The 8 Best Gorgias Alternatives: Reviewed and Compared
Gorgias can be a great option for small ecommerce companies. Its usage-based pricing is affordable when support volumes are small, and its integrations with platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce ensure your ecommerce platform and help desk are always in sync.
However, as your business grows, Gorgias' usage-based pricing can become a hindrance rather than an advantage. The pricing becomes unpredictable, you're incurring additional usage-based fees for features and channels that you needed to add on, and suddenly, you're paying a lot more for the platform than you would for an alternative with the same core features.
If you're in the market for a new ecommerce help desk, the eight Gorgias alternatives below — some with more affordable pricing, some with features you won't find in Gorgias, and some built for more sophisticated workflows — are worth considering.
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| Platform | Best for | Ecommerce Integrations | Channels | Starting Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Help Scout | Affordable and predictable pricing | Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, and fully documented APIs for custom connections | Email, live chat, self-service, and social (Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp) | Free for up to five users; paid plans start at $25/user per month |
Shopify Inbox | Small ecommerce businesses | Shopify | Email, live chat, and self-service | Free for Shopify users |
Gladly | Brands that sell products in person and online | Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce, Spree Commerce, and Swell | Phone, live chat, email, self-service, SMS, and social (Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp) | Contact for pricing |
eDesk | Marketplace sellers | Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, and Shopware | Email, live chat, self-service, and social (Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and TikTok Shop); phone and SMS via add-on | $39/agent per month |
SocialPilot | Social media support | Shopify | Social (Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn) | $17/month for one user and up to five social accounts |
Tidio | Usage-based pricing | Magento, BigCommerce, Ecwid, OpenCart, PrestaShop, Shift4Shop, Shopify, Shopware, and WooCommerce | Email, live chat (text and video), self-service, and social (Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp) | Free plan available; paid plans start at $24.17/month for up to 100 billable conversations |
Aircall | Phone and SMS support | Shopify, Magento, PrestaShop | Phone, self-service, and SMS | $30/license per month (minimum three licenses) |
Richpanel | Migration support | Magento, Shopify, and WooCommerce | Email, live chat, self-service, phone, SMS, and social (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) | $69/agent per month |
1. Help Scout – Best for affordable and predictable pricing
Help Scout is an ideal choice for companies that are looking to move on from Gorgias' usage-based pricing. There's a free plan for teams of up to five users, and Help Scout's paid plans are some of the most generous and affordable on the market. Paid plans let you deliver support over email, live chat, self-service, and social (Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp), and the platform integrates with Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, and has a fully documented API for connecting to custom setups.
In Help Scout, all of your requests from email, chat, and social flow into a shared inbox that comes with powerful features to help your team reply more quickly. Collision detection lets you know when someone else is already replying to a request, saved replies can be sent in a couple of clicks to answer FAQs, and AI Drafts composes accurate replies for your team instantly. You'll also get access to round-robin and load-based routing — two features you won't find in Gorgias.
While AI Drafts gives you a way to draft replies quickly (and edit them if needed before sending), you can also fully automate replying to customers' with AI Answers. AI Answers displays in a Beacon (a widget you can embed on your website), and it provides answers to customers instantly in natural language using the content of your knowledge base (which you can also build with Help Scout) and any other website you add as a reference. While limited to chat for now, AI Answers will also be expanding into other channels like email, soon.
Like Gorgias, Help Scout is a Shopify Plus certified tool. Its Shopify integration lets you view customer information and order details like order status, receipts, tracking information, and customer metrics in the sidebar of each conversation. You can also take action on orders in Help Scout, doing things like editing, duplicating, canceling, and refunding orders, as well as restocking cancelled orders.
Finally, Help Scout also comes with tools that let you proactively support customers and generate more sales. Create messages that pop up in your Beacon, as a model, or as a banner on your website to promote sales, offer discount codes, collect feedback, recommend knowledge base articles, and more. Detailed targeting lets you choose exactly who to show your messages to and when they should display.
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Pricing
Free plan and trial available. View Help Scout's current pricing.
Learn more about Help Scout:
2. Shopify Inbox – Best for small ecommerce businesses
If you're using Shopify as your ecommerce platform and just have one or two people answering questions for customers, you may not need a help desk that's as robust as some of the other options on this list. For solopreneurs and small ecommerce shops, Shopify Inbox is a great, 100% free option that gives you a way to accept, organize, and reply to customers' questions and requests.
