We have found 68,852 companies using Zendesk as of 30 October 2026. For about eight in ten of them, our latest crawl found no sign of it on their website: the trace is in their email settings, where they let Zendesk send support replies from their own address. That group is where nearly all the well-known names are. And the businesses behind them are mostly two types, online shops and software companies. Firms that sell a service are much rarer than you’d expect.
- Zendesk says more than 80,000 companies choose it. Our total of 68,852 still includes some rows we don’t trust enough to analyse: Tag Manager-only hits and gambling pages, explained below.
- Of the Zendesk customers we found among the 100,000 most visited websites, 98% show up through the email record rather than any code on the page.
- Online shops and SaaS companies make up three quarters of the Zendesk customers whose business model we can read. Service businesses, the majority of companies overall, are about 70% less likely to show up.
- One in eight runs HubSpot (about 9 times the usual rate) and one in nine has verified its domain with Atlassian. In the email-record group, another help desk turns up on about one in fifty at most.
- About a quarter of the widget detections were on a copied page template that gambling sites put on expired domains. We leave those out of everything except the total.
How many companies use Zendesk?
Our count is 68,852 company websites. Zendesk’s own company page says “80,000+ companies choose Zendesk for AI service”. The two numbers measure different things. Theirs presumably counts customers on their books. Ours is domains where Zendesk can be seen from outside, which includes some companies that set Zendesk up once and may not pay for it today, and misses those that never let it touch their domain.
| Evidence | Companies | Share of the list | Used in this page's figures | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zendesk in the email record (SPF) | 63,848 | 71.0% | Yes | The domain lets Zendesk send email in its name |
| Zendesk’s widget code on the website | 11,556 | 12.8% | Yes | The page loads Zendesk’s help or chat widget |
| Only inside a Google Tag Manager container | 7,569 | 8.4% | No, left out | Zendesk sits in a tag container; we can’t tell if it loads |
| Widget code on a copied gambling-site template | 4,167 | 4.6% | No, left out | Expired domains reused for gambling pages |
| A help-centre address, not a company domain | 2,809 | 3.1% | No, left out | Hosts like help.example.com or example.zendesk.com |
I want to be open about the three rows marked “No”. Together they are about one sixth of the total.
- Tag Manager only. On 7,569 sites the only sign of Zendesk is inside a Google Tag Manager container, so we can’t tell whether the widget ever loads. Some containers are shared across many sites.
- The gambling template. About 4,200 widget sites share one page template that loads Zendesk’s widget alongside the same handful of scripts. Their domain names suggest small businesses (a dance costume shop, a restaurant, a golf club), but most of those we checked now show Indonesian lottery and slot pages. My guess is the template was copied from a retailer’s page, widget and all. Most of these are not Zendesk customers in any useful sense.
- Help-centre addresses. 2,809 entries are help centres rather than companies, such as
help.example.comorexample.zendesk.com. A company should be listed under its own domain, so these don’t belong in a count of companies.
Help-centre addresses are no longer in the total. The other two are, because cleaning them out of the database is a separate job we haven’t done yet. They are left out of every figure on this page, the first rows of the list and the new-customer count.
Why most Zendesk customers show up in their email settings
Zendesk is a help desk, and a help desk sends a lot of email: every reply to a customer, every ticket update. By default those come from a Zendesk address. Most companies want them to come from support@ their own domain, and Zendesk’s setup guide asks them to add include:mail.zendesk.com to their domain’s SPF record so that mail isn’t treated as spoofed. Once that is done, in Zendesk’s words, it “sends them from your domain”.
That record is public, which is why we can see it, and it’s strong evidence: it is rarely added by accident. It doesn’t say how many agents a company has or which plan it pays for, and a record can outlive a company’s use of Zendesk. For most rows, though, it is the clearest signal we have, and the latest crawl found nothing else for about eight in ten companies on the list.
