Zendesk offers a range of plans designed to meet the needs of businesses at different stages of growth and complexity. While the Enterprise plan provides a robust set of features tailored for larger organisations with more complex requirements, the Professional plan is more streamlined, suitable for smaller teams with less intricate workflows.
While both plans offer powerful tools to support your customer service efforts, there are notable distinctions that could impact how you manage your customer interactions.
If you're considering downgrading from the Enterprise plan to the Professional plan, it's important to understand what you might be losing in terms of functionality, customisation, and support.
| Product | Feature | Description | Suite Enterprise | Suite Professional |
| Support | Custom Roles |
Allows for the creation of custom roles and permissions, providing you with granular control over what each user can access and perform within Zendesk. |
✅ |
Limited to standard roles only.
|
| Automatic email archiving |
Send all Zendesk email notifications privately to an address of your choice to keep a complete archive of communication. |
✅ |
🚫 | |
| Widget Unbranding | Remove the "Zendesk" branding from your widget. Available for both live chat and messaging. | ✅ |
"Powered by Zendesk" will be visible within the widget |
|
| Business Hours | Define business hours in Zendesk to let customers know your support availability. | Multiple |
1 |
|
| Audit Logs | View a detailed list of critical changes that have been made. | ✅ |
🚫 |
|
| Standard sandbox |
Try out features and workflows in a sandbox testing environment. |
✅ |
🚫 |
|
| Premium sandboxes | Replicate your ticketing system configurations, customisations and metadata into a non-production environment for testing, development and/or training purposes. | Partial |
🚫 |
|
| Talk | Call offering time limit | Choose the amount of time each agent gets to answer a call before it is placed back in the queue. | ✅ | 🚫 |
| Call usage 99.95% uptime SLA |
Receive usage credit to your account in the event of outages from our service provider. | ✅ | 🚫 | |
| Guide (Help Centre) | Structured Content |
Organise your articles in multiple levels — including unlimited categories and sections — so it's easy for your customers to find what they need. |
Up to 6 levels |
Up to 2 levels |
| Theme customisation | Use themes to control the look and feel of your help centres across multiple brands or products. |
Advanced |
Intermediate |
|
| Multiple Help Centres | Support multiple brands, products, service tiers or regions. |
Up to 300 |
Up to 5 |
|
| Search | Empower customers with the information they need by extending help centre search across the resources they need. |
Federated search for multiple help centres + community forums |
Help centre + community forums
|
|
| Knowledge Management | Bulk actions | Update various article properties, such as labels and permissions, for multiple articles all at once. |
Advanced |
Intermediate |
| Approval and publishing workflows | Designate content editing and publishing permissions across your team, and solicit team input by assigning article updates. | ✅ | 🚫 | |
| Scheduled publishing and verification | Keep your content up to date through its lifecycle with scheduled publishing, unpublishing and verification intervals. | ✅ | 🚫 | |
| Content blocks | Create, manage and update content that is reusable and can live across multiple articles or help centres. | ✅ | 🚫 | |
| AI Agents | Included automated resolutions | Each plan includes a set number of automated resolutions for AI agents, allowing AI agents to autonomously resolve customer issues without human intervention. | 15 ARs per agent/month | 10 ARs per agent/month |
| Agent Workspace | Custom Layouts | Arrange and resize components to create workspaces that dynamically update based on the context of a ticket, so agents can focus on the task at hand and find information faster. |
Up to 20 layouts
|
Up to 1 layout
|
| Custom agent statuses | If your workflow requires more statuses than the default four (online, away, transfer only and offline), you can create a limited amount of customised statuses available to all agents on your account. | Up to 100 | Up to 5 | |
| Dynamic, contextual workspaces |
Contextual workspaces enable admins to present ticket tools and features based on specific workflows. | ✅ | 🚫 | |
| Collaboration Tools | Light agents |
Give team members limited access to tickets without paying for more seats. They can read tickets and provide input by adding private comments.
|
Up to 1000 | Up to 100 |
| Workflows | Ticket sharing between multiple Zendesk accounts | Create workflows that share tickets between multiple Zendesk accounts. | Automated | Available via manual share |
| Guided mode | Line up tickets for agents to work through and guide them from one ticket to the next. This prevents cherry-picking and helps speed up response times and handle times. | ✅ | 🚫 | |
| Automations & Intelligence | Business rules analysis | In-depth analysis of how a given ticket property is used across your triggers, automations, macros and ticket views. | ✅ | 🚫 |
| AI-powered Content Cues |
Content Cues helps you create relevant help centre articles by automatically identifying common topics from customer requests. |
✅ | 🚫 | |
| Reporting & Analytics | Scheduled dashboard delivery |
Schedule and automate the delivery of reporting dashboards. |
Zendesk users and end-users
|
Zendesk users only
|
| Dashboard sharing |
Share relevant dashboards to keep teammates and stakeholders in the loop about key insights and trends. |
Zendesk users and end-users |
Zendesk users only
|
|
| Customisable live dashboards |
Create custom live dashboards for real-time insights. |
✅ | 🚫 | |
| Visual data alerts |
Set threshold alerts to visually understand when teams are under a heavy load. |
✅ | 🚫 | |
| Data | Data storage |
Storage consumed by pre-configured and custom objects in Zendesk. Every Zendesk account includes 10GB of data storage in addition to a per-agent amount of storage based on plan type. |
10 GB + 200 MB/agent | 10 GB + 100 MB/agent |
| File storage |
Storage of files attached to Zendesk objects, like email attachments in a ticket. |
10 GB + 10 GB/agent |
10 GB + 5 GB/agent |
|
| Custom objects |
Store and connect new data sources, like products and order history, for greater context about your customer. |
Up to 50 objects (10 lookup fields/object) |
Up to 30 objects (10 lookup fields/object) |
|
| External events |
Capture every customer interaction — like shopping cart, web or mobile activity — from third-party applications to get a dynamic view of the customer journey. |
Up to 750K/month |
Up to 350K/month |
|
| Sunshine Conversations | Monthly Active Users per month |
Monthly Active Users or 'MAU' is the total number of End-Users engaged in any number of sent or received messages or events within the Sunshine Conversation Service in the month. |
1,000 included (USD $50/pack of additional 2,500 MAUs) | 1,000 included (USD $50/pack of additional 2,500 MAUs) |
| Notifications per month |
A Notification is an attempted or sent text, multimedia and structured messages to any supported Third-Party Messaging Platform via the Sunshine Conversation Notification API. |
1,000 included (USD $50/pack of additional 25,000 Notifications)
|
1,000 included (USD $50/pack of additional 25,000 Notifications)
|
Transitioning from Zendesk's Enterprise plan to the Professional plan can offer cost savings, but it also involves trade-offs in terms of features, customisation, and scalability. While the Professional plan provides robust tools for managing customer interactions, larger organisations or those with complex needs might find the limitations challenging.
Before making a decision, it’s essential to carefully evaluate your current requirements and consider how the differences between these plans could impact your customer support strategy. Consulting with your Zendesk Account Executive can provide additional insights and help you choose the best plan for your business.
We've also put together the same table above into different file versions so you can utilise this checklist as a working document to make your decisions.
File types available:
- PDF (.pdf)
- Excel (.xls)
- Word doc (.docx)
- CSV (.csv)