Crisp vs Gorgias
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
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The short answer
Editorial assessmentGorgias compared with Crisp
Crisp charges a flat monthly fee per workspace with AI bundled, which makes it dramatically more predictable than Gorgias's stack of meters and cheaper at almost any volume. What it does not have is native Shopify order actions, revenue attribution, or the commerce app ecosystem. Choose Crisp when budget certainty is the binding constraint and your agents can live with a browser tab open to the store admin; choose Gorgias when the time saved per ticket by acting in place is worth the variable bill.
Choose Crisp if
Small and mid-sized teams (roughly 3 to 25 agents) that want chat-led, multi-channel support with AI automation included, care more about a predictable monthly bill than about polish, and would rather buy one $95 workspace than ten $25 seats.
Choose Gorgias if
Direct-to-consumer Shopify stores doing between a few hundred and a few thousand support conversations a month, especially ones with seasonal volume spikes and a part-time or agency support rota, where most tickets are order-status, returns, and exchanges and where the fastest fix is an agent acting on the order from inside the ticket.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Crisp | Gorgias |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Support | Support |
| Starting price | $45/mo flat (Mini, 4 seats included) (free plan available) | $10 per month for the help desk alone (Starter, 50 tickets, 3 seats), or $40 with AI Agent included (7 days trial) |
| Pricing model | Flat monthly price per workspace across four tiers (Free, Mini, Essentials, Plus) with a block of seats included in each and additional agents at $10 per month, plus a bundled AI credit allowance per tier. Monthly or yearly billing; Enterprise is quoted. | Volume-based subscription metered by billable tickets rather than agent seats, now quoted as a combined price for the help desk plus AI Agent. The pricing page splits each plan into a Helpdesk component and an AI Agent component, bundles a number of automated interactions into each tier, and meters anything beyond the allowance per ticket or per interaction. Voice and SMS are separate usage-based add-ons. |
| Free plan | Free tier for 2 seats: basic shared inbox, chat widget, and mobile apps, with no AI credits included. | No |
| Free trial | 14 days, all features, no credit card required | 7 days, capped at 10 email ticket messages |
| Best for | Small and mid-sized teams (roughly 3 to 25 agents) that want chat-led, multi-channel support with AI automation included, care more about a predictable monthly bill than about polish, and would rather buy one $95 workspace than ten $25 seats. | Direct-to-consumer Shopify stores doing between a few hundred and a few thousand support conversations a month, especially ones with seasonal volume spikes and a part-time or agency support rota, where most tickets are order-status, returns, and exchanges and where the fastest fix is an agent acting on the order from inside the ticket. |
| Setup time | Under an hour for a live widget and a connected mailbox, especially through the Shopify or WordPress plugins. Adding WhatsApp and Instagram, writing the knowledge base, training the AI model, and building bot flows is more like one to two weeks, most of it content work. | Half a day to be answering tickets, one to two weeks to be answering them well. Connecting the store and forwarding the support address is quick; building the macro library, the rules, and the help center content that actually reduces handle time is the part teams underestimate. |
| Learning curve | Low for agents, moderate for the person building bots. The drag-and-drop builder is approachable but the confidence thresholds, fallback paths, and training-source management need deliberate testing before you let a bot answer customers unsupervised. | Low for agents, who mostly need to learn that the order actions are in the sidebar. Moderate for the person who owns the account, because Rules, Macros, Views, and AI Guidance interact, and a badly written auto-reply Rule can make otherwise free tickets billable. |
| Platforms | Web app, Windows and macOS desktop apps, iOS and Android apps, Chat widget in 50 languages, REST API, JavaScript and mobile SDKs | Web app, iOS, Android, Embeddable chat widget, Shopify app, BigCommerce app, Adobe Commerce module |
| Compliance | GDPR handling as a French company operating under EU law, Formal certification evidence (for example a SOC 2 report or trust portal) is not prominently published on public pages | SOC 2 Type II (report available on request via the trust center), HIPAA capability documented in the trust center, GDPR |
| Founded | 2015 | 2015 |
| Headquarters | Nantes, France (office opened 2018; remote-first, globally distributed team) | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Ownership | Bootstrapped, 100% founder-owned | Venture-backed, independent |
Strengths and limitations
Crisp
Strengths
- Flat workspace pricing with included seat blocks, which breaks the per-agent cost curve that makes support software expensive as a team grows.
