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Free, forever.
$0/ month
Get FreeWhat's included
- Unlimited posts
- Unlimited users
- 3 admin roles
- 2 feedback boards
- Public roadmap
- Public changelog
The Zendesk alternative with a flat price and no agent seats.
UserJot is a Zendesk alternative with live chat, a support inbox, and an AI agent that answers from your docs, next to a public feedback board, roadmap, and changelog. Flat pricing, no agent seats, free to start.
Every day, the teams behind Tally, OpenPanel, Drizzle, SuperWhisper, Scite, Throne, Nuelink, Ghostbase, and hundreds of others talk with their customers in UserJot.
At a glance.
| Feature | Zendesk | UserJot |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $19 to $115 per agent a month billed yearly, $25 to $149 monthly | Free, $29, or $59 a month, flat |
| Free plan | None; a 14-day trial of Suite Professional | Live chat, inbox, Juno, board, roadmap, and changelog, with 3 team members |
| AI agent | 5 or 10 resolutions per agent a month included, then $2 each | Juno, included while Conversations is in beta, with no charge per resolution |
| A teammate who reads tickets | A full seat on Support Team and Suite Team; 100 light agents included on Suite Professional | No seat charge; everyone on the team can work the inbox |
| Feature requests | Gather forum on Suite Professional, at $115 per agent | Public board, roadmap, and changelog on every plan; Juno files them from chat |
| Leaving | 30 days' notice before renewal; charges nonrefundable | Cancel any time from settings |
Top Zendesk alternatives
Zendesk bills by the agent, and then by the resolution once its AI starts answering. If you would rather pay a flat price, these are the alternatives to Zendesk worth a look. If voice, SLA policies, and skills routing are what you use Zendesk for, UserJot has none of them; Freshdesk and Zoho Desk have all three on their top tiers, and Help Scout has some.
UserJot
Get started freeLive chat on your site and in your app, support email in the same inbox, and Juno, an AI operator who answers from your docs and files feature requests on your public board. Roadmap and changelog included, and an MCP server on paid plans. Flat pricing, no agent seats, free to start.
Best for: SaaS teams whose support happens in a chat widget and a support address, and who want the feature requests in those conversations to land somewhere.
A shared inbox, live chat, and a docs site, at $25 per user a month billed yearly, with a free plan for 5 users and 100 helped contacts a month. Its AI agent, Envoy, is $0.75 per resolution after a three-month free trial for new accounts.
Best for: Teams that want Zendesk's inbox and chat with less to configure, and can live with a seat price.
The Messenger and Fin, from $29 a seat billed yearly plus $0.99 per Fin outcome, with $19 a seat billed yearly for new customers. Part of Salesforce since September 2026.
Best for: Teams whose support is the chat widget and who want Fin, at a per-seat and per-outcome price.
Email ticketing from $19 an agent billed yearly; live chat needs Freshdesk Omni, from $29. Free for six months for two agents, and Freddy AI at $49 per 100 sessions.
Best for: Teams that want Zendesk's ticket model at the same seat price, with six months free for two agents, and don't need chat on day one.
Tickets from $7 an agent billed yearly and a free plan for three agents. Messaging for logged-in customers is on Standard at $14; live chat for visitors is on Enterprise at $40. AI is billed by tokens.
Best for: Small teams on a budget, and anyone already paying for Zoho.
A chat-first inbox priced per workspace, not per seat: free for 2 seats, $45 a month for 4, $95 for 10. Its AI runs on dollar credits included with each paid plan.
Best for: Teams that want a flat price and a chat widget before a ticket queue.
Chatwoot
Open source and self-hostable, with live chat and email, a free cloud plan for 2 agents, and paid plans from $19 an agent. You run the server and the backups if you self-host.
Best for: Teams whose support data has to stay on their own servers.
Where Zendesk falls short.
Zendesk, founded in 2007, sells help desk software with tickets, chat, voice, a help center, SLAs, skills routing, and an app marketplace. It also has an AI that bills $2 a resolution past the allowance, a seat for everyone who opens a ticket, a contract that renews unless you say so 30 days early, and no home for the feature request inside the ticket.
The AI charges by the resolution
5 or 10 included per agent a month, then $2 each, or $1.50 on a commitment
Support Team and Suite Team include five automated resolutions per agent a month, Suite Professional ten, and past that each one is $2 pay as you go or $1.50 on an annual commitment. A two-person team handling 500 conversations a month pays $138 on Suite Team if people answer everything and about $418 once the AI resolves 30% of them; the worked bills are in our Zendesk pricing guide. Zendesk announced the model on its own community in April 2024, and the post carries 90 comments and a vote total of minus nine. One commenter in May 2024 wrote "Unless a client confirms that his issue is resolved, it is not resolved and he probably just switched channels"; a 14-agent team wrote that it would "now be paying $10,000+ yearly for a service that has always been included"; another, in August 2025, called ten free resolutions per agent "insultingly low". In May 2026 Zendesk introduced a resolution-tier model with a pooled allowance. It has not published per-tier rates, and the pricing page still prints the older numbers.
