Gorgias vs Freshchat: Top Differences and Similarities

Gorgias vs Freshchat - A Quick Comparison

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Overview - Gorgias and Freshchat

Let’s begin by understanding the differences between Gorgias and Freshchat. Here’s a quick context for both the tools before we start with our comparison.

Gorgias is a help desk (help center or customer support) for eCommerce stores that allows your customer service team to manage all customer service in one place - be it emails, live chat, phone conversations, or social media.

Freshchat is a customer messaging software built for businesses of all sizes. It allows you to talk to customers on the web, mobile, social, and messengers. Freshchat displays all support channels on the same dashboard to help support teams respond to conversations easily and effectively. 

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Top Differences Between Gorgias and Freshchat

Gorgias and Freschat are great tools for customer support on your online store. But which one is the best? Let’s find out the differences between both the tools so you can make an informed decision.

1. Built for Ecommerce

Ecommerce store owners need a support tool that merges all support channels into one and also integrates with important business tools.

Gorgias is built for ecommerce and integrates deeply with Shopify. This means that you can edit, cancel, return any order without having to leave the Gorgias dashboard. That’s not all – Gorgias comes with a host of integrations with other commonly-used ecommerce apps. This makes it all the more powerful.

Freshchat on the other hand is a simple chat support tool for combining your support channels into a single dashboard. But the features offered by Freshchat are designed for general use. So for an ecommerce store, you may find a lot of the important integrations lacking in this tool.

Ecommerce viability: Gorgias ✅ | Freshchat ❌

2. Intent Identification for Auto Response

Customers want an instant response. Since it’s difficult to do that personally every time, automation works well here. 

Now, you can choose to go for a generic “We’ll get back to you soon” response. 

But Gorgias goes a step further. It lets you identify the intent of a query and respond with the most appropriate response, automatically.  The rules can be set to check whether a customer query is related to many common questions about the refund policy, order tracking, shipment info, pricing, discounts, etc. 

Based on the intent of the query, a personalized response can be sent to the customer. 

Freshchat has advanced rule-based automation. But the capabilities are lacking when it comes to supporting ecommerce customers. For example, since Freshchat cannot identify the query, you can only respond with a generic response based on specific conditions. 

Intent identification: Gorgias ✅ | Freshchat ❌

3. Supporting channels

Customers are active on Instagram, Facebook, Email, and WhatsApp. And managing them independently is quite a task. So you need a tool that can merge as many of your support channels as possible. 

With Gorgias, you can integrate with most of the support channels except Twitter and WhatsApp. 

On the other hand, Freshchat lets you integrate Web, Mobile, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Apple Business Chat, and LINE! 

If you’re looking for a tool that integrates with Facebook, WhatsApp, Email, and even Shopify, you’ll find DelightChat to be a great fit for your needs.

Support channels: Gorgias ❌ | Freshchat ✅

4. FB/IG Comments

When you run ads or create posts on Facebook & Instagram, you will get comments. Some of them are support questions, while others might be queries about a product you sell. Either way, you need to respond to those comments and fast. 

Freshchat doesn’t support responding to comments on Facebook or Instagram. 

Gorgias allows you to respond to comments from posts and ads in one place after you’ve integrated your brand accounts on Facebook & Instagram. 

FB/IG comments: Gorgias ✅ | Freshchat ❌

5. Knowledge Base

Most customer questions are repetitive and do not need an agent to spend time answering. Questions about refund policies, shipping time, product information, company information, payment methods, etc can be answered with an FAQ section.

Gorgias does not offer a built-in knowledge base capability so you have to resort to the Helpdocs integration. While it’s still possible to build the FAQ section, you end up paying an additional fee for Helpdocs.

Freshchat comes equipped with a knowledge base built-in where you can add answers to the FAQs. These FAQs are automatically pulled when a customer is typing in their query in the live chat widget on your website! 

Essentially this feature saves time for the customers as well as the agents who are answering customer questions day-in and day-out!

Knowledge base: Gorgias ❌ | Freshchat ✅

6. Canned Responses

While many of the repetitive questions can be answered with an FAQ, some of them require personalization. But the answers are still monotonous. Canned responses save time by saving message templates that agents can use as required. 

Gorgias has an upper hand here. Since it integrates with ecommerce platforms like Shopify, you can use order information variables in your canned responses. The added benefit is that you can merge the canned responses with their intent to identify what type of query it is and automatically respond to it.

Freshchat also offers canned responses and can pull data from Shopify if you’ve integrated it. However, since Freshchat is a basic chat support tool, the

Canned responses: Gorgias  ✅ | Freshchat ❌

7. Automated ticket assignment

Sending the right ticket to the right person in the team ensures that you have the fastest response time, better workload distribution, and less stressed agents. 

