Top 10 Zendesk AI Agent Alternatives to Replace Zendesk Advanced AI (2025)

Created time

Oct 24, 2025 02:53 PM

Ready for draft

Author

Mike Heap

Ecomm?

I can use AI in Zendesk without using their Advanced AI…?

You heard right.

Zendesk’s Advanced AI is expensive and not for everyone.

They do however have their own app marketplace that allows 3rd party companies (like ours) to create their own apps or integrations to connect to your Zendesk helpdesk.

While their capabilities vary, 3rd party apps can replicate all of Zendesk Advanced AI’s features (and more), including things like:

Using AI to reply directly to customers

Creating AI draft notes on responses

Adding an AI copilot to your Zendesk to generate responses

Automatically tagging conversations and tickets using AI

So don’t worry if you can’t afford Zendesk AI (or just want an alternative), you have lots of options!

In fact, I’m going to go over 11 of them for you right now.

Overall Comparison

I know most of you will just want to see the scores on the doors, so I’m going to start off by showing you my ratings, before showing you my working and how I got here:

(scores out of 10)	My AskAI	eesel	Decagon	Maven AGI	Aissist	Ada	Certainly	Aide	Moveo	Kommunicate	Stylo
Zendesk integration	10	9	8	5	9	5	8	3	7	2	3
Ease of setup	9	8	5	7	7	4	7	9	7	8	9
Training sources	8	8	7	7	7	6	7	7	7	7	6
Features	9	9	10	8	9	10	7	7	8	6	6
Improving	9	8	10	8	7	8	6	7	7	6	6
Security	7	7	9	10	4	10	9	8	7	10	8
Maturity	6	7	8	8	5	10	7	7	7	8	8
Cost	9	3	2	4	8	2	4	7	4	7	6
Overall (out of 80)	67 (84%)	59 (74%)	59 (74%)	57 71%	56 (70%)	55 (69%)	55 (69%)	55 (69%)	54 (68%)	54 (68%)	52 (65%)

How I selected the AI agents

There are hundreds of apps on the Zendesk app store, I narrowed these down to a shortlist of 11 AI customer service agent integrations based on:

Being a founder in the space for nearly 3 years, the names of apps that I hear come up in calls often.

Reviewing the AI & Bots section of the Zendesk app marketplace.

Going to each app’s site, reviewing their documentation and trying to figure out the best options available.

As part of this selection process I focused the shortlist on AI agents that are actually agentic (not just a simple chatbot or basic RAG set-up).

This meant I was looking for AI agents that could feasibly come close to replacing a human agent (with the right configuration and time invested), not just answering questions but also performing actions (looking up orders, initiating refunds etc).

I also wanted to only include integrations that would largely work without you having to purchase and use an entirely new platform, i.e. you can just plug in your AI customer service agent into your existing Zendesk helpdesk.

This criteria narrowed it down to:

My AskAI

eesel

Aissist

Decagon

Stylo

Certainly

Aide

Moveo

Kommunicate

Maven AGI

How I compared them

I am one of the founders of My AskAI, so I obviously can’t be completely impartial in this assessment, but I have tried to be as fair as possible, which is why we don’t win every category/test.

I’ve tried to stick to facts and hope that after reading you will have come to the same conclusion I did.

I broke the comparison down into the areas that I have found, from doing countless demo calls, are the most important aspects of an AI agent for most customers:

Zendesk integration

Not all Zendesk apps and integrations are born equal.

Some are simple “click to connect” integrations, whereas others require you to essentially connect to their APIs via a number of setup and configuration steps.

They may get to a similar result in the end, and you will likely only have to do this once, but it can be a blocker for some businesses, especially if you don’t have technical expertise on your team.

Any integration with Zendesk Messaging will also likely require connecting with their Sunshine Conversations APIs, and you to be on their Professional plan at a minimum.

Once connected, there are then multiple ways you can use an AI agent within Zendesk, from having it directly reply to customers, generate internal notes or draft copilot replies, so I have looked to see which apps can do which.

A screenshot of the My AskAI agent within Zendesk replying in notes mode to a user question.

And finally, beyond AI agent replies, there are other AI features that integrations or apps may enable in Zendesk.

Things like tagging and translation and so I have said when these are or aren’t possible.

Ease of setup

Nowadays most AI customer service agents follow pretty much the same pattern: sign up, add content and integrate.

Sure there are different ways you can add content (covered in “Training sources”) and methods of integration (covered in “Zendesk integration”), but there is also how you get it set up to work how you need it.

This can include everything from potentially having to write your own prompts, deciding when it should handover conversations and everything in between.

On this I looked at how much you can configure in your AI agent, along with how easy it would be to do this for the layperson.

Training sources

The first thing you need to do with an AI customer service agent (much like with a human) is train it - give it the information and content so it can answer questions.

If you use Zendesk as your helpdesk platform, you’ll likely also use their help articles so will need to be able add these as knowledge to your AI agent at a minimum.

As long as they are public, they can always be crawled and scraped, however crawling webpages is rarely the best way to get information as it:

Includes other bits of the webpage you likely don’t want added to your AI agent (buttons, adverts, other listings etc)

Isn’t complete - due to how a crawl works, most crawls will only ‘find’ 95% of pages, so there will be a number of articles missed.

Both of these will result in a worse performance for your AI agent.

In addition, if you can’t get your knowledge from where it lives into your AI agent it will also result in worse answers, as the agent is less knowledgeable.

A screenshot from My AskAI’s knowledge integration page.

So I have rewarded apps in this comparison that integrate with Zendesk help articles directly and have more knowledge source integrations.

Features

Each AI agent will have its own set of unique features, but I have tried to boil them down to a consistent (common) set to compare against (that aren’t considered elsewhere in the comparison), namely whether they have or allow:

Human handover: escalating the ticket or conversation to a human member of the team when the AI can’t assist

Multilingual responses: the ability to reply to users all in languages

Multiple agents: to be used for different brands, products or tasks

Guidance: modifying the behavior of the AI agent or giving it instructions to align with your brand’s guidelines or tone of voice.

