Gorgias vs Intercom: The 2025 guide to choosing your helpdesk

Choosing a new helpdesk can feel like a huge, irreversible decision. You’re trying to find the perfect fit, and two names that pop up constantly are Gorgias and Intercom. On the surface, the choice looks pretty straightforward: Gorgias is for e-commerce, and Intercom is the all-in-one platform for pretty much everyone else. But once you start digging, you realize it's not that simple.

This guide is here to cut through the marketing noise. We're going to break down the real differences in the Gorgias vs Intercom debate, looking at their core features, what their AI can actually do, and their famously confusing pricing. By the end, you'll have a much clearer idea of which one fits your team. We’ll also explore a third path: what if the answer isn't about replacing your helpdesk, but making it smarter with a flexible AI layer?

What is Gorgias?

Gorgias is a customer service helpdesk that was built from the ground up with one type of business in mind: e-commerce stores. Its superpower is its incredibly deep integration with platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento.

Imagine this: a customer writes in asking about their order. Instead of having to open another tab, log into Shopify, and search for the customer's details, your support agent can see everything right inside the Gorgias dashboard. Not only can they see the order, but they can take action. They can edit the order, issue a refund, or apply a discount without ever leaving the conversation. It’s all about speed and efficiency.

A screenshot of the Gorgias dashboard, illustrating its e-commerce focused interface in the Gorgias vs Intercom comparison.::alt_text=A screenshot of the Gorgias user interface with deep Shopify integration visible, a key feature in the Gorgias vs Intercom comparison for e-commerce brands.::alt_title=Gorgias Dashboard Shopify Integration Gorgias vs Intercom

It pulls all your customer conversations from email, live chat, and social media (like Facebook and Instagram) into one place. Gorgias also leans on AI to automate answers to all those repetitive e-commerce questions, like the classic "Where is my order?" (WISMO). This frees up your team to handle trickier issues and conversations that can actually lead to a sale. The whole philosophy is to turn your support team from a cost center into a profit center.

What is Intercom?

Intercom is a much broader customer communications platform. While Gorgias is hyper-focused on e-commerce support, Intercom aims to manage the entire customer journey, which is why it's so popular with SaaS companies. Its whole approach is "messenger-first," built around its famous little chat widget that lives on your website.

Beyond just support, Intercom has tools for marketing automation, sending targeted messages to users, and customer onboarding, like walking new users through your app with product tours.

A screenshot of the Intercom Messenger, showcasing its modern design in this Gorgias vs Intercom comparison.::alt_text=A screenshot of the Intercom Messenger, showcasing its modern design in this Gorgias vs Intercom comparison.::alt_title=Intercom Messenger Live Chat Gorgias vs Intercom

Its AI chatbot, Fin, is a big part of the package. Fin’s job is to provide instant answers by digging through your help center articles and a knowledge base, deflecting tickets before they ever reach a human agent. While Intercom connects with plenty of other apps, its integrations aren’t designed for deep backend actions like editing an order in Shopify. The focus is much more on proactive communication and helping customers help themselves. It’s a tool for the whole customer lifecycle, not just for support tickets.

Gorgias vs Intercom: The main differences

Both platforms want to help you talk to your customers better, but their philosophies are worlds apart. Let's put them side-by-side to see how they really compare on features, automation, and how they play with other tools.

Who are they for?

This is the biggest distinction. Gorgias is unapologetically built for e-commerce and direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands. Every feature, every workflow is fine-tuned for the fast-paced world of online retail. The main goal is to solve problems that happen after a purchase as quickly as possible and use those support chats to encourage another sale.

Intercom, on the other hand, is for a much wider audience, especially SaaS companies, online marketplaces, and digital services. Its strengths are in engaging with users before they even have a problem, guiding new customers through a product with tours, and building out a detailed self-service knowledge base to support a piece of software, not just answer questions about a shipment.

How their AI and automation work

Gorgias gives you some pretty slick, rules-based automation for common e-commerce tasks. You can set up rules to automatically tag any ticket that mentions "return," send back an instant reply with the order status, or route all shipping-related questions to a specific person. It's fast and effective, but its AI can feel a bit one-dimensional if your support needs go beyond the usual retail scenarios.

A screenshot showing Gorgias's rule-based automation for ticket routing, a key aspect of the Gorgias vs Intercom debate.::alt_text=A view of the Gorgias rules-based automation setup, a key point in the Gorgias vs Intercom comparison.::alt_title=Gorgias Automation Rules Gorgias vs Intercom

Intercom’s Fin AI chatbot is great at handling common questions by finding answers in your help articles. It’s a solid tool for self-service, but it comes with a pretty big string attached: it's a pricey add-on, usually costing $0.99 for every question it resolves. Getting it to do anything more complicated than fetching an answer can get complex and might mean you need a developer to help out.

This is where both platforms kind of hit a wall. Gorgias's AI is powerful but narrow, while Intercom's is expensive and only learns from the content you put inside Intercom. A more modern tool like eesel AI works differently. It plugs into the helpdesk you already have and connects to all of your company's knowledge, whether it's in old tickets, Confluence pages, or Google Docs. Plus, its pricing is transparent and never charges you per resolution.

Gorgias vs Intercom: Integrations and how they connect to other tools

Here, Gorgias really shines with its tight ecosystem of e-commerce apps. It connects perfectly with tools like Recharge for subscriptions, Loop for returns, and Klaviyo for email marketing. It’s designed to be the command center for a retail tech stack. But if you look for integrations outside of the e-commerce world, the options are pretty slim.

Intercom has a massive app store with over 250 integrations, but they're mostly for SaaS tools like Salesforce, Marketo, and Jira. Its Shopify integration is pretty shallow; it can show you customer data, but it can't do anything with it. You can look, but you can't touch.

