Comparing Gladly Sidekick and Kore.ai? 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 | Gladly Sidekick | Kore.ai |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Paid · ~$180/seat/mo | Paid · Custom |
| Founded | 2014 | 2014 |
| Categories | AI Agents & Chatbots E-commerce Support Help Desk & Ticketing | AI Agents & Chatbots Enterprise Voice & Phone AI |
| Integrations | Shopify Salesforce Zendesk Twilio Amazon Connect Slack | Genesys Amazon Connect Salesforce ServiceNow Twilio Zendesk |
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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Kore.ai is an enterprise platform for building and orchestrating AI agents, with customer experience as one of its flagship uses. Teams design agents using no-code visual tools or pro-code SDKs, deploy them across web chat, messaging, voice, and contact-center channels, and manage them with the security and analytics a large organization demands. Its agentic contact-center suite spans intelligent self-service, AI-powered routing, and real-time agent assist, and a growing set of prebuilt vertical apps for banking, healthcare, retail, HR, and IT gives buyers a running start instead of a blank canvas.
The scale here is the headline. Kore.ai says its platform automates more than a billion interactions a year and has delivered over a billion dollars in cumulative customer cost savings, and it has been named a leader in independent analyst evaluations of conversational AI and cognitive search. Its newer generative application platform, GALE, and an AI-first agent platform push the product deeper into the agentic era.
There is a nice against-the-grain story to the company, too. Kore.ai was founded in 2014 by serial entrepreneur Raj Koneru, whose resume includes four earlier companies, and it grew up not in Silicon Valley but in Orlando, Florida, only later opening a West Coast office. It has raised well over four hundred million dollars across its rounds, including a 2026 growth investment, and became a launch partner for Microsoft's agent ecosystem while earning agentic credentials with AWS.
Big names like AT&T, Coca-Cola, and Airbus are among the hundreds of Global 2000 enterprises it serves, and pricing is entirely custom, scaled to the sessions, seats, and add-ons a given deployment needs. For large organizations that want a single, proven platform to build and run both customer-facing and employee-facing agents across every channel, without stitching together half a dozen point tools, Kore.ai is a serious heavyweight worth putting on the shortlist and taking for a proper test drive.
Read the full Kore.ai listing → · See Kore.ai alternatives →
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