Zendesk vs. Gorgias

E-commerce companies need support software built for growth. That's why many choose Zendesk vs. Gorgias. See for yourself.

Zendesk vs. Gorgias: A comprehensive guide

Last updated September 6, 2023

Customer service has never been more important, especially for e-commerce companies. That’s why 70 percent of business leaders from retail companies expect their agents to expand their roles and responsibilities over the next year, according to the Zendesk CX Trends Report 2023.

Wondering if Zendesk or Gorgias is the better solution for your team? Learn from Pair Eyewear’s experience. The eyewear company relied on Gorgias help desk software during its early startup phase, but the rapidly growing company needed a more sophisticated solution with stronger reporting, automation, and community support. It explored other customer experience (CX) solutions, but none of them had the in-depth reporting, automated features, and support that Zendesk offers.

When choosing between Gorgias and Zendesk it’s important to consider a few key things: scalability, the level of CX expertise and operational insights you desire, and the quality of support you’ll get. Take a deeper look below.

3 ways Zendesk outperforms Gorgias

Scalability

Zendesk delivers the tools businesses need now and the solutions they’ll need in the future, so they can scale faster. However, Gorgias struggles to support growing operations, which pushes businesses to migrate to a different platform for robust features, like up-to-date and accurate reports.

CX expertise and deep operational insights

Zendesk can use the CX insights from the many markets we serve to guide e-commerce businesses and provide best practices to help them stay ahead of the curve. Gorgias is serviceable for e-commerce use cases, but this narrow view can hinder a business’s growth.

Quality support

The Zendesk team doesn’t disappear after you’ve made your purchase. From a strategic implementation to always-on service, we make sure you get the best value out of Zendesk. On the other hand, Gorgias provides low touch onboarding support to customers outside of Advanced and Enterprise plans and restricts communication to emails and live chat.

More in this guide:

At-a-glance comparison: Zendesk vs. Gorgias

Take a look at these specs to compare the Zendesk and Gorgias customer service software. All findings are the result of in-depth research and customer feedback.

What you need to deliver the best CX
Critical capabilities
Zendesk
Gorgias
Omnichannel support Voice
Add-on
Text/SMS
Add-on
Add-on
Email
Social media
Self-service Knowledge base
Community forum
✖️
Article recommendations
Add-on
Routing and workflows Skills-based routing
Add-on
✖️
Custom workflows
Agent workspace and conversation management Macros
Ticket tags
Ticket tags
Custom fields
✖️
SLA management
✖️
Side conversations
✖️
Analytics and reporting Custom reports
✖️
Real-time data
Integrations Highly rated integrations
✖️
Robust catalog
✖️
Chatbots and AI Bots
Add-on
AI
Add-on
Add-on
Social messaging and live chat Social channels Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter) Facebook and Instagram
Chat widget
E-commerce support Designated success
E-commerce store integrations
Advanced customization Custom metrics
✖️
Custom ticket views
Help center branding
Workforce management User permissions
Ticket forecasting
✖️

Zendesk vs. Gorgias: Features comparison

A business’s customer service software is the backbone of its customer service strategy and builds the foundation—and a potentially limiting ceiling—for its success. Take a look at how Zendesk and Gorgias measure up to this challenge.

Omnichannel support

Zendesk offers businesses powerful omnichannel capabilities across email, live chat, phone, social media, and more. Customer service agents can meet customers on their preferred communication channel without losing context, enabling them to seamlessly continue the conversation. During a live chat or on a phone call, for example, an agent can view the previous exchanges the customer has had with the company and key account details, like order history or account type.

With a unified omnichannel workspace, the customer isn’t burdened with having to get the agent up to speed. The result is increased efficiency for your team and improved customer satisfaction for the company.

Gorgias also lets its users centralize their communication channels and work from a shared inbox, but its use is much more limited. Voice capabilities are only available as an add-on and there are only 10 phone integrations listed on its website.

Self-service

Customer self-service features come standard with Zendesk, so you can help your customers get answers whenever they need them. With Zendesk, businesses can create knowledge bases, community forums, and chatbots that remove tasks from your agents’ workloads.

Zendesk also provides its users with advanced tools that help streamline knowledge management. Content Cues identify gaps in your knowledge base, so you can proactively create or improve articles for better performance. Businesses can also control customer access to articles through authenticated portals.

Gorgias lets businesses create a help center that includes the basics, like FAQ pages and order tracking, but it lacks the robust features that Zendesk provides. Community forums and authenticated portals are unavailable, limiting a business’s ability to aid its customers.

