Gorgias vs Help Scout: An honest comparison for 2025

Picking the right helpdesk is a pretty big deal. It’s the command center for your entire customer experience, and if you get it wrong, you’re looking at wasted time, burned-out agents, and unhappy customers. For businesses that are growing, the choice often comes down to two major players: Gorgias and Help Scout. But they’re built with completely different ideas in mind, one is a focused specialist, while the other is a flexible all-rounder.

So, how do you actually decide? In this article, we’ll give you a straightforward, no-fluff comparison of their features, AI smarts, and how they charge. We’ll also let you in on a little secret: your helpdesk is just the starting point. The real magic happens when you add a smart AI layer on top, which can turn your support team from a cost center into a growth engine.

What is Gorgias?

Gorgias is a customer experience platform designed from the ground up specifically for e-commerce brands. Its whole reason for being is to help online stores pull all their customer conversations into one place and turn support interactions into sales opportunities. It gathers messages from email, social media DMs, post comments, SMS, and voice into a single feed. But its real strength is how deeply it connects with e-commerce platforms.

If you’re running on Shopify, BigCommerce, or Magento, Gorgias feels like a part of your store. Your agents can see customer data, edit orders, process refunds, and check subscription details without ever having to switch tabs. This tight-knit relationship with the Shopify ecosystem is its biggest selling point, helping teams solve problems faster and even find chances to sell. And when you’re looking to add another layer of intelligence, you’ll find that eesel AI integrates with Gorgias perfectly to boost its capabilities.

What is Help Scout?

Help Scout is more of a general-purpose customer support tool, well-known for being simple and putting people first. While Gorgias is all about retail, Help Scout is made for a much broader audience, from SaaS startups to universities.

Its main tools include shared inboxes for teamwork, a solid knowledge base feature called "Docs," and an embeddable help widget they call "Beacon." The whole idea behind the platform is to encourage personal, helpful conversations instead of just cranking through tickets. It’s a great fit for small and medium-sized businesses that want a clean, easy-to-use interface and don’t need all the heavy e-commerce features Gorgias offers. It does have a Shopify integration, but it’s more for looking up order history than for making changes, which shows its wider focus.

Core features and focus

The biggest difference between these two platforms really comes down to who they’re for. Think of it as a scalpel versus a Swiss Army knife.

E-commerce specialization vs general-purpose support

Gorgias is loaded with features tailor-made for online stores. It can track how much revenue is generated from support chats, use sentiment analysis to flag urgent e-commerce problems like "defective item" or "shipping issue," and has built-in integrations for Instagram and Facebook comments, which are huge sales and support channels for direct-to-consumer brands.

Omnichannel capabilities and integrations

Gorgias is fantastic at pulling all your e-commerce channels into one dashboard. It handles Facebook, Instagram (including comments on posts and ads), SMS, and voice right out of the box. It also connects with over 100 key e-commerce apps like Klaviyo, Yotpo, and Recharge, letting you build a fully connected customer experience.

Help Scout manages email and live chat without a hitch and connects to social media through other integrations, but they aren’t as deeply woven into the platform as they are in Gorgias. Instead, its integration library is stronger for general business tools like Salesforce, Jira, and HubSpot. This makes it a better option for teams whose daily work goes beyond just the e-commerce world.

The takeaway on features

Your business model should really guide your decision here. If you live and breathe e-commerce, Gorgias has the purpose-built features to help you sell more and provide smarter support. If what you need is streamlined communication and organization that works for any industry, Help Scout offers a powerful, clean, and adaptable solution.

Feature	Gorgias	Help Scout
Who it’s for	E-commerce brands	SMBs, SaaS, any industry
Shopify Integration	Deep (edit orders, refunds)	Basic (view order history)
Social Media	Built-in (FB/IG comments, DMs)	Through integrations
AI Focus	E-commerce tasks, sales	Drafting, summarizing, KB answers
Knowledge Base	Basic (via integrations)	Strong built-in feature ("Docs")
Pricing Model	Per billable ticket	Per "contact helped"
Standout Feature	Revenue tracking from support	"Beacon" embeddable widget

A look at their AI and automation

Both platforms have their own AI features, but they approach it differently, and both have their limits. This is where it really pays to understand your options.

How Gorgias uses AI

Gorgias’s AI is all about automating common e-commerce jobs. It uses intent detection to figure out what a customer is asking for (like an order status or a return request) and can automatically tag the ticket or send a pre-written reply using "Flows." It’s a practical tool built to handle the flood of repetitive questions that online stores get every day.

The catch? Its AI is effective but not very flexible. It only works inside the Gorgias system and depends on the knowledge you’ve set up by hand. The pricing can also get expensive, since it often charges you for each automated resolution, basically, you pay more for being more efficient.