- AI is bundled as credits rather than metered per resolution, so successful deflection lowers your cost per conversation instead of raising your bill.
- The widget is the most feature-dense at this price: co-browsing, video and audio calls with screen sharing, MagicType, rich media, and 50 languages.
- Genuinely broad scope for one subscription: inbox, chat, bot builder, knowledge base, CRM, campaigns, and analytics, where competitors sell several of those separately.
Limitations
- AI credit consumption is published only as approximate dollar equivalents and conversation counts, which is friendlier than per-resolution pricing but harder to forecast precisely or audit after the fact.
- The free tier has no AI credits and only 2 seats, so it is not a realistic long-term home the way Chatwoot's or Tidio's free plans can be.
- A team of roughly 20 to 30 people cannot match the documentation, help content, or support responsiveness of vendors ten times the size, and it shows.
- Enterprise compliance evidence is thin on public pages: no prominently published SOC 2 report, certification portal, or data-residency options, which will stall a formal security review.
Gorgias
Strengths
- The only mainstream help desk that does not price by seat above the entry tiers, which is a structural advantage for stores with seasonal, part-time, or agency support staffing.
- Shopify actions inside the ticket are the real product. Refunding, cancelling, and editing orders without leaving the conversation removes the tab-switching that is most of the actual work in ecommerce support.
- Revenue statistics attribute sales back to support conversations, which is the single most useful reporting feature in this category and is not offered by Help Scout, Freshdesk, or Front.
- Honest AI billing boundary: you are charged for a conversation the AI resolves or for the human ticket it becomes, not for both.
Limitations
- The AI Agent requires Shopify. BigCommerce, Adobe Commerce, and WooCommerce merchants get the 2022 help desk while paying for a company whose entire current positioning is the AI.
- Two meters running at once makes the bill hard to forecast, and voice and SMS add two more. Budgeting for Gorgias is a modelling exercise, not a line item.
- The three-seat cap on Starter quietly undermines the marketing claim of never charging per agent, and the fourth seat means moving to Basic. Gorgias lifted Basic to 500 seats in 2026, so the old $60 to $360 jump for a fourth agent has gone.
- Nothing here fits non-commerce businesses. Strip out the order object and you have an ordinary shared inbox priced against a commerce feature set you cannot use.
Pricing compared
Crisp
Flat monthly price per workspace across four tiers (Free, Mini, Essentials, Plus) with a block of seats included in each and additional agents at $10 per month, plus a bundled AI credit allowance per tier. Monthly or yearly billing; Enterprise is quoted.
- Free$0
- Mini$45
- Essentials$95
- Plus$295
- EnterpriseCustom
On raw capability per dollar Crisp is the best value in this category and it is not particularly close. Essentials at $95 a month covers ten seats, every channel, a knowledge base, a trained AI bot, and campaigns; the equivalent team on a per-seat platform with per-resolution AI would spend three to five times that. The bundled AI credits are the sharpest contrast: Help Scout charges $0.75 for every AI resolution while Crisp includes roughly 450 automated conversations in the $95 tier. What you trade away is polish, documentation depth, enterprise compliance evidence, and the reassurance of a large vendor. If your evaluation is a spreadsheet, Crisp wins; if it is a procurement review, it may not survive one.
Gorgias
Volume-based subscription metered by billable tickets rather than agent seats, now quoted as a combined price for the help desk plus AI Agent. The pricing page splits each plan into a Helpdesk component and an AI Agent component, bundles a number of automated interactions into each tier, and meters anything beyond the allowance per ticket or per interaction. Voice and SMS are separate usage-based add-ons.
- Starter$40
- Basic$90
- Pro$550
- Advanced$1,430
- CustomCustom
For a Shopify store doing 1,000 to 3,000 tickets a month with a fluctuating agent count, Gorgias remains the best-priced serious help desk on the market: the help desk component of Pro is $360 a month with 500 seats, which beats six or eight Help Scout seats plus a Shopify connector, and the order actions save real minutes per ticket. Two things changed in 2026 and both matter to the arithmetic. The AI Agent is now part of the headline price rather than a separate purchase, which makes Gorgias look more expensive at a glance and is genuinely cheaper for anyone who was going to buy it anyway: $30 a month on Basic replaces what used to be quoted as a commitment of a few hundred. And the Pro and Advanced overage rate is $36 per 100 tickets rather than $0.25 a ticket, so the penalty for outgrowing an allowance is 44 percent steeper than our previous figure. Below about 300 tickets a month the whole calculation still inverts, because you are paying a platform fee to answer a volume that a shared inbox handles for nothing.