In Gorgias, you can use the intent and rule-based automation capabilities to automatically identify the type of incoming ticket and assign it to the right team. 

With Freshchat, you do not need to create rules to assign the ticket. You can let the system work for you. The IntelliAssign feature finds idle agents or the ones with the lowest workload and assigns an incoming ticket to that person. 

Both of these methods are great. But if you need customization, Gorgias offers flexibility in how the tickets are handled. 

Automated ticket assignment: Gorgias  ✅ | Freshchat ✅

8. Reporting

When you need to know the current status of your team performance, real-time reporting comes in handy. 

Gorgias offers good reporting and analytics features but the data is delayed. While you can view historical data well, you may find this lacking feature a bit of an issue. This is offset by the fact that Gorgias lets you measure conversions coming in from different channels on your website. Any sale that happens from a chat on Gorgias is tracked helping you identify the ROI.

Freshchat supports real-time reporting for individual team members that you can view on the admin dashboard. But the integration with ecommerce is quite limited. This restricts you from diving deep into the conversion data. However, you may still like Freshchat if you have basic requirements.

Real-time reporting: Gorgias ❌ | Freshchat  ✅

9. Integrations

Every company relies on a different toolset for its business needs. And it does not make sense to complicate the help desk by adding in-built support for all the tools. 

So, a majority of the companies take the integration route. 

Gorgias and Freshchat integrate with a host of business tools. But Gorgias takes the lead by offering a lot more integrations. 

Gorgias integrates with almost all business tools out there. Unless you’re using an obscure tool, you will find that Gorgias can connect with the tools you use.

Freshchat integrates with many of the major tools out there. But you should consider checking the integrations for both the tools to ensure that the ones you use can be connected. 

Integrations: Gorgias ✅ | Freshchat  ❌

10. Live Translation

For ecommerce stores that cater to customers across the world, you may need to translate their messages before responding.

Gorgias supports multi-lingual responses and lets your agents respond in 50+ languages. But you need to translate customer messages on an external service or have agents who speak the language. 

Freshchat supports live translation as the conversation is ongoing. This allows agents who do not speak the language to respond quickly in the language of the customer.

Live translation: Gorgias ❌ | Freshchat  ✅

11. Agent Collision Detection

A problem with shared inboxes is that multiple agents can view the same customer conversation. It’s difficult to know who is already working on a ticket. 

Gorgias knows this problem and helps you prevent it by notifying the agent if someone else is already working on the ticket. 

Freshchat does not have such a feature. 

Agent collision detection: Gorgias ✅ | Freshchat  ❌

12. Pricing

Gorgias pricing comes with four plans; the lowest one starts at $60/month. You get 350 tickets/month. If you want to add more tickets, you need to pay $25 for 100 tickets. This rate goes down as the plan increases. 

Freshchat is priced per agent. While the free tier is perfect when you want to get started, the paid plans offer automation and a multitude of features that we’ve discussed here. 

Gorgias is cheaper when you have fewer queries per month. Freshchat is cheaper if you have fewer agents but lots of queries.

Top Similarities Between Gorgias and Freshchat

1. Proactive Messaging

Also known as campaign messages, proactive messages allow you to proactively message users who land on your website from specific campaigns. For example, if you run a Facebook ad campaign and people land on your homepage. 

With campaign messages, you can open the chatbox automatically with a personalized message relevant to the ad. This increases the engagement on your website since the chat is on-point and the user can immediately relate to the message. 

Both Gorgias and Freshchat support proactive messages to allow you to connect with your live users. 

ℹ️ Note: Gorgias merges the campaign messaging feature with its rule-based automation to make proactive messaging even more effective. 

2. Web widget

A live-chat widget is quite powerful if you use it right. Customers that land on your store will not be ready to buy right off the bat. They may have a few questions and if answered quickly, it can result in a sale. 

Gorgias and Freshchat offer customizable live-chat widgets for your website. Integrating Gorgias with Shopify is easy as you simply need to install the app from the Shopify store. 

For Freshchat, you can add the live-chat widget code to your Shopify theme and the widget will begin appearing at the bottom right of your website.

3. Team Inbox

The entire purpose of a customer support tool is to ensure that your entire team can handle the same business accounts without having to share your passwords. 

Gorgias and Freshchat offer a customizable shared team inbox for your entire team to log in and start using. 

All the support channels you connect to and your agents’ business tools can be viewed by your agents simultaneously. 

The same goes for Freshchat who allows your team to log in and interact with the platform at the same time.

