The Zendesk Guide alternative that keeps itself accurate, with every feature included
Fern, our AI agent, reads your Zendesk tickets and your product changes, and drafts the fix whenever an article goes out of date. Every feature comes on one plan, with no add-ons.
Book a demo - 7-day free trial
- No credit card
- Import from Zendesk, URLs kept
Ferndesk Zendesk- Built for
- Help centers that keep themselves accurate Ticketing, with a help center included
- Keeping articles current
- Fern drafts fixes from PRs, tickets and the live product Freshness scores by last edit, in early access
- Hosting
- Your domain or a /help subfolder A subdomain only, no subfolder
- Price per month
- $149, or $124 billed yearly $55–$115 per agent, plus AI resolutions
Use Zendesk for tickets and Ferndesk for your help center.
Zendesk’s help center works, but it is priced and gated like a part of ticketing. Ferndesk is built only for the help center: it keeps every article accurate, runs on your own domain or a /help subfolder, and includes every feature on one plan.
When to choose Ferndesk, and when to choose Zendesk
Choose Ferndesk if
- Your product ships every week and the articles fall behind.
- You want your help center on a /help subfolder of your own domain.
- You want a modern help center with every feature included, without paying for add-ons or plan upgrades to unlock them.
- You want resolved tickets and merged pull requests to drive doc updates.
Choose Zendesk if
- You want tickets and the help center from one vendor.
- You need approval workflows, content blocks or up to 300 branded help centers on Enterprise.
- You rely on Zendesk’s ticketing depth, compliance and marketplace apps.
- Your help center is small and rarely changes.
They work together
Ferndesk connects to Zendesk and reads your resolved tickets to find the articles your customers need. Your agents keep working in Zendesk.
Where Zendesk’s help center holds teams back
Teams move the help center when it sits on the wrong domain, needs upgrades for the basics, or falls behind the product.
No subfolder on your own domain
Zendesk maps a help center to a subdomain only, and says mapping to a subdirectory of your site isn’t supported. Your docs live at help.example.com, never example.com/help.
The basics need theme work or a bigger plan
There is no table of contents button. Custom theme code, more than one language and version history start on Growth, and approval workflows and content blocks on Enterprise.
Finding stale articles is still manual
Knowledge copilot, in early access on Professional, scores freshness by months since the last edit and suggests articles from tickets. Nothing reads your code, checks articles against the live product, or retakes screenshots.
Ferndesk and Zendesk, side by side
| Feature | Ferndesk | Zendesk |
|---|---|---|
| Keeping docs accurate | ||
| Drafts doc updates from merged pull requests | Yes | No |
| Drafts articles from support tickets | Yes | Up to 40, one-off |
| Checks every article against the live product | Yes | No |
| Retakes screenshots when the UI changes | Yes | No |
| Help center | ||
| Every help center feature on one plan, no add-ons | Yes | Split across plans and add-ons |
| Visual editor | Yes | Yes |
| In-app help widget | Yes | Yes |
| AI answers from your docs | Yes | Yes |
| Host on a /help subfolder of your domain | Yes | No |
| Table of contents in articles | Yes | Theme code, Growth and up |
| Multiple languages | Yes | Growth plan and up |
| Ticketing and a support inbox | No | Yes |
| Developer docs | ||
| API reference from OpenAPI | Yes | No |
| Interactive API playground | Yes | No |
| llms.txt for AI tools | Yes | No |
Your tickets already say what’s missing. Fern writes it down.
Fern watches the places docs go wrong: merged code, your Zendesk tickets and the live product. The fixes arrive drafted, and nothing publishes until someone on your team approves it.
Every merged PR, checked for doc impact
Fern reads each pull request you merge, finds the help articles it made wrong, and drafts the edit with a link to the change it came from.
Zendesk tickets turned into articles
She reads your resolved Zendesk tickets, spots the questions your docs do not answer, and drafts the missing article. Every day, not once.
Every article checked against the product
Verification reads each article claim by claim and checks it against your codebase, your website and the live product. Anything that is no longer true becomes a drafted fix, and scheduled audits repeat the check.
Screenshots retaken from your real UI
When a screen changes, Fern recaptures the screenshot from your product, so articles stop showing last year’s design.
“At Duplika we recently migrated to Ferndesk from Zendesk Guide, and it feels like upgrading from Internet of the 90s.”
Juan Founder, Duplika Custom-domain subfolder hosting without paid add-ons for basics
Read the Duplika storyMove your help center in minutes
Ferndesk has a dedicated Zendesk importer. It rebuilds your categories and sections, can bring translations across, rewrites internal links, and redirects your old URLs to the new pages so links and search rankings survive the move. If something will not import cleanly, we do it with you.
What comes across
- Your categories, sections and nested sections
- Translated articles, if you choose to import them
- Article content and images
- Internal links, rewritten to the new pages
- Your URLs, with redirects from the old paths
The importer reads your public help center. Articles limited to signed-in users or segments move from an export, or we import them with you.
One flat price for the help center
Every help center feature on one plan, at a price that does not grow with the size of your support team.
Ferndesk Pro $149a month
Or $124 a month billed yearly, $1,490 a year. Includes the help center on your own domain or /help, the in-app widget with 1,000 AI conversations a month, private help centers, white labeling, 5 languages and 5 seats, with Fern keeping every article accurate. 7-day free trial, no card.
Under $1M ARR? The first 12 months are half price: $745 for the year. Early-stage rate
$55–$115per agent a month, billed yearly
The help center comes with every Suite plan. Custom theme code, more languages and version history start on Growth, approval workflows and content blocks are Enterprise, and AI agents bill past an included allowance, from $1.50 per automated resolution.
From Zendesk’s pricing page, checked 24 September 2026.
Ferndesk vs Zendesk: common questions
Something we missed? Write to us, a human answers.
No. Ferndesk replaces only the help center. Your tickets, agents and workflows stay in Zendesk, and Ferndesk connects to Zendesk to read your resolved tickets.
More on Zendesk and the alternatives
The tools teams weigh when Zendesk stops fitting.
How Duplika left Zendesk GuideA faster help center on a subfolder, with tickets showing what to fix.
Zendesk help center examplesFourteen Zendesk help centers, and what makes each one work.
IntegrationsThe support tools, code hosts and chat apps Fern reads from.
Help center softwareWhat a modern help center does, and how Ferndesk compares.
How migration worksWhat comes across, what redirects, and how long it takes.
Your docs have been stale for months. Fix them in ten minutes.
Import your help center and Fern checks every article against your product, drafts the fixes, and keeps them current from then on. You approve, she publishes.
- 7-day free trial, no card
- Import in 10 minutes, URLs preserved
- Your support tool stays where it is
- Nothing publishes without you