Gorgias vs Freshdesk: Top Differences and Similarities

Gorgias vs Freshdesk - A Quick Comparison

If you’re looking for a tool that has features from the best support tools on the market, try DelightChat for free for the next 30 days. 

Overview - Gorgias and Freshdesk

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

Gorgias is a Shopify help desk (help center or customer support tool) 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.

Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer service software that enables businesses of all sizes to deliver great customer support. It converts requests coming in via email, web, phone, chat, and social into tickets, and merges ticket resolution across channels. Freshdesk also lets you automate workflows, provide self-service, manage SLAs, and measure metrics, so you can stay on top of all things customer support.

Top Differences Between Gorgias and Freshdesk

Gorgias and Freshdesk are both customer support tools designed for ecommerce businesses. Let’s check some of the major differences between these two tools.

1. Ecommerce Viability

If you run an ecommerce store, choosing a random customer support tool is counterintuitive. You need a tool that is designed with the needs of ecommerce businesses in mind. 

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.

Freshdesk, although a leading customer service software, isn’t specifically designed for ecommerce businesses. It integrates with Shopify through third-party integration. While it allows you to edit, cancel or refund orders, the data from Shopify cannot be directly used in your customer responses as Gorgias does. So it brings on additional steps for your agents and wastes time.

With DelightChat, you not only have deep integration with Shopify that lets you work with orders on the same screen, but your canned response templates can also automatically fill in order details as required by pulling customer information from Shopify. 

Ecommerce viability: Gorgias ✅ | Freshdesk ❌

2. Combining customer queries from multiple channels

You receive customer messages from different support channels. And sometimes the same customer sends you the same message from different support channels.

Freshdesk creates individual tickets for each customer query irrespective of the number of times they message. This is cumbersome when your support agents have to figure out if the query has already been answered on a different channel to avoid responding twice.

Also, customers may have to repeat themselves and for them, it will seem like there is no communication between your team members. 

Gorgias on the other hand works well with handling customer history. They combine the chat messages of a customer from all support channels into a single one. 

So if an agent takes over a customer conversation, they can view the entire history across all channels instead of running around trying to find missing pieces of a thread. 

Combined customer query history: Gorgias ✅ | Freshdesk ❌

3. Automated follow-ups

While your team is drowning in new customer messages, keeping a tab on follow-ups is extremely difficult. But it isn’t optional either. If your team sent a message, following up after a set period of no-response is necessary. This increases customer’s trust and confidence in your brand.

Freshdesk has a great rule-based automation solution named Supervisor that allows you to create automatic follow-up emails. You can add the number of hours before a follow-up email has been sent, the status of the ticket, and narrow it down further to nail the automation here.

With Gorgias, you get great automation capabilities while the conversation is ongoing. But automating follow-up messages or emails is a missing feature. 

Automated follow-up: Gorgias ❌| Freshdesk ✅

4. Artificial intelligence assistance

AI-assisted workflows reduce the amount of manual work for employees. If your team handles a lot of customer queries through social media like Twitter, AI assistance can be a very handy option. 

Freshdesk uses AI to automatically analyze and prioritize tweets so important brand mentions can be attended to quickly. This allows your agents to focus on responding to queries rather than sifting through the hordes of Twitter mentions for your brand.

Gorgias does not have such capabilities as of now. However, you can work on rule-based automation to identify the intent of a query using specific words, and then organize the messages with tags. 

AI-assistance: Gorgias ❌ | Freshdesk ✅

5. Auto responses

The first response needs to be timely and preferably, instant. But that’s not always possible. Your agents can be overloaded with queries during buying season and the response to customers will be delayed. 

To reduce the impact of the delay, it’s a good idea to implement auto-responses for your customers. 

With Gorgias, you can identify the intent of the query and respond with the most appropriate response. The rules can be set to check whether a customer query is related to any of the common questions about the refund policy, order tracking, shipment info, pricing, and discounts, etc. 

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

Freshdesk offers rule-based responses, however, the level of customization is nowhere near to Gorgias. So you may be able to create query responses based on the time of the day or the support channel that it comes from, customizing the response with individual variables is not possible yet. 

At DelightChat, we added a powerful feature called Fast Replies. Instead of manually typing out the responses every time, you can create response templates with personalization variables. Whenever a customer makes a request that can be answered with a Fast Reply, simply select the template and the customer details will be filled automatically wherever you have placed the variables. 

And since DelightChat deeply integrates with Shopify, all order information can be made available without going outside of the app. 

Auto response: Gorgias ✅ | Freshdesk ❌

6. Gamified Help Desk Dashboard

Support is monotonous. If it isn’t at the beginning, it sure becomes so after a few weeks of taking it up. A concept that many SaaS companies are incorporating in their tools is Gamification. 

Games are designed to keep players hooked and give a reason to keep coming back by offering rewards for tiny achievements. 

Freshdesk considered this idea and designed their help desk tool to have gamification for support agents. The administrators can create interesting levels which automatically awards points to agents on completion. 

Simple steps like “Publish an FAQ” or “Close your first ticket” offer rewards that agents can view on their dashboard. As they get used to this, they automatically work to seek these rewards. Also, it becomes easier to incentivize agents based on the points that are earned. 

Gorgias does not offer such a feature in the tool. 

Gamification: Gorgias ❌ | Freshdesk ✅

7. Reporting and SLA management

Solid SLA management is a must for growing support teams. And Freshdesk hits a home run here. While it is not specifically catered towards Shopify users, Freshdesk offers solid reporting capabilities. 

On the contrary, Gorgias has reporting and analytics too. But with Freshdesk, you can manage your SLAs by identifying your response times and query resolution times right from the dashboard. 

If you only need reporting, either of the tools will be perfect. But for the additional SLA management feature, Freshdesk is great.

Reporting: Gorgias ✅ | Freshdesk ✅

8. Knowledge Base

A knowledge base on your website helps your customers quickly find answers they’re looking for without contacting customer service. 

Freshdesk comes equipped with a knowledge base feature where you could add all the necessary FAQ questions that your customers ask regularly or they might ask under particular circumstances. 

Gorgias is at a loss here as it doesn’t have this feature built-in. But you can integrate Gorgias with Helpdocs, a knowledge base software for ecommerce companies. The only caveat is that you have to pay additional fees for the overpriced tools you integrate with.

‍Reporting: Gorgias ❌ | Freshdesk ✅

9. WhatsApp support

WhatsApp is the new normal for communication. And users from many countries expect customer support to be available on WhatsApp as well. 

So it only makes sense to have WhatsApp support built into the helpdesk tool that you use. 

Freshdesk integrates with the WhatsApp API and allows you to talk to customers right from their dashboards. Gorgias is yet to implement WhatsApp integration and falls short for now. While it is in their development pipeline, you would have to continue using an additional tool alongside Gorgias if you support customers on WhatsApp.

Also, remember that you need access to the API at an additional cost since you are also charged by WhatsApp and the API provider for template messages.

You can choose to go with DelightChat as your API provider. We have fully integrated with WhatsApp API and help you manage customer support & WhatsApp marketing from one solution.

‍WhatsApp support: Gorgias ❌ | Freshdesk ✅

10. Pricing

The price of the tool should fit your budget and requirements. Buying in on an overpriced tool will only eat away at your ROI. 

Let’s take a look at the pricing for both Gorgias and Freshdesk.

Gorgias is priced based on the number of tickets or customer conversations that you have. The benefit of Gorgias is that you can have an unlimited number of users for the same price. So if you have fewer tickets per month, the per ticket pricing will work better. 

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

On a side note, DelightChat’s pricing is based on the number of unique customer conversations per month. Since we’re specialized in Shopify customer support, if you’re a Shopify user, this might be a great alternative to choose when comparing Gorgias vs Freshdesk. 

Go for Gorgias if you have fewer customer conversations per month. Go with Freshdesk if you have fewer agents but a lot of customer conversations. Go with DelightChat if you want the best of both apps for your Shopify store.

‍Pricing: Gorgias ✅ | Freshdesk ✅

Top Similarities Between Gorgias and Freshdesk

Let’s now discuss the similarities that bring Gorgias and Freshdesk in the same category for ecommerce help desk tools. 

1. 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 Freshdesk integrate with a bunch of business tools that you use daily including Slack, Dropbox, Surveymonkey, WordPress, Gmail, and a lot more.

You can find the entire list of integrations for Gorgias here. And for Freshdesk, the integrations can be found here.

‍ℹ️ Note: Gorgias has far more integrations that Freshdesk.

2. Shared Inbox for teams

The main purpose of a support tool is to allow the entire support team to log in and respond to customers simultaneously. Both Gorgias and Freshdesk support unlimited users to work on the team simultaneously. 