As well known as Help Scout’s customers, and ten times as many
A big company’s support team almost always sends mail from its own domain, so the email record is where large help desk customers show up, whichever help desk they run. The fair test of Zendesk is therefore against other help desks found the same way. I took the companies with each product’s email record and asked what share of them make the top 100,000 of the Tranco list of busy websites.
| Customers found by | Companies | In the top 100,000 | Share in the top 100,000 | Share with any Tranco rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zendesk, email record | 63,862 | 4,569 | 7.2% | 32.7% |
| Help Scout, email record | 6,350 | 427 | 6.7% | 30.6% |
| Freshdesk, email record | 7,952 | 164 | 2.1% | 16.2% |
| Zendesk, widget code | 15,746 | 84 | 0.5% | 4.8% |
As a share, Zendesk’s customers are about as well known as Help Scout’s: 7.2% of them sit in the top 100,000, against 6.7%. Both are more than three times Freshdesk’s 2.1%. Where Zendesk stands apart is scale. Its record is on 4,569 of those busy sites, Help Scout’s on 427, about ten times as many, which is simply because Zendesk’s list is about ten times longer. So a Zendesk customer is no more likely than a Help Scout customer to be a household name, but if you want large companies with a help desk, most of the ones we can see are on Zendesk.
Inside Zendesk’s own list, how we found a company says a lot about its size. Of the Zendesk customers in the top 100,000, 98% came through the email record and just 84 through widget code. The widget group is a crowd of smaller sites that put a help button or chat bubble on their pages; one in 21 has any Tranco rank, against one in three in the record group. My guess is that large companies keep support behind a contact page or inside their app, out of reach of the homepage and public pages we read, while their email record stays in plain view.
Shops and software houses, not service firms
Sort Zendesk customers by business model and two groups dominate. Of the companies in the email-record group whose model we can read, 40% run an online shop and 37% sell software by subscription. Across all companies we profile, those two models together come to under 40%. The gap is filled by service businesses: 58% of companies overall, 16% here.
| Found by the email record | Found by widget code | All companies | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Runs an online shop | 40.3% | 59.8% | 30.4% |
| Sells software by subscription (SaaS) | 36.8% | 11.6% | 8.3% |
| Sells a service (agency, clinic, firm, trade) | 16.0% | 27.0% | 58.2% |
| Sells to businesses only | 28.9% | 19.6% | 15.7% |
| Sells to consumers only | 42.6% | 48.9% | 48.4% |
| Main button: “book a demo” | 9.5% | 2.0% | 0.7% |
| Main button: “start a trial” | 8.7% | 6.5% | 14.7% |
| Self-serve sign-up, no salesperson | 11.3% | 1.9% | 4.6% |
It fits how support works in each kind of business, though this is my reading rather than something the data proves. A shop gets the same questions thousands of times (where is my order, how do I return this) and needs a queue to handle them. A software company has users who need help inside the product. A consultancy or a clinic talks to a smaller number of clients, usually by phone or from a personal inbox, and has less need for ticketing.
The widget group leans even further towards shops, six in ten of those we can classify, and towards consumers. The record group is where the software companies are: nearly one in ten makes “book a demo” its main button, about 14 times the rate across all companies.
What their websites show
| Signal | Zendesk customers | All companies | Compared with all companies |
|---|---|---|---|
| Publishes case studies | 5.3% | 0.5% | about 10x |
| Has a careers page | 12.6% | 2.9% | 4x |
| Has a pricing page | 9.3% | 2.2% | 4x |
| Has API documentation | 3.1% | 0.9% | 3x |
| Has a blog | 32.3% | 13.1% | 2.5x |
| Offers a free trial | 6.7% | 8.6% | 20% less likely |
Careers pages, pricing pages and case studies are the marks of an established company that is hiring and selling, and Zendesk customers carry all three about four or more times as often as companies in general. Free trials are the exception, a little rarer than average, which fits a list so heavy with shops.
Which industries use Zendesk the most?
Ecommerce and retail is a third of all the Zendesk customers we can place in an industry, the largest group by far and 1.7 times its share of companies overall. After that the list is spread thinly. The industries most over-represented are small ones: HR tech and cybersecurity companies are four to five times as likely as average to be on it, software and developer tools about two to three times.
