Desk.com (discontinued) vs. Fin by Intercom

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Desk.com (discontinued)
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Desk.com was a helpdesk, ticketing, and customer support product offered by Salesforce, and oriented towards the needs of small businesses. It is no longer sold and support has been discontinued. Salesforce recommends its modern Service Cloud as a replacement.N/A
Fin by Intercom
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Fin is Intercom’s AI Agent for customer service, designed to deliver high-quality answers, even for complex queries. It works with any helpdesk, or it can be paired with Intercom’s next-generation Helpdesk to get the full Intercom Customer Service Suite.
$0.99
one-time fee per 1 resolution
Pricing
Desk.com (discontinued)Fin by Intercom
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Fin with your current helpdesk
$0.99
one-time fee per 1 resolution
Copilot add-on
$35
per month per user
The Early Stage program
$65
per month (6 support seats)
Proactive Support Plus add-on
$99
per month
Fin with Intercom’s Helpdesk
from $39 + $0.99 per Fin resolution
per month per seat
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Desk.com (discontinued)Fin by Intercom
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsFin comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee. Here's how it works: Use Fin in at least 250 conversations within the first 90 days after trial. If you're not satisfied, you can request a refund of up to $1M. Refund requests must be submitted within 90 days of starting the subscription.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Desk.com (discontinued)Fin by Intercom
Considered Both Products
Desk.com (discontinued)
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
With the help of the Salesforce Desk, we can get smarter services, especially for small companies as a part of customer support. This leads to increased productivity. Adding applications from AppExchange is an awesome feature where we can integrate with a number of other …
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
We have not used any products like Desk.com
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
I would say it is a best product when you have to take up the customer calls as well as deep dive customer details while addressing their complaints and issues. It is one of the best tools out there in the market and so many multinational companies are taking benefit of the …
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
Wix Answers was much better compared to Desk.com. It had more excellent and much better and more tools and was very customizable. Luckily it also had a search tool and also the sort and filter tools. The only thing better than Wix Answers on desk.com was that we could keep …
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
We liked it as a tool because of the ease and advantages offered by the tool compared to the other solutions evaluated.Due to its ease of implementation and ease of use it adapted very well to the needs of the company, that was the reason why we chose desk.com.
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
We would have stayed on desk.com if Salesforce did not force us to move off the platform. To be honest it was a great platform at a reasonable price. I was the administrator and our agents were very happy with how things worked. I would go back to them in a heartbeat if I …
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
Zendesk is much more light and setup friendly. This system does not require a lot of Salesforce knowledge or certification to set it up. Zendesk is better suited to small to medium-sized businesses.
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
Desk.com and Salesforce Service Cloud can be very easily implemented, administered, and scaled across support teams within the organization. It is truly an industry gold standard as it has a lot of great out-of-the-box functionality and does not require as much customization …
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
This one seemed to have the best salesforce integration and seemed to be the best for having all of our different teams (sales, retention, support, marketing, SRM, etc.) in one place. Also, we were able to get a very good price. The other platforms seemed like they would be too …
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
Desk connects directly with Salesforce with many other teams in the business use. This tool did take longer to set up because of all the customization possibilities. There is a good amount of customization that needs to be completed in order to make it function correctly and …