A truly helpful AI tool shouldn't make you burn everything down and start over. It should make what you already have better. That’s the idea behind eesel AI. It's designed to plug right into Gorgias, Intercom, or whatever helpdesk you’re using to bring all your knowledge together and add a smart automation layer without forcing you to change your entire workflow.

Feature	Gorgias	Intercom
Best For	E-commerce, DTC Brands	SaaS, General Business
Shopify Integration	Deep (can edit orders, issue refunds)	Surface-level (can only view data)
How their AI works	Automation focused on e-commerce tasks	Chatbot that pulls from a knowledge base
AI Pricing	Per automated interaction	Per resolution ($0.99)
Where AI gets info	Help Center, Macros	Help Center, Articles
Setup Difficulty	Moderate	High, usually needs a few sales demos

Gorgias vs Intercom: A pricing breakdown

Pricing is where these two platforms really diverge, and honestly, where things can get a little messy.

Breaking down Gorgias pricing

Gorgias uses a ticket-based pricing model. The good news is that they offer unlimited user seats on all their plans, which is fantastic for teams that are growing.

• Starter: $10/month for 50 billable tickets.

• Basic: $50/month for 300 billable tickets.

• Pro: $300/month for 2,000 billable tickets.

• Advanced: $750/month for 5,000 billable tickets.

The catch is in the fine print. You have to watch out for overage fees if you go over your ticket limit. And their AI Agent has its own cost. Each fully automated resolution will set you back between $0.90 and $1.00, depending on your plan. If you have a busy month, those costs can add up surprisingly fast.

A screenshot of the Gorgias pricing page, illustrating the ticket-based model in the Gorgias vs Intercom comparison.::alt_text=A screenshot of Gorgias pricing plans, a factor in the Gorgias vs Intercom decision.::alt_title=Gorgias Pricing Plans Gorgias vs Intercom

Breaking down Intercom pricing

Intercom’s pricing is seat-based and famously complicated. Their plans are structured to get you started, but many of the features you actually need are sold as expensive add-ons.

• Essential: Starts at $39 per seat, per month.

• Advanced: Starts at $99 per seat, per month.

• Expert: Starts at $139 per seat, per month.

The biggest hidden cost is the Fin AI Agent add-on, which is a flat $0.99 per resolution. No exceptions. Other features like proactive support messages, product tours, and using other channels like SMS also come with their own usage-based fees. This makes it incredibly hard to predict your monthly bill.

For comparison, eesel AI’s pricing is designed to be simple and predictable. Plans are based on the features you need and your overall usage, but there are no per-resolution fees. This actually encourages you to automate more, because you won't get penalized for your success.

The real Gorgias vs Intercom headache: Trapped knowledge and inflexible AI

When you choose between Gorgias and Intercom, you're essentially picking a lane, e-commerce or SaaS. But the biggest problem with both platforms is something they don't advertise: they operate in their own little bubbles, which limits what your automation can do and locks you into their way of doing things.

First, there's the issue of trapped knowledge. Let's be real, your company's collective brain doesn't just live in a neatly organized help center. It's scattered everywhere: in the resolutions of past tickets, in internal wikis built in Confluence or Notion, and in process docs tucked away in Google Drive. Gorgias’s AI can't tap into any of that internal knowledge, and Intercom’s AI is stuck reading only its own help articles. This means your AI is flying blind, working with only a tiny piece of the information it needs to be genuinely helpful.

Second, both platforms force you into their rigid workflows. Trying to customize how the AI behaves is often a pain, and you can't really test your automations on real-world data before you let them loose on your customers. That’s a risky way to roll out AI and makes it tough to feel confident flipping the switch.

A different way to think about the Gorgias vs Intercom choice: Unify your tools with a flexible AI layer

Instead of boxing yourself into a restrictive platform, what if you could just add a flexible AI layer on top of the tools you already know and love? This is exactly why eesel AI was created, to solve those exact problems of trapped knowledge and rigid automation.

First off, eesel AI connects all your knowledge sources instantly. It doesn’t just plug into your helpdesk; it also connects to all the other places your team stores information, like Google Docs, Confluence, past tickets, you name it. This gives your AI a complete understanding of your business, so it can give accurate, context-aware answers that other platforms simply can't match.

Second, eesel AI puts you in complete control. You can get set up and running in a few minutes, not a few months, because it's a truly self-serve platform. It has a powerful simulation mode that lets you test your AI on thousands of your past tickets, so you can see exactly what your resolution rate would be before you turn it on for customers. You get fine-grained control to shape the AI's personality, customize what it can do, and tell it precisely which types of tickets it should and shouldn't handle.

This approach just makes more sense. Your existing tools, whether that’s Gorgias, Intercom, a knowledge base like Confluence, or even internal chat in Slack, all become food for a single, unified AI brain. That brain, powered by eesel AI, can then deploy smart agents across all your support channels, from your helpdesk to an internal Q&A bot for your team, ensuring every answer is consistent and draws from all your available knowledge.

Should you pick Gorgias, Intercom, or something more?

So, after all that, what's the final call in the Gorgias vs Intercom showdown?

• Go with Gorgias if you run an e-commerce store on a platform like Shopify and your main priority is a helpdesk that can manage orders and customer issues in one place.

• Go with Intercom if you’re a SaaS company that wants to focus on proactive messaging and self-service, and you’ve got the budget to handle its complex, per-seat pricing.

But if your real goal is to build a smarter support system that uses all of your company’s knowledge, then neither platform on its own is the complete answer. The future of customer support isn’t about choosing one siloed tool over another; it's about connecting the tools you already use with a smart, flexible AI layer that sits on top.

See for yourself how eesel AI can make your current helpdesk more powerful. You can start a free trial and find out what your automated resolution rate could be in just a few minutes.