Actions/tools: connecting your AI customer service agent to 3rd party or back end data sources to either read or write data

Tasks: automation of complex, multi-step processes that may involve multiple tool calls or actions.

A screenshot showing My AskAI’s Tasks feature.

Answer quality

While answer quality and accuracy is probably one of the most important aspects of your AI agent’s performance it is very difficult to judge subjectively and compare fairly.

Each vendor will quote their own resolution stats (ours are on our homepage), none of which are verifiable and most of which will be cherry-picked (although ours are updated every 24hrs on our site, live).

A screenshot from My AskAI’s website showing their total customer support tickets resolve by AI agents (1,170,303), along with their AI resolution rate for the last 30 days of 74.9%

Performance can be down to the set-up and configuration of the AI, the quality of the documentation you provide, the prompts you choose to use (where applicable) and more.

While there will likely be large gulfs between some of these AI agents in terms of the answering abilities due to how they are constructed behind the scenes (varying from simple one prompt retrievals to multi-stage agentic set-ups), truly the only way to compare fairly is to test for yourself, on your own data.

So, my suggestion would be to pick the 2 or 3 vendors that feel like the best fit for you, test them out yourself and see how you like their responses.

Improving

Training your AI customer service agent is only the first step in the process.

To improve your AI resolution (deflection) rate (aside from overall model improvements by your chose AI agent vendor), you need to monitor how your agent is responding, identify areas it can’t answer and update your knowledge base to address these gaps.

A screenshot of the Improve - Knowledge Gaps section of the My AskAI dashboard, showing an example identified knowledge gap and an AI draft from past tickets.

Minimum capabilities you should expect to see here are stats on handover and escalation rate, along with overall usage.

But you should also be able to view all the AI agent’s conversations and ideally be shown logs explaining why the AI answered in the way that it did.

On top of the that you will want your AI to have some way of ‘learning’ from your human agent responses, identifying when questions couldn’t be answered and ways of correcting these.

Security

The main security, quality and privacy certifications you would expect to see from AI customer service agents are likely to be:

GDPR

CCPA

SOC-2 Type II

ISO 27001

So I have rated apps that have more of these certifications more highly.

Maturity

AI (as we know it today) is a new space, with companies springing up all the time.

Not all of them stick around.

You can often tell by: how long they have been around already, how many customers they have, how they are funded and how often they have or are updating or maintaining their product.

I have therefore rated apps as higher where they have been around longer, have lots of customers, are bootstrapped (or highly funded) or have a detailed changelog.

Cost

While all of the agents in this comparison price based on usage, some also price based on the outcome of that usage (also know as resolution-based pricing).

This means that you only pay when the AI resolves a ticket (i.e. it doesn’t have to be handed over to a human member of your team).

In order to compare like-with-like, I have assumed that all AI agents have an average of 50% resolution and will reply twice per ticket to get to this resolution.

Also I have taken annual pricing where available and used the most relevant pricing plans.

Note that this isn’t a perfect methodology as it assumes:

Answer quality and performance is the same across all AI customer service agents

Price is static (when actually the overall monthly cost increases if you have resolution-based pricing and stays the same with pure usage based).

No additional add-ons.

Now that’s all clear, onto the comparison:

My AskAI

My AskAI was founded in 2023 and (fun fact) we were one of the first companies in the world to utilize RAG technology (the technology that underlies all AI customer service agents today) in a production capacity.

How does My AskAI integrate into Zendesk?

We wanted to make sure My AskAI is as tightly-integrated with Zendesk as possible so we can offer direct replies, internal note replies, as well as a copilot extension, and auto-tagging using your Zendesk tags and custom field values.

Our AI agent works with Zendesk Tickets, as well as Messaging.

How easy is it to setup My AskAI?

Our setup is fully no-code and our Zendesk connection is through approved Zendesk apps (no API or other tricky configuration required - just click to connect).

It’s just a case of signing up, connecting some knowledge and (in our case), selecting Zendesk as your helpdesk provider.

By default we only ever send AI replies in “internal notes” mode (except for our Messaging integration, which is live on connection), so you’ll see how they look before you let your AI agent respond to your customers.

What knowledge sources can I train My AskAI on?

We have one of the most comprehensive collection of knowledge integrations going, including a direct integration with your Zendesk help articles and macros for accurate daily syncs of knowledge.

In addition we can also connect to: Intercom and Freshdesk help articles, websites, Google Drive, Notion, Dropbox, SharePoint, OneDrive, Confluence and Salesforce knowledge articles.

But we don’t only train on static knowledge sources.

You can also connect dynamic data and live user data about your customers, either with one click from Shopify or via our user data API, meaning your AI agent can provide personalized responses to each customer.

Plus, all sources are automatically re-synced either on update, daily or fortnightly.

What features does My AskAI have?

We have worked to ensure that My AskAI has one of the most advanced AI agent feature sets for Zendesk on the market, but without introducing too much complexity.

Some of our headline features include:

Tools/actions: these allow you to call APIs in your backend systems to take action. They could be read-only tools to look up products or accounts, or ‘write’ tools that actually update something e.g. initiate a refund or change an address.

Tasks: these are automated, complex, multi-step processes that require logic and potentially multiple tool calls. They could, for example, be used for a refund process, a warranty claim or an identity verification process.

Guidance: this can be used to control exactly how your AI agent responds to users in different scenarios, and allows you to apply your brand’s tone of voice to responses.

Tagging: your AI agent can use your existing Zendesk tags and custom fields to automatically apply them to incoming tickets to improve the consistency and coverage of your reporting.

All of these features can be set up with no or little development expertise.

How do I improve my My AskAI responses?

Improving your AI’s responses is one of our big product focus areas, so we provide multiple tools and features to help you in getting those AI resolution rates as high as possible.

Firstly, we identify your knowledge gaps - things your AI agent is unable to answer as it doesn’t have the available information.

