8 Gorgias Alternatives for Better Customer Support

Gorgias is a customer service platform that has done many things right. Their omnichannel approach will let your team work with customers across almost any channel, including email, live chat, voice, SMS, and social media. Gorgias funnels all communications into a shared inbox where agents can use helpful features like macros (aka email templates) to provide quick responses, views to organize requests better, and rules to automate tasks and give time back to agents.

Perhaps its greatest asset is that Gorgias boasts a deep integration with Shopify, the ecommerce platform. Support teams can not only view a customer’s purchase history from within a ticket, but they can also perform refunds and create orders. Integrations with apps like Shopify make it easy to create macros with third-party information (like order numbers) embedded in the copy. They also provide agents with all the information they need to deliver a fully personalized support experience.

Gorgias is built for ecommerce companies, but is it built for customer service?

There’s no debate — Gorgias is built for ecommerce and has a lot of functionality that could be a game changer for an online retailer. The platform will allow their support team to bring all their communications into one place, proactively engage with potential customers, and turn their support contacts into revenue drivers.

Gorgias’ ecommerce integrations will help provide online retailers with a positive, streamlined experience. Outside of this space, however, there’s not much to set Gorgias apart from their competition.

Most customer service software has similar functionality to Gorgias — shared inboxes, live chat, workflows, reporting — and some even have Shopify integrations of their own. Gorgias has also been late to add features that other platforms have had for years, such as a native knowledge base. While the company continues to add these standard features — they introduced a help center solution in 2021 — some teams may want to go with a more developed product.

The top 8 Gorgias alternatives for customer service

If you don’t need the ecommerce functionality or are simply looking for a more customer-centric approach to support, here are 8 Gorgias alternatives for customer service that you should consider.

1. Help Scout

2. Front

3. Freshdesk

4. Zendesk

5. Kayako

6. Zoho Desk

7. Gladly

8. Kustomer

1. Help Scout - Best for teams focused on customer experience

Help Scout is a complete support solution designed to be customer centric. When you sign up for a free trial, you’ll have instant access to an impressive suite of tools built to support and delight. Here are a few features that make Help Scout a great alternative to Gorgias.

Shared inbox

Our shared inbox product isn’t just a method for ticket management; it’s a place for conversations. We help you ensure that user-reported issues are not only resolved but that customers leave the interaction feeling valued by your brand.

We do that through:

• Customer management tools directly within conversations, allowing agents to offer personalized support more efficiently.

• The ability to leave internal notes for issues requiring team collaboration.

• Real-time collision detection to prevent agents from accidentally sending out duplicate emails or conflicting information.

• Saved replies to help get customers on the road to delight a little bit faster.

• Workflows that automate repetitive tasks and connect your customers with the right agent for the job.

• Integrations, including Shopify, to add context and provide easy access to additional customer information.

Knowledge base capabilities

Industry statistics show that more than two-thirds of customers will attempt to solve their issues independently.

Help Scout’s knowledge base solution, Docs, lets you easily publish media-rich articles to a customizable help center so that your customers can get the information they need, when and wherever they need it.

We also provide analytics for monitoring content performance, letting you know which articles are performing well, which might need to be modified, and what search topics are trending within your help center.

Live chat and Messages

Salesforce reports that 81% of customers use chat or live support to communicate with a company. Help Scout lets you make chat support a priority through Beacon, our multi-purpose web widget. Add a Beacon to any page on your website and instantly start chatting with your customers.

Beyond chat, Beacon allows your customers quick access to any of your Docs and also opens the ability for you to use our proactive engagement product, Messages.

Messages lets you promote upcoming features or releases, update customers on existing issues, or reach out to users who may need a little extra help based on conditions like time spent on a page or where they are on your app or site.

AI

The platform also has AI tools built in. AI summarize can help you get caught up on long conversations quickly, AI assist can help you polish your copy before hitting send, and AI drafts can generate replies to customer emails that are based on previous conversations and your help center documentation. Just review and hit send.

Reporting

Help Scout comes with out-of-the-box dashboards for gauging team performance. Keep track of metrics like contact volume, response time, and channel usage.

In addition to our pre-built dashboards, you can run customized reports that dial in on your most important metrics or use our API or Fivetran integration to export your data to the business intelligence tool of your choice.

24/6 support

We provide 24-hour support six days a week to ensure that no matter where your business is, we’re available to give you the necessary support to meet your customers’ needs.

If you’re looking for a help desk with a customer-centric approach at a competitive price, then Help Scout could be a great Gorgias alternative for you.

Price: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $50 per month.

2. Front - Best for team collaboration

Front is a shared inbox tool that is a strong choice for customer service teams of all industries. It supports email (both shared and personal), live chat, SMS, and social, as well as voice and knowledge base functionality through third-party integrations.

The platform has several features that make it ideal for team collaboration. It has the usual suspects — ticket assignments, internal comments, shared views, and automatic routing workflows — but Front also has shared draft and internal discussion features. They let teams work together to resolve issues in real time and keep their customer-related conversations within the inbox to make them easier to reference in the future.

Front has a Shopify integration, though it is view-only, meaning that agents can see pertinent information such as order history and shipping information but can’t perform any actions without visiting Shopify’s website.

Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $19/person per month.

3. Freshdesk - Best for larger teams requiring a field service component

Freshdesk is a full-stack customer support solution that provides omnichannel support, AI technology, and advanced reporting, and it supports integrations for popular apps like Slack, Jira, and Shopify.

