Knots.io review: An honest look at the Zendesk automation tool in 2025

If you’re running a support team on Zendesk, you know the feeling. Your agents are buried under a mountain of repetitive tasks like tagging tickets, merging duplicates, and manually copy-pasting order numbers from attachments. It’s a huge time-drain that keeps them from handling the tricky customer problems where they really shine. So, you start looking for a way to automate the grunt work.

That search probably led you to Knots.io, a well-known suite of no-code apps designed to automate workflows right inside Zendesk. But is it the right tool for your team?

In this straightforward Knots.io review, we’ll break down exactly what it does, how much it costs, and where it works best. We’ll also get into some key limitations you should be aware of before you commit, helping you decide if it really fits your long-term plans.

What is Knots.io?

First off, Knots.io isn’t a single product. It’s more like a toolkit of over 25 individual apps that plug directly into your Zendesk account. You can mix and match them to build out automations for different parts of your support process.

Its main promise is to handle all the tedious stuff before an agent even sees a ticket. When a new request comes in, Knots.io apps can jump in to spot key details, categorize the ticket, pull info from attachments, and even merge duplicates. The whole point is to give your agents clean, organized tickets so they can get right to solving the actual problem.

It’s important to remember that Knots.io is 100% focused on the Zendesk world. Its entire existence is about making that one platform better, and it does a pretty good job of it.

A closer look at features and apps

To really get what Knots.io is about, you have to look at its individual apps. Most teams don’t just use one; they string a few together to create a custom automation flow that works for them.

Ticket and data management apps

These are the workhorses that handle the most common, mind-numbing tasks in any support queue. Judging by what users say, these are some of the most popular ones:

• Merge Tickets: This app is a lifesaver. It automatically finds and merges duplicate tickets based on rules you set, like the customer’s email, the subject line, or a custom order ID. It keeps your queue from getting cluttered and stops two agents from accidentally working on the same issue. Best of all, this app is completely free, so it’s a pretty easy decision for any team on Zendesk.

• Ticket Parser: This is a fan favorite for a reason. It scans the text of an incoming ticket for specific things, like PO numbers, user IDs, or tracking codes, and automatically pulls that info to fill out your Zendesk ticket fields. This is a huge help for turning messy, unstructured text into neat, structured data that can kick off other automations.

• Autofill Fields & Assign to Agents: These apps usually follow right after the Ticket Parser does its thing. Once you have the data you need, you can use these to automatically categorize tickets, set the right priority, and send them to the correct team or agent with a round-robin system.

Attachment and data processing apps

Let’s be real, dealing with attachments is a massive time sink. Knots.io has a few clever apps designed to unlock the data trapped inside those files.

• OCR (PDF/Image to Text): This app uses Optical Character Recognition to read attachments like PDFs, invoices, or scanned forms. It basically turns the text in those images into searchable data within the Zendesk ticket, so your agents don’t have to manually type everything out.

• Process Excel/CSV/DOCX: If your customers send a lot of spreadsheets or documents, these apps can pull data from specific cells or sections and use it to fill in ticket fields. Another great way to cut out the copy-paste grind.

AI and advanced automation apps

Knots.io is also getting into more AI-driven features to help with tasks that need a bit more brainpower.

• AI-powered Classification & Sentiment Analysis: These apps read a ticket’s content to figure out what the customer wants (like a refund or help with a technical bug) and how they’re feeling (frustrated, happy, etc.). This is great for automatically bumping urgent or angry customers to the front of the line.

• GPT Sidebar App: This is an assistant tool that lives inside the Zendesk interface. It can help agents write replies more quickly, summarize long email chains, or tweak the tone of a message before sending it.

While these tools are handy, they operate as separate, single-step actions. A more modern AI system can apply this kind of intelligence across the entire workflow at once. For example, an AI agent can understand sentiment, classify intent, look up order information, and draft a personalized response as one fluid process, rather than needing separate apps for each step.

Pricing and plans

Knots.io uses a subscription model that depends on two things: how many of their apps you want to use and your monthly ticket volume. While their free Merge Tickets app is a great place to start, you’ll need a paid plan for more advanced automation.

Here’s a quick look at their packages:

Plan	Price (Monthly)	Key Features	Best For
Essentials	$269 / month	3 Knots apps, up to 5,000 tickets/month	Small teams just getting started with basic automation.
Power Suite	$899 / month	10 Knots apps, up to 30,000 tickets/month	Growing teams that need more complex, multi-app workflows.
Enterprise	Starts at $1900 / month	Unlimited apps, up to 75,000 tickets/month	Large companies with high ticket volumes and security needs.

