Gorgias vs Help Scout
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 Help Scout
Help Scout is the better product for making support feel like a human wrote it, and the better fit for B2B and services companies, but it charges per seat and then charges again per AI resolution. Gorgias inverts the seat model and adds commerce actions Help Scout has no equivalent for. A five-agent B2B SaaS team should take Help Scout; a five-agent Shopify store answering returns and order status should take Gorgias, and the deciding question is simply whether your customers have order numbers.
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.
Choose Help Scout if
Small and mid-sized teams (roughly 2 to 50 support seats) whose support is relationship-heavy and email-led: B2B SaaS, agencies, healthcare, education, and ecommerce brands that want conversations to feel personal and can live without enterprise workflow engines or an omnichannel command centre.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Gorgias | Help Scout |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Support | Support |
| Starting price | $10 per month for the help desk alone (Starter, 50 tickets, 3 seats), or $40 with AI Agent included (7 days trial) | $21/user/mo (Standard, billed annually; $25 monthly) (free plan available) |
| 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. 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. | Per-seat subscription across four tiers (Free, Standard, Plus, Pro) with roughly 16% off on annual billing, plus separate usage-based billing for AI Answers at $0.75 per resolution and per-unit add-ons for extra inboxes and Docs sites. |
| Free plan | No | Free tier for up to 5 users: 1 Inbox, 1 Docs site, 100 contacts per month, 10 saved replies, 10 tags. |
| Free trial | 7 days, capped at 10 email ticket messages | Free plan available indefinitely; paid plans offer a free trial, and AI Answers includes a 3-month unlimited trial |
| Best for | 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. | Small and mid-sized teams (roughly 2 to 50 support seats) whose support is relationship-heavy and email-led: B2B SaaS, agencies, healthcare, education, and ecommerce brands that want conversations to feel personal and can live without enterprise workflow engines or an omnichannel command centre. |
| Setup time | 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. | A working shared inbox in under an hour: forward or connect the mailbox, invite the team, done. A full deployment with Docs written, Beacon embedded, workflows built, and AI Answers tuned is realistically 2 to 4 weeks, most of it spent writing knowledge-base content rather than configuring software. |
| Learning curve | 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. | Among the lowest in the category. Agents who can use email need no training; an admin can learn workflows, views, and reporting in an afternoon. The only genuinely fiddly parts are Beacon customisation and getting Docs content good enough for AI Answers to be accurate. |
| Platforms | Web app, iOS, Android, Embeddable chat widget, Shopify app, BigCommerce app, Adobe Commerce module | Web app, iOS and Android apps, Beacon web and mobile SDKs, REST API |
| Compliance | SOC 2 Type II (report available on request via the trust center), HIPAA capability documented in the trust center, GDPR | SOC 2 Type 2 (Security and Availability), HIPAA with a signed BAA (Pro add-on), GDPR handling with a published sub-processor list, Regular independent penetration testing |
| Founded | 2015 | 2011 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States | Boston, Massachusetts, United States (fully remote since 2020) |
| Ownership | Venture-backed, independent | Private, venture-backed, structured as a Public Benefit Corporation |
Strengths and limitations
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.
Help Scout
Strengths
- The email-native experience is still the best in the category: customers reply to a person, not a portal, which measurably changes tone and satisfaction on relationship-driven support.
- A free tier for 5 users with a knowledge base included, which is more than most competitors give away and enough for a pre-revenue startup to run properly.
- Fast to adopt: an inbox is live in under an hour and agents who can use Gmail need no training, so onboarding does not consume a quarter.
- Docs plus Beacon is a coherent self-service story, with contextual article suggestions that deflect before the contact form rather than after.
Limitations
- AI Answers at $0.75 per resolution with no included allowance is the weakest part of the commercial model, and the spending cap fails hard by disabling the feature mid-month instead of degrading it.
- No native telephony. Phone support means paying for Aircall separately, which is a real gap next to platforms that include voice.
