Smooch (Sunshine Conversations) vs Zendesk Chat

Smooch and Zendesk Chat are both Zendesk products, and as of 7 August 2026 neither is sold under the name you searched for. Smooch was acquired by Zendesk in May 2019 and is now called Sunshine Conversations. Zendesk Chat has no plan and no price of its own on zendesk.com/pricing — Zendesk's live chat reaches new customers only inside a Zendesk Suite subscription, which starts at $55 per agent per month on annual billing.

That naming tangle is the reason most people land on a page like this, so this comparison starts there rather than with a feature grid. Every price and product claim below was re-checked against Zendesk's own pricing page and help centre on 7 August 2026, and where a number that circulates widely is no longer published by Zendesk, this page says so instead of repeating it.

The second thing worth knowing early: these two are not really competitors. Sunshine Conversations is an omnichannel messaging API that developers build against, gated to Zendesk Suite Professional and above. Zendesk Chat was a website live chat product that agents logged into, and Zendesk now steers those customers toward its newer messaging product. One sits underneath the other rather than opposite it, so "which should I buy" usually turns out to be the wrong question — and the right one is which layer of Zendesk your problem actually lives in.

What is Smooch called now?

Smooch is called Sunshine Conversations. Zendesk announced its acquisition of Smooch Technologies Holdings ULC, the Montreal company behind Smooch, on 22 May 2019, and the product has carried the Sunshine Conversations name inside Zendesk ever since. Zendesk's own welcome post from that week is still published.

The Smooch name did not disappear cleanly, which is why it keeps surfacing in search seven years later. The original documentation domain, docs.smooch.io, still resolves and still serves the Sunshine Conversations guides — every page there now carries a banner reading "Our documentation is moving! Visit developer.zendesk.com for the latest updates." The official client libraries on GitHub, published under Zendesk's own organisation as sunshine-conversations-python and sunshine-conversations-ruby, are still summarised in their repository descriptions as "Smooch API Library."

The practical rule when reading old integration notes: Smooch is the pre-2019 name, Sunshine Conversations is what Zendesk sells and documents today, and any Smooch-branded surface you hit is a legacy artefact rather than a separate product you can still buy. Checked 7 August 2026.

Is Zendesk Sunshine the same as Sunshine Conversations?

No. Zendesk Sunshine and Sunshine Conversations are two different products that launched six months apart and do unrelated jobs. Zendesk Sunshine arrived on 13 November 2018 as an open CRM data platform built on Amazon Web Services, introduced in Zendesk's own launch announcement. Sunshine Conversations arrived through the Smooch acquisition in May 2019 and is a messaging API.

The shared "Sunshine" prefix is the whole confusion. One product is about storing and relating customer data; the other is about routing customer conversations across WhatsApp, Apple Messages for Business, LINE, WeChat, Telegram, Viber and SMS.

The distinction now matters more, not less, because the Sunshine data platform's best-known capability has been retired. Zendesk declared End of Life for legacy custom objects: from 15 January 2026 no new legacy custom objects or relationships could be created, and the remainder were removed in phases through 27 July 2026, per its removal notice. Sunshine Conversations was untouched by that change. If a 2024-era tutorial tells you to build on Sunshine custom objects, it is describing something that no longer exists.

What does "Sunco" mean in Zendesk?

"Sunco" is informal shorthand for Sunshine Conversations. It is not a product, a plan or an add-on — it is the abbreviation Zendesk admins, partners and developers use because "Sunshine Conversations" is unwieldy in a support ticket.

The shorthand appears inside Zendesk's own channels: a thread in the Zendesk help centre community is titled "Zendesk Sunco" and asks what is included in pre-committed notifications "in Sunco". If you have seen the term in an implementation thread, a partner scope of work or a reseller's quote, it means Sunshine Conversations and nothing else.

Two things "Sunco" gets confused with are worth separating out. It is not Zendesk Sunshine, the CRM data platform. And it is not Zendesk Messaging, which is the customer-facing conversation experience that Sunshine Conversations powers underneath — the great majority of Zendesk accounts run messaging without ever touching the Sunshine Conversations API. Checked 7 August 2026.

What is Zendesk Chat today?