We then use your historic Zendesk tickets (human replies) to generate suggested custom answers (that you approve) so it will answer next time someone asks.

You can also add these custom answers at any time if you don’t want to add more help articles.

We provide a deep “inspect and debug” feature that allows you to see exactly why the AI answered in the way that it did, and what knowledge sources, guidance and user data it used to generate its response.

This means you have complete transparency and traceability in how your AI agent is working.

Finally we have our Test feature, which generates test questions from your historic tickets and then shows you how your AI agent is replying to them, so you can batch test after making updates to your knowledge or guidance.

How secure is My AskAI?

My AskAI complies with GDPR and CCPA and we are in the process of completing our SOC-2 Type II certification.

Who is using My AskAI?

We are used by 100’s of businesses, you can see a selection of our reviews and case studies here, including ones from Zinc, Swytch and Freecash.

We cater to: B2B, B2C, SaaS, eCommerce, Rewards, Travel, Crypto, and Marketplace businesses.

How much does My AskAI cost?

My AskAI is one of the most affordable AI customer service agents for Zendesk available today.

We charge $0.10 per ticket, with no resolution-based pricing, this means, as you improve your AI and we improve our product, you pay the same amount.

Using our pricing comparison methodology, this works out as the equivalent of $0.20 per resolution.

You will however be charged based on usage for features like tasks, tools and tagging.

✅

Choose My AskAI if: you want the most integrated, affordable and easy to set-up Zendesk AI agent alternative.

❌

Don’t choose My AskAI if: you need a HIPAA compliant AI agent or don’t have any form of help articles to begin with.

eesel AI

eesel was founded in 2020 out of Sydney, Australia.

We’ve got a full rundown of all of eesel’s features and a comparison to My AskAI here, but read on for the abbreviated version:

How does eesel integrate into Zendesk?

eesel has the full-suite of options to integrate with Zendesk for both tickets and messaging, including direct replies, internal note replies and their own copilot.

How easy is it to setup eesel?

It’s very easy to get your eesel AI agent set up within Zendesk initially.

The only quirk however, is that pretty much all behavioral control (e.g response styles, how reference links are displayed and internal note/tagging) is completed through the use of actions and prompts that you have to manually set up (this includes having to set up a human handover prompt).

The upside of this is that you can have granular control over the behavior of your AI agent.

The downside of this is that, while their docs do help with a number of use cases, it will mostly be left to you to play around with your AI agent to try and get the best responses.

This is probably best demonstrated by the fact that eesel offers 8 hours of prompting assistance for $999 per month in addition to their usage-based plans.

What knowledge sources can I train eesel on?

eesel is one of the more impressive AI agents in this list from a connections standpoint, with the ability to train on your Zendesk macros and internal knowledge sources like: Google Drive, Notion, and Confluence, but also on external sources like your websites, YouTube videos, Shopify stores, and, most notably, tickets (although no direct Zendesk help article integration, so adding these will have to be via a webcrawl).

Very few products allow for direct training on tickets, and when they do, the process is often rudimentary.

With eesel however instead of just ingesting your tickets and using them as a reference source, you first filter/query your tickets to narrow them down to the tickets you want to train on.

This ensures you only use specific agents, or over a specific time period.

Then they use this sample of your tickets to generate articles that you review and approve before adding to your AI agent’s knowledge base.

This works very well if you have no, or very outdated help articles to begin with.

Where it becomes less useful is if you don’t apply good filtering in the first place or if you already have articles - as these may then duplicate or add contradictory information to your existing articles.

You can also connect dynamic data, live user data about your customers, either with one click from Shopify or via their actions connectors, meaning your AI agent can provide personalized responses to each customer.

What features does eesel have?

One of the more comprehensive and well-developed products on this list (helped by the founder being an ex-Intercom employee), eesel has a number of strong features worth pointing out:

Train on historic tickets: as mentioned above, you can use your historic tickets as a knowledge source

Complete control via actions/tools: while more complex to set up, it will give you a granular level of control over your AI agent

Tagging: so you can improve your reporting or triage of conversation workflows

Batch testing/simulation: to see how your AI agent is performing you can simulate historic tickets.

For a full rundown of eesel’s features, check out our comparison post here.

How do I improve my eesel responses?

eesel has a good set of ‘improve’ features too, from stats on escalation and deflection rates to knowledge gap identification, answer inspection (showing which articles and macros are being used), improvement from historic tickets and the aforementioned batch testing.

All of which should mean that you should find it pretty easy to get those AI resolution rates up.

How secure is eesel?

eesel doesn’t disclose GDPR or CCPA compliance, however it is likely to have GDPR at a minimum.

They are also currently undergoing their SOC-2 Type II certification.

Who is using eesel?

They have over 1,000 customers and have published a wide selection of customer stories on their site, including from Stereo Labs, Hivemapper and Years.

How much does eesel cost?

eesel is not the cheapest provider, pricing per “interaction”, however these do include action/tool calls.

Interaction prices go from $0.30 down to $0.21 per interaction on non-Enterprise plans.

Comparing using 2 messages per ticket and a 50% resolution rate, and using their lowest rates we get a price of $0.84 per resolution.

✅

Choose eesel if: you want a highly configurable AI agent that can be trained on your historic tickets and you may move helpdesks in the near future.

❌

Don’t choose eesel if: you are looking for an affordable alternative to Zendesk AI (prices are cheaper, albeit still high).

Ada

Ada has been around since 2016 and has grown to revenues of $71m ARR, it’s one of the biggest AI vendors on this list.

It has its own AI agent widget and helpdesk but can also be added to Zendesk.

How does Ada integrate into Zendesk?

While primarily Ada focuses its efforts on its own widget, they do have a direct integration with Zendesk Messaging via Sunshine Conversations to allow their AI agent to respond directly to chats there.

There is no internal note or copilot option though and it doesn’t seem to be compatible with Zendesk Tickets.

How easy is it to setup Ada?