The "per-app" pricing is something to watch. A workflow that seems simple can quickly eat up your app limit. For example, if you want to pull an order number from a PDF (that’s app #1), use that number to categorize the ticket (app #2), and then assign it to the right agent (app #3), you’ve already maxed out the Essentials plan. As your automation gets more sophisticated, you might find yourself needing to upgrade sooner than you thought.

Key limitations to consider

Knots.io is a capable tool, but it’s not perfect. These aren’t necessarily complaints, but they are important things for any team to think about when planning their long-term automation strategy.

The "Zendesk-only" bubble

The tight integration with Zendesk is Knots.io’s biggest strength and its biggest weakness. If your company lives and breathes Zendesk and has no intention of ever using anything else, this probably isn’t a big deal for you.

But most businesses use a mix of tools. What if your support team uses Freshdesk, your sales team is on Intercom, and your IT department runs on Jira Service Management? You’re stuck. In contrast, many modern AI platforms are built to work with any helpdesk. An AI support agent from eesel AI, for instance, has one-click integrations that let you use it across your entire support stack, not just in one tool.

Fragmented workflows and disconnected knowledge

The "building block" approach of Knots.io is flexible, but it can also get messy. To build a single automation from start to finish, you might have to set up, test, and connect several different apps. This can become a headache to manage and fix when things go wrong.

On top of that, Knots.io mostly learns from what’s inside a ticket or its attachments. It can’t easily connect to your company’s other knowledge sources. All that useful information sitting in places like Confluence, Google Docs, or old Slack conversations is out of reach.

A unified AI platform like eesel AI gets around this by connecting to all of your knowledge sources right away. It creates one central brain that can solve problems using information from anywhere in your company, without you needing to set up a bunch of separate tools.

No way to test before you go live

This is a big one for any automation tool: the ability to see how it will work before you unleash it on your customers. There’s no clear mention of a robust simulation feature on Knots.io’s site that lets you test your automations against real-world scenarios.

This means you’re often deploying new rules blind. You can’t be sure how your setup will handle the weird and wonderful ways customers write in, which can lead to mistakes, tickets going to the wrong place, and a frustrating experience for everyone.

This is where a simulation mode really proves its worth. For example, eesel AI lets you run its AI agent over thousands of your past tickets in a safe, sandboxed environment. You get a clear forecast of how many tickets it can resolve and can see exactly how it would have replied, letting you fine-tune everything before a single customer interacts with it.

eesel AI's simulation mode provides a clear forecast of how many tickets it can resolve based on your past data.

eesel AI: An alternative

If those limitations sound like potential deal-breakers, it might be time to look at a more all-in-one solution. While Knots.io gives you the pieces to build rule-based automations, eesel AI gives you a ready-to-go AI Agent that learns from all your company knowledge to handle support conversations on its own.

It’s a completely different way of thinking about it. Instead of piecing together single-purpose apps, you’re deploying one smart system that can manage the entire support interaction.

Here’s a quick comparison:

Feature	Knots.io	eesel AI
Platform Support	Zendesk only	Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom, Gorgias, & more
Knowledge Sources	Ticket fields & attachments	All sources: past tickets, docs, Confluence, Slack, etc.
Setup Model	Configure and combine multiple apps	Single platform, live in minutes
Core Technology	Rule-based automation & specific AI apps	Unified, generative AI agent
Pre-launch Testing	Not specified	Advanced simulation over past tickets
Pricing Model	Based on app count & ticket volume	Based on AI interactions, all products included

This video provides a walkthrough of how the Knots.io API Data Sync app works to automatically fetch information within Zendesk.

Is Knots.io the right tool for you?

So, after this Knots.io review, what’s the final call? Knots.io is a great set of tools for teams that are all-in on Zendesk and want to automate specific, rule-based tasks with no-code apps. If your main goal is to clean up your queue by merging duplicates, pulling order numbers from emails, or assigning tickets based on simple rules, it’s a solid and popular choice.

However, if you’re looking for a more comprehensive, multi-platform AI agent that can handle complex conversations, bring together all of your company knowledge, and be deployed without any guesswork, you’ll probably want a more modern solution.

If you’re ready to look beyond rule-based apps and see what a true AI agent can do, get started with eesel AI in just a few minutes and discover what a unified platform can do for your team.

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