10 Best Gorgias Alternatives in 2026, After Gorgias Repriced in August

Gorgias repriced in August 2026 and most comparison pages have not caught up. The page now leads with the helpdesk and the AI Agent bundled into one number, with the two components itemised underneath and **two separate overage meters** running past your allowance.

Two details in the new card that almost nothing on the internet currently reports. **Seats are capped, not unlimited** — three users on Starter and 500 on everything above it, where the old model was widely described as unlimited agents. And **the AI overage is $1.50 per automated interaction at every tier**, which is the highest published AI rate we hold on any platform in this directory.

Whether that makes leaving worth it depends almost entirely on one thing, and it is not the price. It is whether your tickets need to read live order data. If they do, most of this page is the wrong answer at any cost.

What Gorgias costs now, read on 25 August 2026

Read directly from gorgias.com/pricing on 25 August 2026. The helpdesk and AI Agent components are still shown separately inside each tier — Starter is $10 helpdesk plus $30 AI, Pro is $300 plus $171 — but the headline is now the bundle. Starter is monthly-billing only. Our own dataset previously carried only the helpdesk component, which read as the whole price; it has been corrected.

The allowances are the part to model, not the headline. **Pro includes 2,000 tickets but only 190 automated interactions.** If the AI handles more than 190 conversations in a month — which is under 10% of your included ticket volume — every one after that is $1.50. A store where the agent handles 600 conversations is paying $615 in AI overage on top of a $471 subscription.

That is the single most important arithmetic on this page and it is why the AI allowance, not the ticket allowance, is the number that decides your bill.

Before the list: three reasons to leave, and only one of them is good

The bad reason: the sticker looks high

Gorgias is priced by volume with unlimited-ish seats, and most alternatives are priced per seat. Those two models cross over, and where they cross depends on your team size rather than your ticket count.

**Gorgias gets relatively more expensive as your team gets smaller**, which is the opposite of how volume pricing is usually pitched. A two-person team doing 5,000 tickets is Gorgias's worst case and a twenty-person team doing 5,000 tickets is its best. Work out which one you are before reading any further.

The bad reason: the AI is not resolving enough

This is a content and configuration problem far more often than a vendor problem, and switching vendors carries it with you. Every platform on this page answers from what you have written down; a store with a thin help centre gets thin deflection everywhere.

If you want to test that cheaply, layer a different agent onto the Gorgias you already run rather than migrating. eesel at $0.40 a task against Gorgias's $1.50 per automated interaction is a direct comparison you can run in a fortnight without moving anything.

The good reason: you outgrew what it is for

Gorgias is Shopify-native ecommerce support. If you have added B2B accounts, a wholesale channel, a subscription platform it does not integrate with, or a support team that now handles things other than orders, you have moved outside the shape of the product. That is a real reason to leave and it is the one this page is genuinely useful for.

The question that decides everything: does the agent read live order data?

Gorgias's whole product is that its agent looks up the order rather than quoting the shipping policy. Its documentation publishes a money-direction rule nobody else does: the agent refunds a decrease on its own and hands over when the total increases.

Most alternatives on this page do not do that, and the ones that do mostly ask you to build the connection yourself.

Read that split against your own ticket mix. If most of your volume is where-is-my-order, a documentation-only agent will deflect almost none of it however well it writes, and the cheaper subscription will cost you more in unresolved tickets than it saves in fees.

The ten alternatives

Each card renders from our typed dataset with a provenance tag per row, so the facts and the prose cannot drift. The prose is our read.

Zendesk — The one you left, or nearly did, and it is cheaper than you think

Zendesk is the incumbent Gorgias positions itself against, and for a merchant outgrowing Gorgias it is the obvious upmarket move. Read on 25 August 2026, Support Team is $19 an agent a month billed annually, Suite Team $55 and Suite Professional $115.