One unique offering that is worth highlighting is their field service management capability. This $15/month add-on allows in-house teams to attach field service tasks to customer tickets, manage their field team’s schedule via an easy drag-and-drop interface, and keep track of essential service metrics using Freshdesk analytics.

Their mobile apps for iOS and Android make it easy for service technicians to reap the benefits of the service add-on as well. Technicians can communicate directly with customers to coordinate home visits, keep track of their schedules and time spent on a job, collect customer signatures, and send back live updates from the field.

Though a big concern with Freshdesk is its pricing structure and its tendency for price creep, if you're an online retailer whose product requires in-person service calls, the above features might make a switch to Freshdesk worth it for your company.

Price: Free trial and plan available. Paid plans start at $15/agent per month.

4. Zendesk - Best for enterprise teams looking for a highly customizable solution

Familiar to most, Zendesk is a comprehensive customer communications platform. Their shared inbox solution brings all your customer channels — email, voice, SMS, chat, social, and self-service — together, providing a complete view of your service efforts.

Zendesk integrates with over 1000+ applications, including Shopify. Like with Gorgias, you can cancel orders, perform refunds, and view other relevant information within the ticket window. You can also embed Zendesk Chat into your Shopify site to provide your customers easy access to live chat.

The downside of Zendesk is the same regardless of the competitor — its complexity. While it’s true that you can customize Zendesk to do just about anything you’d like for it to do, those changes will require developer resources. If you’re choosing a support platform for a larger organization that can manage those customizations, Zendesk should be on your short list.

Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $19/user per month.

5. Kayako - Best for teams who need a time tracking feature

Kayako could be a good option for those requiring a time tracking feature. Using the platform’s tracker, you can monitor how much time agents spend on tickets and mark the time as billable. This functionality can be helpful in a couple of ways:

• If your agents are independent contractors, having Kayako automatically keep track of billable hours makes invoicing more straightforward.

• Knowing how much time an agent spends on specific tickets can give insight into areas of struggle for your team and help indicate where extra training or internal education might be helpful.

Some other collaborative aspects of Kayako are their free collaborator licenses and internal notes features. These allow for cross-functional communication and can be especially helpful for resolving issues that require expertise outside of the support department.

As for its primary features, Kayako offers a shared inbox for managing email, live chat, and social requests, a native knowledge base builder, workflows, macros, and reporting analytics. The platform offers out-of-the-box integration with Salesforce, but you’ll need to set up all other connections through Zapier.

Cost is the final thing to consider when weighing the pros and cons of Kayako. While their simple and transparent pricing is a welcome sight, the actual price tag is less so. Plans start at $125 per agent per month with a five-agent minimum. A $625 per month entry level will put Kayako out of budget for many smaller companies.

Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $125/agent per month (5 agent minimum).

6. Zoho Desk - Best for teams using other Zoho products

The best integrations for Zoho Desk are other Zoho products, particularly the CRM. It’s essentially seamless, so it might be worth trying their help desk offering if you're already a Zoho customer.

Price: Free trial and plan available. Paid plans start at $14/agent per month.

7. Gladly - Best for enterprise teams requiring payment processing

Gladly is a customer-centric support platform providing valuable features with a clean, easy-to-use interface. The tool has native solutions for all customer channels — email, live chat, social, text, voice, IVR, and self-service — and customers have the freedom and flexibility to switch back and forth between channels due to Gladly’s customer timeline.

Instead of having separate tickets for each customer contact, Gladly keeps all communications in one timeline. This interface makes it easy to verify information from previous conversations or, as mentioned above, even switch channels in the middle of an issue.

On the ecommerce front, Gladly has a Shopify integration. Like Gorgias and Zendesk, agents can complete refunds and cancel orders. Beyond Shopify, Gladly also enables your team to accept payments natively through messaging channels.

While Gladly’s features are top-notch, they come at a price. Gladly’s base plan comes at a whopping $150/user per month with a 10-seat minimum. It’s a significant investment and one that might be out of reach of many small to mid-sized businesses.

Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $150/user per month (10 seat minimum).

8. Kustomer - Best Gorgias alternative for teams who provide localized support

Recently acquired by Meta (aka Facebook), Kustomer is another customer support platform geared toward enterprise teams. Like Gladly, Kustomer utilizes a conversation timeline to provide agents with context across all available channels (email, live chat, voice, SMS, social, and self-service).

You’ll find the typical features with Kustomer, such as a native help center, views, shortcuts (similar to Help Scout’s saved replies), reporting dashboards, and customer satisfaction surveys. There is also an AI component called Kustomer IQ, which provides sentiment analysis, advanced conversation routing, and agent suggestions — recommended responses based on historical data.

If your business provides localized support, Kustomer’s automatic language detection features can be helpful. According to their website, Kustomer IQ can “recognize a customer’s origin language and route to a specific agent or auto-translate messages for fast resolution.”

Kustomer offers integrations and apps for many popular platforms, including Shopify. Their Shopify app allows agents to view order information within a ticket and take action on them by processing refunds, order updates, exchanges, and returns.

Kustomer is one of the pricier options on this list. While not as high as Gladly or Kayako, Kustomer’s pricing of $89/user per month may be cost-prohibitive to smaller organizations.

Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $89/user per month (4 seat minimum).

Is Gorgias the best customer service platform for you?

Gorgias is a solid customer support solution with obvious positives for online retailers. For businesses outside of the ecommerce space, though — and even some within — another platform might be a better fit.

As you evaluate your options, consider the features your team will benefit from the most and which software best caters to those needs. Whether you’re looking for a tool that seamlessly integrates with your CRM or a product more focused on customer experience, we’re confident that you’ll find the right solution for you.