Every teammate is an agent
Full agent seats on Support Team and Suite Team; 100 light agents included on Suite Professional at $115
Every seat on Support Team and Suite Team is a full agent at the plan rate. Light agents can read tickets and leave internal notes; Suite Professional at $115 per agent billed yearly includes 100 of them, and on Suite Team they are an add-on with no published price. Below Professional, the product manager who wants to follow tickets is a seat, and answering a customer takes a full agent on every plan. A Hacker News commenter put it this way in August 2021: "as an engineer, I want to make a comment on a support ticket once every 3-6 months, but Zendesk would require my company to pay for another user license to do that." Another, on the thread about a company that replaced Zendesk in May 2026, said the final straw was "attempting to move Zendesk down to one seat to have historical/archive capabilities for a period of time, and they couldn't even manage that process properly."
Thirty days' notice, or another term
Nonrenewal notice 30 days before the term ends; charges nonrefundable
Under the Zendesk Customer Agreement, subscriptions renew automatically for the same term unless you give notice of nonrenewal at least 30 days before the term ends, charges are nonrefundable, and seat reductions take effect only at renewal with 30 days' written notice. Eligible self-service accounts can cancel from Admin Center; sales-assisted accounts go through their account representative. Comments under Zendesk's own "Canceling products and accounts" article: in June 2023, "No notice that the plan is auto renewing. Cannot change until 30days prior"; in July 2023, a writer who asked to cancel was told after three inquiries that the account would not renew, then watched it renew and charge the card on file $6,400; in March 2025, "I have been trying to cancel my account for several weeks with no satisfaction."
The request ends as a tag
Gather forum on Suite Professional; no roadmap or changelog module listed
When a customer asks for something in a Zendesk ticket, the ticket is where it stays. Gather is a community forum with posts, votes, and the statuses Planned, Not planned, Completed, and Answered, on Suite Professional at $115 per agent. Zendesk lists no public roadmap or changelog module for your product, and its marketplace connects Canny, Productboard, and UserVoice instead. A post on Zendesk's community in October 2023, from a team handling thousands of emails a month, asks "How do you gather your feedback without having to ask each agent to manually input feedback they receive in the ticket?" It has nine comments.
What UserJot does instead.
UserJot has what a small SaaS team uses Zendesk for: live chat on your site and inside your app, support email in the same inbox, and Juno, an AI operator who answers from your docs and hands the thread to a person when one is needed. It adds the public feedback board, roadmap, and changelog that the requests in those conversations end up on, and an MCP server for your own agents.
Everyone on your team works the inbox, and Conversations is free on every plan while it is in beta. Paid plans start at $29 a month with a 14-day trial, and you're live in minutes.
Starter
Staff pick. For small teams.
$29/ month
Get StarterEverything in Free, plus
- Custom domain
- Guest posting
- Automatic login
- 5 feedback boards
- Private boards
- One integration
Professional
For growing teams.
$59/ month
Get ProEverything in Starter, plus
- Unlimited boards
- Advanced search
- Single sign-on
- Unlimited integrations
- Unlimited admin roles
- Public identity masking
Chat on your site, email in the same inbox.
The widget that shows your board, roadmap, and changelog gets a Messages page when Conversations is on. Customers write to you from inside your product, and your team answers from the dashboard where it already triages requests. Forward your support address and email lands in the same inbox, with no DNS changes, and your reply goes out from the forwarding address. When a customer leaves the chat and you have their email, your answer reaches them there and their reply comes back into the thread.
Each conversation has an assignee and a state: needs team, AI handling, or waiting on customer. Internal notes, snooze, reminders, search, typing indicators, blocked senders, and an away reply for when the whole team is off are in the inbox. The inbox translates incoming messages into your language, and you can translate your reply before it goes out.
Juno answers first, and hands off when a person is needed.
Juno is the AI operator built into UserJot. On each customer message, chat or email, she decides to answer, hand off, or stay silent. She answers from your docs and the sites you point her at, in the customer's language, at any hour. She hands the thread to your team when the customer asks for a person, when she isn't confident, or when the question is outside what she knows, and leaves a note on why. Once a teammate replies, she stays out of that thread until someone hands it back.
There is no charge per resolution. Juno comes with every plan while Conversations is in beta, and a conversation she resolves costs the same as one she hands off. You can turn her off for the workspace, and new conversations go straight to the team.