4. Roles and Teams

For bigger teams, it makes sense to distribute the workload. This is made possible with the use of teams and role settings. 

Gorgias and Freshchat both offer features to split the agents between teams and assign specific roles to them. Based on these roles and teams, the workload can be managed and split equally without burdening an individual user. 

5. Conversation tagging

With so many messages coming in from users, it’s difficult to manage them well. Conversation tags let your agents know what the query is about and prioritize their daily workflow.

Both Gorgias and Freshchat offer conversation tags as a feature to help categorize tickets for your agents. These can be tagged automatically with the use of rules or manually by agents after reading through the ticket.  

6. Developer APIs

Developers may want to extend the feature set offered by the tools. Since customizing a tool to fit every business need is impossible, access to APIs is a great alternative.

Freshchat and Gorgias have open APIs for developers to work on and add features or build complete apps using them. 

With such extensibility, you can build tools that suit your business needs without having to wait for the Gorgias or Freshchat team to implement a solution.

Customers reviews for Gorgias and Freshdesk

Real customer reviews for Gorgias

The good:

"My favorite part is having access to all of the Shopify info while responding to Tickets. It's also such a time saver being able to issue refunds in Shopify from Gorgias." - Vionic Shoes Canada

“Gorgias has been such a great value add to our business. It's so easy to manage communication with our customers and respond to them in an organized and timely manner.” - Pladra

The bad:

“If your domain email is not g-suite, you may have email delivery issues for outgoing emails; I know there are ways to work around this, but it's complicated and not documented by Gorgias.” - Zen Art Shop

“Not good for campaigns with different types of Shopify stores. Pricing is too high for a tool that is supposed to manage a good chunk of data” - Personalized Jewel

Real customer reviews for Freshchat

The good:

"I love how easy the dashboard was and how easy it was to set up on my wordpress website. The chat was also very clean, very easy to use multiple members of my team. The app on my phone made it simple to chat with visitors on my website from my phone" - Seth H.

"The software is incredibly simple to install and intuitive to use. It is also pretty organized, which helps when you need to assign chats to other reps" - Steve C.

The bad:

"The bot is a bit laggy at times and irresponsive. There are times when a comm will be sent via the bot but no response will come through for about a minute." - Rameez B.

"The integration with Freshdesk FAQ is not so friendly and it's really hard to measure which articles are more popular and which ones are not." - Guilherme Daniel

FAQs

Between Gorgias and Freshchat, which tool is more suited for small stores?

With a small support team, you should go with Freshchat. If you do not need the automation capabilities, you can also make do with the free tier and use the tool with no obligations. 

Gorgias can be a good choice when you’re working with fewer customer conversations per month. It will offer lower pricing while allowing you to add as many team members to Gorgias as required. 

If you want an affordable and modern alternative to Gorgias, you can check out DelightChat. 

Is it difficult to set up Gorgias or Freshchat for your business?

Being self-serve tools, you would not require any help to get them integrated into your customer support workflow. However, if you do need assistance, the support team can offer you advice. You can also refer to their setup documentation on the websites.

How much does Gorgias cost?

Gorgias starts at $60/month for 350 tickets + $25 for every additional 100 tickets. The price of additional tickets goes down as you upgrade to higher plans. All plans on Gorgias include unlimited user support. 

How much does Freshchat cost?

Freshchat costs $19/agent/month for the added automation capabilities. However, if you’re starting, you can use the free tier until you decide to upgrade. 

Considering better & more affordable options?

As Shopify store owners, customer support takes hours of your time. And you don’t want something to add to your busy schedule.

Now, Gorgias and Freshdesk are great choices. But Gorgias is cheaper with a cluttered UI, increasing your effort in organizing conversations. Freshdesk looks great and has many modern features but the Shopify integration isn’t at par with Gorgias. Also, it’s expensive as you scale up your team.

DelightChat solves both the problems and more:

• The interface is designed to be familiar so you can use DelightChat without any training whatsoever. Once all your support channels are integrated, you’ll feel right at home! 
• Integration is easy. And, we offer a 1:1 concierge setup with any plan that you choose. 
• Deep integration with Shopify lets you pull order details directly from Shopify. Your agents spend less time finding orders and more time solving the query!
• DelightChat is extremely affordable compared to any solution out there. Starting at just $100/month for 2000 monthly unique conversations, you get unlimited team members, unlimited stores, and unlimited support channels included in the plan! 

There are a lot more features in place and pricing. Hope this guide helps you make an informed decision. 

Hope this guide helps you make an informed decision. If you have any questions, feel free to drop a line here.