Shopify Inbox lets you add a chat widget to your storefront so customers can chat with your team when they have questions (or send your team an email when no one is available to chat). Those conversations show up in a shared inbox that has features like assignments, quick replies, and conversation tagging. You can also quickly add discount codes or recommended products to your replies.
When you're chatting with a customer, the platform will show you exactly what the customer has in their cart so you can send personalized replies, and there's also an automatic message classification system that highlights questions from customers who are likely to make a purchase so you can prioritize conversations that will lead to sales.
While Shopify Inbox doesn't have anything as robust as a knowledge base, you can create instant answers that display in your chat widget to help customers find answers to FAQs quickly. There's also a pre-built order tracking instant answer that customers can click to see the status of their orders, and the platform's AI can automatically suggest replies your team can use when chatting with customers.
Pricing
Free for Shopify customers.
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3. Gladly – Best for brands that sell products in person and online
Gladly is an omnichannel platform with native support for email, live chat, social, SMS, phone, and self-service. It stands out because of its customer timeline feature that brings every interaction you have with a customer into a single profile, making it function as a combined CRM and help desk. Whether a customer makes a purchase in store or online or reaches out via phone or email, you'll be able to see the entire interaction history when viewing a new support request.
The timeline also lets customers switch between channels mid-conversation without you losing any context. If in the middle of a text message back-and-forth the customer decides to call your support line instead, the rep who answers the phone conversation will have all of the context from the SMS conversation readily available so the customer doesn't have to start from scratch describing their issue.
To make sure conversations get to the right person every time, Gladly's People Match routing system takes multiple factors into account, such as the customer's sentiment, loyalty status, and lifetime value, the urgency of the request, and how experienced an agent is. Then, it calculates a point value based on all of those factors and then uses the total points to route and prioritize requests appropriately.
Another unique feature is that Gladly lets your agents accept payments from customers over messaging channels. Instead of having to point customers back to your ecommerce platform to make purchases, your agents can accept payments for orders immediately as part of the support conversation.
Gladly's Shopify integration also offers a lot of the same features as Gorgias': you can see customer order information, issue discount codes, and cancel and refund orders directly in Gladly. Gladly's AI can also give customers order status updates and perform basic transactions like canceling and refunding orders so your team doesn't need to get involved.
Pricing
No free trial offered. Contact Gladly for pricing.
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4. eDesk – Best for marketplace sellers
Like Gorgias, eDesk is designed specifically for ecommerce companies. It integrates with major ecommerce platforms (Shopify, WooCommerce, Magneto) and more niche ones (like Shopware), as well as marketplaces like TikTok Shop, Amazon, eBay, and Walmart. Email, social, self-service, and chat support are built into the platform, and voice support is available as an add-on.
The marketplace integrations are eDesk's biggest highlight. In addition to pulling in support requests from those platforms so you can see and respond to them all from a central shared inbox, there's also a feature that lets you automatically request reviews/feedback on Amazon and eBay, as well as an Amazon-specific SLA feature that helps ensure you reply to all customers questions within the required 24-hour timeframe.
Its TikTok Shop integration is another highlight; TikTok Shop integrations are rare among help desk platforms. The integration lets you see and reply to TikTok Shop messages; process returns, cancellations, and refunds directly from the eDesk interface; and initiate conversations with customers. There's even an "Orders" tab where you can see all of your TikTok Shop orders in eDesk.
You can build a knowledge base in eDesk, and the content of your knowledge base is used to power eDesk's AI agent. The AI agent answers customers' questions for you in real-time and works across all of the platform's text-based support channels, including email, chat, social, and marketplaces. There's also an AI assistant feature that helps your team write replies faster and an AI translation add-on that translates incoming and outgoing messages into other languages.
Like Gorgias, eDesk can also connect sales to support interactions, giving you solid numbers to share with leadership on the impact of support on revenue. However, it is worth noting that eDesk's Shopify integration isn't quite as robust as Gorgias'. You'll be able to see customer and order details in a sidebar and take actions like cancelling orders and replacing items, but you won't be able to create discount codes or generate dynamic product recommendations in eDesk.
Pricing
Free trial available. View eDesk's current pricing.