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
Overall, it performs a lot better than all three combined, with a lot fewer glitches and a lot more user-friendly and user experience efficiency. Any new link that needs to be done, takes a lot less time to execute on desk compared to the three others. Simply advanced when it …
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
We have used Amazon Connect and it's one of the worst systems we've ever used. It will hang up mid-call or just refresh the whole call and go mute the system was horribly designed we prefer Desk.com and will continue to use desk.com at this office company.
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
Salesforce Desk is a lot easier to use than Zoho. Zoho has way too much going on, within the software, to be easily manageable. However, SysAid is the easiest, for users, to use because it is extremely basic and straightforward. Our users prefer the easiest method of opening an …
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
In my opinion, Intercom is more customer oriented, using chat and real time marketing features. Desk.com is a more old school solution focused on tickets and cases. Desk.com does not have much integration capacities with your platform, Intercom has lots of features around this, …
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
Lower pricing per user. That's about it! Other companies have all-around better features and easier user interfaces, but Desk can beat them on pricing even at higher account tiers. Included knowledgebase tools are a plus, and fairly easy to manage.
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
The big turn off to this product was the price and poor integration to existing systems. We were in the process of launching a new CRM and needed a tool that would work well with this new tool. Desk.com is a partner and works closely where Zendesk did none of that
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
We have not used any other products and probably will not. It's cost effective and easy to use.
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
Desk.com is comparable, on a smaller scale. We went with Desk.com because it provided the functionality we needed and was more affordable.
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
Originally, I was using Salesforce to keep track of students and their progress through the system (with an end goal in mind). It was really great for handling students on a case by case basis with the different fields and and sections for multiple people to complete as the …
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
I was not involved in the selection process of Desk.com vs. competitors but we are discontinuing our Desk.com subscription this month and instead opting to use Service Cloud as our new ticketing system. It allows better integration with Salesforce.com and also is more client …
Chose Desk.com (discontinued)
  • Kayako
    • Interesting, but really clunky and unstable at the time.
Fin by Intercom
Chose Fin by Intercom
We're using another AI agent too. Fin AI is a little behind, as it needs to start learning from either testing or real conversations, so it can better advise users with accurate information - whereas the other AI agent is learning very fast and needs little to no adjustment of …
Chose Fin by Intercom
I did not choose which platform our support teams used. But I did not like NetSuite because it sent out a lot of email updates and required the client to reply to the correct email in order to have everything tracked. ServiceNow was pretty similar. The reports in ServiceNow …
Chose Fin by Intercom
HubSpot CRM, HubSpot Marketing Hub and Zendesk Suite
Chose Fin by Intercom
I used Zendesk briefly but found it difficult to navigate — I often couldn’t tell what was going on or how to simply reply to a ticket. In contrast, Intercom is much more intuitive and user-friendly. Its clean interface and support for multiple communication formats like …
Chose Fin by Intercom
As explained previously, most of these platforms were focused on tickets, most reports only work with tickets, there is no way to postpone a service without turning it into a ticket, and since our response time target is a maximum of 2 minutes, these platforms were unable to …
Chose Fin by Intercom
Sprinklr Social, Zendesk Sunshine Conversations, Clarabridge (discontinued), Engagor (discontinued) and Qualtrics XM for Customer Frontlines
Chose Fin by Intercom
Honestly, we haven't really looked at this, but we do use it for another team because a third-party works with it.