Being a full Enterprise product, it isn’t the easiest thing to set up, judging by their documentation.

Nor is the integration with Zendesk particularly straightforward to set up via their “Ada Glass” feature.

But as it is unlikely you’ll be doing the set-up alone (you’ll probably have an account manager to assist you), it might not be that bad.

What knowledge sources can I train Ada on?

Ada has a number of native knowledge integrations with: Salesforce, Contentful, Dixa, Gladly, and do offer custom integrations too, they also have a native integration with Zendesk Guides.

You can also crawl websites for training and add your own custom knowledge articles directly into your Ada AI agent.

What features does Ada have?

Being one of the more established (and well-funded) options in this list, Ada’s feature set is pretty comprehensive with the ability for their AI agent to:

Create scripted bots

Add processes (tasks)

Use actions or tools

Utilize SOPs or ‘playbooks’

(So pretty much any set-up for the agent you could hope for).

You can also provide it with up to 10 custom instructions (guidance) to control behaviors.

Oh, and their agents can handle voice, too!

How do I improve my Ada responses?

They have some strong improvement features too, from stats in their dashboard for resolution rate, performance and usage reports to topic-based insights.

You can also analyze and improve upon your AI agents responses with their inspect and ‘coaching’ features.

How secure is Ada?

Ada has pretty much all security certification under the sun including: SOC-2 Type II, ISO27001, GDPR, CCPA and HIPAA compliance.

Who is using Ada?

Ada has a number of high-profile clients as customers (although these are likely mostly using their own agent widget), including: Pinterest, Canva and Monday.com.

You can read their customer stories here.

How much does Ada cost?

All this functionality doesn’t come cheap, although Ada doesn’t publish their prices anywhere, the word-on-the-street is that they only do annual contracts and they start from $30k per annum ($2,500/mo).

While their exact pricing model is unknown it is thought to be in the $2-3 per resolution range.

✅

Choose Ada if: you want a polished, fully featured AI agent, with heavy Enterprise credentials.

❌

Don’t choose Ada if: you want a simple Zendesk integration, need a Tickets integration or you are looking for something cheaper than Zendesk AI (Ada is 133-200% the cost).

Decagon

Decagon is one of the fastest growing of a new wave generative AI CX platforms, having been founded in August 2023 and already raising $131m in June 2025, valuing them at $1.5bn.

But aside from some snazzy marketing materials and graphics there is precious little detail on their product online (with no public documentation).

How does Decagon integrate into Zendesk?

Decagon say that they have a “pre‑built Zendesk connector” that syncs with your tickets and customer data from Zendesk to its AI platform.

Their Zendesk agent can handle email routing, triage incoming conversations via Zendesk Sunshine and tag or update tickets automatically.

It also supports live‑chat escalation, handing conversations to human agents with full context.

How easy is it to set up Decagon?

They say no custom code is required and it is a case of selecting Zendesk from their integration list, authorizing access and mapping ticket fields.

Due to the size their usual customers, their enterprise team typically helps with onboarding.

What knowledge sources can Decagon train on?

Decagon can be trained on your knowledge base articles (we’ll assume this includes Zendesk articles), Confluence pages, Google Drive and SharePoint files and custom knowledge connections.

What features does Decagon have?

With so little information and documentation online about its features, you may have to take this with a grain of salt.

But based on their marketing materials, they mention:

Auto‑tagging and routing: assigning tags, priorities and owners to tickets based on intent.

Analytics and continuous learning: highlighting friction points and suggesting automation rules.

Agent operating procedures (AOPs): one of the biggest selling points they talk about are AOPs. These sound like autonomous multi-step tasks that include function or tool calls i.e. tasks. It is unclear if they going anything beyond this.

Model Context Protocols (MCPs): they also mention the ability to connect to MCPs (theirs or 3rd parties), which would mean the ability to ingest pretty much any data and information.

How do I improve Decagon’s responses?

While they do mention various analytics capabilities, detail is light.

They do talk about measuring CSAT by AOP, visual heatmaps and the ability to converse with your data to ask questions via their own AI assistant.

You can also measure knowledge-base performance to see which your top performing articles are.

Due to their Enterprise set-up they also mention that their customer success team will assist in analyzing transcripts and help you refine intents to improve accuracy.

A feature called “Watchtower” supposedly gives real-time visibility into every conversation, providing an AI QA functionality.

They also have an AI ‘suggestions’ feature to fill gaps in your knowledgebase.

While it is hard to assess, if the features work as written, it is a comprehensive improvement feature-set.

How secure is Decagon?

Unsurprisingly, Decagon has pretty much every security certification out there, from SOC-2 Type II to HIPAA, you can see them all here.

Who is using Decagon?

Enterprise B2C companies like Classpass, Eventbrite and Duolingo all use Decagon to automate high volumes of chat and email tickets, read their case studies here.

How much does Decagon cost?

While they do not share pricing publicly and it is a case of “contact us” it is custom and is reputed to start at around $8,000/mo (without the likely implementation services included).

✅

Choose Decagon if: money is not an issue and you are looking for a highly custom set-up where forward-deployed engineers will work with your team to create impressive results.

❌

Don’t choose Decagon if: you need something affordable, quick to value and largely self-managed.

Stylo

Stylo was around before the generative AI boom, having been founded in 2021.

They raised a $3m seed round and focus exclusively on Zendesk apps and integrations currently.

How does Stylo integrate into Zendesk?

Unlike the other AI agents in this list, Stylo doesn’t directly reply to customers.

Instead you can consider it as a supercharged copilot.

When installed as a Zendesk app it will appear as a side-panel in your inbox that you copy-paste answers over from.

How easy is it to set up Stylo?

As it isn’t truly integrated into your replies, the app is installed with a few clicks and requires no engineering resources.

Agents log in with their Zendesk credentials and can start using the AI assistant immediately, just by clicking the “Stylo smile” in their text response field.

What knowledge sources can it train on?

Stylo again is different to other options on this list in that you don’t have to train it on anything.