Sara Meyer
Team support
We were charged twice this month, can you help?
4:07 PM
Sorry about that! Refunds need a teammate, so I'm bringing one in now.
4:07 PM
Juno handed this conversation to the team
Hi, Sara here. Just refunded the duplicate charge, you'll see it back in a few business days.
4:09 PM
The feature request leaves the ticket.
When a customer describes a feature in chat, Juno searches your public board, shows them the matching request, and once they confirm, adds their vote or files a new one in their name. The request is where your team plans from, with the customer attached.
When you mark the request Planned or In Progress, it moves to that column on the public roadmap. Every status change emails everyone who posted, voted, or commented. When you mark it Completed, the changelog post you write links back to it, with Juno drafting the post from the requests you completed since the last one.
Planned
12Committed and queued
- Features
Mobile app
The whole web app on iPhone and Android, with push notifications when something needs you.
Alex Martin - Features
Export reports to CSV
Finance needs the monthly numbers in a spreadsheet. A one-click export from any report would save us an afternoon every month.
SRSofia Reyes - Integrations
Zapier integration
We’d love to send new tasks to the rest of our tools without writing a script. A trigger for new tasks would cover most of it.
TBTom Becker - Features
Custom fields on tasks
We track budget and client on every task. A couple of custom fields would replace the spreadsheet we keep next to Acme.
MLMia Laurent - Features
Two-factor sign-in
Our security review asks for it every year. An authenticator app option would be enough for us.
OHOmar Haddad
In Progress
4Actively being built
- Features
Dark mode
Late nights in Acme are hard on the eyes. A dark theme that follows the system setting would be perfect.
Marcus Chen - Features
Bulk edit tasks
Changing the assignee on twenty tasks one at a time takes forever. Let me edit a whole selection at once.
HSHana Sato - Features
Task templates
We set up the same onboarding checklist for every new client. Saving it once as a template would save us an hour each time.
NPNina Petrova - Features
Timeline view
Seeing tasks on a timeline would make it much easier to plan around deadlines and spot overlaps.
LPLeo Park
Done
9Recently shipped
- Integrations
Google Calendar sync
Due dates should show up on my calendar without copying them over one by one.
PNPriya Nair - Integrations
Slack alerts for due tasks
A message in our team channel the morning a task is due would stop things from slipping.
CDChloe Dubois - Bugs
Search freezes in big workspaces
With a few thousand tasks, typing in search locks the page for a second or two.
BABen Adler - Features
Keyboard shortcuts
Creating and moving tasks without the mouse would make Acme so much faster to use all day.
RMRavi Menon
The price is the plan.
$0, $29, or $59 a month, by the features you turn on. No agent seats, no charge per resolution while Conversations is in beta, and unlimited customers on every plan, including Free. Pay monthly or yearly, cancel from your settings, and export your posts as CSV any time.
Zendesk vs UserJot, side by side.
| Feature | Zendesk | UserJot |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | ||
| Pricing model | Per agent, plus per AI resolution past the allowance | Flat, by feature set |
| Free plan | None; 14-day trial of Suite Professional | Chat, inbox, Juno, board, roadmap, changelog; 3 team members |
| 2 agents, 500 conversations, people answering | $50 a month on Support Team, $138 on Suite Team | $0, $29, or $59 a month |
| The same team with AI resolving 30% | About $330 on Support Team, $418 on Suite Team | $0, $29, or $59 a month |
| 10 agents, 5,000 conversations, AI at 30% | About $3,150 on Support Team, $3,590 on Suite Team | $29 or $59 a month |
| Startup offer | Six months for up to 50 agents (its navigation says up to 2 years), then list price | The Free plan, with no end date |
| Trial | 14 days of Suite Professional with Copilot | 14 days of Starter or Professional, from the dashboard |
| Inbox and chat | ||
| Channels | Email on Support; chat, messaging, voice, and social on Suite | Chat in the widget and forwarded email |
| Agent seats | Every teammate is a full seat; light agents included on Suite Professional, an add-on on Suite Team | None; 3 team members on Free, no seat charge on paid plans |
| Canned replies | Macros, from Support Team | None; Juno answers the repeat questions from your docs |
| SLAs and skills routing | Suite Professional and up | None |
| Translation | AI agent in 80+ languages; AI translation for agents | Incoming messages translated to your language; translate a reply |
| Internal notes and assignment | Both; collision detection above Team | Both, with snooze and reminders |
| Phone | Voice on Suite, metered by minute and number | No |
| AI | ||
| Price | 5 or 10 resolutions per agent a month included, then $2, or $1.50 committed | Included on every plan while Conversations is in beta |
| Where it answers | Messaging, email, voice, and help center search | Chat and email |
| What it answers from | Help center, crawled sites, CSV and Markdown, Notion, Confluence, Drive, SharePoint | Your docs site, crawled, and uploads, five sources; she searches the board for requests |
