DocumentationAPI Reference

Web Widget (Classic) and SDKs

Add Zendesk customer support to your Website and Mobile app.

Zendesk has multiple SDKs and tools to provide your website visitors or mobile app users with Zendesk functionality such as messaging, ticketing, knowledge base access, live chat, and talk. This page lists the reference documentation for the Web Widget (Classic) and the Classic SDKs. For questions and answers, see the Zendesk developer community.

The Zendesk SDK for messaging is a SDK adapted to the Agent Workspace and Zendesk messaging. If you are interested in this new SDK to benefit from the new Messaging experience, you can find more information about their implementation and capabilities by going to Zendesk SDK.

Classic SDKs

Web Widget (Classic) and Zopim Web SDKs

Zendesk offers the ability to customize the Web Widget (Classic) that appears on your web pages. These are developed and intended for web usage.

Chat Widget for Chat-only account:

A more complex implementation of the Web Widget (Classic) is "Zopim Web SDK" which allows you to have complete control over the widget. You must have a Zendesk Chat account on the Enterprise or Premium (Legacy) package in order to use this SDK.

Mobile SDKs

Unified SDK

The Unified SDK provides a more conversational approach to mobile support, giving your customer a much more interactional experience using Chat, Zendesk bots, and Support, rather than just filling form out. This latter approach is still possible using the Support SDK.

The Unified SDK acts as the front-end layer through which an end user interacts with the mobile classic SDKs. As an integrator, you configure the Unified SDK with the SDKs you want it to use. Each SDK exposes an engine that can be passed to the Unified SDK at start time, meaning that you can use one or multiple products simultaneously in the same UI. For instructions on how to use the SDKs together:

Chat SDK and Support SDK can also be used as a standalone implementation in your application. Please note that all the SDKs compatible with Unified are intended for your customers' usage only, not for your agents.

Note: The package name of the UI of the Classic SDKs is 

messaging
, this doesn't refer to the messaging channel however and is unrelated. The name of the Zendesk SDK package name is 
zendesk.messaging:messaging-android
as described in the Zendesk SDK Getting Started document.

Support SDK

The classic Support SDK encapsulates Support and Guide functionalities. Since the release of the Unified SDK, the Support SDK can be used to provide a more conversational experience for mobile apps. If you want to provide multiple conversations based on tickets for your customers, or if you are not a Suite customer, you may prefer to use the standalone Support SDK to have the user submit tickets via your application. For instructions on how to use the classic Support SDK, see:

Guide

The classic Support SDK contains an implementation of the help center by Zendesk Guide, with category navigation, article search, and visualization. You can use your help center on your mobile app together with the Unified SDK or the classic Support SDK conversational experiences. For more information, see:

Answer Bot SDK

The Answer Bot SDK requires the Support SDK and Guide to be able to access your help center content. It also requires Answer Bot to be available in your Zendesk Account and enable in the Mobile SDK section. The Unified SDK uses the engine to deflect customer queries automatically. If the deflection is unsuccessful, the Unified SDK can hand over to another contact option powered by a different SDK, like Chat or Support. For more information on Answer Bot implementation, see:

Note: Zendesk has renamed our bot capabilities. Answer Bot is now Zendesk bots. For more information on this change, see this announcement.

The Chat SDK default bot name is "Answer Bot" which can cause some confusion. More information on that here.

Chat SDK

The Chat SDK provides the Chat functionality of the Unified SDK, so that end-users can reach you by chat or leave offline messages directly from your application. For specific instructions on how to build a Chat experience on mobile, see:

Non-Unified SDKs

Talk SDK

The classic Talk SDK lets integrators add voice-based customer support to their iOS and Android apps. Your mobile app user can initialize a digital call to a pre-configured Talk digital line, connecting the user with your Zendesk Talk call center. This SDK is not part of the Unified SDK. You must have an active Zendesk Talk subscription to use the SDK. For more information on the Talk experience on mobile, see:

Unity SDK

Integrate Zendesk support capabilities natively into Unity projects with the Zendesk SDK for Unity:

Build your own UI

If the UI provided by our SDKs doesn't suit your needs, you can build your own UI on top of the SDKs' API providers.

The API providers handle communication with the Zendesk back-end and the associated logic. Our own SDK UI layer is built on top of the providers, but we also ship the provider artifacts so that our customers are free to build their own experiences on top of them.

UI integrations vs API providers integrations

To read more about using the API providers, see: