When looking for a customer service platform, you don’t have to go through many suggestions to see Zendesk over and over. There’s a reason it’s one of the most used helpdesks in the world. Aside from the fact that huge brands trust it to help manage their customer service, it’s also feature rich and always innovating.
That being said, another benefit is the platform’s ability to be used with other apps and plugins in order to enhance or add functionality. While Zendesk has its own add-ons, it allows users to use third party apps and plugins as they see fit. The purpose of these additional plugins can range from automating tasks to adding new features, with the end goal of being to shorten response times and increase customer satisfaction.
With the number of apps and plugins growing, it’s hard to find what tools you actually need. We’ve put together a list of the top 10 apps for 2025 based on innovation, usability, and impact, so you don’t have to go out of your way to hunt them all down.
We created a list of criteria for the chosen apps/plugins. All of the ones we’re going to feature had to make it past all of the following criteria in order to even be considered and from there we cut it down to the 10 we felt would best benefit most businesses.
| Criteria | Details |
|---|---|
| User reviews and ratings | We scoured the internet to find the most reviewed apps/plugins and only included those with a majority of positive reviews where the pros outweigh the cons. |
| Features and benefits | The features/benefits brought to the table have to be something not previously available or drastically improve on an already existing feature. |
| Impact on productivity and customer satisfaction | The app/plugins chosen have to make a noticeable impact, meaning metrics have to improve. |
| Ease of integration | The apps chosen all require as little setup time as possible while offering the most features as possible. |
| Price to feature ratio | We’ve made sure that the features each of these apps and plugins is equal to or exceeds their price. |
In addition, our list of the top 10 Zendesk apps and plugins for 2025 are related to the 2025 customer service trends list. This means they all touch on at least 1 trend, effectively making sure that your customer service department is in line with customer expectations.
Top 10 Zendesk apps and plugins for 2025
Making the most of your Zendesk platform means expanding its functionality. These apps and plugins do that in a variety of ways, ranging from helping automate tasks, making collaboration between departments easier, and even providing cost effective alternatives to more premium tools.
It’s important to note that all of these are free to install, but may require a subscription to function properly.
1. eesel AI
As a direct alternative to Zendesk’s own Advanced AI add-on, our product offers a more competitive way to completely automate your support or add a copilot to help your support agents. It ticks a lot of boxes as it improves productivity by leveraging AI automation, provides analytics, and allows customers to train its AI on past tickets. (And you don’t have to pay-per-agent!)
The app is an AI powered platform that automates support intelligently, able to use hundreds of integration to teach AI how to reply to your customers instantly and on-brand.
We also offer training on past tickets, which is one of the most asked for features when it comes to training AI. This allows Zendesk to make use of a wide range of sources without having to migrate everything into the help center.
You can create AI agents that can handle tier 1 tickets for you based on the knowledge you put into it. You can customize their tone, phrasing, diction, and behavior, even allowing for certain actions like escalating to the proper live agents when you deem it necessary.
eesel AI makes this list due to it being feature rich at a price point that’s hard to beat, as well as its rave reviews. The ability to integrate multiple sources easily, train multiple bots, and have tier 1 tickets handled instantly will save your team countless hours of work, freeing them up to handle more complex tasks.
Pricing: The Team plan for eesel AI comes in $239 a month billed annually. This comes with everything a small team needs to succeed with AI tools. If you have a bigger team you can opt for the Business plan or go for a custom plan. eesel AI uses a pay-per-interaction model, ensuring you don’t run into any overage charges. For a free trial or to learn more, check out our website.
2. Aircall
Aircall for Support helps deliver omnichannel support and automation through its technology.
Aside from its integration being only a couple of clicks, Aircall for Support has several features that makes it stand out. Incoming calls will automatically bring up the contact page of the caller, displaying all details about the customer. It also creates tickets automatically when a call is answered, reducing the amount of work your live agents have. Your Quality Assurance team can also monitor your live agents in real time on the dashboard and even listen in on calls as they’re happening.
Aircall serves as a powerful calling solution that is easily integrated into your Zendesk platform. It handles all of the tedious work, allowing your live agents to focus on providing quick customer service and resolving tickets.
Pricing: Aircall’s pricing starts at $30 a license with an Essentials plan, but they do offer a Professional and Custom plan if you need more features.
3. Slack
Slack for Zendesk is Slack’s plugin for Zendesk. Its goal is to help streamline communication and allow for quick and painless collaboration.
This plugin helps with effortlessly collaborating with your team. It allows you to create or update Zendesk tickets within Slack. Your live agents will get real time notifications when tickets are created. You can even create an Answer Bot in Slack which will allow you to give your customers a self service option when making inquiries.