| Industry | Zendesk customers | Email record | Widget | All companies | Compared with all companies |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ecommerce and retail | 33.2% | 32.4% | 45.0% | 19.9% | 1.7x |
| Software and SaaS | 7.8% | 8.0% | 4.8% | 2.8% | 2.8x |
| Media and content | 7.7% | 8.1% | 1.5% | 12.0% | 40% less likely |
| Healthcare | 7.5% | 7.4% | 8.2% | 12.8% | 40% less likely |
| Professional services | 7.4% | 6.9% | 13.4% | 18.8% | 60% less likely |
| Financial services and fintech | 7.1% | 7.3% | 3.7% | 4.4% | 1.6x |
| Hospitality and travel | 6.4% | 6.3% | 8.6% | 12.4% | 50% less likely |
| Education | 5.4% | 5.3% | 6.7% | 5.5% | about average |
| Marketing and sales tech | 4.7% | 4.9% | 1.9% | 4.1% | 1.2x |
| Operations and logistics | 3.4% | 3.4% | 2.6% | 2.1% | 1.6x |
| Developer tools and infrastructure | 3.3% | 3.5% | 1.5% | 1.6% | 2.1x |
| Cybersecurity | 2.0% | 2.1% | 0.7% | 0.5% | 4x |
| HR and people tech | 1.8% | 2.0% | 0.4% | 0.4% | 5x |
Professional services stand out at the other end, 60% less likely than average. Hospitality, healthcare and media are also well below their usual share. Media is an odd one. Large publishers are easy to find among the best-known names on the list, but media sites as a whole are under-represented; my guess is that small publishers have little use for a help desk.
What else do Zendesk customers use?
Half of them run Microsoft 365 for email and two in five run Google Workspace (some run both), each nearly three times the usual rate. That is what you’d expect from companies organised enough to have a help desk. The more telling companions are further down.
| Software | Share of Zendesk customers | Email record | Widget | Against the baseline |
|---|---|---|---|---|
M  | 50.3% | 55.0% | 23.7% | 2.9x |
G  | 41.0% | 44.8% | 19.9% | 2.7x |
W  | 28.2% | 27.1% | 34.6% | 20% less likely |
H  | 12.5% | 14.1% | 3.5% | 9x |
S  | 12.4% | 13.0% | 8.6% | 4x |
A  | 11.4% | 13.4% | under 1.1% | about 24x |
A  | 11.0% | 12.5% | 2.2% | 15x |
M  | 9.5% | 10.6% | 3.5% | 11x |
K  | 8.9% | 8.9% | 8.9% | 8x |
S  | 5.2% | 6.1% | under 1.1% | about 13x |
S  | 3.8% | 4.3% | 1.2% | 6x |
W  | 3.7% | 2.8% | 9.0% | about average |
W  | 1.8% | 2.1% | under 1.1% | 80% less likely |
S  | 1.1% | 1.0% | 1.8% | 80% less likely |
HubSpot is on one in eight, about nine times its usual rate, and one in nine has verified its domain with Atlassian, about 24 times the usual rate. Salesforce appears on one in twenty. My reading: these are companies with a sales team, an engineering team and a support team that each picked their own software. Shopify, at one in eight, and Klaviyo, at one in eleven, are the shop side of the list showing through. If you want either of those groups on its own, see our list of companies using HubSpot, our list of Shopify stores and our list of companies using Klaviyo.
The big site builders go the other way. Zendesk customers are about 80% less likely than other companies to run Wix or Squarespace, which mostly host very small businesses.
Do Zendesk customers run a second help desk?
Rarely, as far as we can see. In the email-record group, Gorgias turns up on 0.8%, Intercom on 0.6%, Help Scout on 0.4% and Freshdesk on 0.3%. Added together that is about one company in fifty at most, and some of those may be leftovers from an earlier tool, or a second brand or region run on a different system. A help desk tends to be one choice per company, and once a company has made it, the record on its domain says so. Zendesk’s own live chat product, Zendesk Chat, is tracked as a separate technology and isn’t counted here.
Where are Zendesk customers based?
We know the country for about one in seven of the sample, so this is a sketch. Zendesk’s list is less American than you might guess for a San Francisco company: the US is about a third of those we can place, the same share as across our database. The UK follows at one in ten, then France and Germany level at 7.7% each, then Australia. Denmark and Sweden each hold more than 2%, though neither appears at all in our small comparison set. The widget group is the more American one, about half of the 130 we could place, against three in ten of the email-record group.
| Country | Share of companies with a known country |
|---|---|
| United States | 31.8% |
| United Kingdom | 10.1% |
| France | 7.7% |
| Germany | 7.7% |
| Australia | 6.9% |
| Netherlands | 4.6% |
| Canada | 3.6% |
| Denmark | 2.4% |
| Sweden | 2.4% |
| Italy | 2.3% |
How does Zendesk compare with other help desks?