Zendesk Chat is Zendesk's legacy live chat product, and Zendesk itself now steers customers off it toward messaging. The company publishes a help centre article titled "Why migrating from live chat to messaging is the right choice", last edited 26 January 2026, alongside a separate step-by-step migration guide.

The two are genuinely different products, not a rename. Live chat — the Chat product, delivered through Web Widget (Classic) — is session-based: close the tab and the conversation ends. Messaging, delivered through the current Web Widget, is persistent: the thread survives across sessions and devices, matching the continuity model of WhatsApp or Messenger. Zendesk maintains an article called "Am I using live chat or messaging?" precisely because customers often cannot tell which one their account is running.

The developer surface is winding down on the same trajectory. Zendesk retired the old Zopim Chat REST API domain in favour of a Zendesk-subdomain endpoint, with the rollout ending 12 May 2025, and its developer documentation stopped accepting new Chat Conversations API integrations from 30 April 2025.

What does Sunshine Conversations cost in 2026?

Sunshine Conversations has no standalone price. It is gated to Zendesk Suite Professional, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus, so the entry cost is a Suite seat — $115 per agent per month on annual billing at the Professional tier, checked against zendesk.com/pricing on 7 August 2026.

The plan gate is stated by Zendesk rather than inferred. Every Sunshine Conversations article in the help centre, including "About Sunshine Conversations platform access and support", carries a "What's my plan?" banner reading "All Suites Professional, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus". Suite Team at $55 per agent per month does not include it, so a five-agent team needs $575 a month of Suite before the messaging API is even switched on.

On top of seats, Sunshine Conversations is metered by monthly active users. Zendesk defines that model in "About monthly active users for Sunshine Conversations", and the allowance itself is published — not on the tier cards, but inside the "Compare all plan features" table on zendesk.com/pricing, where the Suite Professional column reads 1,000 MAUs included, then $50 per additional pack of 2,500. Notifications are metered separately at 1,000 included, then $50 per 25,000. Both overages carry a "True Forward" footnote, meaning sustained overage is trued up into the subscription rather than billed as a one-off, so model the steady-state number rather than a single busy month. Checked 8 August 2026.

What does Zendesk Chat cost in 2026?

Zendesk Chat has no price of its own. Checked on 7 August 2026, zendesk.com/pricing lists Support Team at $19 per agent per month, Suite Team at $55, Suite Professional at $115, and Suite Enterprise with Copilot at no public price at all — there is no Chat line item anywhere on the page. Those are annual rates; month-to-month billing costs more.

For a new customer, the cheapest route to Zendesk live chat is therefore Suite Team at $55 per agent per month: $275 a month for five agents, $825 for fifteen. Support Team at $19 covers email and ticketing and does not include chat or messaging at all.

Existing customers sit in a different position. Zendesk still recognises a plan family it labels "Support with Live chat and messaging" in the "What's my plan?" banners across its documentation, so legacy Chat subscriptions have not been switched off. They are closed to new buyers, and Zendesk's published guidance points those accounts toward messaging.

Which Smooch and Zendesk Chat prices are now out of date?

Three price shapes still circulating for Smooch and Zendesk Chat are stale, and all three are stale in the same direction: each describes a product that was sold separately before 2019.

• "Zendesk Chat from $14/agent/month, up to $59" — the old standalone Chat rate card. No tier resembling it appears on zendesk.com/pricing as of 7 August 2026.
• "Smooch from $60/month, up to $180/month" — pre-acquisition Smooch self-serve pricing. Sunshine Conversations has no self-serve tier; it requires a Suite Professional seat at $115 per agent per month, plus MAU metering on top.
• "Sunshine Conversations costs $500/month for the platform" — a pre-2021 packaged rate that no longer exists. There is no platform fee today: access comes with a Suite Professional seat at $115 per agent per month, and the metered line is MAUs (1,000 included, $50 per additional 2,500) rather than a flat platform charge.

This pattern recurs on every comparison page written about an acquired product: the acquired vendor's old rate card outlives the product by years, because nobody updates a price that no longer has a page to sit on. For teams that want the bill to be one published number, Converge is $49/month flat rate for up to 15 agents with all channels included.

Are Smooch and Zendesk Chat actually competitors?

No, and this is the single most useful thing to establish before comparing them: Smooch (Sunshine Conversations) and Zendesk Chat are two layers of one vendor's stack, not two vendors competing for the same budget line. You cannot meaningfully buy one instead of the other.

