Gladly and Gorgias both target retail and e-commerce, yet they model support differently. Gorgias is ticket-first and Shopify-native at an SMB-friendly price, while Gladly ditches tickets for one lifelong customer thread and prices per seat toward the premium end. High-touch brands that value relationships lean Gladly; high-volume stores watching cost per ticket lean Gorgias.
| Attribute | Gladly Sidekick | Gorgias |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Paid · ~$180/seat/mo | Paid · $10/mo |
| Founded | 2014 | 2015 |
| Categories | AI Agents & Chatbots E-commerce Support Help Desk & Ticketing | AI Agents & Chatbots E-commerce Support Help Desk & Ticketing |
| Integrations | Shopify Salesforce Zendesk Twilio Amazon Connect Slack | Shopify Klaviyo Instagram WhatsApp Slack Recharge |
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.
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Gorgias is a help desk built specifically for online stores, and it knows its lane cold. It integrates deeply with Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento, so its AI Agent can answer customer emails and chats about orders, shipping, returns, and products using live store data, then take real actions like editing an order or issuing a refund right inside the ticket. A Copilot assists human agents with drafts and summaries, and because Gorgias tracks the revenue that support conversations drive, it treats your help desk as a place that can make money, not just spend it.
The origin story is delightfully accidental. Gorgias started in Paris in 2015 as a humble Chrome extension for email templates, until the founders noticed that support agents were the ones actually using it and pivoted the whole company toward them. It shares its name with Gorgias of Leontini, the ancient Greek orator immortalized in one of Plato's dialogues, a fittingly talkative namesake for a conversation platform. Today it is a certified B Corporation and Shopify's only Premier Partner for customer experience, powering a large share of the biggest Shopify brands.
That focus has won a who's who of direct-to-consumer names, including Steve Madden, Glossier, Dr. Bronner's, and Marine Layer, with more than sixteen thousand brands on board in total. Pricing starts at just ten dollars a month and is based on ticket volume with unlimited users, so growing teams are not punished for adding people, and the AI Agent is billed per resolved conversation.
Its 2.0 release added a shopping assistant, image analysis, and cart-recovery flows in more than eighty languages, pushing Gorgias further into the world of support-driven selling. For any e-commerce brand living on Shopify that wants an AI agent tuned to the specific rhythms of online retail rather than a generic one, Gorgias is the obvious specialist pick.
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