Of the help desks we track, Zendesk is on the most company websites, by a wide margin. The next few are a long way behind.
Part of Zendesk’s lead is visibility. It shows up two ways, through the email record and the widget, and about eight in ten of its total come from the record alone. Freshdesk we currently find only through its email record, so it sits lower than it would if we also caught its widget. Intercom’s count already leaves out Tag Manager-only hits, while Zendesk’s still includes them, along with the help-centre addresses and gambling pages described above. Read the bars as how often each help desk can be seen from outside, not as market share.
How many companies start using Zendesk each week?
Since 6 October 2026 our checks have turned up 0 new Zendesk customers. Please don’t read that as Zendesk’s pace of sales. Most of the email records on this list were last checked at the end of September, and we re-check them about once a month, so this number mostly reflects when our re-checks ran. A domain joins this count when an earlier look at it had no Zendesk record and a later look does. The count opens on 6 October because the full re-scan at the end of September briefly made thousands of old finds look new.
We only count the email record here, and the reason is the gambling template. Of the ten widget detections that looked new since 6 October, seven, probably eight, were on those expired-domain sites, so counting them would have mostly measured spam. Tag Manager-only hits are left out too. The cost is that a small shop adding Zendesk’s widget won’t show up as new until its email record does. Because of the monthly re-check, expect new customers to arrive in batches.
What people do with a list of Zendesk users
- Sell an add-on for Zendesk. Quality checks, AI replies, translation and reporting tools all plug into the same system. Apart from the gambling pages and the Tag Manager-only rows, every company here carries direct evidence of that system, and more than four in five of the rows we analyse have set Zendesk up to send email as themselves, a sign it is wired into daily support.
- Sell to online retailers with a support queue. About a third of those we can place in an industry are online retailers, and one in eight of the sample runs Shopify. Returns, delivery tracking and review tools fit here.
- Find large companies with a formal support team. Zendesk’s record sits on 4,569 of the 100,000 busiest websites, more than any other help desk we compared, so the record group works as a list of big support operations.
- Offer outsourced or specialist support. Outsourcing firms and Zendesk consultants usually work inside the client’s own help desk, so a company already on Zendesk is a shorter conversation.
Pro opens the whole list, with filters for industry, country, business model and how we found Zendesk (keep only the email-record group if you want the larger companies), and sends you the new Zendesk customers each week. You can export 100,000 records a month on Pro and 1,000,000 on Business. The 7-day trial needs no card and includes 1,000 records.
If you work in Claude Code, you can add our MCP server and ask questions of the list directly:
claude mcp add --transport http agentdata https://mcp.useagentdata.com/mcpIt asks you to sign in to your AgentData account the first time. A good first question: which UK online shops are on the Zendesk list.
How we built this list
We read company homepages, a few of their other public pages and their public DNS records. A company goes on this list when we find one of these:
include:mail.zendesk.comin the SPF record of the company’s domain (79% of the list)- Zendesk’s widget code, loaded from
static.zdassets.com, on the page (labelled “page code” in the list)
The total also includes Zendesk found only inside a site’s Google Tag Manager container, which stays in the total for now but are left out of every figure on this page, the first rows and the new customers.
Each company appears once on the list with one piece of evidence. When a site has both the widget and the email record, the list shows the page evidence, so “found by the email record” means the latest crawl found only the record. Many first-seen dates on the list fall in October 2026 because of a full re-crawl, so they tell you when we last rebuilt the row more often than when the company started with Zendesk.
Three kinds of figure appear on this page. Counts over every Zendesk row, read on 29 October 2026: the evidence table, the Tranco comparison and the gambling-template count. Sampled figures: business model, market, industry, country and website signals use one Zendesk domain in eight, and other software one in sixteen, chosen by hashing the domain name so the sample spreads evenly across the list. Baselines: where a table says “all companies”, it means either our sample of 184,204 company profiles or a set of 3,003 companies taken from the whole database, as its note says. The total at the top, the new customers and the help desk chart update live.
Two things here aren’t ours: Zendesk’s 80,000, from its company page, and the website ranks, from Tranco.