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5. SocialPilot – Best for brands that are active on social media
If you do most of your product promotion and communicating with customers on social media platforms, SocialPilot, which is technically a social media management tool, can also work well as a help desk. Its Social Inbox integrates with Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, pulling comments, messages, and mentions from those platforms into a shared inbox where your team can view and respond to them.
If you have multiple brands, you can create separate inboxes for each brand in SocialPilot, connect those brands' respective social profiles, then toggle between the inboxes in the platform. Tabs let you filter the messages in your inbox to see everything, unread messages only, starred messages only, or closed messages. The full thread for all messages is displayed when you click on a message in the inbox.
If you see a comment that's spam or needs to be removed, you can delete it directly from SocialPilot's interface, and if you need help from a teammate in order to reply, you can leave a private note that's only shown to members of your team. You can also add tags to messages, which can be helpful in prioritizing certain types of requests or filtering your inbox to see only the messages you need to address.
SocialPilot also has a Shopify integration, but it doesn't work to display customer and order details in your shared inbox like the other tools on this list. Instead, the Shopify integration lets you post products to social media sites directly from Shopify. You can use AI to write captions and add hashtags, schedule when posts will be published, and save posts and hashtags to be used in other campaigns.
Pricing
Free trial available. View SocialPilot's current pricing.
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6. Tidio – Best for usage-based pricing
If Gorgias' usage-based pricing works well for your team and you'd like to find an alternative using the same pricing model, Tidio is a good option to consider. The platform is a bit more limited than Gorgias, offering only email, chat, AI-powered self-service, and social support (no phone, knowledge base, or SMS), but its pricing for its help desk plans is comparable to Gorgias', and usage costs for its AI agent are more affordable.
One nice thing about Tidio is that its live chat widget can be used for both text and video calls. If both your support rep and the customer turn off their videos, video chat functions in essentially the same way as a phone call, meaning you can offer voice support without having to pay for phone numbers and minutes like you do for many help desks that offer voice channel support.
The standout feature for Tidio is Flows: a no-code workflow builder that lets you gently encourage site visitors to make purchases. With it, you can do things like offer a discount code to a visitor who's been to the site multiple times but hasn't made a purchase, recommend related products after a visitor adds a product to their cart, or announce that a product has limited stock.
For self-service, Tidio doesn't offer a knowledge base; all of its self-service offers are powered by its AI agent, Lyro. Lyro can answer customers' questions automatically, provide order status updates, and let customers change their delivery address, modify their subscriptions, or start the return process without a human on your team having to get involved.
Since Tidio doesn't have a feature allowing you to publish a knowledge base, Lyro works a bit differently than the other tools with AI agents on this list. Instead of pulling from existing resources, you upload documentation directly to Lyro to enable it to answer FAQs. However, it also integrates with platforms like Zendesk and Intercom to pull information in from your existing knowledge base built on those systems.
Pricing
Free plan and trial available. View Tidio's current pricing.
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7. Aircall – Best for phone and SMS support
If you only offer support via phone and SMS, Aircall is a good option to consider. It's a complete contact center platform that has everything you need to deliver great voice support: local and toll-free phone numbers, inbound and outbound calling, call recordings, hold music, voicemail, an IVR system, call queues, and a callback system that lets customers request a return call instead of waiting on hold.
Aircall stands out for the amount of AI they've built into the platform. When your support professionals answer calls themselves, the system's AI provides live coaching to the rep during the call. When the call is finished, AI automatically generates a transcript of the conversation and detects customer sentiment. It also can create follow-up tasks for your team automatically so you don't lose track of any to-dos.
Beyond assisting your team, Aircall's AI can also help your customers without your team having to get involved. A real-time voice agent answers calls, collects information, and resolves inquiries entirely on its own. When it can't solve a customer's problem itself, it escalates the call to a member of your team, providing both a full transcript of the conversation and a summary so reps can get up to speed quickly.
Aircall's Shopify information gives your team key customer details in a sidebar that they can reference during a conversation. It shows the customer’s name, email address, previous orders, in-process orders, and linked tracking numbers. However, the integration doesn't support taking action on Shopify orders from within Aircall, so you'll need to switch over to Shopify.
If you do need to be able to make changes to Shopify orders from your support platform, you can integrate Aircall with a platform like Help Scout that has a Shopify integration with edit capabilities. Plus, the combination of the two platforms means you can deliver support across all channels from a single system.
