Difference between Zendesk and Jira Service Management

[Jonathan van Heijzen]

Our company currently uses Zendesk. What's the functional difference between that and Jira Service Management? Seems like there is a large overlap between the two products.

[Mark Segall · Accepted solution]

Hi @Jonathan van Heijzen - Yes there is an overlap.  Atlassian has made a number of strategic acquisitions and R&D emphasis on JSM over the past 3 years to make it a compelling option. 

Zendesk is still a high quality service management solution and I would never knock it (some still argue that it remains further evolved vs JSM).  However, if you're an organization that is already using Jira Software, you'll get more rich integrations between your service management and software teams leveraging JSM.  Additionally, JSM includes OpsGenie so if you're using some other tooling for managing on-call rotations, you'd get a 2-for-1 in consolidating both to JSM.

[Jonathan van Heijzen]

Thanks @Mark Segall ! Do you know if customers need to log in to use Jira Service Management? Currently, that's our biggest roadblock in getting the type of feedback that we want with Zendesk.

[Mark Segall]

Yes - You have a few options for customer access in JSM:

1. Invite Only (Authentication)
2. Self-Registration (Authentication)
3. Email (No Authentication)

So, if you go with option 3 you'd be able to enable unauthenticated access.