Gorgias vs Zendesk: Which help desk is right for you in 2025?

Picking a new help desk feels like a huge commitment, doesn't it? It’s where all your customer conversations live, and it’s a decision that can stick with you for years. If you're running an e-commerce brand, the pressure is even higher because a great support experience can turn a first-time buyer into a customer for life.

This usually leads to a face-off between two of the biggest names in the game: Gorgias, the tool built specifically for e-commerce, and Zendesk, the powerful veteran that can handle just about anything.

So, do you go with the specialist that gets your world completely, or the flexible all-rounder that can grow with you in any direction?

It’s a tough question. But what if there's a third option that gets lost in the noise? What if you could get the specialized features you’re craving without going through the headache of switching platforms? Sometimes, the smartest move isn't to tear everything down and start over, but to give your current setup a serious power-up. Let's get into it.

What is Gorgias?

Gorgias is a customer service platform made for online merchants, particularly those on Shopify, BigCommerce, or Magento. Its whole purpose is to bring every customer message, whether it’s from email, chat, or a social media comment, into one place and help your support team turn those chats into sales.

A look at the Gorgias dashboard, a key part of the Gorgias vs Zendesk evaluation.

You can think of it as a help desk that thinks like a store owner. Its biggest advantage is how deeply it connects with shopping platforms. An agent can pull up a customer's entire order history, change an order, issue a refund, or see how much they've spent over their lifetime, all without ever leaving the ticket. It's also designed to manage the sometimes-chaotic world of social media commerce, letting you reply to DMs and comments on Facebook and Instagram right alongside your support emails. Plus, it has automations ready to go for the most common e-commerce question ever: "Where's my order?"

What is Zendesk?

Zendesk is one of the originals in the customer service space. It's a massive, incredibly flexible platform used by everyone from small startups to huge global companies in pretty much every industry you can think of. If Gorgias is a precision scalpel, Zendesk is the fully-loaded Swiss Army knife.

Its main purpose is to give you a super solid, all-in-one foundation for customer support that can handle a ton of volume. The ticketing system is the core of it all; it's robust, customizable, and can be tweaked to manage even the most complicated workflows. Zendesk brings together email, chat, phone calls, social media, and even community forums into one agent workspace. It also has a huge app marketplace with over 1,500 integrations and a powerful knowledge base tool, Zendesk Guide, for building out your self-service options. It’s built to be the one central spot for every single customer interaction.

A detailed breakdown: Gorgias vs Zendesk

Alright, now that we've met the contenders, let's see how they stack up on the features that really matter.

Gorgias vs Zendesk: Core focus and who they're for

Gorgias is built from the ground up for direct-to-consumer (DTC) e-commerce brands. If you live and breathe Shopify and want your support team to have every scrap of customer data in front of them, Gorgias is for you. It's designed for teams that want to resolve tickets quickly and view support as a way to make money, not just a department that costs money.

Zendesk, on the other hand, is aimed at mid-sized to enterprise companies that need a seriously powerful and customizable system to manage conversations across different departments and industries. It’s for teams that require detailed reporting, top-notch security, and the ability to build out complex workflows that go way beyond just retail.

And here’s where things get tricky. Choosing either one means you're signing up for a major setup project, retraining your team, and probably a painful data migration. But what if you could get those slick e-commerce features you want without ditching the help desk your team already knows? An AI layer like eesel AI can plug into your current system and give you the best of both worlds, minus the migration drama.

Gorgias vs Zendesk: E-commerce integrations and functionality

Okay, this is where the Gorgias vs Zendesk comparison really gets interesting, and it’s Gorgias’s home field advantage. The integration with Shopify is practically flawless. Agents can do things like issue refunds, edit orders, or slap on a discount code directly within the help desk. That feature alone can slash your resolution times and make your support team way more effective.

A view of Gorgias's seamless Shopify integration, a major point in the Gorgias vs Zendesk debate.

Zendesk has a Shopify integration, but to be honest, it's pretty basic in comparison. It mostly just shows order information. If an agent actually needs to do something, they still have to open up a new tab and log into Shopify. That constant back-and-forth is a huge source of friction and a common gripe for e-commerce teams using the platform.

