Gorgias vs Zendesk: Which tool is right for you?

Both Zendesk and Gorgias promise to streamline your customer service — so it’s little wonder that choosing between them can be challenging to say the least. However, with a little thought over your budget and the features you need in a help desk solution, you can easily land on the right one for you. 

Zendesk is a popular customer support software with over 170,000 users. Brands across industries, including e-commerce, healthcare, and finance, use it to offer better customer service. Gorgias is not as famous as Zendesk, but with more than 15,000 users worldwide, it’s no small player. A solid lineup of features also makes it a powerful rival built for online merchants.

In this article, we take a deep dive into both platforms to understand their capabilities, limitations, and differences — helping you make an informed decision for your business. 

What is Gorgias?

Gorgias is an e-commerce customer service platform that focuses on the needs of online sellers. It connects seamlessly with platforms that most online brands use, like WooCommerce, Shopify, and BigCommerce. With these integrations, merchants can manage customer support across multiple e-commerce platforms — all from one place. 

Key features

Gorgias has numerous features, but we’ve listed the major ones below.

Robust automation

Gorgias automates manual tasks to speed up customer service operations and boost your team’s productivity. Some automatable processes in the platform include

• Assigning tickets: A generalist support agent manually escalating customer issues to specialized teams can delay resolution times. Gorgias can automatically assign incoming tickets to the right agent or team. 
• Responding to customers through voice support: Interactive voice response (IVR) can answer basic questions without the customer talking to a human agent. It can also automatically route clients to the appropriate support agent. 
• Tagging tickets: Gorgias can automatically label incoming tickets based on communication channel, tone, content, and more. 

Artificial intelligence-powered responses

Gorgias has an artificial intelligence (AI) agent that answers customer emails with human-like empathy and personalization. Your support team is then free to focus on complex issues rather than wasting time on basic ones that AI can resolve automatically. 

Centralized interactions

You can manage all customer interactions in a single place. Gorgias brings conversations together in one interface by integrating with multiple communication channels, including email, live chat, social media, WhatsApp, and text message. This omnichannel support allows your team to answer customers quickly without switching between communication tools slowing things down. 

Insightful support analytics

Gorgias enables you to track support performance using metrics like first response time and ticket resolution time. These kinds of analytics help you improve your team’s efficiency — optimizing your customer experience. 

Limitations of Gorgias

Since Gorgias is designed for e-commerce, it’s a great customer support platform for online brands. However, this does mean that businesses in other sectors, such as healthcare and finance, may not find the integrations and features they need. 

What’s more, Gorgias has limited customization options, as it focuses on serving small and midsize businesses specifically. Large brand with complex customer support workflows? You’re probably going to want to look for a tech solution that can be modified to meet your unique needs.

What is Zendesk?

Zendesk is a multi-industry help desk solution. Whether you’re in banking, aviation, software, or any other sector, you can use it to manage your customer support. 

The tool is also scalable. In other words, it works just as well for small brands as it does for large enterprises. That goes some way to explaining why Zendesk is one of the most prominent players in the customer service industry. 

Key features

Zendesk streamlines your customer support function. Users can manage tickets efficiently, automate responses to save time, and handle customer inquiries across multiple channels. Below are just a few of its standout features.

Automation tools

Zendesk automation lets you personalize support, respond to customers around the clock, and resolve issues quickly without overwhelming your team. Automation tools in the platform include

• AI agents: These can answer frequently asked questions (FAQs), help customers troubleshoot issues, and process refunds. Use them to leverage AI in customer service. 
• Automated ticketing systems: Using the power of AI, Zendesk routes customer tickets to the agent best equipped to handle a particular issue. This speeds up resolution times and improves your customer experience. 
• IVR tool: Zendesk offers automated software that can direct callers to the right agent, accept payments, and answer FAQs using pre-recorded responses. 

Advanced analytics and reporting

Zendesk provides data to measure customer experience when people interact with your support team. You can track performance in two ways: 

1. Use pre-built dashboards with best-practice customer service metrics.
2. Create custom reports and dashboards based on the metrics that matter most to your business.

Omnichannel support

Zendesk integrates multiple communication channels into one platform. You can manage voice, text message, email, live chat, and social media customer interactions in a central place. This also means that your support agents can see a complete record of a customer’s past interactions, no matter where they happened, and get the context they need to quickly offer help. 

Self-service options

With Zendesk, your customers can get what they need without ever engaging a human agent. One way to achieve this on the platform is by creating a centralized data hub where AI automatically pulls information based on user demands.

Another way is building an online community forum where customers interact and help each other solve issues. As a result, you reduce your team’s help desk workload. 

Limitations of Zendesk

Zendesk has numerous enterprise-level features and integrations — great news for brands with large teams, complex support workflows, and big budgets. However, small business owners who only need a fraction of Zendesk’s capabilities might find it overwhelming. They may even end up paying for features they don’t use. 

With such a vast number of tools and customization options, setting up Zendesk in your business may take days or even weeks. And then, of course, you have to master all the features, which can further eat into your time. 

Gorgias vs Zendesk: Feature comparison

So, Zendesk vs Gorgias — how do they compare?

Automation, AI, and self-service capabilities

Zendesk and Gorgias users can set triggers (macros) to automate customer service tasks, like replying to customers and routing tickets. They can also use AI to hold human-like conversations with customers over email and automate common inquiries using chatbots. 

