Freshdesk 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
Both sides assessedFreshdesk compared with Gorgias
Gorgias is a Shopify-native ecommerce help desk where order lookup, refunds, and cancellations happen inside the reply pane, and it bills by ticket rather than by seat. Freshdesk is a general help desk that can be pointed at ecommerce with marketplace apps. If you are a DTC brand on Shopify and most tickets are 'where is my order', Gorgias will pay for itself on handling time alone. If you sell software, services, or anything with a support relationship that outlives the transaction, Freshdesk is the more sensible general-purpose base.
Gorgias compared with Freshdesk
Freshdesk is the cheap generalist: low per-agent prices from $19 and a broad feature set that works for any industry, though its free plan has gone. Gorgias is the expensive specialist that pays for itself only if your tickets are attached to orders. If you have three permanent agents and modest volume, Freshdesk costs less and does more categories of thing. If you have fluctuating headcount and thousands of order-related tickets a month, Gorgias's ticket meter and Shopify actions win on both cost and handle time.
Choose Freshdesk if
Small and mid-sized teams that genuinely want ticketing rather than a shared inbox: 3 to 50 agents, structured queues, SLA obligations to customers, and enough process that dispatcher rules and skill-based routing earn their keep. It is strongest for a team that wants one vendor covering support, a customer portal, and eventually IT service management, and that is comfortable modelling an AI meter rather than a flat bill.
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 | Freshdesk | Gorgias |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Support | Support |
| Starting price | $19 per agent per month (Growth, billed annually) (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 | Per-agent subscription across three tiers, quoted per agent per month on annual billing, plus a metered customer-facing AI charge and a per-seat agent-facing AI add-on. Occasional agents can be covered by day passes instead of seats. | 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 | None. The pricing page lists only Growth, Pro and Enterprise, and Freshworks answers the question in its own FAQ: the no-cost route is a 14-day trial on the Enterprise plan, after which an unpaid account is suspended. Both the old permanently free agent tier and the later six-month Free Program have gone from the page, so a shortlist built on Freshdesk being free needs rebuilding. | No |
| Free trial | 14 days on the Enterprise plan, no credit card required at signup | 7 days, capped at 10 email ticket messages |
| Best for | Small and mid-sized teams that genuinely want ticketing rather than a shared inbox: 3 to 50 agents, structured queues, SLA obligations to customers, and enough process that dispatcher rules and skill-based routing earn their keep. It is strongest for a team that wants one vendor covering support, a customer portal, and eventually IT service management, and that is comfortable modelling an AI meter rather than a flat bill. | 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 | A working queue in about an hour: forward your support address, verify the domain, invite agents, and set business hours. A properly configured instance takes one to two weeks, because the value is in the dispatcher rules, SLA policies, ticket fields, and knowledge base structure, and those are decisions rather than settings. | 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 | Moderate for agents, who mostly need to learn statuses, canned responses, and when to use a private note. Steeper for whoever owns admin: three rule engines, SLA policies, routing, portal theming, and the marketplace add up to a real configuration surface, and a badly-set dispatcher rule silently misroutes tickets for weeks. | 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, iOS, Android, Customer portal on your own domain, Embeddable help widget | Web app, iOS, Android, Embeddable chat widget, Shopify app, BigCommerce app, Adobe Commerce module |
| Compliance | SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA (available on higher tiers under a BAA) | SOC 2 Type II (report available on request via the trust center), HIPAA capability documented in the trust center, GDPR |
| Founded | 2010 | 2015 |
| Headquarters | San Mateo, California, United States (with major operations in Chennai, India) | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Ownership | Public company (NASDAQ: FRSH) | Venture-backed, independent |
Strengths and limitations
Freshdesk
Strengths
- Real ticketing depth at a small-business price: three separate rule engines, multiple SLA policies with their own business-hours calendars, and skill-based routing on Enterprise.
- Day passes at $2 to $12 solve the part-timer problem that almost every per-seat competitor forces you to overpay for, and 5,000 external collaborators on Pro means occasional internal contributors cost nothing.
- The knowledge base publishes to your own domain with your own branding and is crawlable, so self-service accumulates organic search value rather than sitting behind a vendor subdomain.