| Human handoff | Yes; handoffs are not billed | Yes, with a note on why; she stays out once a person replies |
| Agent assist | Copilot, $50 per agent a month billed yearly, Suite Professional and up | No |
| Feature requests from chat | A tag or a ticket; Canny, Productboard, and UserVoice by integration | Juno files the request or adds the vote after the customer confirms |
| Feedback board, roadmap, and changelog | ||
| Feature request board | Gather community forum, Suite Professional | Public board on every plan, with votes and comments |
| Public roadmap | Post statuses in Gather; no roadmap module listed | Every plan; Planned, In Progress, Done |
| Changelog | Help center or community posts; no changelog module listed | Every plan, on the board and in the widget |
| Duplicate detection | Similar posts shown in Gather | As people type, on the board and in the widget |
| Status emails | Not documented | Every status change emails everyone on the request |
| NPS and surveys | Native NPS retired in 2023; CSAT after a solved ticket | None |
| Access and branding | ||
| Custom domain | Help center host mapping | Board on your own domain from $29 |
| Customer identity | Messaging authentication by JWT; help center SSO | Identify on every plan; automatic login from $29; SSO (JWT) at $59 |
| Languages | 80+ for the AI agent; localized help center | Board in 12 languages, including Arabic |
| Remove vendor branding | Messaging widget unbranding on Suite Enterprise; help center branding can be hidden on any plan | $59 |
| Data location | Data Center Location on Suite Professional and up | Hosted in the US |
| Integrations and API | ||
| Slack, Discord | Slack app; Discord by a third-party app | Both; one integration on Starter, all on Professional |
| Jira, Linear, GitHub | All three, by marketplace apps | No |
| HubSpot, Salesforce | Both | No |
| Zapier | Yes | No |
| API and webhooks | Ticketing, help center, and messaging APIs; webhooks | API on Starter and Professional; no webhooks |
| MCP | An MCP client that calls external servers; no server listed | A server, on Starter and Professional; Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, ChatGPT desktop, Windsurf, and other clients that speak remote MCP with an API token |
| Leaving | ||
| Cancellation | 30 days' notice before the term ends; self-service for eligible accounts, otherwise a rep | Any time, from settings |
| Export | Tickets and users as JSON by API; attachments as links; help center by API | Posts as CSV, any plan; comments, voters, changelog posts, and conversations are not exported |
| Data after cancelling | Export access for 30 days after the term; deletion begins at 90 days | Kept; downgrade and nothing is removed |
| Import from the other | Partner migrations from Freshdesk, Intercom, HubSpot, and others | No Zendesk importer; forward email, and CSV for requests |
Zendesk's prices and the shortlist's were checked against their pricing pages on ; Zendesk's features, help center, and Customer Agreement on October 14, 2026. The worked bills are monthly billing with the older per-agent AI allowance Zendesk's pricing page still prints; the May 2026 tier model has no published rates. If something has changed, tell us and we will correct it.
Switching from Zendesk to UserJot.
There is no ticket importer, and you don't need one to start: forward the support address and the next email lands in UserJot. Zendesk's export is for your records, and your help center becomes what Juno answers from.
If something doesn't come across, email support@userjot.com and we'll finish the migration with you.
Forward your support address.
Turn on Conversations, copy the forwarding address, and add a forwarding rule in Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. No DNS changes; replies go out from the forwarding address.Put chat in your app and teach Juno.
Install the v3 widget with a script tag; with Conversations on, it gets a Messages page. Point Juno at your docs and at the Zendesk help center while it is still up, so she answers from day one.Export your Zendesk tickets.
Zendesk's incremental export API returns tickets and users as JSON and the help center API returns articles; attachments come as links you download separately. Keep that as your archive. Feature requests sitting in tickets or in Gather go onto the board with the CSV import.Then cancel Zendesk, 30 days before the term ends.
Notice of nonrenewal is due at least 30 days before the end of the subscription term; eligible self-service accounts can cancel from Admin Center, and sales-assisted accounts go through their representative. Charges already billed are not refunded. Export access runs 30 days past the term, so take the export first.
Zendesk alternative FAQ
$19 to $115 per agent a month billed yearly, or $25 to $149 monthly, before AI. Support Team, which is email and ticketing, is $19. Suite Team, which adds chat, messaging, voice, and a help center, is $55. Suite Professional, with skills routing, custom reporting, and 100 light agents, is $115. Enterprise is quoted. The AI agent is metered on top, and Copilot is $50 per agent a month. The worked bills for 2, 5, and 10 agents are in our Zendesk pricing guide.
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