Editorial verdict on each
Crisp
Crisp is the value play in customer support software, and its flat per-workspace pricing with bundled AI credits looks better every quarter that competitors push further into per-resolution billing. The widget is genuinely the best in this price range, the scope covers products that other vendors sell separately, and being bootstrapped means the pricing is unlikely to be re-engineered against you. The costs are real too: thin compliance evidence, a support and documentation operation sized for a 25-person company, and a steep jump to the $295 tier for features small teams reasonably expect. If you are a chat-led team of five to twenty who will never face a formal security review, Crisp is the shortlist leader. If your buyer is a CISO, look at Help Scout instead.
Read the full Crisp profileGorgias
Gorgias is the right answer for Shopify stores and close to the wrong answer for everyone else. The ticket meter and the 500 seats on every plan above Starter genuinely suit a support team whose headcount moves with the season, the order actions inside the ticket save minutes on every conversation that a general help desk cannot, and revenue attribution is the only reporting feature in this bracket that lets a support lead argue in the language finance speaks. What has to be modelled before you buy is the second meter: at $0.85 to $1.00 a resolution beyond a small bundled allowance, the AI Agent can cost more than the help desk itself, and it does not run on BigCommerce or Magento at all, which makes the 2026 marketing story inapplicable to a meaningful chunk of the addressable market. Buy it if you are on Shopify, doing more than a few hundred tickets a month, and willing to judge the AI component on its own business case even though it now arrives bundled in the plan price. Skip it if your customers do not have order numbers, if your volume is small enough that a shared Gmail still works, or if a variable invoice is something your finance team will not tolerate.
Read the full Gorgias profileCrisp profile last reviewed 2026-10-01; Gorgias last reviewed 2026-10-01. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.
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Frequently asked questions
6 questionsWhat is the difference between Crisp and Gorgias?
Crisp charges a flat monthly fee per workspace with AI bundled, which makes it dramatically more predictable than Gorgias's stack of meters and cheaper at almost any volume. What it does not have is native Shopify order actions, revenue attribution, or the commerce app ecosystem. Choose Crisp when budget certainty is the binding constraint and your agents can live with a browser tab open to the store admin; choose Gorgias when the time saved per ticket by acting in place is worth the variable bill.
Is Crisp or Gorgias cheaper?
Crisp starts at $45/mo flat (Mini, 4 seats included) (free plan available). Gorgias starts at $10 per month for the help desk alone (Starter, 50 tickets, 3 seats), or $40 with AI Agent included (7 days trial). The billing models differ, so the entry price is rarely the whole cost. Crisp pricing model: Flat monthly price per workspace across four tiers (Free, Mini, Essentials, Plus) with a block of seats included in each and additional agents at $10 per month, plus a bundled AI credit allowance per tier. Gorgias pricing model: Volume-based subscription metered by billable tickets rather than agent seats, now quoted as a combined price for the help desk plus AI Agent.
Does Crisp or Gorgias have a free plan?
Crisp has a free plan. Free tier for 2 seats: basic shared inbox, chat widget, and mobile apps, with no AI credits included. Trial terms: 14 days, all features, no credit card required. Gorgias has no free plan. Trial terms: 7 days, capped at 10 email ticket messages.
Who should choose Crisp?
Small and mid-sized teams (roughly 3 to 25 agents) that want chat-led, multi-channel support with AI automation included, care more about a predictable monthly bill than about polish, and would rather buy one $95 workspace than ten $25 seats.
Who should choose Gorgias?
Direct-to-consumer Shopify stores doing between a few hundred and a few thousand support conversations a month, especially ones with seasonal volume spikes and a part-time or agency support rota, where most tickets are order-status, returns, and exchanges and where the fastest fix is an agent acting on the order from inside the ticket.
What are the best alternatives to Crisp and Gorgias?
SaaSTracker profiles 27 products in Customer Support Platforms. The Summer 2026 awards in the category went to Help Scout (Category Leader), tawk.to (Best Value), Plain (Momentum). Every profile is compiled from primary sources, so a shortlist can be built from pricing, limitations, and fit rather than from star ratings.
