Every page that ranks for this comparison is written by somebody selling against both of them. Go and look. The helpdesk startups, the AI agent startups, the migration tools. All of them have a horse in the race, and all of them arrive at a conclusion that happens to leave room for their own product.
So here is a different cut at it. We took the two platforms and scored them on one thing only: what each company publishes where a buyer can check it. Not which is better. Not which we would pick. Just what is written down, on their own sites, without a login or a sales call.
Zendesk came out at 61.2. Intercom, now renamed Fin, came out at 70.5. Both were assessed against all six criteria, so the composites are directly comparable.
| Criterion | Weight | Intercom | Zendesk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing transparency | 1.5 | 85 | 45 |
| Training on your data | 1.5 | 60 | 65 |
| Data export | 1.25 | 55 | 35 |
| DPA and subprocessors | 1.0 | 90 | 90 |
| Status page history | 1.0 | 40 | 55 |
| Security attestation | 1.0 | 95 | 90 |
| Composite | 70.5 | 61.2 |
The gap is almost entirely one number
Both of these products bill you twice. You pay for seats, and then you pay again every time the AI resolves something. In this category the second number is the one that decides your annual bill, because seats are predictable and resolution volume is not.
Intercom publishes it. Fin costs $0.99 per resolved outcome, printed on the pricing page next to the seat prices, the same figure whether you are on Essential at $29, Advanced at $85 or Expert at $132 per seat per month.
Zendesk does not publish it. The seat prices are there, $19 for Support Team, $55 for Suite Team, $115 for Suite Professional. The per resolution rate is nowhere on the site. Neither are the consumption rates for App Builder, Action Builder or Voice, though the pricing FAQ confirms all three bill above plan allowances. Suite Enterprise with Copilot shows Talk to Sales where a price should be.
You can price Zendesk’s seats down to the dollar. You cannot price the year. That single omission is worth 40 points on the heaviest weighted criterion, and it accounts for most of the nine point gap between these two companies.
Neither of them makes it easy to leave
This is the finding that surprised us, and it goes against both of them.
Zendesk ships with data export switched off. To turn it on, the account owner has to contact Zendesk Customer Support and ask. Team plan customers cannot have it at all and are pointed at the API. Once it is enabled the formats are fine, and JSON in particular keeps full comment history, but the first step in getting your own data back is a support ticket. That is 35.
Intercom does better without being good. The self serve export under Reports gives you reporting metadata, not conversations. Browser downloads stop at 10,000 rows. To get the actual message content you need the Conversations API in ninety day slices, or an S3 export. That is 55.
So one of them makes you ask permission and the other makes you write code. If portability matters to you, budget for it either way.
Training on your data: close scores, different shapes
Zendesk edges this one at 65 against 60, and the reasoning is worth spelling out because the headline numbers hide what is actually going on.
Both companies are strong on the third party question. Neither lets OpenAI or any other model provider train on your data, and both run generative features on zero retention endpoints. If your worry is that your customers’ messages end up in somebody else’s foundation model, both have written the answer down.
The difference is what each does with its own models. Intercom says plainly that Fin may fine tune on anonymised customer data by default, that you can opt out whenever you like, and that deletion follows within thirty days. Clear, and the default is on.
Zendesk documents more machinery. Identifier fields like username and email are excluded, free text is de identified with natural language processing, and what remains is tokenised before any training happens. There is a customer control over whether it happens at all. What Zendesk’s own AI data use page does not say is which way that control points if nobody touches it, and we do not fill in a default that a vendor has not written down. Zendesk gets the extra five points for the sanitisation detail and loses some for the silence.
Where Zendesk clearly wins
Two places.
Its subprocessor policy is the better of the two. Thirty days notice before a new subprocessor starts processing data, against Intercom’s twenty, with an email sign up and a written thirty day objection window. Both score 90, for different reasons, and if you are the person who has to answer a vendor questionnaire, Zendesk’s version gives you more to work with.
Its status page keeps ninety days of incident history across a long list of components. Intercom’s, which now lives at finstatus.com, tells you about today and not much else. Ninety days is not twelve months, and Zendesk’s status API will only return active incidents so you cannot pull the archive programmatically, but 55 against 40 is a real difference to anyone who has been asked to justify a renewal.
On attestations they are both excellent and Zendesk has the longer list, including FedRAMP LI-SaaS and CSA STAR AI. Intercom still scores higher, at 95 against 90, because Zendesk’s SOC 2 Type II report only comes out under NDA and its HIPAA coverage needs a paid add on. Breadth is not the same as access.
One thing that will change this
Intercom renamed itself Fin in May 2026. On 15 June, Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to buy it for around $3.6 billion, with the deal expected to close in Salesforce’s fourth fiscal quarter of 2027.
Nothing in the score above is wrong because of that. Every figure was checked against a live page this week. But an acquisition is exactly the moment a disclosure record can move, quietly, in ways nobody announces: a subprocessor list absorbed into a parent company’s, a DPA replaced, a pricing page rebuilt. We will reassess when the terms settle, and the score you see today will still be on the page next to the new one.
What this does not tell you
It does not tell you which product is better. We have not measured resolution quality, how either one handles a messy inbox, or whether your team will get on with the interface. Those things matter enormously and we cannot check them from outside.
What we can check is whether a company is willing to write its terms down in public. A low score is not an accusation. Zendesk’s 45 on pricing means the rate is not published, not that the rate is bad, and for all we know it comes in under Intercom’s for your volume. You just cannot find out without a call, and that is the finding.
Both scorecards carry the evidence and the source link behind every number:
Update, 19 August 2026: Help Scout has since been scored on the same six criteria and came in at 72.8, ahead of both. It publishes its AI resolution rate and lets you cap the monthly spend, which neither of these two do. We also read all three training policies side by side: which AI support tools train on your data. The Help Scout scorecard is here.