The ultimate guide to choosing a Gorgias chatbot in 2025

If you’re running an ecommerce brand, you probably use (and love) Gorgias. It’s fantastic at pulling all your customer conversations into one place and it works beautifully with Shopify. But as your store starts to take off, you run into a new kind of problem: more sales mean a flood of support tickets.

Suddenly, your team is buried, and customers are starting to expect 24/7 support, something that’s pretty much impossible to deliver with a small crew.

The standard Gorgias chat is a decent starting point, but relying on basic rules and macros can only get you so far. You need something smarter to handle the incoming questions. This guide will walk you through your options, from Gorgias’s own tools to more advanced AI chatbots, so you can find a solution that grows with your business without forcing you to change how you work.

What is a Gorgias chatbot?

When you hear someone mention a "Gorgias chatbot," they could be talking about one of two very different things. Getting this distinction right matters for your team and your budget.

1. Gorgias’s built-in automation features: These are the tools that come with the Gorgias platform. Think of them as a simple set of instructions you can give your helpdesk, like basic Rules, Macros, and the paid "Automate" add-on. They’re handy for speeding up repetitive tasks but they aren’t what you’d call conversational AI.

2. Third-party AI integrations: These are specialized AI platforms from other companies that plug into your Gorgias account. They bring much more advanced skills to the table, like understanding natural language, learning from past support tickets, and handling complex requests. Essentially, they act like an AI agent working right inside your helpdesk.

Understanding this difference is the first step. Let’s dig into what you actually get with each option.

Understanding the native Gorgias chatbot and automation features

Gorgias gives you a good foundation for customer support, but its automation is more traditional and rules-based. It’s designed to help your human agents work faster, not to reduce the number of tickets they have to handle in the first place.

The standard Gorgias live chat

At its core, Gorgias offers a real-time, human-powered live chat widget for your store. It’s lightweight, fast, and pulls in a ton of customer data from Shopify, giving your agents the context they need to solve problems quickly.

But here’s the problem: it only works when your agents are online. If everyone’s logged off for the day, the chat widget just turns into a contact form. When you consider that 82% of customers expect an immediate response, asking them to wait for an email just doesn’t feel good enough anymore.

Basic Gorgias chatbot automation with rules and macros

To speed things up, Gorgias includes Rules and Macros. Rules are simple "if-this-then-that" commands. For example, you can automatically tag a ticket with "Shipping Question" if it contains the word "tracking." Macros are just pre-written responses that agents can use for common questions so they don’t have to type out the same answer a dozen times a day.

The Gorgias chatbot Automate add-on

For a bit more power, you can buy the Gorgias Automate add-on. This unlocks features like a self-service portal where customers can track or return orders on their own, as well as button-based chat guides (Flows) and automatic article suggestions.

This is a step in the right direction, but it comes with a major catch. The pricing is often based on the number of automated resolutions, which usually costs around $0.90 each. This means that as the tool gets better at deflecting tickets, your bill goes up. You’re basically paying a penalty for becoming more efficient, which leads to unpredictable costs that can get out of hand during busy seasons. This is a big difference from platforms like eesel AI, which offer clear, predictable pricing that doesn’t punish you for automating more.

The world of third-party Gorgias chatbot integrations

Because the built-in Gorgias tools have their limits, a whole ecosystem of third-party apps has popped up to fill the gap. Brands are looking for real AI that can understand customers, learn from experience, and resolve issues without help. You can find plenty of options in the Gorgias app store, from tools like PerfectBot to Manifest AI.

But diving into the app store isn’t always a quick fix. Here’s what you might run into:

• Complicated Setups: Many of these tools require long onboarding calls, custom coding, or even a dedicated manager just to get them running. You’re not just buying software; you’re taking on a whole project.

• Siloed Knowledge: Most bots can only learn from a single source, like your help center articles. They completely ignore the goldmine of information hidden in your past support tickets, internal notes, and agent macros.

• "Rip and Replace" Issues: Some solutions make you throw out the native Gorgias chat widget and use theirs instead. This messes up your team’s workflow, confuses your agents, and ruins the smooth experience you chose Gorgias for.

This is where a more modern platform like eesel AI really stands out. It’s built to be so easy you can set it up yourself, letting you go live in minutes, not months. Even better, it instantly connects all of your company knowledge, from old Gorgias tickets to your internal guides in Confluence or Google Docs.