The Slack integration makes the top 10 list due to the sheer number of businesses that use Slack as a team communication channel. It makes collaborating with tickets simple and it even adds an automation that you may not have had, saving valuable time and allowing customers the freedom to solve issues “themselves”.
Pricing: Slack for Zendesk works on a per month basis starting at $4.38USD. This is limited to just one workspace, with extra fees for more workspaces. There’s a free offering with some limited features but at a glance their Slack integration is reasonably priced. For more pricing tiers check out their site.
4. Zendesk Chat
Zendesk Chat is a native application by Zendesk. It aims to help with omnichannel support, allowing your live agents to have every chat at their fingertips.
This app gives your live agents access to different channels all from the Zendesk platform. They’ll be able to see real time chats from the website, mobile apps, and social media platforms, helping cut down the time needed to answer as they won’t be constantly switching between apps just to keep up with customer interactions. It even has other features such as, chatbots and reporting, allowing you to use data to fine tune your processes.
As a native app Zendesk Chat makes the list due to its simple deployment and its ability to make a huge impact on the speed at which customer interactions can happen. It’s been proven that customers are more likely to make a purchase when the business engages in a chat with them, this platform lets you do just that.
Pricing: The Zendesk Chat app is included with any of Zendesk’s pricing plans.
5. JIRA
The JIRA integration falls under the cloud based solutions and remote work categories of the customer service trends of 2025.
JIRA allows for support and engineering teams to collaborate effortlessly, without the need to constantly switch applications. Support teams will be able to push and link Zendesk support tickets to JIRA directly from the Zendesk platform, this allows for less downtime and faster work processes. Your support team doesn’t have to learn to use JIRA to communicate with engineers and your engineers won’t have to learn Zendesk to fix any problems that are escalated by your support teams.
This JIRA integration makes the list due to its ability to reduce the time it takes for a problem to reach the engineering department. As support staff are the first responders to issues, the usual process of getting a technical issue on the server side fixed is long and drawn out, this integration helps alleviate that as it cuts out several steps, allowing for engineering eyes to be on problems a lot sooner, leading to earlier fixes.
Pricing: While the integration is free, you still need a JIRA plan to make use of it on a team basis. To find more of the pricing tiers click here.
6. Salesforce
The Salesforce plugin is the official Salesforce solution in Zendesk as they’re partnered. Similarly to the JIRA integration, this plugin is categorized as a cloud based solution that helps with remote work as it makes communication that much easier between departments.
This plugin allows for seamless communication between your support and sales teams. This allows for better customer context meaning support teams have more details to help customers resolve issues while sales has access to more information to help them make a sale. Your support team can use Zendesk to communicate with your sales team on Salesforce and vice versa. Information is also synced between the two platforms, meaning all important customer information is available whenever needed.
This integration is on the list as it’s an official Salesforce solution. Allowing information to be shared by customer support and sales allows for more personalized interactions by both departments. These personalized interactions can help ease tensions during customer support sessions and increase the chances of a sale.
Pricing: While the plugin is free to download, you’ll still need a Salesforce subscription to access their platform. They do offer a free 30 day trial if you want to check out their features and use the plugin.
7. Mailchimp
The Mailchimp plugin is another tool that falls under the cloud based solutions and collaboration umbrella. It does require that you enable customer lists in your Zendesk account.
The best part of the Mailchimp plugin is that it gives your support staff the ability to see customer data related to their marketing journey. They’ll be able to personalize interactions with customers as they can see the campaigns they’ve been sent and what actions were taken with each campaign.
Having more information about customers to provide a more personalized experience adds to the customer journey. Having more background knowledge about what a customer has been exposed to gives customer support an upperhand, potentially allowing them to take a proactive approach to customer queries and even offers upselling chances.
Pricing: The Mailchimp plugin is free but does require a subscription. Their pricing is based on the number of contacts you regularly deal with and all tiered plans can be found here.
8. SurveyMonkey
The SurveyMonkey app requires you to enable customer lists in your Zendesk account. Aside from being another cloud based solution, SurveyMonkey are helping support teams transform from cost centers to key revenue drivers.
SurveyMonkey allows you to gain valuable feedback from your audience. You can get a better understanding of your actual audience, what they think about certain products or features, and find ways to improve your product or service, all from the Zendesk platform. You also gain access to powerful analytic tools and graphs to help visualize the data you’ve gathered.
This app makes the list as it allows you to pull valuable data from your audience on Zendesk making gathering actionable data quick and painless. Your support agents can add it as part of their wrap up activities and you’ll build enough data to analyze and action it, helping you improve in ways your customer base actually wants/needs.
