we're reviewing our support stack and i've narrowed it down to hubspot service hub vs zendesk. the part i'm struggling with is that this isn't just a support decision. our sales and customer data already lives in a crm, so i'm trying to figure out whether having support tightly connected to that data is actually useful in practice or just sounds good on paper.

for teams that evaluated both:

• what was the biggest reason you picked one over the other?
• did crm integration end up changing how your support team worked?
• how useful were the reporting and customer history features?
• was onboarding straightforward or more work than expected?
• at what company size did the differences start to matter?

i'm less interested in feature lists and more interested in what actually affected day to day operations after the rollout.

what would you choose today and why?

quick update on this: we ended up going with hubspot service hub and the crm connection has been more useful than i expected. having support activity alongside sales and customer data means the team gets the full context without having to jump between systems.

the hidden cost of disconnected data was a good point from the comments. for us, the customer history and reporting have made the day to day workflow easier, and the support data is useful beyond just closing tickets.