Comparing Ada and Gladly Sidekick? Both are AI Agents & Chatbots tools in the directory, which is why buyers put them on the same shortlist. Below is a side-by-side look at how they price, what they integrate with, and when each is the better fit, so you can pick on the facts rather than either vendor's own sales page.
| Attribute | Ada | Gladly Sidekick |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Paid · Custom | Paid · ~$180/seat/mo |
| Founded | 2016 | 2014 |
| Categories | AI Agents & Chatbots Enterprise | AI Agents & Chatbots E-commerce Support Help Desk & Ticketing |
| Integrations | Zendesk Salesforce ServiceNow Shopify Twilio WhatsApp | Shopify Salesforce Zendesk Twilio Amazon Connect Slack |
Ada is an AI agent platform built for brands whose support queues are measured in the millions. The pitch is simple: onboard the agent on your knowledge and policies, then measure and coach it exactly the way you would manage a star human employee, using built-in testing and analytics to push its automated resolution rate higher every quarter. Ada handles chat, email, SMS, and voice in more than fifty languages, and its generative actions let it actually resolve issues in your back-end systems rather than just deflecting them with a canned reply.
There is a great origin story here. Before writing a line of code, Ada's founders spent roughly a year working as frontline support agents at seven different companies, because they wanted to feel the job before automating it. That empathy shows up in a product obsessed with resolution quality, not vanity deflection numbers. The company even shares its name with Ada Lovelace, widely considered the first computer programmer, which is a fitting match for software meant to think.
Founded in Toronto in 2016 by Mike Murchison and David Hariri, Ada has since powered billions of automated customer interactions for names like Meta, Verizon, Square, Shopify, Canva, and YETI. It is firmly an enterprise product: pricing is quote-based and annual, aimed at organizations fielding hundreds of thousands of conversations a year, so this is not a tool you swipe a credit card for on a Tuesday afternoon.
What you get for that commitment is a mature, measurable platform with a long track record and a coaching loop designed to keep getting better over time. If your support volume is huge, your brand stakes are high, and you want an AI agent you can manage like a real team rather than set and forget, Ada belongs firmly at the top of your shortlist.
Read the full Ada listing → · See Ada alternatives →
Gladly organizes support around people instead of tickets, and that one decision changes everything about how it feels. Every customer gets a single lifelong conversation thread that follows them across voice, chat, SMS, email, and social, so they never have to repeat themselves and your agents always see the full story. Sidekick, its AI agent, lives inside that thread, resolving requests using real customer context and taking genuine actions like tracking an order, starting a return, or making a change, then handing off to a human with everything already in view.
A recent standout is Sidekick on Voice, which Gladly bills as the industry's only AI voice agent powered by that lifelong, multichannel history, so a phone conversation picks up right where a chat left off. The company has kept expanding the family with Sidekick Sales for product recommendations, Sidekick Email, and versions that extend the agent onto Zendesk and Salesforce, so teams on other platforms can borrow its brain.
Gladly was founded in 2014 by Joseph Ansanelli and his co-founders, and it has leaned cheerfully into its theme, naming its pricing tiers Hero and Superhero. It is very much an enterprise product, sold largely by quote with seat minimums, and its Sidekick AI is billed per conversation or resolution on top. That positioning fits its customer base of consumer brands that treat support as a loyalty channel, including Crate and Barrel, Ulta Beauty, and Breeze Airways.
The through-line here is emotional as much as it is technical: Gladly wants every interaction to feel like talking to a company that genuinely remembers you and your history. If you sell to consumers who expect a personal, continuous relationship rather than a cold, fresh ticket every single time they reach out, Gladly and its Sidekick agent are built from top to bottom around exactly that promise.
Read the full Gladly Sidekick listing → · See Gladly Sidekick alternatives →
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