The trap in comparing it to Gorgias is the unit. Zendesk is per agent; Gorgias is per ticket. A five-person team handling 2,000 tickets pays Zendesk $275 a month on Suite Team and Gorgias $471 on Pro. A two-person team handling the same 2,000 tickets pays Zendesk $110 and Gorgias the same $471. **Gorgias gets relatively more expensive as your team gets smaller, which is the opposite of how it is marketed.**

What you give up is the thing Gorgias exists for. Zendesk's agent answers from your content; it does not read live Shopify order state without work. For a store whose volume is where-is-my-order, that is most of your deflection gone.

Zendesk also meters automated resolutions separately at roughly $1.50 to $2.00 with no included allowance, so the AI comparison against Gorgias's $1.50 per automated interaction is closer than the seat prices suggest.

Yuma AI — Built for exactly the same buyer, and it layers rather than replaces

Yuma is the closest thing on this page to a like-for-like swap in intent: ecommerce-native AI support, built around Shopify, with the vendor shipping the reach rather than asking you to build it.

The structural difference is that Yuma is designed to sit on top of a help desk rather than to be one. That makes it the low-disruption option — you keep your ticketing, your history and your macros, and you replace the agent. For a merchant whose complaint is that Gorgias's automation is not resolving enough, that is a smaller change than a migration.

It is demo-gated with no published rate, which is a real cost during evaluation. You cannot line it up against Gorgias's $1.50 per automated interaction without entering a sales process, and by the time you have a number you have spent two weeks.

Siena AI — Vendor-shipped reach through an app store, with a custom-API route beside it

Siena's model is an app-store style connection catalogue, with the option to connect any API alongside it. Its own words: build custom integrations connecting any API to Siena. That is a genuinely useful middle position — pre-built where pre-built exists, and an escape hatch where it does not.

For a Shopify merchant the pre-built path covers the common ground, and the custom route covers the 3PL or subscription platform that no vendor has a connector for. Gorgias is narrower and deeper; Siena is broader and shallower.

Also demo-gated. Same evaluation cost as Yuma.

Zowie — The strongest acting agent here, and you build the reach yourself

Zowie is the option a large merchant ends up shortlisting, and it sits at the acting end of the capability split. What it can do to your systems is real, and it is the buyer who supplies the mechanism.

Its documentation is unusually direct about that: the same mechanism used for pulling customer information can be used to act on behalf of a user, through API calls to your systems. In practice that means a Shopify custom app you create with the scopes you grant, plus whatever HTTP endpoints your team exposes.

So the honest framing is that Zowie's ceiling is higher than Gorgias's and its floor requires engineering that Gorgias does not. If you have no backend capacity, the capability advantage is theoretical.

No published price, and no self-serve signup.

Richpanel — Ecommerce-native, and the guarantee is worth reading in two versions

Richpanel is a direct ecommerce competitor to Gorgias with a self-serve portal focus. Its agent sits on the assist side of the line rather than the acting side, which matters if your reason for leaving Gorgias is that you want more autonomy rather than less.

It is also the vendor that taught us to read pricing pages in raw source. Richpanel A/B tests the wording of its own resolution guarantee, and the page serves different promises to different visitors — we have seen both a 30% in 60 days variant and a 50% in 30 days variant in the same page source.

That is not dishonest, it is ordinary conversion testing. But it means **the guarantee you were shown is not necessarily the guarantee in the contract**, and it is worth getting the exact wording in writing before you rely on it.

Re:amaze — The quiet one, owned by GoDaddy, and cheap at volume

Re:amaze is a multi-channel help desk with strong ecommerce integrations from $59 a month, and it is the least-discussed product in this comparison.

Against Gorgias at volume the arithmetic is favourable: Gorgias Advanced is $1,227 a month billed annually for 5,000 tickets, and Re:amaze at a flat monthly rate does not scale with ticket count the same way. For a high-volume, low-complexity store that is a large difference.