Sunshine Conversations is an API. It has no agent interface, no inbox to log into, and no pricing page of its own. Developers build against it to move a conversation between channels, bots and human agents — the switchboard model, where a triage bot answers first and hands off mid-thread without the customer restarting. It runs underneath Zendesk Messaging rather than beside it.

Zendesk Chat was a product you used directly. It had a dashboard, a live visitor list, canned shortcuts and proactive triggers, and support agents worked in it all day. It is also the older of the two, and the one Zendesk is winding down.

When a comparison presents these two as rivals with competing feature grids, it was written from the pre-2019 product catalogue and has not been checked since.

Who should pick Sunshine Conversations?

Pick Sunshine Conversations when you have developers, you are already committed to Zendesk Suite Professional or higher, and you need conversation routing that a standard Zendesk Messaging configuration cannot express.

The cases where it earns its cost are specific: passing one live thread between several bots and a human without the customer starting over; connecting a channel Zendesk does not offer natively through a custom integration; embedding messaging inside your own mobile app through the SDKs; or running messaging for several brands off one conversation store.

The cases where it does not are equally specific. If what you want is a shared inbox your agents open in the morning, Sunshine Conversations will not give you one. Every account on Suite Professional already has Zendesk Messaging, and most teams never touch the API underneath it. Buying up to Suite Professional purely to reach Sunshine Conversations, with no engineering time budgeted to build against it, is the most common way teams overspend on this decision.

Who should pick Zendesk's live chat instead?

Nobody can newly pick Zendesk Chat, because it can no longer be newly bought — but plenty of teams should pick Zendesk Messaging, which is what the Chat product became.

Messaging is the right call when your support model is a website widget plus email, your volume fits inside Suite Team at $55 per agent per month, and you want ticketing, a help centre and chat from one vendor behind one login. It is also the right call for anyone still on a legacy Chat plan: Zendesk's own migration guidance points that way, the session-based model loses the conversation continuity customers now expect, and the old Chat developer APIs are closed to new integrations.

It is the wrong call when messaging apps rather than your website are where customers actually reach you. Zendesk's per-agent model charges for the whole Suite whether or not you use the ticketing half, and a five-agent team on Suite Professional is $575 a month before add-ons.

What should you compare instead?

If you arrived looking for Smooch versus Zendesk Chat, the comparison that will actually answer your question is one of three others, depending on which problem sent you here.

• Choosing a help desk. Compare Zendesk Suite against its real rivals rather than against its own components. Start with Zendesk pricing for the current tier-by-tier rates, then Intercom vs Zendesk for the closest head-to-head.
• Choosing a messaging API. The alternatives to Sunshine Conversations are other conversation platforms, not Zendesk's chat widget. That is a build decision with engineering cost on both sides of it, and the seat price is the smaller half of the number.
• Replacing a website chat widget. This is the most common case and the one where staying inside Zendesk is least automatic, because the widget is the cheapest component of the Suite you would be paying for.

Working out which of the three you are in takes a few minutes and saves a procurement cycle spent comparing a Zendesk product to its own plumbing.

How do you tell which Zendesk chat product you already have?

Three checks tell you whether a Zendesk account is running legacy live chat, current messaging, or Sunshine Conversations underneath — and each takes a couple of minutes.

1. Check the widget. In Admin Center, look at which widget is configured. Web Widget (Classic) with a Chat section means legacy live chat. The current Web Widget means messaging. Zendesk publishes a dedicated help centre article on exactly this question, which is the clearest signal that the two are hard to tell apart from the outside.
2. Check for a Conversations API key. In Admin Center, under apps and integrations, the presence of a Conversations API key means someone has enabled Sunshine Conversations. No key means the account is on plain messaging, whatever the plan would allow.
3. Check the plan name on an invoice. "Suite Team" cannot include Sunshine Conversations at all. "Support with Live chat and messaging" is a legacy plan family, which tells you the account predates the current Suite line-up.

Teams that finish this audit and conclude their customers are on WhatsApp, Telegram and Instagram rather than the website widget usually end up comparing messaging-first inboxes instead — Converge is $49/month flat rate for up to 15 agents, with those channels included.