Otherwise, I am extremely happy with Intercom and have not looked towards another software.
Chose Fin by Intercom
It was a long debate before we switched from Crisp to Intercom, but we never regretted that decision. Intercom looks and looks sleeker, works smoother, and has the knowledge base feature, which was our main need to switch. The transition took very little time, so no bumps on …
Chose Fin by Intercom
Way better than all of them - especially the workflow tool which I don't think Help Scout or Crisp even had. Really easy to manage capacity too through snoozing conversations and customers receiving emails after a response.

With HubSpot, there was no way for our users to return …
Chose Fin by Intercom
Dialpad Support, Talkdesk and SnapEngage
Chose Fin by Intercom
This is the first one we tried.
Chose Fin by Intercom
My main concern at the moment is how the integration looks to the users and Intercom just looks modern and up-to-date. HubSpot is missing this. In the background it always comes down to how you organize your team and processes.
Chose Fin by Intercom
Odoo was, in my opinion, terrible - a jack of all trades and master of none, which is why all teams in the business moved away to bespoke software. Freshdesk - an easier and more organisable way of creating and managing tickets. Although Intercom now has tickets, we're still …
Chose Fin by Intercom
At the moment, I only use Supademo to record screen tours. It is very intuitive, has a browser extension, and is perfect for recording the onboarding of new features.
Chose Fin by Intercom
Intercom as a tool is well suited to manage our key metrics with the help of its reports. We have evaluated a lot of tools but Intercom remains the best in terms of report. It helps us maintain OKR's for the support team and track whenever needed. FinAI also has the reporting …
Chose Fin by Intercom
Personally I have not used any other platforms like Intercom and do not wish to search as of right now.
Chose Fin by Intercom
The intercom is more intuitive and provides easier management and personalization of our conversations. It's been a while since I used Zendesk, so this might have changed, but Intercom provides a bigger catalog of functionality targeted to product marketing, such as emails, …
Chose Fin by Intercom
Noone has been able to standup to the level of service and product that Intercom gives us.
Chose Fin by Intercom
To compete with Salesforce, the main point is the pricing. Intercom has a very different budget when it comes to start ups and up and coming companies, which helps.
To compete with other platforms, Intercom has a more developed interface and a super completa arrange of tools, …
Chose Fin by Intercom
Several factors as pricing, customisation, ease of use, popularity, user-friendly and the continuous online support as well improvements helped us make this choice. Onboarding new colleagues to Intercom does not even take one day, it is so efficient and intuitive. If the …
Chose Fin by Intercom
Intercom is much more flexible and modern than Zendesk, UI is better. Zendesk is better at multiple brand experience and localisation.
Chose Fin by Intercom
All tools that we used in the past, have a lot of problems on the chat app, our the syncing data between integrations, Intercom has too, but is very less than others.
Chose Fin by Intercom
We used Aircall for many years and it was a great tool, however as we scaled down our phone support usage it became expensive and cumbersome. Intercom phones offered a cheaper solution that turned out to be more efficient for our team to use as well.
Best Alternatives
Desk.com (discontinued)Fin by Intercom
Small Businesses
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
LocaliQ
LocaliQ
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Piper the AI SDR by Qualified
Piper the AI SDR by Qualified
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
SysAid
SysAid
Score 9.1 out of 10
Conversica
Conversica
Score 9.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Desk.com (discontinued)Fin by Intercom
Likelihood to Recommend
8.2
(0 ratings)
8.3
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.4
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.3
(0 ratings)
8.8
(0 ratings)
Availability
1.0
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Performance
10.0
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.2
(0 ratings)
5.7
(0 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
7.4
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
10.0
(0 ratings)
6.6
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Desk.com (discontinued)Fin by Intercom
Likelihood to Recommend
Desk.com and the Salesforce Service Cloud provide a sophisticated suite to easily create and track cases coming in, along with automatically routing and escalating issues as they arise. It allows me to configure my own workflows and customizes consoles with easy drag and drop functionality. It is the perfect help desk software, which integrates with the Salesforce Sales and Commerce clouds seamlessly. The in-app and mobile support is also very expedient and helpful.
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While Fin is an awesome investment, the setup and tuning of responses to meet brand alignment and delivery have taken some time. If you prioritize not just resolution rate and accuracy, but style and delivery, it's a bigger lift. However, for the vast majority of businesses, the step and its impact on resource management are a worthy investment.
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Pros
  • Help Center. Desk has worked endlessly with us to perfect our Help Center. They are dedicated and willing to work in order to make your product right.
  • Customization. Though we exceeded the rule limitation for Desk, they have still allowed us to take their product and make it our own. We have our own labeling, and priority system which help us hit important SLAs.
  • User education. Whenever there is a new feature released, I feel like I'm in the know about it which is extremely important when we've been requesting certain features for a long period of time. Their communication is on point.
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  • Great UI - everyone has their own inbox but can still see all incoming messages.
  • Fin AI - we love the AI functionality, it saves tons of time of the team.
  • Automated emails - we configured Intercom in a way that it uses a lot of information we have about our users (e.g. their subscription, date of upgrade, etc.) so that we can use it to automate communication.
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Cons
  • Internal knowledge tools are clunky and annoying to access, outside the regular workflow of everyday staff