- Backed by a public company with $838.8 million of 2025 revenue, 67,000-plus customers, and roughly 4,500 employees, which is the lowest vendor-continuity risk in this category.
Limitations
- The bill is not predictable. Freddy AI Agent at $49 per 100 sessions ties your invoice to your ticket volume, and at 2,000 tickets a month the AI charge exceeds the seat charge for a five-person team.
- Freddy AI Copilot is a separate $29 per agent per month and does not exist on Growth, so the honest cost of an AI-assisted agent is $84 a month, not $19.
- There is no free plan left. The permanently free three-agent tier went first, the six-month Free Program went after it, and what remains is a 14-day Enterprise trial that suspends the account if nobody pays.
- The Freshdesk versus Freshdesk Omni split is confusing and expensive to get wrong; chat, messaging, and telephony are not in the product called Freshdesk.
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
Freshdesk
Per-agent subscription across three tiers, quoted per agent per month on annual billing, plus a metered customer-facing AI charge and a per-seat agent-facing AI add-on. Occasional agents can be covered by day passes instead of seats.
- Growth$19
- Pro$55
- Enterprise$89
Per seat, Freshdesk is one of the better deals in customer support: $55 for multiple SLA policies, intelligent routing, custom dashboards, a multilingual portal, and 5,000 external collaborators is more capability per dollar than Zendesk Suite Team at a similar price, and the day-pass mechanism is genuinely useful for a team with irregular cover. Per resolution, the picture inverts. Once you are deflecting seriously, the Freddy meter is the dominant line on the invoice and it grows with the same volume the tool exists to absorb. Freshdesk is excellent value if you are buying seats and process, and only average value if you are buying automation, because the automation is the part you rent by the unit.
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
Freshdesk
Freshdesk is the best per-seat value among serious ticketing help desks, and the day-pass and external-collaborator mechanics make it unusually kind to small teams with irregular coverage. Pro at $55 buys multiple SLA policies, intelligent routing, custom dashboards, and a branded multilingual help centre from a public company that will still exist in five years. The catch is structural, not incidental: the AI is metered, at $49 per 100 sessions plus $29 a seat for Copilot, and at any real deflection volume that meter becomes the largest line on your invoice. Buy Freshdesk if you want disciplined ticketing with process you can enforce and you are willing to model an AI bill that grows with your ticket count. Look at LiveAgent or Help Scout instead if you want a flat number you can forecast, or if your customers should never feel like they have been assigned a ticket ID.
Read the full Freshdesk 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 profileFreshdesk 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 Freshdesk and Gorgias?
Gorgias is a Shopify-native ecommerce help desk where order lookup, refunds, and cancellations happen inside the reply pane, and it bills by ticket rather than by seat. Freshdesk is a general help desk that can be pointed at ecommerce with marketplace apps. If you are a DTC brand on Shopify and most tickets are 'where is my order', Gorgias will pay for itself on handling time alone. If you sell software, services, or anything with a support relationship that outlives the transaction, Freshdesk is the more sensible general-purpose base.
Is Freshdesk or Gorgias cheaper?
Freshdesk starts at $19 per agent per month (Growth, billed annually) (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. Freshdesk pricing model: Per-agent subscription across three tiers, quoted per agent per month on annual billing, plus a metered customer-facing AI charge and a per-seat agent-facing AI add-on. Occasional agents can be covered by day passes instead of seats. 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 Freshdesk or Gorgias have a free plan?
Freshdesk has a free plan. None. The pricing page lists only Growth, Pro and Enterprise, and Freshworks answers the question in its own FAQ: the no-cost route is a 14-day trial on the Enterprise plan, after which an unpaid account is suspended. Trial terms: 14 days on the Enterprise plan, no credit card required at signup. Gorgias has no free plan. Trial terms: 7 days, capped at 10 email ticket messages.
Who should choose Freshdesk?
Small and mid-sized teams that genuinely want ticketing rather than a shared inbox: 3 to 50 agents, structured queues, SLA obligations to customers, and enough process that dispatcher rules and skill-based routing earn their keep. It is strongest for a team that wants one vendor covering support, a customer portal, and eventually IT service management, and that is comfortable modelling an AI meter rather than a flat bill.
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 Freshdesk 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.
