Help Scout vs. Kernel Comparison Chart

Zendesk is an AI-powered service solution that’s easy to set up, use, and scale. It works out-of-the-box and adapts quickly, enabling businesses to move faster. Built on billions of CX interactions, Zendesk AI supports the whole service journey—from self-service to agents to admins—helping teams resolve issues faster and operate efficiently at scale. Zendesk empowers agents with tools, insights, and context to deliver personalized service on any channel—social messaging, phone, or email. It unifies personalized conversations, omnichannel case management, AI workflows, automation, and a Marketplace of 1200+ apps. Easy to implement, it frees teams from relying on IT or costly partners. Serving over 130K global brands in 30+ languages, Zendesk simplifies business complexity to create meaningful customer connections. Headquartered in San Francisco, it operates worldwide.

Pylon is an All-in-one B2B Support Platform for modern B2B businesses. We bring together everything a post-sales teams team needs including a ticketing system, B2B omnichannel integrations (Slack Connect, Microsoft Teams), modern chat widget, knowledge base, AI support bot, account management, customer marketing, and more. The support system for B2B companies. Allow your customers to get support wherever they'd like and enable multiple support tiers. Let AI draft support articles for you based on your issue resolutions. Use Triggers to codify business processes and workflows, and create Macros to streamline common responses. Broadcast new features, newsletters, and more to your customers and track engagement. A dedicated place to store, track, and organize all customer data. A shared view to give your stakeholders visibility into their team's active issues. If you use or want Slack for customer support, we should talk. Our Slack power users average 180+ customer channels

Best in class online service desk software. Offer your customers world-class services with ServiceDesk Plus Cloud, the easy-to-use SaaS service desk software from ManageEngine, the IT management division of Zoho. Track and manage IT tickets efficiently, resolve issues faster, and ensure end-user satisfaction with the cloud-based IT ticketing system used by over 100,000 IT service desks worldwide. Manage the complete life cycle of IT incidents, problems, changes, and projects with out of the box ITIL workflows. Create support SLAs, define escalation levels, and ensure compliance. Automate ticket dispatch, categorization, classification, and assignment based on predefined business rules, and set up notifications and alerts for timely ticket resolution. Reduce walk ins and unnecessary tickets by giving your users more control. Enable end users to access IT services through your service catalog in the self-service portal. Help users create and track tickets and search for solutions.

If you're looking for an IT service desk solution that's actually simple, turn to Freshservice. A plug-and-play ITIL service desk by Freshworks, Freshservice helps businesses modernize IT and other business functions--without the cost and complexity. Freshservice offers everything teams need for proactive IT service management, including ticketing and asset management, configuration management and enhanced impact analysis, robust incident management functionalities, and more.

NinjaOne automates the hardest parts of IT, delivering visibility, security, and control over all endpoints for more than 20,000 customers. The NinjaOne automated endpoint management platform is proven to increase productivity, reduce security risk, and lower costs for IT teams and managed service providers. The company seamlessly integrates with a wide range of IT and security technologies. NinjaOne is obsessed with customer success and provides free and unlimited onboarding, training, and support.

Sendbird is the omnichannel AI agent platform enterprises choose to elevate customer experience, by initiating autonomous support & sales conversations, keeping humans in the loop for complex inquiries, and re-engaging customers with proactive business messages. Combining omnichannel AI and a battle-tested, award-winning communication APIs, Sendbird enables businesses to build AI agents and meaningful customer connections at scale. Sendbird’s AI-powered customer service platform helps businesses deliver scalable, omnichannel support through intelligent AI agents. These agents work seamlessly across channels like mobile apps, web, SMS, and social media, providing instant and proactive assistance to customers 24/7. With the ability to integrate into existing customer support tools, the platform enhances resolution rates, reduces response times, and improves customer experience by offering a unified view of all interactions.

irdeye is the #1 AI platform for Hyperlocal Marketing®, purpose-built for multi-location brands. Over 150,000 businesses rely on Birdeye’s intelligent AI agents to run marketing and drive business outcomes. Birdeye helps multi-location brands enhance online reputation, engage customers across social, search, and web, and gain real-time insights into consumers and competitors — all to boost leads & increase foot traffic, reduce costs, and grow revenue. Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Palo Alto, Birdeye is led by a team of innovators from Google, Amazon, Salesforce, and Yahoo and is backed by the who’s who of Silicon Valley, including Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, Trinity Ventures, World Innovation Lab, and Accel-KKR.

Podium is a comprehensive AI-driven lead management and communication platform utilized by over 100,000 businesses seeking to enhance customer acquisition and retention. At the heart of Podium’s innovation is its AI employee, which ensures businesses respond to incoming leads instantly around the clock, dramatically improving conversion rates and revenue growth. The platform assists businesses in generating more customer reviews, improving their Google rankings, and unifying their lead channels into a single, manageable dashboard. Through the web and mobile applications, businesses can call and text customers, send payment links for quick transactions, and deploy bulk messaging campaigns to boost repeat sales. Podium’s powerful AI-driven automations seamlessly manage customer interactions across multiple communication platforms, providing accurate and timely responses that help drive sales.

Odoo is a fully integrated, customizable, open-source software packed with hundreds of expertly designed business applications. Odoo’s intuitive database is able to meet a majority of business needs, such as: CRM, Sales, Project, Manufacturing, Inventory, and Accounting, just to name a few. Odoo is an all-in-one software solution designed to meet the needs of companies, regardless of their size (or budget). The unbeatable, seamless nature of Odoo helps businesses become more efficient by reducing redundant manual processes, which helps companies save countless hours of labor. Every module is interconnected to provide a fully-integrated experience from app to app, and users can automate many processes that would’ve otherwise required manual inputs into multiple applications. Odoo keeps all business functions in one place, allowing teams to collaborate with other departments from one unified platform in the most efficient way possible.

Guru is the AI Source of Truth for your company. It’s an AI knowledge platform that connects everything your teams know—across chats, docs, and apps—into one trusted layer that delivers cited, permission-aware answers everywhere you work. Guru automatically connects to tools like Slack, Teams, Google Drive, Confluence, Salesforce, Zendesk, and more, so employees and AI assistants can access verified knowledge directly in their workflow. Every answer shows where it came from, inherits existing permissions, and stays accurate automatically through built-in verification and expert updates. By connecting knowledge, making it accessible everywhere, and keeping it trustworthy automatically, Guru eliminates manual searches and ensures everyone—human or AI—works from the same truth.