Tender (http://tenderapp.com/ ) is pretty nice, and it looks like it's almost always cheaper than Zendesk. (I think the only time Zendesk would really be cheaper is if you're a 1- or 2-person team that can get by on the starter plan.)
As a support person, I don't find Tender especially amazing, but it gets the job done and never really gets in the way. But, more importantly, as an end user, I find Tender to be much easier and more pleasant to use than Zendesk. I cringe whenever I go to someone's support site and it's Zendesk.
We user Tender and absolutely love it. They've occasionally have issues with delayed jobs, but they were minor quirks. We use it all the time and cannot recommend it enough.
I was evaluating both zendesk and tenderapp last week. Tenderapp had serious confirmed email problems so I had to wait one day to see mails appearing on tenderapp.
This is not the thing we would like as an early startup.
We've to evaluate other services now because neither zendesk nor tenderapp are usable (imho)
Hey rmoriz. I just wanted to follow up on your email issues with Tender. Did you have an open support discussion I could pull up? We certainly strive to provide the best service possible as we built Tender for supporting our own services and clients and are highly dependent on it.
My co-founder wanted to give up tender because no mail were processed so I checked google apps mail forwarding and found no errors.
As I was unsuccessful I've tweeted to @tenderapp and got a reply some hours later stating that there was indeed a mail receiving problem.
As tender/entp also uses google apps, it's kind of scary to see that there was a problem. I mean that's probably the easiest combination to deal with imho.
Sending email isn't processed by Google Apps though, only incoming. We have a dedicated email server that handles outgoing mail. Sorry about the issue though and I would love to take another look at the problem directly. Some edge cases come up that take some pretty deep digging to find out what's wrong between the main email server and the setup on the users end, but that's typically pretty rare. I've only had that happen on a few isolated instances.
As a support person, I don't find Tender especially amazing, but it gets the job done and never really gets in the way. But, more importantly, as an end user, I find Tender to be much easier and more pleasant to use than Zendesk. I cringe whenever I go to someone's support site and it's Zendesk.