The trade is the agent. Re:amaze reads store and order data into the answer rather than writing back to it, so it informs replies rather than resolving autonomously. And it has been maintained rather than aggressively developed since GoDaddy acquired it on 6 April 2021 — a legitimate purchase, but a fact that belongs in a multi-year decision.

Help Scout — If your store is small and your tickets are conversations

Help Scout is the option for merchants whose support is lower-volume and higher-touch — considered products, long email threads, repeat customers by name.

Free at $0 up to five users, then $25, $45 and $75 a user a month, with AI Answers at $0.75 per resolution on every tier. Against Gorgias Starter at $40 a month for 50 tickets, Help Scout's free tier is genuinely free and its paid entry is comparable.

There is no live Shopify order lookup in the agent, which is the recurring trade on this page. If your volume is where-is-my-order, this is the wrong tool at any price.

eesel AI — Keep Gorgias, replace the automation

The option that does not require leaving. eesel layers onto the help desk you already run and bills $0.40 per regular task and $4.00 per heavy one, with no platform fee and no minimum on pay-as-you-go.

Set that against Gorgias's $1.50 per automated interaction above your bundled allowance. If your complaint is specifically that the AI Agent's overage rate is punishing at peak, this is a direct fix that costs you no migration, no ticket history and no rebuild of macros.

It is not a help desk and does not pretend to be. You still need Gorgias, or something, underneath it.

Tidio — Below Gorgias's floor, with two meters to read

Tidio targets the segment beneath Gorgias Starter — the store doing tens of tickets a month rather than hundreds. Free at $0, then $24.17, $49.17 and $300 a month.

Two meters run in parallel: visitor conversations and Lyro AI conversations are metered separately, so the tier that covers your traffic may not cover your AI usage. And Starter's 50 Lyro conversations are a one-time allowance rather than a monthly one, which teams model as recurring and it is not.

Worth knowing who you are talking to in public forums about this product. In January 2025 a Tidio go-to-market employee posted to r/SaaS describing the company as an alternative to Zendesk, Intercom, Salesforce and Gorgias, and inviting conversations. They were open about working there, which is more than several vendors in this category manage.

Chatwoot — If you would rather run it yourself

Free self-hosted, or $19, $39 and $99 an agent a month in the cloud. For a technically capable merchant, self-hosting removes the ticket meter entirely, which is the single largest structural difference from Gorgias.

The honest accounting is the one open-source comparisons omit: a server, backups, TLS, SMTP that reaches inboxes, upgrades, and somebody's time when it breaks during a Black Friday spike. Deliverability alone defeats more self-hosted help desks than any missing feature, and a store that cannot email order confirmations during peak has a worse problem than a Gorgias invoice.

Right for teams that already run infrastructure. Wrong for teams that would be learning to, especially in Q4.

Two we are recommending against

Kustomer, because of what its meter counts

Kustomer bills an engaged conversation when the AI attempted to generate a response regardless of whether it was sent, and also when an AI team merely viewed or opened the conversation without replying. A merchant leaving Gorgias because a $1.50 overage is unpredictable should not move to a meter that charges for looking at the ticket.

Mavenoid, because it answers a different question

Mavenoid is product troubleshooting for hardware, and it is good at it. That is a genuinely different problem from order support, and a store selling apparel or consumables will find the model does not fit. It appears on ecommerce lists because it is adjacent, not because it is a substitute.

The Q4 problem nobody prices

Ecommerce support volume is not flat, and Gorgias's model interacts with that badly in a specific way.

A store on Pro is buying 2,000 tickets and 190 automated interactions. In November that store might do 6,000 tickets. The ticket overage is 4,000 at $0.36, which is $1,440. But if the AI handles even a third of the extra volume, that is roughly 1,300 automated interactions above the 190 included, at $1.50, which is **$1,950 in AI overage alone**.