They have their own machine learning model trained on hundreds of thousands of prior responses.

You can then type what you would want to answer, and then have their AI finesse the response.

That said, in reality, you are likely to want to use their “Context engine” that allows you to plug in your Zendesk guide or your own question and answer pairings.

On top of this, you can also connect your Shopify store to provide additional context and address WISMO-type queries.

What features does Stylo have?

All of Stylo’s features are based on helping human agents be more efficient (not on replying for them), with that in mind, they do have an impressive set of capabilities, including:

Info gathering: surfacing relevant articles, past tickets and macros to help agents respond.

Ticket summaries: quickly summarizes long conversation threads.

Tone management: adjust length, formality, friendliness and empathy.

Translations: real‑time translations to and from many languages.

Auto‑resolve & workflows: you can build workflows that trigger macros or send automated replies based on ticket conditions,

Analytics: track adoption, agent usage and how many tickets are automatically resolved.

Additionally, you can add custom instructions (guidance) to your AI copilot to control the tone of voice.

How do I improve Stylo’s responses?

Stylo learns from how your agents edit its drafts. You can adjust macros, highlight preferred articles and tweak workflow prompts.

They have analytics dashboard shows where improvements are needed.

How secure is Stylo?

Stylo is SOC-2 Type II certified.

Who is using Stylo?

Used by over 200 businesses, they shared only a couple of case studies, with ShipHero and alveole.

How much does Stylo cost?

Pricing starts at $15 per agent per month, but this doesn’t include AI response credits, which are $0.20 per response when prepaid or $0.35 when not.

✅

Choose Stylo if: you don’t see yourself ever using AI for direct to customer replies and want a super-powered AI copilot.

❌

Don’t choose Stylo if: you need an AI agent for direct replies, deep knowledge-base integrations and feedback on how to identify and improve your help center.

Aissist

Aissist was founded in 2024 and is one of the more powerful AI agents in this list.

How does Aissist integrate into Zendesk?

Aissist appears to offer all integration options for Zendesk - direct reply, internal note replies and even draft notes (although it is unclear if this last option is a draft within Zendesk or in the Aissist platform).

How easy is it to setup Aissist?

It’s as easy as any of the other platforms to get started and setup with Aissist.

Like most of the other AI agents, it does however require you to set up your own prompts and instructions initially, so you’ll definitely want some prompting skills.

The integration with Zendesk does however require a decent amount of configuration.

You can then apply tags on tickets to control where the AI runs.

What knowledge sources can I train Aissist on?

As with most AI agent platforms, you can train on websites and PDFs.

A few more integrations that set Aissist apart though are: Google Docs, Sheets, Shopify, WooCommerce, Pipedrive, HubSpot, PostgreSQL and Calendly.

They don’t appear to have helpdesk knowledge integrations (i.e. with Intercom and Zendesk), so you’ll have to add yours as a public URL (and it won’t work if your help articles are private).

What features does Aissist have?

Aissist’s most impressive features are that it allows the creation of large, multi-agent systems where each agent can have a separate role and task.

It’s probably the most comprehensive agent setup of all the options on the list and will give you a very high level of control over your AI customer service agent.

However, it is also therefore one of the more complex to set up.

Another neat feature it has is the ability for the (human) agent to run commands/initiate agents from internal notes, probably more of an advanced feature for most but cool nonetheless.

Because of Aissist’s multi-agent set up, you can also create things like tagging agents and summarization agents within your Zendesk.

How do I improve my Aissist responses?

It gives you a few ways to help you improve your AI agent’s responses from:

Testing with their ‘simulator’

‘Teaching’ the AI agent with examples

Investigating success metrics like containment and escalation rates

Along with an overall reporting and insights dashboard.

How secure is Aissist?

Again, from looking around their site and asking their own AI, I couldn’t find any details or mention of security, so it’s probably reasonable to assume they don’t have a SOC-2 Type II certification or ISO27001.

However they do mention they are GDPR compliant.

Who is using Aissist?

Aissist’s homepage lists a number of customer stories including those from Holafly, Sunroom and Coros.

How much does Aissist cost?

They price per reply, with the amount you pay dependent on your volume.

At its cheapest (on their Enterprise plan) it is $0.08 per reply, and $0.12 per reply on their lower tier plans.

They quote this as being $0.43 per resolution assuming 4 replies and a 75% resolution.

For our comparison, to keep things fair, we will assume 2 replies and 50% resolution, meaning a cost of $0.32 per resolution.

✅

Choose Aissist if: you want a fully featured agent with a true multi-agent set-up, where each agent is capable of completing different tasks.

❌

Don’t choose Aissist if: you aren’t technical/familiar with prompting or are looking for something SOC-2 Type II compliant.

Certainly

Certainly.io has been around for 8 years, being founded in 2017 in Copenhagen, Denmark.

How does Certainly integrate into Zendesk?

Their AI agents can respond to both Zendesk Messaging (via the Sunshine conversations APIs) and Tickets directly.

There doesn’t appear to be an internal note reply, option, nor a copilot functionality.

As well as responding on tickets, it can also pre-populate fields within Zendesk, so your agents don’t have to.

How easy is it to set up Certainly?

Integrating the Certainly Zendesk Messaging couldn’t be much simpler, it’s just a case of installing the app, choosing channels and setting it live. The ticketing AI agent is a bit more technical however, although likely still easy enough to install for most non-developers.

If you want to do anything more complicated than just pure knowledge-based answering you will likely have to set up flows (modules).

You’ll also have to specify your own guidelines for the AI agent to work from, which may be daunting for those who haven’t spent a lot of time prompt-engineering, although there are some useful guides in their docs.

What knowledge sources can it train on?

While not mentioned in their docs, their marketing materials do seem to imply they do have an integration with Zendesk Guide (help center articles) in order to train on and also a number of other integrations with dynamic data sources like Shopify.

Beyond that though e.g. web crawls, file uploads, Google Drive, Notion, Confluence etc, it does seem they are lacking.