How Help Scout uses AI

Help Scout’s AI is more focused on helping agents be more efficient, not trying to replace them. It can summarize long email chains to get new agents up to speed, help draft replies based on past conversations and knowledge base articles, and suggest relevant help docs. Think of it as a helpful assistant that helps your team give better, faster human support.

The limitation here is that it’s more of a suggestion tool than an automation engine. It can’t do things like update a ticket field, look up live order information from another system, or resolve a ticket all by itself. It’s also limited to the knowledge you have stored inside Help Scout.

The third option for a smarter, more flexible AI layer

Here’s the thing: you don’t have to be locked into your helpdesk’s native AI. A dedicated AI platform that works with any tool can give you a lot more power and flexibility, whether you end up choosing Gorgias, Help Scout, or something else.

This is where a tool like eesel AI fits in. It’s an intelligent AI layer that connects directly to the helpdesk and other tools you already use, getting around the limitations of built-in solutions.

Here’s how it’s different:

• It unifies all your knowledge: eesel AI doesn’t just learn from your helpdesk. It instantly connects to all your company knowledge, past tickets, your Confluence wiki, Google Docs, Notion pages, and even Slack threads. This gives it the full picture of your business, which means it can give much more accurate and complete answers.

• You get total control and custom actions: Forget being stuck with rigid, pre-set rules. With eesel AI’s prompt editor, you can define your AI’s exact personality, tone of voice, and the specific actions it’s allowed to take. Need it to look up an order in Shopify, check a shipping status through an API, or escalate a ticket with a specific tag? You can build that yourself, no developers required.

• You can go live in minutes, not months: Setting up eesel AI is completely self-serve. You can connect your helpdesk with a single click and, this is the best part, use its powerful simulation mode. This lets you test your AI on thousands of your past tickets to see exactly how it would have performed. You get a clear forecast of your automation rate before it ever talks to a real customer. That level of confidence and transparency is something other platforms just don’t offer.

eesel AI's simulation mode provides a clear forecast of your automation rate by testing its performance on your past tickets before going live.

Comparing pricing models

Let’s talk about money. Pricing can be a huge deciding factor, and Gorgias and Help Scout have very different philosophies here.

Gorgias pricing explained

Gorgias’s pricing plans are based on the number of "billable tickets" your team handles each month. Each plan, from Starter to Enterprise, includes a certain number of tickets. If you go over that limit, you’ll pay overage fees. It’s also important to know that many of their advanced automation features are sold as a separate, paid add-on, which can really drive up the total cost.

The main drawback of this model is that it can be unpredictable. A successful marketing campaign or a busy holiday season could easily push you into expensive overage territory, making it tough to budget for your support costs.

Help Scout pricing explained

Help Scout has a pretty unique approach with its pricing. Their plans are based on the number of unique "contacts helped" per month. This tends to be a bit more predictable than per-ticket pricing, and one of its biggest perks is that all plans include unlimited users. Their AI features are also included in the main plans without an extra fee.

While this is a fairer model, your costs can still go up and down depending on how many different customers you talk to each month.

A more predictable alternative with eesel AI’s pricing

If you’re looking for real predictability, eesel AI’s pricing offers a transparent option. Plans are based on a flat number of "AI interactions" per month, which covers any AI-generated reply or action.

The benefit is simple: there are no per-resolution fees. You’ll never get a surprise bill because your AI was too good at its job. Your monthly or annual cost is fixed, which makes it easy to budget and scale without getting financially penalized for your success. It’s just straightforward pricing that works with you.

What’s the call?

After all that, which one should you go with?

Choose Gorgias if: You run an e-commerce store on a platform like Shopify. Your main goal is to automate e-commerce questions and turn your support team into a revenue-generating machine. It’s a specialist tool that’s brilliant at what it does.

Choose Help Scout if: You’re a small-to-medium business in any industry (including e-commerce) and you care most about having a clean, simple interface and a human-first approach to customer service. It’s a versatile and well-loved tool for good reason.

Both are great platforms. The "best" one is just the one that fits your business and how you think about support.

Give your chosen helpdesk a brain that actually works for you

Remember, your helpdesk is just one piece of the puzzle. The real power comes from an AI that adapts to your business, not one that forces you to adapt to it.

Whether you land on Gorgias or Help Scout, eesel AI is the solution that makes your choice even better. It fills in the gaps left by their native AI, connects all your scattered knowledge, and puts you in complete control of your automation strategy. Instead of ripping out your entire helpdesk just to get better AI, you can plug a more powerful brain into the workflow you already have.

Ready to see what a truly flexible AI can do for your team? Sign up for eesel AI and go live in minutes, not months.

This video provides a detailed comparison of Gorgias vs Help Scout, exploring key differentiators like features and pricing to help you choose the best fit.