So peak season costs more on the AI meter than on the ticket meter, and the better your agent performs the worse that gets. Total for that month: $471 subscription, $1,440 tickets, $1,950 AI, around **$3,861 against a $471 sticker.**

Two defences worth knowing. Gorgias states plainly that **you are not billed for test conversations**, which is more than most vendors here offer and makes pre-peak testing free. And Gorgias's own onboarding page publishes something no competitor does: **average time to launch is 60 days, even for brands with multiple stores.** If you are planning to switch before Q4, count backwards from that number.

What Gorgias does better than anything else on this page

A list of alternatives that never says what the incumbent is good at is a sales document. Four things Gorgias does that most of this page cannot, and they are the reasons its price is defensible.

**It reads live order state and acts on it.** Not the shipping policy — the order. Its documentation publishes a money-direction rule no competitor states: the agent refunds a decrease on its own and hands over when the total increases. That is a governance decision written down, and finding an equivalent sentence anywhere else in this category is hard.

**It does not bill test conversations.** Gorgias states plainly that you are not billed for test conversations, that they do not affect reporting, and that they send no real messages to shoppers. Compare that with Intercom, where preview is free but testing in your live environment is billed per outcome, or with Salesforce, which charges 16 credits for a sandbox action against 20 in production. Free testing is worth real money during evaluation and almost nobody offers it.

**It publishes its implementation time.** Sixty days, average, even for brands with multiple stores, on its own onboarding page. Every other vendor in this comparison either claims minutes or publishes nothing. A vendor willing to print sixty days is a vendor that has counted.

**Seats are effectively free above Starter.** Five hundred users on Basic at $77 a month is a genuinely different model from $55 an agent, and for a retailer with store staff dipping into the queue it is not close.

None of that is a reason to stay if your team is two people and your bill is four figures. It is a reason to be honest about what leaving costs you beyond the migration.

If you are leaving, the order to do it in

Migration off an ecommerce help desk has one constraint that general support migrations do not: the calendar. Q4 is immovable and everything below is timed against it.

• **Do not migrate between October and January.** Gorgias publishes 60 days as the average time to launch for arriving; leaving is the same work in reverse plus a rebuild at the far end. A migration that slips lands in peak, and a store that cannot answer order enquiries in December has a worse problem than any invoice.
• **Export before you cancel, not after.** Ticket history, customer records, macros and your help centre articles. Several vendors reduce export access once a subscription lapses, and the data you want is the data you stop being able to reach.
• **Screenshot every automation rule before it is switched off.** Rules do not port between platforms and they are rebuilt by hand. The ones nobody remembers writing are the ones that break checkout support quietly.
• **Reconnect Shopify first and test order lookup before anything else.** It is the single capability the whole category is bought for and the one most likely to behave differently at the destination.
• **Run both systems on live traffic for one full week.** A week of overlap costs one month of double subscription and is the only way to find the gap between what the importer claimed and what arrived.
• **Keep the Gorgias account read-only for one billing cycle after cutover.** Cheaper than discovering in week three that a report you needed only exists there.

The item people skip is the third one, and it is the one that costs the most. Automation rules are the accumulated institutional knowledge of a support team, they are almost never documented, and no importer on this page carries them.

What merchants actually say

Four public threads, read as what they are.

In February 2026 a merchant posted the same question to r/shopify and r/ecommerce on the same day, which is itself a signal about how hard the answer is to find:

“I’ve been using Gorgias as our main customer service software to answer emails, live chat, and social media DMs. We’re scaling fast and have...”— r/shopify and r/ecommerce, 19 February 2026

That is one merchant's account rather than a finding of fact, and the phrase doing the work is scaling fast. Under Gorgias's model scaling fast means crossing tier boundaries and then meeting two overage meters, which is exactly the shape of bill that sends people looking for alternatives.

A second thread is worth citing for what it is rather than what it says. In January 2025 someone building the go-to-market function at Tidio posted to r/SaaS describing the company as **“an Alternative to Zendesk, Intercom, Salesforce and Gorgias”** and inviting conversations. They stated who they worked for, which is more than several vendors in this category manage — but it is a reminder that a large share of the alternatives discussion in public forums is written by people with a product in the race.