The zendesk/shopify integration is also garbage and doesn't let you do anything, just shows order info. So you're constantly bouncing between Zendesk and Shopify.

Reddit

Instead of moving away from Zendesk just to get better e-commerce tools, you could just add them with eesel AI. By connecting to your Shopify store, eesel's AI can look up order details, process a return, or check on inventory for you, all from inside Zendesk (or even Gorgias, for that matter). This saves you the huge cost and time sink of a full migration while still giving your team the tools they actually need.

Gorgias vs Zendesk: Automation and AI capabilities

Gorgias has some solid, e-commerce-focused automation built in called "Rules." You can set them up to automatically tag tickets or fire off a quick reply to common questions about order status. Their AI Agent is meant to handle these simple chats all on its own. The only downside is that these automations can be a bit rigid and are limited to the information you have stored inside Gorgias.

Zendesk has an extremely powerful automation engine for building out complex, multi-step workflows, but it has a reputation for being complicated to set up and manage. Its own AI tools are mainly built to suggest help center articles. That's fine for deflecting basic questions, but it doesn't help much when a customer has an issue that requires information from other business tools.

The AI in both platforms is stuck inside its own little world, which is a big problem. eesel AI solves this by connecting all your knowledge sources together. It doesn't just learn from a single help center; it learns from your team's past tickets, your internal wikis in Confluence or Google Docs, and even your technical docs. You get full control over the AI's personality and what it's allowed to do. Even better, its simulation mode lets you test how it would have handled thousands of your past tickets before you ever turn it on, so you know exactly what kind of impact it will have from day one.

Gorgias vs Zendesk: Pricing models

How you pay is another major difference between the two.

Gorgias uses a ticket-based pricing model. You pay for the number of "billable tickets" you handle each month, but you get unlimited user accounts. This might sound great for small teams, but the costs can be all over the place. During a busy season like Black Friday, your ticket volume can skyrocket, and your bill will go right up with it. It basically costs you more as you get more successful.

Zendesk charges you per agent, per month. This model is predictable, which is nice for budgeting, but it can get pricey fast as your support team gets bigger. It can also make you hesitant to give a license to someone in another department who might only need to pop in once in a while.

Both models can get expensive as you scale. eesel AI offers a much simpler alternative with clear, predictable pricing based on how many AI interactions you use, not how many agents you have or tickets you get. This lets you grow your support capacity without sweating surprise fees or adding more expensive agent seats.

Beyond Gorgias vs Zendesk: The third option of upgrading your help desk

Let's be real: moving your help desk is a monster of a project. You're talking about migrating years of customer data, rebuilding all of your workflows from scratch, and retraining your entire team. It's a huge disruption, it costs a ton, and it can take months. But on the other hand, sticking with a tool that isn't quite working for you creates daily frustrations and burns out your team.

There's a better way to think about this: just add an AI platform on top of what you already have.

eesel AI works like a smart layer that sits right over your current tools. It connects to Gorgias, Zendesk, and other help desks in minutes with a simple one-click setup. It immediately starts learning from all your past tickets and scattered knowledge bases, letting you launch powerful, custom automations without messing with your team's day-to-day routine. This "upgrade, don't replace" approach gives you immediate results and helps you skip months of migration misery.

Gorgias vs Zendesk: Which is right for you?

So, what's the final call in the Gorgias vs Zendesk debate? It really comes down to who you are and what you need right now.

• Go with Gorgias if you're a growing e-commerce brand and a deep, ready-to-go Shopify integration is your number one priority.

• Go with Zendesk if you're a larger company working across different industries and need a super customizable, scalable platform that can handle anything you might need down the road.

But before you sign a new contract and start planning a migration, ask yourself a simple question: do you really need a whole new help desk, or do you just need better automation? eesel AI delivers more powerful, flexible, and controllable AI that plugs right into the system your team already uses every day.

You can get the advanced e-commerce automation you're looking for without the pain of switching. Why not just give your current help desk a superpower upgrade instead?