However, you may only be limited by the costs as Freshdesk is priced per agent. Both the tools also work well to make internal communication possible with the help of Slack integration. 

While building DelightChat, we noticed internal communication was an issue that most companies experienced. Even if all the support channels were integrated into one, they had to get back to their collaboration tools to ask for help or share ticket information. 

So to solve this problem, DelightChat has built-in internal communication so your team can tag and talk to team members without ever having to leave the customer conversation screen! 

3. Automated ticket categorization

Both Gorgias and Freshdesk have features that allow automatic ticket categorization. 

On Freshdesk, the platform auto-suggests ticket fields to route incoming messages. 

With Gorgias, you have rule-based automation that allows you to auto-tag customer queries.

Both offer a good level of customization. But Gorgias’ rule-based automation can be paired with its keyword-based intent identification to add tags on complete auto-pilot. 

‍ℹ️ Note: Gorgias' intent-based automation can help make better automations

4. Support channels

Both Gorgias and Freshdesk integrate with multiple support to help you respond to your customers from a single screen. You can reply to your customers over email, live chat, Facebook, Instagram & Twitter (only on Freshdesk). 

DelightChat integrates with all major support channels including Twitter so you have a complete ecommerce support tool for your business and do not have to subscribe to additional services to get more features.

‍ℹ️ Note: Gorgias does not support Twitter and WhatsApp yet.

5. Follow-up Reminders

You may have to follow up with customers at a certain time. A customer may want you to get back to them after a week or a month. And with Gorgias and Freshdesk, you can add a reminder to a chat conversation so when the time is triggered, you get notified right away to follow up with the customer.

This not only saves you time but also allows you to give customers a great experience! They will notice that you went above and beyond the protocol to follow up on the date they asked you to and stick around with your brand longer. 

6. Conversation tags

Tagging a conversation helps you segregate and prioritize tickets. You may want to respond to specific tickets promptly or assign a set to a particular team. 

Both Freshdesk and Gorgias allow tagging of conversations to help you organize and assign the relevant tickets to the right teams. 

7. Mobile application

If you’re traveling or not in front of the laptop, you can’t respond to customer queries. And every question is a lost opportunity to make a sale or to delight an existing customer. 

Thankfully, both Gorgias & Zendesk come with mobile apps for Android & iOS. This will help you respond to your customers on the go. 

8. Canned Responses

Most queries are repetitive. Now Gorgias allows you to completely automate a lot of those queries with the use of their intent identification feature. 

But some queries cannot be completely automated. You need an agent to take a look before a response is sent. But the responses remain quite similar. 

Canned responses save time for the agents and give a great experience to the customers since the responses can be made quickly. 

Both Gorgias and Freshdesk offer their versions of canned responses. 

Gorgias however goes a step further and lets you add dynamic placeholders for Shopify data. This is thanks to the deep Shopify integration that it offers. 

For example, you can place an order tracking link, or the name of the product, the price of the product, and other details that are available on Shopify within your canned response. 

‍ℹ️ Note: With deep Shopify integration, Gorgias allows you to automatically add customer information from Shopify in your canned responses.

9. 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. With Gorgias and Freshdesk, you get agent collision detection on the chat screen. 

If in case an agent is already working on a ticket, Gorgias and Freshdesk both notify the agent about who is working on the same. 

This prevents agents from accidentally replying to the same customer twice. 

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 Freshdesk

The good:

“Freshdesk is straightforward to use and offers many features that can be customized to meet the business requirements. The ability to add multiple collaborators to support large numbers of our customers online in less time is what I love the most about Freshdesk.” - Samata B

“Freshdesk is easy to set up and use. It allows us to keep track of all customer's requests and easily manage them. It has a lot of powerful instruments to help streamline the work of the helpdesk team. It also comes with a mobile app.” - Gavino B

The bad:

“Their price should be lowered, it's quite expensive even though they have a free trial when you first join.” - Cedric C

“This tool is very amazing about ticket handling but overall when I look upon it as a customer engagement tool. It lacks many features that include the collaboration with other social platforms and this is a major issue as I have to switch to other software for responding to my customers’ from my other channels” - Katherine M

FAQs

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

With a small support team, you should go with Freshdesk. 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 Front, you can check out DelightChat. 

Is it difficult to set up Gorgias or Freshdesk 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 Freshdesk cost?

Freshdesk 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 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 at an affordable price.

• 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. 

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