Routing and workflows

Zendesk gives businesses full control over their workflows so they can run their operations the way that’s best for them. Omnichannel routing lets you route tickets based on availability, capacity, and ticket priority. Intelligent triage automatically determines a ticket’s intent, the language it’s written in, and the customer sentiment (positive or negative). Pairing these two features lets you incorporate a ticket’s intent, language, and sentiment into your routing rules, while still taking availability, capacity, and priority into consideration. You can also set up workflow rules that trigger the next step for a ticket so that it doesn’t get stuck in limbo.

Gorgias lets businesses assign tickets to a group of agents it has created with a specific skill. But this kind of routing isn’t considered intelligent as it’s just following team-assignment rules.

Agent workspace and conversation management

Giving your agents a unified space where they can work and collaborate helps them stay organized and aligned while carrying out their duties. The Zendesk Agent Workspace helps teams do this, and more, by providing:

  • Macros: Agents can use predefined responses to send standardized replies and save time with common requests.
  • Ticket tags: Zendesk can automatically add tags to tickets to provide additional context and improve routing.
  • Custom fields: Organize tickets with customer information that you need to optimize workflows.
  • Service level agreement (SLA) management: Ensure you uphold customer contracts.
  • Side conversations: Bring in other teammates for help on a ticket without leaving the window.

The Gorgias agent workspace lacks the deep customization that Zendesk offers. While an agent can customize their own private views, only admins and lead agents can customize shared views. There’s also a limit of four custom ticket fields for the entire account and they lack conditional logic. Gorgias also notes other limitations to setting up ticket fields here.

Analytics and reporting

Zendesk makes it easy to collect real-time and historical data across every channel. You can also generate both pre-built and custom reports regarding team performance, customer behavior, and channel activity. These reports include your desired metrics, so you can measure what matters most to your organization.

Businesses that use Gorgias don’t receive the same functionality from its analytics. Users can’t generate custom reports in the app, so they must export their data. The pre-built reports in the app only have basic filters, and the data is limited in what it can provide, like the dollar amounts of tickets.

Integrations

Zendesk has over 1,500 integrations, including highly rated apps for the e-commerce market, to bring together data from all parts of your business, such as inventory, billing, shopping history, and preferences.

The Shopify app alone has over 15,000 installations. See how the Zendesk and Shopify integration is helping Raddish Kids streamline support by reading its customer story.

Quote from Raddish Kids' Customer Service and Retention Manager

Gorgias only has around 100 integrations in its app store. It doesn’t list the user ratings of the apps, so it’s difficult to determine how well they perform. Many of the integrations also require users to code their APIs (application programming interfaces), adding to the cost of the service.

Chatbots and AI

Zendesk AI is intuitive for agents to use and available alongside all their tools in a centralized workspace, empowering your team to be more productive. We use proprietary models that understand customer intent and sentiment, so your bots are smarter and more helpful. Our AI works from day one and is ready to go in minutes. No need for developers, heavy IT spend, or months of lead time.

Some of these features include:

  • Pre-trained chatbots that your team can deploy across channels to support customers 24/7.
  • AI-generated insights that offer agents suggestions on how to best respond to customers.
  • Intelligent triage that routes tickets based on customer intent, sentiment, and language and aids workflow distribution.

The Gorgias automation provides responses to basic questions, order tracking, and recommending knowledge base articles. However, it lacks the range of Zendesk AI, like advanced routing.

Social messaging and live chat

Zendesk keeps you connected with your customers’ preferred social media channels, including Facebook, Instagram, and X as well as popular messaging apps like WhatsApp. With Zendesk, you can also embed a live chat widget on your website or mobile app, so customers can quickly reach agents when they have questions about your products.

Gorgias can integrate with Facebook and Instagram profiles but not X, which creates a blind spot for businesses striving to have omnichannel operations. It also provides a chat widget with customizable colors and auto responses.

E-commerce support

Zendesk connects data from all areas of your operation—like inventory, billing, and customer preferences—so e-commerce businesses can create robust customer profiles and provide personalized service. Integrations with Shopify and Magento let agents pull order information into the Agent Workspace to provide detailed answers to customers.

Quote from Chupi's CTO

Zendesk also helps you build an extended ecosystem of suppliers, distributors, and vendors. From design and development to distribution and analytics, it’s easy to manage all the moving parts, every step of the way.