What features does Certainly have?

Certainly’s AI features do seem to be more limited than some others in this list.

Their main headline feature is their drag and drop workflow builder, that lets you create logic branches and custom actions, pulling in data from other 3rd party platforms.

The only other AI focused feature I could see was their “AI guidelines” (guidance) feature to control the tone of responses and how the AI will behave in specific scenarios.

How do I improve Certainly’s responses?

They offer a tracking dashboard where you can review unresolved conversations, add new intents and adjust flows.

They also have reports that allow you to monitor business impact of your AI agent too.

How secure is Certainly?

Their platform is SOC-2 Type II, HIPAA and GDPR compliant and hosted in ISO‑27001 certified facilities.

Who is using Certainly?

Companies like Feastables, Quadlock and Finitba are among Certainly’s current customers.

How much does Certainly cost?

Certainly charges on a per‑conversation basis but does not publicly-disclose their pricing (you even have to contact them for their basic “Starter” plan) and I couldn’t find any reliable sources, so let’s assume it isn’t going to come cheap!

✅

Choose Certainly if: you are familiar and enjoy building drag-and-drop workflows and need a HIPAA compliant solution.

❌

Don’t choose Certainly if: you need to train on anything other than your Zendesk Guide, want more complex features like Tasks and are looking for an affordable solution.

Aide

Aide is a Canadian-based AI customer support company founded in 2020.

How does Aide integrate into Zendesk?

Unlike some other AI agents in this list, Aide is an “aid” or copilot agent in Zendesk, rather than something that can autonomously and directly respond to tickets as they come in.

It looks like they only have full AI agent features when you are using their own widget.

This isn’t always clear from their Zendesk app page, but reading the language they use and the screenshots they share, this does appear to be the case.

While only a copilot, it is probably the most powerful copilot on the list, allowing for drafting, tagging, routing and automations from within their copilot UI.

How easy is it to set up Aide?

Like most agents, Aide is easy to train initially, and because it only operates as a copilot, it is just a simple app to install in your Zendesk inbox, and won’t require any development expertise to get live.

What knowledge sources can it train on?

Aide lets you train your AI copilot on historic Zendesk tickets (although I couldn’t find any detail on this in their docs so assume this must be a custom integration), macros, eCommerce integrations, websites and manually uploaded articles.

You can also add your Zendesk help center (public), via a web crawl (not direct API connection).

What features does Aide have?

Aside from general question answering capabilities, and features specific to their AI agent (not copilot), Aide’s most impressive feature is ‘scenarios’ which allow you to create “If this then that” based logic for how the AI should respond in certain scenarios.

These flows also allow you to include actions to call other tools and services.

How do I improve Aide’s responses?

There are some useful reporting features you can use to improve Aide’s responses.

Things like allowing your agents to review and provide feedback on responses and automatic topic detection.

You can review all conversations your AI copilot was involved in too, so you can understand the topics, sentiment and user data used to answer.

One of the more useful features from a copilot standpoint though is the ability to see which suggestions and drafts were used, so you can get a view on the impact your copilot is actually making.

How secure is Aide?

Aide ticks all the major security and compliance requirements with SOC2, GDPR and HIPAA certifications. The only one they don’t currently hold is ISO27001.

Who is using Aide?

Aide is used by a number of startups and FinTechs, including Threadbird, Stay Upright and Lando, although the only Zendesk case study I could see was with BeMo.

How much does Aide cost?

Pricing is usage-based, and priced per conversation.

Their Essentials plan starts at $0.25 per conversation and $300/mo, with prices falling to $0.20 per conversation in higher tier plans.

This pricing does however include tagging, actions and workflows.

✅

Choose Aide if: you are looking for a fully integrated copilot in Zendesk.

❌

Don’t choose Aide if: you want direct reply automation for Zendesk Messaging or Tickets.

Moveo.ai

Moveo is an AI customer service company based in Greece, founded in 2020.

How does Moveo.ai integrate into Zendesk?

Moveo is one of the few AI agents on this list with a full Zendesk Messaging integration that doesn’t require configuring your own APIs.

It is however primarily a chat interaction and therefore there doesn’t seem to be a Zendesk ticketing integration for responding to emails and forms.

There also is no copilot or internal note option for using your agent.

How easy is it to set up Moveo.ai?

After training your AI agent on your business’, the installation/connection process with your Zendesk Messaging is very simple given their true marketplace app-based integration.

The only friction point will come if you want to start adding more complex workflows (called Dialogs) to integrate 3rd party, dynamic data sources or perform actions.

Without some technical know-how, this may be tricky for some.

What knowledge sources can it train on?

Moveo has direct API connections with Zendesk and Intercom help centers so you will get the highest quality training data from these.

But you can also train on your own Q&As (custom answers), uploaded PDF or doc files or websites.

In their marketing materials they do also mention training on historic tickets, but I didn’t see any mention of this in their documentation, so if available, this is likely only achieved through a custom integration or plan.

What features does Moveo.ai have?

It has some comprehensive AI agent capabilities including:

Live instructions: to customize and personalize responses to each customers you can feed in live information via webhook (similar to the User Data API in My AskAI)

Dialogs (workflows): I’ve mentioned these already but this would be how you’d build complex, multi-step actions and workflows in Moveo, by identifying intents, specifying triggers and events so a process can be followed. To make creating Dialogs easier they released an “Auto AI” feature which essentially creates the flow for you after you describe it in plain English.

Webhooks: these enable you to send information to your own back-end systems to perform lookups or actions.

How do I improve Moveo.ai’s responses?

Moveo has a number of ways you can look into and test your AI agent’s performance.

Primarily though they fall into 2 categories: analytics/stats and conversation review.

From a stats perspective you can look at data on containment rates, escalation rates, response times (moot for AI as they are almost instant), CSAT, overall AI CSAT, sentiment, and whether goals have been achieved.

