Zendesk Explore Alternative for Real-Time Dashboards | Geckoboard
The Zendesk Explore alternative for realtime team dashboards
Geckoboard brings your live support metrics out of Zendesk, so your whole team can see what’s happening now, while there is still time to act.
Help your team act on what is happening now
Zendesk’s reporting tools are optimized for analyzing the past and designed for managers, not the wider team.
Geckoboard makes current performance part of the team’s day through wallboards, snapshots and individual agent views.
When teams see how they are performing in real time, they can tackle rising wait times, step in when customers are unhappy and prevent SLA breaches before it is too late.
Geckoboard vs Explore
| Zendesk Explore | Geckoboard |
|---|---|
| Built for historical reporting and detailed analysis | Built for live, team-wide visibility |
| Difficult to learn and use. Formulas and calculated metrics are often needed to create even fairly basic custom reports | Easy to build and customize without specialist reporting knowledge, with pre-built metrics and powerful filtering |
| Standard reports refresh hourly or daily and can take longer to process when a lot of data is involved | Metrics refresh in seconds or minutes, regardless of how much data is involved |
| Customization and live features depend on your Zendesk plan | Fully customizable live dashboards are available on all Geckoboard plans |
| Limited to Zendesk data | Combine Zendesk with more than 90 other data sources, including Salesforce, Jira and Shopify, on the same dashboard |
| Dashboards live primarily inside Zendesk | Designed to put your data where your team will see it, with dashboards optimized for TVs, browsers, mobile, Slack, Microsoft Teams and email |
| Access and sharing depend on your Zendesk plan | Unlimited viewers without Zendesk seats, so executives and other teams can access dashboards directly |
Most teams start with Geckoboard because they need better live Zendesk dashboards. Once they see how much easier it is to build, customize and share them, they often end up using Geckoboard for more.
See how easy it is to build a live dashboard with Geckoboard
Connect Zendesk in a couple of clicks and start with a set of pre-built dashboards. Customize the metrics, add data from other sources and share the result with your team.
Your Zendesk data, inside ChatGPT or Claude
Ask questions in plain language and let your AI assistant investigate your Zendesk metrics alongside the wider context from your other data sources. Zendesk is developing conversational analytics, but Explore metrics are not available to external AI tools through MCP.
Why over 500 Zendesk teams choose Geckoboard
Being reactive is one thing, but being proactive is where we need to be. Having live Zendesk data at our fingertips, showing queue spikes and productivity right now, changed everything.
Courtney Blocker
Director of Global Support at TrackforceThe information was critical, but it was stuck in Zendesk. We needed real-time insights that anyone could see, from agents to executives.
Kieran Boyce
General Manager of Operations at Woolworths MarketPlus
Should you use Geckoboard or Zendesk Explore?
For most support teams, the answer is both.
Use Zendesk Explore when you need to…
- Investigate historical performance
- Build detailed custom reports
- Analyze trends in depth
- Work only with Zendesk datasets
- Produce formal or periodic reporting
Use Geckoboard when you need to…
- Give the whole team a shared view of performance
- Keep queues, SLAs and workloads visible
- Build customized live dashboards
- Share Zendesk metrics without buying more seats
- Combine Zendesk with other systems
- Monitor several Zendesk accounts together
- Use your metrics through ChatGPT, Claude and other AI tools
Run your support operation with live Zendesk metrics
Build dashboards your whole team can see, understand and act on.
Connect Zendesk and create a live dashboard for your team.
Talk to us about what Geckoboard could look like for your team.