10-14.
- Zendesk Help, Zendesk Talk number availability and pricing: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408846483482-Zendesk-Talk-number-availability-and-pricing, read 2026-10-14.
- Pipedrive, pricing (its page data, in US dollars): https://www.pipedrive.com/es/pricing, read 2026-10-14.
- Zendesk Help, exporting ticket, user or organization data: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408886165402-Exporting-ticket-user-or-organization-data-from-your-account, read 2026-10-14.