For conversation review, you will also be shown questions they AI was unable to answer (aka knowledge gaps) and also be able to dig into specific conversations to understand why the AI answered in the way that it did.

How secure is Moveo.ai?

They are SOC-2 Type II compliant. There is no mention of ISO27001 compliance, and while there is no GDPR certification disclosed, they are likely compliant with this also.

Who is using Moveo.ai?

Moveo quotes over 100 enterprise using their AI agents already, and includes case studies from companies like Allianz, Edenred and Kaizen Gaming.

It’s unclear how many (if any) are using the Zendesk integration though, versus Moveo’s own widget.

How much does Moveo.ai cost?

Another AI agent that frustratingly doesn’t include any details of pricing on their site, it is a “talk to sales” job unfortunately, even for their most basic Pro plan.

Their usage-based model is also based on “meaningful conversations” a term they have coined and define as:

- LLM meaningful: The conversation has at least one covered LLM response. - AI Agent meaningful: After the user's first message, an AI Agent has at least one covered and contained response. Essentially, a session is called meaningful when the assistant has successfully replied at least once after the user's first message. A successful response is one that does not originate from the Unknown flow of the assistant.

So basically, any AI conversation with a customer.

✅

Choose Moveo if: you only need a Zendesk Messaging (not tickets) AI agent, are price insensitive and you are familiar working with workflows.

❌

Don’t choose Moveo if: you use Zendesk Tickets, need training on any internal knowledge sources (like Notion or Google Drive) and aren’t a fan of decision trees.

Kommunicate

Kommunicate is a German customer service platform founded in 2020.

How does Kommunicate integrate into Zendesk?

There is only a ‘light’ integration for Kommunicate to Zendesk, whereby when using the Kommunicate chat widget, you can choose (manually) to escalate a ticket to Zendesk if you want to.

There is no human handoff in the Zendesk widget itself.

They also have their own copilot feature, which, again, is on their own platform, not Zendesk’s.

How easy is it to set up Kommunicate?

Initial set up of the AI agent is relatively simple, a case of signing up, adding your knowledge and deploying.

This is, in part, because there isn’t a true Zendesk integration required so you are essentially using their widget.

What knowledge sources can it train on?

You can train your AI agent on a number of sources including: your Zendesk help center URL (via API), Salesforce, websites, PDFs, docs, and spreadsheets.

There are no internal knowledge base connectors available (e.g. Google Drive, Notion etc).

What features does Kommunicate have?

You can create multiple agents for your businesses, however these only come in the form of separate accounts that you can use for different brands, rather than being used in a true multi-agent sense.

They do offer human handoff, but again, this will be via their widget or manual escalation to a Zendesk ticket.

You can set basic custom instructions to control things like tone, formality and answer length, but you will need to be familiar with prompting to get the most from these instructions.

One nice feature is the ability for the AI agent to summarize the conversation prior to handover, so the human agent can pick things up without reading through the entire transcript.

Overall, Kommunicate’s AI features feel pretty basic, with no advanced AI capabilities like actions or tasks as far as I can see.

How do I improve Kommunicate’s responses?

Most of Kommunicate’s analytics features are more focused on reporting on overall customer service performance (including that of your human agents), rather than specifically focusing on how to get your AI agent performing better.

For instance they have their Insights and Human Analytics features which report on things like CSAT, handle time, resolution time and active hours.

Their main measure of AI performance is with their Bot Effectiveness Index a score that approximately measures AI deflection rate, but is calculated in a different (and slightly odd) way as it blends conversations and questions into a single metric.

Beyond this, they put pretty much all improvement identification on you to review conversations and add more knowledge.

How secure is Kommunicate?

Kommunicate has the full host of security certifications, including SOC-2 Type II, HIPAA, and ISO27001. You can also host data in the EU or US and restrict access via roles.

Who is using Kommunicate?

They have numerous case studies, including with EasyBots, Crunch and LULA Loop.

How much does Kommunicate cost?

In order to use their Zendesk integration you will need to be on their Professional plan at a minimum.

The plan starts $200/mo with 2,000 conversations included (classed as 80,000 messages), additional conversations are $10/1,000 conversations.

✅

Choose Kommunicate if: You don’t want to use Zendesk’s own Messaging or Tickets widgets or inbox.

❌

Don’t choose Kommunicate if: You want a modern, fully featured AI agent with tight integrations with Zendesk.

Maven AGI

Founded in 2023, Maven AGI’s ambition is to achieve “Business AGI”, it looks like they are starting this journey with customer success.

How does Maven AGI integrate into Zendesk?

I’ll be honest here, I can’t tell for sure how it integrates and what with, I’ve looked over their website and docs and the best I can understand is that it integrates with either Zendesk Messaging or Tickets (my guess would be Zendesk Messaging).

But to find out for sure, I think you’ll have to book a demo unfortunately!

How easy is it to set up Maven AGI?

To set up their Zendesk integration you’ll need to create an API key in Zendesk, enter your sub‑domain, username and API key in Maven’s settings.

You then install the Maven plugin from the Zendesk marketplace to handle ticket hand‑offs.

What knowledge sources can it train on?

Maven syncs your Zendesk knowledge base and can combine it with other sources like Salesforce and Freshdesk.

You can upload PDFs, CSVs, and DOCs along with allowing it to crawl any public website.

It also has its own developer platform so technically, you could integrate any internal system (with a decent amount of effort).

One neat feature it does allow is the customization of knowledge sync schedules, although this is probably an edge-case for most businesses.

What features does Maven AGI have?

Maven AGI has a solid set of AI agent capabilities (as you’d expect from anything suggesting is was AGI!).

A few of their main features include:

Actions: the agent can perform actions such as refunds, subscription changes or record updates when connected to your systems, they also have their own MCP you can connect with and allow Agent-to-Agent (A2A) interactions, something I haven’t seen elsewhere.

Personas: essentially control over the system prompt or instructions to define how you want your AI agent to respond and behave.

