When it comes to delivering exceptional customer service, choosing the right platform is crucial. Both Zendesk and HubSpot Service Hub are popular choices, offering robust tools to manage support tickets, streamline communication, and improve customer satisfaction. But while Zendesk has long been seen as a customer support staple, many businesses are now turning to HubSpot Service Hub for its modern, all-in-one approach.
With native CRM integration, intuitive automation, and a unified view of the customer experience, HubSpot doesn’t just help you respond to tickets but it helps you build stronger, more meaningful relationships at scale. In this blog, we’ll compare Zendesk and HubSpot across key features to help you determine which is the better fit for your business (why HubSpot might just have the edge) and why you should choose ProsperoHub to switch.
While HubSpot's Service Hub and Zendesk take different approaches to customer service, there are several core features where both platforms deliver solid, dependable functionality. Ticket management is one such area, both systems offer robust tools to log, assign, and track customer issues efficiently. Agents can categorise tickets, set priorities, and use automation rules to streamline workflows and reduce response times. Whether you're using HubSpot's intuitive pipelines or Zendesk's more traditional ticket queues, both platforms support efficient case resolution at scale.
Another feature where both platforms are evenly matched is the knowledge base and customer self-service functionality. Both HubSpot and Zendesk allow you to build well-organised help centres that empower customers to find answers on their own, reducing the load on your support team. Articles can be categorised, searchable, and optimised for SEO, with permissions and versioning available in both systems. Each platform also supports customer portals, where users can track their own ticket history and submit new requests—providing transparency and a better customer experience overall.
One of the biggest concerns businesses have when switching platforms is the complexity of migrating data and getting their team up to speed. Fortunately, moving from Zendesk to HubSpot Service Hub is a particularly smooth transition. Every ticket, custom field, contact detail, and support interaction in Zendesk has a natural home in HubSpot's system. This is because HubSpot’s CRM-first foundation is designed to be flexible, scalable, and highly customisable—so you’re not leaving any critical data behind.
One of the standout advantages of HubSpot’s Service Hub is that it’s fully integrated within the broader HubSpot ecosystem, meaning it shares and leverages data from your CRM, marketing, and sales tools. This interconnectedness gives your support agents a 360-degree view of each customer, including their past interactions, deal history, communication preferences, and more. With this context at their fingertips, agents can provide faster, more personalised, and more accurate responses to customer queries.
In contrast, Zendesk is a standalone, service-focused platform. While it’s powerful for handling tickets and support workflows, it doesn’t naturally offer the same depth of customer insight unless you manually integrate it with external CRM tools. As a result, agents often lack critical context—like whether the customer is a high-value client, where they are in the buyer’s journey, or what other issues they’ve faced—leading to more generic or less informed responses.
In short, HubSpot Service Hub doesn’t just help you answer support requests—it helps you build relationships. By pulling in meaningful data from across your organisation, it empowers your team to deliver support that’s smarter, more tailored, and ultimately more effective.
HubSpot Service Hub goes far beyond ticket resolution, it offers built-in tools that actively improve performance and consistency across your entire support function. Standout features like coaching playlists and playbooks, allows managers to easily curate and share best practices, call recordings, and scenario-based guidance for agents. This fosters continual learning and ensures that every team member is aligned on how to handle complex or high-value interactions. Zendesk lacks this level of structured, in-platform coaching, often requiring external systems or manual processes for training.
HubSpot also excels with generative AI capabilities that are tightly integrated into the Service Hub experience. Agents can quickly draft personalised email replies, summarise conversations, and pull in relevant knowledge base content which dramatically improves efficiency and accuracy. Combined with unified document management, which centralises all customer-facing assets, templates, and internal resources in one place, HubSpot ensures agents always have the right information at their fingertips. In contrast, Zendesk’s support content is often siloed or spread across multiple tools, which can slow down responses and create inconsistency in messaging. Altogether, HubSpot enables a more intelligent, collaborative, and scalable approach to customer service.
HubSpot Service Hub is purpose-built for proactive customer care, giving your team the tools to identify risks, nurture relationships, and intervene before small issues become major problems. The Customer Success Workspace centralises everything your success team needs - account data, communications, tasks, goals, and upcoming renewal - so they can take action without switching between tools. This unified view makes it easy to spot trends, track progress, and engage customers at exactly the right time. In contrast, Zendesk is primarily reactive, focusing on tickets and support queues rather than forward-looking account management.
What truly sets HubSpot apart is its deep emphasis on customer insights. With customer health scores and automated alerts, your team can monitor key behaviours and signals that indicate churn risk or upsell potential. Paired with robust feedback tools including NPS, CSAT, Customer Engagement, and custom surveys. HubSpot empowers you to continuously gather and act on customer sentiment. All of this data lives within your CRM, meaning it's not just collected, it's used to trigger workflows, notify teams, and prioritise high-impact outreach. Zendesk offers basic survey functionality, but it lacks the connected intelligence that HubSpot provides to drive truly proactive, strategic customer care.
| Feature | HubSpot Service Hub | Zendesk |
| Easy to use | Intuitive and user friendly | Complex and often requires more onboarding |
| CRM Integration | Built with HubSpot's CRM platform so integrated with marketing and sales | Requires integration with third party CRMs |
| Customer Portal | Fully customisable and tied to CRM data | Very limited customisation and can require developer support |
| Reporting & Analytics | Unified reporting across all hubs | Strong analytics but often segmented across tools |
| Scalability | Scales with your business and easy to add marketing, sales and other tools | Scailable with service features but nees multiple products to cover hubspots bredth |
| Pricing Transparency | Clear, transparent pricing with free CRM and bundled features. | Modular pricing and can become expensive as you add more capabilities. |
At ProsperoHub, we’re no strangers to guiding companies through successful HubSpot implementations and platform migrations and that includes moving from Zendesk to HubSpot Service Hub. In fact, we've supported numerous businesses in making the switch, helping them unlock a more unified, efficient, and scalable approach to customer service.
Our experienced team understands the nuances of both platforms, which means we can ensure a smooth transition with minimal disruption. From migrating your data and setting up custom workflows to training your team and optimising for long-term success, we're here to handle every step of the process.
If you're considering the move, we’d love to chat. Book A Meeting with one of our HubSpot specialists, we’ll walk you through what to expect, highlight the powerful features HubSpot has to offer, and help you decide if it’s the right fit for your business. With ProsperoHub, switching to HubSpot doesn’t just feel easy, it actually is.