How to choose the right Gorgias chatbot

Picking the right Gorgias chatbot isn’t like choosing just another app. It’s more like hiring a new member of your support team. Here are a few things to look for when you’re evaluating your options.

Ease of setup and implementation

What you should look for: An ideal tool lets you sign up, connect your helpdesk with one click, and start testing the AI in minutes, all without needing to schedule a sales call.

The common problem: Many AI companies hide their products behind mandatory demos and then hit you with a setup process that takes weeks. It’s hard to know if the tool is even a good fit before you’ve already sunk a bunch of time and energy into it.

How eesel AI is different: eesel AI is completely self-serve. You can start for free, connect Gorgias in a single click, and immediately jump into the simulation mode. This feature lets you test the AI on thousands of your real, historical tickets in a totally risk-free environment. You can see exactly how it would have replied, get a precise forecast of your automation rate, and figure out your potential ROI before it ever talks to a single customer.

The eesel AI simulation mode allows you to test the Gorgias chatbot on historical tickets to forecast automation rates and ROI.

Intelligence and learning capability

What you should look for: The AI should learn from all of your knowledge sources, especially the valuable, real-world info locked away in your team’s past conversations.

The common problem: Most chatbots can only learn from a static knowledge base. If a customer asks something that isn’t spelled out in an FAQ article, the bot is stumped. It can’t handle subtle questions, match your brand’s voice, or adapt when new issues pop up.

How eesel AI is different: eesel AI is designed to unify your knowledge instantly. It doesn’t just scan your help center. It trains on your past Gorgias tickets, your macros, and even internal resources your team uses, like Google Docs or Notion. This helps ensure its answers are always accurate, sound like your brand, and can handle all those tricky, one-off questions your team has answered before.

eesel AI’s intelligent Gorgias chatbot connects to all your knowledge sources, including past tickets and internal documents.

Customization and control

What you should look for: You need total control over what the AI automates, what it passes on to a human, and what actions it can take for the customer.

The common problem: Many AI tools feel like a "black box." You just flip a switch and hope for the best. This all-or-nothing approach is risky and often leads to frustrating customer experiences when the bot inevitably makes a mistake.

How eesel AI is different: eesel AI gives you a fully customizable workflow engine, putting you in control. You can use the prompt editor to define the AI’s exact personality and tone. You can set up rules so it only automates specific topics, like "Where is my order?" questions, while sending everything else to your team. You can even build custom AI Actions that let the bot look up order details from Shopify or update ticket fields, just like a human agent would.

With eesel AI, you can fully customize the behavior and rules of your Gorgias chatbot for complete control.

A clear look at pricing

Pricing can be one of the trickiest parts of choosing a chatbot. Vendors use all sorts of different models, making it tough to compare them fairly.

Gorgias pricing

First, there’s the cost of the Gorgias helpdesk itself, which is based on how many tickets you handle.

This pricing was sourced from the official Gorgias pricing page and may have changed.

Don’t forget, the AI features are sold separately as the Gorgias Automate add-on. As we covered earlier, this is priced per resolution. This model leads to unpredictable bills that grow right alongside your automation success, which is a real downside for growing businesses.

The eesel AI alternative

eesel AI offers a much clearer and more predictable alternative with its flat-rate subscription. You get all the main products (AI Agent, Copilot, Triage, Chatbot) included for one price.

The most important difference here is that there are no per-resolution fees. Your bill stays the same every month, whether the AI handles 100 tickets or 10,000. It’s a model built to help you grow, not to charge you more for it.

This video introduces the Gorgias AI Agent, showcasing how it can serve as a powerful Gorgias chatbot for your team.

Give Gorgias a boost with a truly smart Gorgias chatbot

Gorgias is an excellent helpdesk, but its built-in automation relies on old-school, rigid rules that can’t keep up with what customers expect today. While third-party chatbots can fill this AI gap, many are a headache to set up, can’t learn from all your data, and have pricing models that are confusing and unpredictable.

The best approach is to add a modern AI layer on top of Gorgias, one that’s easy to use, learns from your existing knowledge, gives you full control, and has transparent pricing.

eesel AI is a platform that delivers on all these points, letting you launch a powerful AI agent for Gorgias in minutes, not months. You get to improve the tools you already use without having to rip everything out and start over.

Ready to see what a real AI-powered Gorgias chatbot can do for your store? Start your free eesel AI trial today and run a simulation on your own tickets to see it in action.