- Workflow logic is shallow compared with enterprise help desks: fine for routing and tagging, insufficient for multi-step approvals, conditional branching, or complex escalation trees.
- Reporting is competent but not analytical; teams that want cohort analysis or custom metric definitions will export to a BI tool.
Pricing compared
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.
Help Scout
Per-seat subscription across four tiers (Free, Standard, Plus, Pro) with roughly 16% off on annual billing, plus separate usage-based billing for AI Answers at $0.75 per resolution and per-unit add-ons for extra inboxes and Docs sites.
- Free$0
- Standard$25
- Plus$45
- Pro$75
Per seat, Help Scout is priced roughly where it should be: cheaper than Intercom, more polished than the discount tier, and the $21 annual Standard seat buys a genuinely multi-channel help desk. The free plan is real, not a demo, and the 5-user allowance is more generous than almost anything in the category. The AI economics are the caveat that matters. Vendors that bundle AI into a flat fee, Crisp and Plain among them, look dramatically cheaper the moment deflection volume climbs, because Help Scout charges $0.75 every time its agent does its job well. If your support is high-touch and low-volume, the meter is irrelevant and Help Scout is excellent value. If you are trying to automate away thousands of repetitive questions, do the arithmetic first.
Editorial verdict on each
Gorgias
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 profileHelp Scout
Category LeaderHelp Scout remains the best answer for teams whose support is a relationship rather than a queue. The email-native experience is genuinely differentiated, the free tier is real, the product is stable and independent after fifteen years, and the compliance posture is stronger than the price suggests. Where it now demands scrutiny is AI: $0.75 per resolution with no included allowance is the most expensive AI model among the startup-friendly options in this category, and it punishes exactly the deflection success it is meant to enable. Buy Help Scout for the inbox, the knowledge base, and the unlimited agent-facing AI, treat AI Answers as a spreadsheet exercise before you enable it, and look at Crisp or Plain if bundled AI economics matter more to you than email craft.
Read the full Help Scout profileGorgias profile last reviewed 2026-10-01; Help Scout 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 Gorgias and Help Scout?
Help Scout is the better product for making support feel like a human wrote it, and the better fit for B2B and services companies, but it charges per seat and then charges again per AI resolution. Gorgias inverts the seat model and adds commerce actions Help Scout has no equivalent for. A five-agent B2B SaaS team should take Help Scout; a five-agent Shopify store answering returns and order status should take Gorgias, and the deciding question is simply whether your customers have order numbers.
Is Gorgias or Help Scout cheaper?
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). Help Scout starts at $21/user/mo (Standard, billed annually; $25 monthly) (free plan available). The billing models differ, so the entry price is rarely the whole cost. 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. Help Scout pricing model: Per-seat subscription across four tiers (Free, Standard, Plus, Pro) with roughly 16% off on annual billing, plus separate usage-based billing for AI Answers at $0.75 per resolution and per-unit add-ons for extra inboxes and Docs sites.
Does Gorgias or Help Scout have a free plan?
Gorgias has no free plan. Trial terms: 7 days, capped at 10 email ticket messages. Help Scout has a free plan. Free tier for up to 5 users: 1 Inbox, 1 Docs site, 100 contacts per month, 10 saved replies, 10 tags. Trial terms: Free plan available indefinitely; paid plans offer a free trial, and AI Answers includes a 3-month unlimited trial.
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.
Who should choose Help Scout?
Small and mid-sized teams (roughly 2 to 50 support seats) whose support is relationship-heavy and email-led: B2B SaaS, agencies, healthcare, education, and ecommerce brands that want conversations to feel personal and can live without enterprise workflow engines or an omnichannel command centre.
What are the best alternatives to Gorgias and Help Scout?
SaaSTracker profiles 27 products in Customer Support Platforms. The Summer 2026 awards in the category went to tawk.to (Best Value), Plain (Momentum), Intercom (Innovation). Every profile is compiled from primary sources, so a shortlist can be built from pricing, limitations, and fit rather than from star ratings.