Pricing: The app is free to install but requires a subscription to use. You can create a free account and use a limited free version, but most of the features are locked behind the paid plans.
9. Knowledge Capture Actions
The Knowledge Capture Actions application fits into the category of digitizing contact centers and helping expedite the resolution process of tickets through automation.
This app lets you link actions to your knowledge base, basically a shortcut to articles based on tags. From the Zendesk platform you can add tags to tickets and trigger actions based on those tags, essentially automating ticket routing and giving your support staff shortcuts to resolve issues. These shortcuts come in the form of macros that you can program and customize right from the Zendesk platform.
Knowledge Capture Actions makes the list due to its automation features. It serves as an alternative to paid Zendesk add-ons in the event that you don’t want to commit to the steeper Zendesk prices.
Pricing: In terms of pricing, there is a 7 day free trial but after that, it’ll cost you $2.50 per agent, per month. For more pricing options you can contact them here.
10. Kaizo
The Kaizo plugin touches on the AI and automation side of things, all while helping improve the quality of the customer service provided.
It allows for easier management of support teams and has tools which help make quality assurance a breeze. It also gamifies engagement for your live agents, making solving tickets a more engaging activity. Aside from its automations, another key feature are the performance insights that are offered. You can identify underperformers for coaching and even get full reports to compare individuals and teams.
Kaizo will enable you to spend less time working on analysis and reports and more time on actually solving issues. In addition, gamification is a powerful method of keeping staff actively engaged while working.
Pricing: Kaizo offers a 30 day free trial with three price tiers to choose from.
How to choose the right Zendesk apps for your business
With a number of fantastic apps to choose from, how do you decide what’s best for you?
Things to keep in mind:
- Business size and industry
- Specific pain points or goals
- Budget and scalability
- Ease of integration and setup time
Your business size will impact which apps or plugins will be right for you. Some apps work better with bigger data sets to learn from while others will work even with smaller teams. This, in combination with budget and scalability, sometimes disqualifies apps or features. If you have a start-up company, sometimes apps that price per agent may not be scalable as the cost can quickly get out of hand.
Pain points are a great place to start when looking for the right Zendesk apps and plugins to use. By taking into account your requirements and budget, you can quickly trim down your potential picks. If you’re seeing too much time being spent on departmental collaboration, due to the different teams having to interact on tools foreign to them, then something like the Slack, Salesforce, or JIRA app may be useful to you depending on what departments are involved.
While a vast majority of the suggested apps and plugins are essentially plug and play, some of them will require a bit more customization in order to fully work. Be aware of this when looking for tools if you don’t want to spend too much time configuring settings or flipping switches on and off.
Key trends in Zendesk app development for 2025
As technologies get better every year, here are a couple of trends to watch for that are shaping the Zendesk ecosystem.
| Key trend | Description |
|---|---|
| AI and machine learning integration | AI is being used more in everyday life through AI assistants like Siri and Alexa. People are becoming accustomed to AI and expect it to be an option in the customer service space. |
| Automation for repetitive tasks | Customers don’t like waiting and live agents don’t want to spend all day answering the same questions. Automation in the form of AI agents or complex automation workflows handling tier 1 tickets is quickly becoming the norm. AI is also more readily being used to automate the sorting and organization of data. |
| Omnichannel support and customer engagement tools | With businesses using so many channels to attract their audience, they’re also expected to communicate through all of them. More apps/plugins are allowing for all communication channels to be accessed in 1 place, making communication less tedious. |
| Analytics-driven customer insights | Giving people what they want or need is a key factor in product and service development. Being able to gather useful data and break it down into actionable intel is a challenge many apps are now tackling. Reducing the time it takes for any major feature roll outs to happen. |
| Enhanced collaboration and productivity tools | Businesses are seeing the benefits of different departments collaborating. Support team collaboration with a sales team can lead to more sales and faster ticket resolutions. These collaborations help turn cost centers to revenue drivers and are seeing more focus in app development. |
Maximize Zendesk’s potential with the right tools today!
Choosing the right apps and plugins for Zendesk is an important step when trying to enhance your customer service process. Our top 10 apps and plugins for 2025 are sure to help your business as they all improve the customer experience. They’ll help transform a former cost center into a revenue driver that also helps retain customers.
No matter what you choose, these tools will help empower your team and meet or even exceed customer expectations in 2025. With the right data, tools, and implementations, you can give your customers a more efficient and personalized experience they won’t forget!
If you’re interested in taking eesel AI for a spin, feel free to have a go with our free trial or reach out at hi@eesel.app