  • Arbitrary and confusing limitations in business rules and custom fields
  • Arbitrary and confusing limitations in case handling - for example, if you begin a case as a phone call you CANNOT email the customer from the case. As though no one working at Desk has ever sent a follow-up email...?
  • Not very good for B2B, mid-to-large businesses. Difficult to set business rules based on company information (for example, service level/tier) and nearly impossible to track key stakeholders and get clear insight into the relationship at a high level
  • Reporting tools are clunky, slow, and just all-around pretty useless
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  • Some things are repetitive. Ex: If you provide guidance to ask a follow-up question, it'll ask that follow-up question each time.
  • It'd be cool to have a "vibe" check for auto-sorting. Ex: We have responses to our outreach feed into Intercom. It'd be cool to have a way to auto-sort based on if they ask a detailed question or just a plain "interested" response.
  • It'd be cool if Fin by Intercom flagged conversations, like it a customer seemed agitated, for the team to review.
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Likelihood to Renew
We will be very likely to renew our contract with Desk.com. It is easy to use, and provides us with everything we need to keep our customers and employees happy. They have also been very helpful in catering the application to our specific and unique needs, including working across brands and adding specific content for our products
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It's currently a perfect fit for our needs, and we are customer-focused and small. When we grow, we may need to re-evaluate, but our current team finds it easy. Reviewing conversations is simple and allows for great training. The canned replies make service fast and easy. Smart suggestions remove the need to re-write technical walkthroughs and explanations for our FAQ
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Usability
Once it is fully set up with all of the unique and necessary customizations for your organization, it becomes easier to use, but before that, it is not very user-friendly and there are not a lot of training resources available. You likely need a Salesforce admin for initial set-up who is experienced with customization.
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It takes a bit of getting used to. It's easy to start off with simple pieces of answering queries, etc. The real part is when one tries to use workflows with triggers and automation. Then, it can be a whole different experience. I would love to see it being much simpler in terms of usability there.
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Reliability and Availability
We've never had a problem with Desk.com's availability.
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always there
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Performance
Fast, responsive, gorgeous, and fun. It's always run like a thoroughbred for me.
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works perfect
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Support Rating
I always get the support and needed answers in a timely manner. Whether by email, ticket, or call. There's always a solution available or a potential one available. Everything is clear and straight to the point in customer support from Desk. I didn't face any difficulty so far with that.
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Intercom is the premier customer support/engagement model and it definitely has one of the top tier customer support teams as well. I don't think I have ever waited more than 5 minutes to get the information I need or get help with an issue. They are incredible and I aim to model our customer service department after them.
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Online Training
No answers on this topic
Easy to know the learning path
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Implementation Rating
As I stated earlier, implementation of Desk.com went more smoothly than most. The resources in the "Support Center" are fantastic, and I never ran into anything that left me stumped, angry, or disappointed.
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The implementation was surprisingly easy but we are having to adapt from our old process to work well with Intercom.
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Alternatives Considered
Wix Answers was much better compared to Desk.com. It had more excellent and much better and more tools and was very customizable. Luckily it also had a search tool and also the sort and filter tools. The only thing better than Wix Answers on desk.com was that we could keep internal communication records by adding notes on tickets, and it saved a lot of time.
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In my experience, what Intercom has done with Fin by Intercom is far more innovative and forward thinking than other tools I've used. It's intuitive, easy, and they are always releasing new things to make Fin by Intercom even more powerful.
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Return on Investment
  • It has definitely had a positive impact by helping our team quickly address issues people are having with our product.
  • Desk.com has helped our team and company get better by addressing customer and tester issues faster, and tracking data so that our team can improve the quality and speed of all of our outgoing communications.
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  • I like how I don't feel like I need to constantly be monitoring support, especially on weekends
  • It's great that the user will get some response right away, I just need to hope that the response they do get is good enough if I'm awk
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ScreenShots

Desk.com (discontinued) Screenshots

Screenshot of Desk.com ConsoleScreenshot of Desk.com Issue ScreenScreenshot of Desk.com Reporting and Analytics

Fin by Intercom Screenshots

Screenshot of Fin, delivering conversational support experience to customers.Screenshot of where to monitor, analyze, and optimize Fin by spotting trends, filling content gaps, and fixing quality issues topic by topic.Screenshot of where to customize Fin's tone of voice, teach it support knowledge and policies, and configure how it handles complex tasks in over 45 languages.Screenshot of where to test answers, review the sources and settings that shape them, and get tailored recommendations to optimize performance.Screenshot of Fin, as it appears across email and live chat to phone, SMS, and social. Fin can answer any question, across any channel, any time.