A May 2026 thread on r/MerchantProtection makes a point adjacent to this decision and worth carrying into it: refunds resolved quickly cost less than chargebacks, and a plain-language refund policy published front and centre reduces disputes. That is a deflection argument that costs nothing and does not appear on any vendor's pricing page.

Reddit is untrusted public text and this site treats it that way. Threads are cited with dates so you can read them in full, and no price on this page rests on any of them — every figure comes from a vendor page read on 25 August 2026.

Check it yourself, in about twenty minutes

• **Open your Gorgias invoice and separate the three lines**: subscription, ticket overage, AI interaction overage. Most merchants have never looked at the third one separately and it is frequently the largest.
• **Count your automated interactions against your tier's allowance.** Pro includes 190. If you are consistently above it, your effective AI cost is $1.50 and that is the number to compare, not the subscription.
• **Export last November and December.** Peak is where the model either works or does not, and an annual decision made on a July invoice is made on the wrong month.
• **Sample 100 recent tickets and mark which needed a live order lookup.** That percentage is the ceiling on what any documentation-only alternative can deflect for you.
• **Count your agents.** Under about six, per-seat alternatives are cheaper at every volume above 2,000 tickets. Over fifteen, Gorgias's model is working in your favour.

Pass or fail: if more than half your tickets need a live order lookup and you have fewer than six agents, you are Gorgias's worst-case customer on price and its best-case customer on capability. That tension is the whole decision, and no comparison page can resolve it for you.

What this page does not know

The missing measurement is resolution quality on ecommerce tickets specifically: given an identical Shopify store, an identical help centre and an identical set of order-status, refund and policy questions, which of these agents resolves the most without escalating and without getting anything wrong.

Producing it would need one seeded store, a standard ticket set across order status, refund request, policy question, angry escalation and out-of-scope, run through every platform in the same week and scored for resolution quality, hallucination and escalation behaviour. Then repeating it at peak volume, because the interesting failures are load-related.

Nobody publishes it. The vendors publish their own resolution rates using definitions that are not comparable, and the analyst firms that could run it are paid by the vendors they would be scoring.

**This page has not run it either.** Everything above is read from vendor pages and our typed records. We do not publish benchmarks or resolution-rate rankings.

What to do instead: Gorgias does not bill test conversations. Use that. Replay fifty real tickets through your current agent and through one alternative's trial, and compare what each one actually resolved. That is a genuine measurement on your own data and it costs an afternoon.

The verdict

**If your tickets need live order data and you have more than six agents, stay.** Gorgias's model is working in your favour and no alternative here does the order-lookup job as directly at that team size.

**If the AI overage is the problem, layer rather than move.** eesel at $0.40 a task against $1.50 per automated interaction is the same fix with none of the migration, and you can test it in a fortnight.

**If you have fewer than six agents and real volume, per-seat pricing is genuinely cheaper** and Zendesk at $55 an agent is the move — accepting that you lose the live order lookup, which for a two-person store handling 5,000 order enquiries may not be an acceptable trade at all.

And if you have outgrown ecommerce support altogether — B2B accounts, wholesale, a subscription platform Gorgias does not reach — that is the one case where leaving is unambiguously right, and Zowie or Siena are where to look, budgeting for the sales cycle neither will let you skip.

Gorgias re-read 25 August 2026 after the August repricing; every alternative carries its own read-date in the cards above. If a figure here has moved again, tell us and it gets corrected and re-dated.

WRITTEN BY AR · UPDATED 2026-08-25

I read the fine print. Vendor pricing pages, billing definitions, terms, funding filings and acquisition notices — then I do the arithmetic nobody publishes: what a platform actually costs at your volume, what its headline metric is really counting, and who owns it now. I do not run benchmarks, and no page here pretends otherwise.

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