Text messages can also be managed in Aircall. Your team can see all SMS requests in a shared inbox and send replies directly from Aircall's interface. SMS and phone calls are tied to customers' profiles in the system, so if a customer switches from texting to calling mid-conversation, your reps will see the full context of the text conversation when answering the call. And if someone on your team believes a call would be more efficient, you can simply click the phone number in the text message to call the customer.
Pricing
Free trial available. View Aircall's current pricing.
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8. Richpanel – Best for migration support
Moving to a new help desk can be a huge undertaking, particularly if you don't have someone on your team dedicated to managing the migration from start to finish. Richpanel makes migrating to its platform simple. Every new customer gets personalized migration and onboarding. They'll move your data from your old system to Richpanel and help you configure your self-service portal and workflows.
If you're interested in automating some of your support operations, Richpanel even has an Automation Success Kit add-on you can take advantage of. For a one-time fee of $2,000, the Richpanel team will help you set up its AI features, identifying the types of requests that should be automated, creating self-service flows, and updating your website or knowledge base as needed so the AI has the information it needs.
Richpanel's Shopify integration lets you view customer and order details in a sidebar and make changes like adding discounts, updating addresses, processing refunds, and even drafting orders. You can also create self-service flows in Richpanel that let customers make those types of changes themselves without assistance from your team.
When it comes to managing requests as a team, you can assign requests manually or take advantage of round-robin or load-based routing. Add tags to conversations, create macros to send pre-written replies, and add private notes to conversations to collaborate on replies before responding to customers. There's also an AI assistant that drafts replies, creates summaries, and translates messages.
One unique feature you'll find in Richpanel is its social media AI bot that helps you manage your reputation on social channels. It will automatically remove spam and harmful comments from posts, alert you to major issues before they escalate, analyze customer sentiment, and even auto-reply to support inquiries when possible (or create tickets for your team to look into when not).
Pricing
No free trial offered. View Richpanel's current pricing.
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Evaluating Gorgias alternatives to find the right one for your team
As you work on putting together a shortlist of Gorgias alternatives to consider, we recommend evaluating your top picks based on how well they meet the criteria below:
It integrates with your ecommerce platform: Having to switch back and forth between your ecommerce platform and help desk to support customers is time-consuming and unnecessary. Look for platforms that at least give you view access to your ecommerce platform's data — but edit access is even better.
It lets you support all of the channels you get requests on: If customers call you, email you, and ask you questions on social media, you'll want to make sure to find a platform that will consolidate requests received across all of those channels and let your team manage them in a single view.
It offers AI and other automation features: There's no reason for your team to spend time doing things like providing order status updates, assigning tickets to the right team, and answering frequently asked questions. Look for platforms with AI and workflow features to do this work for you.
It gives you the features you need at a price you can afford: Spend extra time validating that you're going to get the features you need at the price you expect to pay. Software pricing isn't always transparent, and you don't want to get everything moved over to a new system only to be shocked by the cost of your first monthly payment.
It's easy to use and intuitive: This is especially important if you have a lot of turnover on your team or plan to scale your team in the future. Tools that are difficult to learn will create a lot of headaches for you later; you'll end up spending a lot of time training your team on how to use the system.
You have access to high-quality support when you need it: Help centers, AI agents, and tutorials are great, but there comes a time when we all need help from a real human. Send the tools you're considering a few support tickets while you're evaluating them to see how quickly they respond and how helpful those responses are.
Demos and free trials are your friends while trying to find the right tool for your team. Demos let you get answers to the questions you couldn't find answers for on your own, and free trials let you get hands-on with the tools to see how they'll work for your team.
We recommend testing the tools with a couple of team members (one support rep and one manager) before making a final decision to ensure that the platform you choose will work for everyone on your team. Also, keep in mind that if you need more time to make a decision, many platforms will extend the length of your free trial if you just ask.
Jessica Greene
Jessica Greene is a Help Scout alum, where we make excellent customer service achievable for companies of all sizes. Connect with her on LinkedIn or through her website.
Alexa Ahrens
Alexa is a content strategist at Help Scout, where she writes and helps other authors tell stories about customer experience, technology, and company culture. Before working in support and content creation, she worked at a wax museum — an experience that prepared her surprisingly well for a life of storytelling. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