Tasks: via their system instructions and aforementioned actions you can set your AI agent to complete multi-step, complex workflows, without having to build any decision trees.

How do I improve Maven AGI’s responses?

There are a few ways you can improve your responses with Maven AGI.

Firstly, they share a lot of stats via their ‘widgets’ for cutting your AI agent’s performance in lots of different ways (including the obvious escalation and deflection rate metrics, as well as user feedback scores).

You can also deep-dive into the details of each AI agent response to better understand what knowledge it used to answer each question and any actions it used to try and answer.

They also offer thumbs up and down user feedback for end-users, however it is unclear if this is available when deployed via their Zendesk integrations.

Finally, you can batch-test and simulate your AI agent’s responses so you can see what happens when you tweak your instructions or knowledge.

How secure is Maven AGI?

Maven AGI is certainly enterprise‑grade from a security standpoint: it offers SOC2, HIPAA and GDPR compliance along with ISO27001 and PCI compliance.

Who is using Maven AGI?

Maven AGI’s most notable customer is ClickUp, but they are also used by FinTechs such as Rho and Papaya, amongst others.

How much does Maven AGI cost?

Maven AGI doesn’t list their pricing publicly and there is little information on it that I could find. Given it is enterprise-focused and custom, you can expect pricing to start in the mid‑five figures per year.

✅

Choose Maven AGI if: you’re a FinTech or enterprise in need of PCI or HIPAA compliance and are budget-insensitive.

❌

Don’t choose Maven AGI if: you need extensive knowledge integrations, copilot features in Zendesk or Zendesk Ticket responses.

Conclusion: so… which Zendesk AI alternative should you pick?

If you skimmed to the end (no judgement), here’s the TL;DR:

Yes, you can run AI in Zendesk without Advanced AI.

You should shortlist 2 - 3 vendors and test on your tickets, don’t choose based on a demo.

Make sure you know your constraints: Messaging vs Tickets, budget, security, setup effort, and how much control you want over behavior.

A simple way to choose:

Start with the must-haves

Works where you use Zendesk already (Tickets, Messaging, or both)

Direct replies vs. copilot only

Security needs (SOC-2/ISO/GDPR/HIPAA)

Check trainability

Direct Zendesk Guide sync vs web crawls and any other internal knowledge integrations

Bonus: macros, historic tickets

Assess ease-of-setup

Can a non-developer configure guidance, handoff, tagging?

Is there transparent inspect/logs to debug answers?

Are there actions/tasks for real workflows (refunds, lookups, changes)?

Check your pricing

Model both usage and resolution-based pricing at your volumes

Re-run your calculations at 50% and 75% deflection to see the true cost

Here’s my take after looking at all 11:

Pick My AskAI if you want the tightest Zendesk fit, fastest no-code setup, and the best $/ticket economics - with enough headroom (tools, tasks, guidance) to grow.

Pick eesel if you value deep configurability and learning from historic tickets, and don’t mind prompt tinkering.

Pick Ada/Decagon/Maven if you’re enterprise-heavy, price-insensitive, and want maximum breadth (with account-led onboarding).

Pick a copilot (Stylo/Aide) if you won’t allow autonomous replies but still want big agent productivity gains.

Pick Moveo/Certainly/Kommunicate if your channel mix or compliance needs line up with their strengths.

Last tip: turn on internal-notes mode first, measure handoff/deflection, plug the knowledge gaps, then go live on direct replies. That sequence alone will save you budget and brand pain.

If you want a head start, we built My AskAI to nail exactly this Zendesk use case - integrated, affordable, and actually manageable.

FAQs

Can I use AI in Zendesk without paying for their Advanced AI?

Yes. Zendesk’s App Marketplace has third-party AI agents that plug into your existing workspace. Many support direct replies, internal-note drafts, and/or a Copilot sidebar - so you can keep Zendesk and swap their Advanced AI for another vendor.

Which Zendesk Advanced AI alternatives integrate most smoothly with Zendesk?

My AskAI - Best overall integration (Tickets, Messaging, internal notes, copilot, auto-tagging; true click-to-connect).

eesel - Deep Zendesk coverage (Tickets, Messaging, internal notes, copilot) though more prompt/action setup.

Aissist - Full integration potential (direct replies, internal notes, drafts) but heavier config.

Certainly - Solid Messaging + Tickets; stronger if you like drag-and-drop flows.

Moveo.ai - Excellent for Zendesk Messaging; limited for Tickets.

Stylo / Aide - Smooth copilot side-panel experience (assist, draft, tag), not autonomous replies.

Ada / Decagon / Maven AGI – Enterprise-grade integrations; powerful but typically heavier to implement.

What do the costs look like versus Zendesk AI’s $1.50/resolution?

My AskAI: ~$0.20/resolution (flat $0.10 per ticket; assumes 50% deflection, 2 replies).

eesel: ~$0.84/resolution (per-interaction pricing; 2 msgs/ticket at lower tiers).

Aissist: ~$0.32/resolution (per-reply pricing; 2 replies, 50% deflection).

Ada: typically $2- $3/resolution (enterprise contracts, higher base).

Decagon / Maven AGI / Moveo / Certainly / Kommunicate: custom or tiered pricing—often above My AskAI and closer to enterprise ranges; get a quote for your volume and resolution rate.

What should I prioritize in features when looking at a Zendesk AI replacement?

Look for: (a) human handover rules, (b) multilingual support, (c) guidance to control tone/behavior, (d) actions/tools to read/write external data (e.g., Shopify, CRMs), (e) tasks/workflows for multi-step processes (refunds, address changes), and (f) improvement tooling (knowledge-gap surfacing, inspect/debug, batch tests).

How do training sources differ by vendor?

Best-case is direct help-center integrations (cleaner than web crawls). My AskAI connects to Intercom/Zendesk/Freshdesk articles plus internal repos (Drive, Notion, SharePoint, etc.) and live customer data; eesel excels at training from historic tickets (plus common sources). Many others rely mainly on sites/PDFs or require manual re-syncs.