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 (Starter, 50 tickets, 3 seats) (7 days trial).

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.

The short answer

Both sides assessed

Freshdesk 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: a free tier, low per-agent prices, and a broad feature set that works for any industry. 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 (Starter, 50 tickets, 3 seats) (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, with a separate usage meter for AI Agent resolutions and further usage-based add-ons for voice and SMS.
Free plan	A Free Program advertised as $0 for one or two users for six months. The old permanently free three-agent tier is no longer the offer, so treat this as an extended trial rather than a plan you can build on.	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.
The permanently free tier is gone. What remains is described as $0 for one or two users for six months, which is a trial with a long fuse, not a plan.
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 and Basic quietly undermines the marketing claim of never charging per agent, and pushing to Pro for a fourth agent is a jump from $60 to $360.
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, with a separate usage meter for AI Agent resolutions and further usage-based add-ons for voice and SMS.

Starter$10
Basic$60
Pro$360
Advanced$900
EnterpriseCustom

For a Shopify store doing 1,000 to 3,000 tickets a month with a fluctuating agent count, Gorgias is the best-priced serious help desk on the market, and it is not close: Pro at $360 with unlimited seats beats six or eight Help Scout seats plus a Shopify connector, and the order actions save real minutes per ticket. Below about 300 tickets a month the calculation inverts, because you are paying a platform fee to answer a volume that a shared Gmail with labels handles for nothing. And the AI Agent should be judged as a separate purchase with its own business case, not as a feature of the plan: at roughly a dollar a resolution it is priced like a contractor, and it deserves the same scrutiny you would give one.

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 profile

Gorgias

Gorgias is the right answer for Shopify stores and close to the wrong answer for everyone else. The ticket meter and unlimited seats above Pro 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 roughly $0.90 a resolution 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 treat the AI as a separate purchase with its own business case. 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 profile

Freshdesk profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Gorgias last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.