With either tool, you can build knowledge bases or help centers where customers receive AI recommendations. But one self-service feature sets the two apart: Zendesk users can create community forums, where Gorgias fans cannot. 

Omnichannel support

Zendesk and Gorgias both allow users to centralize communications channels. They support email, live chat, phone (voice), and social media. However, Zendesk has built-in voice support, while Gorgias offers it as an add-on. Add-ons usually come with additional set-up procedures and an extra fee on top of what you pay for using the platform. 

It’s also worth noting that Zendesk integrates with Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and X, whereas Gorgias only connects with the first three channels. 

Integration

As a help desk solution for online merchants, Gorgias offers deep integration with over 100 applications as well as e-commerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce. This enables direct order management within the customer support software.

On the other hand, Zendesk integrates with more than 1,800 applications that address different business needs. With such a wide range of integrations, you can build a customer support system that meets your unique requirements. 

Customization

Gorgias offers basic workspace customization. For instance, you can organize your tickets based on topics, language, channel, and urgency. Personalizing your help center with custom themes, fonts, and layouts inside the platform is easy, but more advanced tailoring requires technical knowledge. 

Zendesk offers more customization options, which include

• Personalized knowledge base templates: Design your help center with a custom theme and simple editor.
• Custom workspace: Modify your ticket based on conditions that matter most to your business.
• Custom metrics: Choose the key performance indicators to use in reports.

Reporting and analytics

To track team performance, channel activity, or customer behavior, Zendesk users can use pre-built or custom reports. 

Meanwhile, Gorgias only has pre-built reports with basic filters and no custom analytics. That means you can’t personalize metrics in reports — you can only use those available on the platform. 

Gorgias vs Zendesk: Pricing plans

Gorgias and Zendesk have different pricing models, which can influence your chosen tool. 

Gorgias

Gorgias uses ticket-based pricing. Instead of charging per user (each agent in your customer support team that uses the platform), you pay for every ticket answered by an agent or an automation rule. 

In other words, how much you pay depends on your average monthly tickets, not the size of your support team. Gorgias has five pricing plans: 

The price for these packages increases if you use automated tickets. Each plan comes with a free trial. 

Zendesk

Zendesk uses seat-based pricing, which is less complex and more predictable than a ticket-based model. You pay for every customer support team member who uses the platform.  

Gorgias vs Zendesk: User reviews and ratings

It’s all well and good for us to tell you about Zendesk and Gorgias, but what do actual users say about the two platforms? 

Zendesk

Some reviewers praise Zendesk for its multichannel support, which allows teams to manage tickets from different channels in a central place. Others say that setting it up was simple. They also appreciate that organizations, big or small, can tailor the solution to their needs. 

Many people liked Zendesk’s automation capabilities, robust ticketing systems, and wide range of integrations. However, the platform has its fair share of criticism. Some reviewers complain that Zendesk has a steep learning curve, and its support agents are often slow or unresponsive. 

G2 rating: 4.3/5 based on 6,496 reviews

Gorgias

Many Gorgias customers find the platform to be user-friendly because it’s easy to implement. New users also master the tool quickly, making it intuitive. Some have praised it for integrating seamlessly with various channels and centralizing customer interactions. 

Where there are complaints, they mostly revolve around limited integrations compared to other help desk solutions. Others say that they’d like to create custom reports in the platform, which is currently unavailable. 

G2 rating: 4.6/5 based on 520 reviews

Choosing the right platform for your business

Gorgias and Zendesk are powerful customer service tools. But each is better suited to particular circumstances. 

Choose Gorgias if

• You run an online business.
• You want a software solution that deeply integrates with e-commerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce.
• You want to unify customer interactions in a platform streamlined for e-commerce workflows.

Choose Zendesk if

• You’re not an e-commerce brand.
• You’re looking for a help desk system with comprehensive, scalable features.
• You need extensive customization options to meet your unique business needs.
• You want advanced analytics, reporting, and AI capabilities in your customer support software.

Enhancing customer support with Jotform

One of the most intriguing features of both tools is AI. After all, AI agents can streamline customer support through personalized, engaging conversations. And if it’s AI agents you’re after, we’d like to introduce you to a third platform: Jotform.

Jotform AI Agents are trained on your business data, whether that’s documents about your brand or URLs on your website. That way, they can ask relevant questions and answer your customers’ queries accurately — without the involvement of your support team. All it takes is a few simple steps: 

1. Start from scratch, use an existing form, or pick a template.
2. Train the AI with documents or URLs.
3. Customize it using the Agent Builder, where you can personalize your AI agents to fit your needs and streamline the data collection and interaction process.

Jotform offers over 7,000 AI agent templates, each serving a specific purpose. For instance, you can collect feedback about your team’s performance with customer service and support AI agents. There’s also Jotform’s Customer Service Feedback AI Agent, which can ask for thoughts on service quality using online forms, revealing areas of improvement.

Once customers submit the forms, they’re automatically sent to Jotform Tables. Here you can easily track and manage submissions, and visualize the data. Again, there are a range of table templates to help you get started quickly, including customer relationship management table templates. From there, you can carry out several tasks, including

• Adding and organizing columns 
• Tracking payments and viewing incomplete payments
• Adding different views 
• Embedding form submissions into a website 

Start using Jotform for free today to see how it could change the way you offer customer support. 

Photo by Los Muertos Crew