While Gorgias lets agents manage orders from its platform, the Starter plan only includes Shopify-based stores. Businesses need to upgrade their plans if they have BigCommerce- or Magento-based stores.

Advanced customization

A big draw of partnering with an established customer service platform is the access to pre-built features that allow a business to get up and running quickly. But that fast time to value doesn’t negate your inherent need to customize the platform to your needs. Zendesk empowers its users to mold its software to their specific needs instead of the other way around. A few ways it does this are with:

  • Custom metrics: You decide which key performance indicators (KPIs) to include in reports, letting you track team performance and customer behavior.
  • Custom knowledge base and help center templates: You can design the look and feel of your site with custom themes and easy-to-use editors.
  • Custom workspace/agent experience: You can modify and add ticket views based on the most relevant conditions of your business. Customize dashboards to include live updates on department activity.

Gorgias also lets users create custom ticket views in their workspaces. Businesses can customize their help centers with logos and images, but more advanced customization requires coding.

Workforce management

Knowing what your team is doing at any given time is crucial to optimizing department efficiency. Zendesk makes it easy to manage workloads and keep tabs on agent progress. You can customize agent roles by granting permission and restricting access to information on an individual level.

On top of that, Zendesk users have access to Tymeshift, an AI-powered workforce management solution. This tool forecasts ticket volumes and automatically schedules teams based on future needs.

The Gorgias workforce management features let its customers grant user permissions. Businesses can control agents’ access to tickets and their roles in handling them, but only leads and admins can create shared and public views. Gorgias also provides a real-time view of an agent’s status so managers can manually assign tickets.

Pricing plans: Gorgias vs. Zendesk

Zendesk
Gorgias
  • Support Team: $19 per agent/month
  • Support Professional: $55 per agent/month
  • Support Enterprise: $115 per agent/month
  • Suite Team: $55 per agent/month
  • Suite Growth: $89 per agent/month
  • Suite Professional: $115 per agent/month
  • Suite Enterprise: Contact sales for pricing

*All plans are billed annually.

  • Starter: $10 per month
  • Basic: $50 per month
  • Pro: $300 per month
  • Advanced: $750 per month
  • Enterprise: Contact sales for pricing

*All plans except for Gorgias Starter are billed annually.

Zendesk and Gorgias take different approaches to pricing. Zendesk charges its users based on the number of agents using the software. That means agents can potentially serve an unlimited number of customers, without hidden fees or looming extra charges.

Gorgias charges its users according to the number of tickets they use. If your customer service team exceeds the ticket cap, you’ll pay extra. So, as your business grows, you’ll be penalized with increased costs due to the higher activity.

Customer stories on using Zendesk vs. Gorgias

Person lowering their glasses

Discover why companies choose Zendesk over Gorgias—and other competitors—and how that decision has helped their success.

Expand support

Pair Eyewear is a subscription eyewear company that offers customers the ability to build a personalized collection of glasses. The company previously used Gorgias for its customer support software, but switched to Zendesk in 2020. Gorgias worked for Pair Eyewear when it was a startup, but the software couldn’t keep up as the eyewear company grew. Pair Eyewear needed more than just e-commerce support software—it needed a complete solution.

Since moving to Zendesk, Pair Eyewear has incorporated automation into its processes that has improved the speed with which it serves customers. Bots help deflect 76 percent of its chat volume and 20 percent of inbound calls. This has led to improved customer satisfaction with a 21 percent increase in its Net Promoter ScoreⓇ, while maintaining a 96 percent customer satisfaction (CSAT) score.

“We explored other CX solutions, but none of them had the in-depth reporting and insights, automated features, and community support that Zendesk offers.”

–Ben Segal, Senior Director of Customer Experience at Pair Eyewear

Raddish Kids: Connect teams and customers

Raddish Kids is a cooking club for children that delivers monthly meal kits to subscribers. While the pandemic drove the Raddish Kids team to work remotely, it also increased business since more families were looking for at-home activities. The company needed a way to manage the large numbers of Shopify orders and help its customer service team keep track of support tickets.

Zendesk was able to integrate all of Raddish Kids’ platforms and make it easy to share information. With a unified view of customer details, agents can quickly figure out what orders are associated with the customer who is reaching out. And with everything integrated, 85 percent of tickets are resolved in a single touch.

“It really helps to get your foot in the door early when your company is small and then grow alongside each other. I don’t think we could ever outgrow Zendesk, as there are so many options and integrations.”

–Jennifer Buchanan, Customer Service and Retention Manager at Raddish Kids

Chupi: Understand data

Chupi is an heirloom jewelry company with a devoted following—both in person at its flagship Dublin, Ireland store and online. The company was growing, but it was still relying on a basic ticketing system that lacked advanced features like robust reporting and analytics.

After partnering with Zendesk, Chupi noticed a significant improvement in its service level. This is partly due to the software’s easy-to-use interface, Shopify and social media integrations, and robust reporting capabilities. Now, Chupi resolves 69 percent of all tickets in one touch and has a 98 percent CSAT score.

“One of the key things we needed was to be able to look at numbers, scale, past trends, and forecasts. We migrated all of our tickets from the old platform into Zendesk, so we had the historical data. Zendesk analyzed that data and gave us a better understanding of how we got to where we are and where we are going.”

–Brian Durney, Chief Technology Officer at Chupi

Honeylove: Broaden engagement

Honeylove is a fashion brand that sells high-quality shapewear directly to consumers. The company was steadily growing over its initial four years and knew it needed to level up its customer service if it was going to continue satisfying customers. Honeylove found the omnichannel solutions it was looking for in Zendesk.

Honeylove is now engaging with customers across phones, SMS, social media, and more. The data from those interactions is stored and used to improve its products and processes. Honeylove credits its reduced contact rate and handle times as the prime drivers behind its SMS and email support CSAT scores, both of which exceed 90 percent.

“Whether we have 30 agents or 3,000 agents, Zendesk will have the right solution for us. Zendesk is a great partner that continues to share best practices with us, so we can identify current trends, understand what’s coming down the pipeline, and plan for the future.”

–Trevor Humphrey, VP of Customer Experience at Honeylove

Drizly: Increase efficiency

Drizly is an alcohol delivery company that lets customers order wine, beer, and spirits from local retailers that are then delivered to customers’ doors. Drizly’s popularity was growing so fast that its team had a hard time keeping up with all of the orders. Its support team had only one shared email inbox, used personal phones to interact with customers, and tracked orders on spreadsheets.

Partnering with Zendesk revolutionized how Drizly conducted business. Its team used automation and workflow customization to streamline its processes and increase agent productivity by more than 200 percent. Analytics reports track KPIs and maintain a culture focused on continuous improvement.

“Our fully trained team went from solving eight tickets per hour to an average of 16 tickets per hour. That’s because we’re tracking every single metric possible, allowing us to continuously improve our results.”

–Brian White, director of customer experience at Drizly

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score, and NPS are trademarks of NICE Satmetrix, Inc., Bain & Company, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.

Frequently asked questions

Learn more about why businesses choose Zendesk over Gorgias from the answers below.

Which is better, Gorgias or Zendesk?

Zendesk is the better customer service software for businesses of all sizes. Zendesk is more established than Gorgias and has a larger user base, so it is experienced in scaling its service to meet growing needs. Zendesk also has a wider range of features that go beyond basic order management use cases for e-commerce.

What are the disadvantages of Gorgias?

Some of the disadvantages businesses might encounter when using Gorgias software are:

  • Its pricing structure is based on the number of billable tickets a business uses per month. The more active your customer service team is, the more expensive the software will be.
  • It has fewer features than its competitors, so as a business’s needs grow, the software will struggle to meet those demands.
  • It has more rigid use cases, making the platform difficult to customize to individual needs.
  • It doesn’t integrate with as many applications as more established platforms, making connecting customer service with other parts of your business difficult.

Why is Zendesk so popular?

Zendesk is a popular customer service software due to its wide range of functionality. Here are some benefits to using Zendesk:

  • The software is easy to use, so staff can be trained quickly and start serving customers faster than on other platforms.
  • The software has many integrations with e-commerce platforms like shopify, enabling omnichannel support and collaboration between departments.
  • Zendesk offers excellent customer support with a large library of resources to help businesses get started and improve their processes.
  • Zendesk uses its extensive experience to create dynamic and effective customer service tools.

Which platform has more integrations, Zendesk or Gorgias?

Zendesk has far more integrations than Gorgias. Zendesk has over 1,000 integrations with other products in various markets, including Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce. In comparison, Gorgias lists roughly 100 apps on its website.

Ready to try Zendesk?

Zendesk provides e-commerce companies with the robust reporting, integrations, and customization capabilities they can’t get from Gorgias to help them deliver a differentiated CX at scale. Discover the lasting impact it can have on your business.