Gorgias and Zendesk are undisputed leaders in the support ticketing software space. But what’s the difference between the two? How can you decide which is best for your team and business?
If you’re looking for a side-by-side comparison of the two, this head-to-head showdown of Gorgias vs. Zendesk is exactly what you need. We’ll rate each comparison on a scale of 1-10 below.
Based on our analysis, Zendesk is a better option for medium-sized to larger companies seeking support software with extensive integrations and CRM data access, while Gorgias suits e-commerce companies and smaller teams prioritizing a lean approach and quick setup without prior Zendesk experience.
Want to understand how we got to this conclusion? Let's dive in!
The best way to compare software is to start by listing the features you need and the features that would be nice to have.
Here’s an overview of Gorgias’ and Zendesk’s top features.
Let’s do a more in-depth analysis and see some examples of what these features look like in each tool.
Supporting different channels (such as chat, email, and phone) is a great first step. Providing a fantastic support experience requires a little more than that. The software has to combine these channels into a seamless and consistent experience.
Gorgias supports all typical customer support channels, including email, chat, phone, social media, SMS, and WhatsApp. All data related to the ticket and user is immediately visible and easy to use. Here’s an example of the agent interface for a chat.
Zendesk's offering is very similar, also including email, chat, phone, social media, SMS, and WhatsApp. As an added bonus, the agent interface in Zendesk also displays previous messages from the customer.
Winner: Gorgias
In functionality, there’s minimal difference between the two platforms. Zendesk integrates with the same suite of social media sites as Gorgias, but the capabilities are slightly more restricted. For instance, comments from Facebook posts and ads do not get sent to Zendesk.
We give Gorgias a score of 10 and Zendesk a score of 9. Gorgias is slightly more powerful here, mainly for the extra functionality when providing social media support.
Test drive Gorgias for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
Help centers are an essential tool for every support team. They are the original self-service solution and provide customers with access to frequently asked questions (FAQs), articles, and other resources to help them be successful.
Gorgias offers a help center product where you can create categories and articles.
They even provide some templates that can be adapted and customized for creating articles. You have basic options to adjust its appearance, such as selecting a light or dark theme, as well as some SEO optimization tools.
This is what those FAQs look like in the back end.
Zendesk offers a knowledge base called Zendesk Guide in which you can create articles and structure these into categories and sections.
Zendesk lets you edit everything about the appearance of your help center and has a huge library of themes. It also includes a community feature, allowing your customers to ask the community questions and receive help from other Zendesk users.
Here’s an example of a help center built using Zendesk.
Winner: Zendesk
Gorgias’ Help Center was just launched in 2021, so it’s not a surprise that the functionality is still a little basic. It’s good enough to get the job done and answer common questions. If you’re dealing with a high volume of repetitive questions, Gorgias may have enough functionality for you.
In comparison, Zendesk Guide is much further ahead. The commenting and community features make it far more robust, and the extensive customization gives you extra options to develop your self-service solutions in whatever direction you’d like. It has all of the same features as Gorgias and more.
We give Gorgias a score of 6 and Zendesk a score of 10. When it comes down to Gorgias vs. Zendesk in the help center arena, Zendesk is the clear winner.
Test drive Zendesk for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
Ticket routing is a must-have for an efficient customer service team.
Ticket routing automatically assigns support tickets to the appropriate agent or team. It’s often based on factors such as skill level, workload, and priority level.
Gorgias can route tickets to agents or groups based on ticket characteristics. Gorgias also provides a feature to create rules (automated actions) based on different types of tickets.
Here’s an example of a view for the finance team that includes tickets with a finance keyword.
Zendesk provides similar functionality. Zendesk agents can be organized in groups, and you can create triggers that assign incoming tickets to certain groups or specific agents.
Zendesk also enables skills-based routing by defining certain skills (based on product knowledge or language) and ensuring those tickets are sent to the right agents.
This is a ticket that was escalated to a manager based on a tag.
Winner: Zendesk
Gorgias’ rule-based system is simple and easy to use, but it’s also quite limited. It works best for smaller teams that don’t have many different types of skills or need a complex routing system.
Zendesk provides many more options with skills-based routing, omnichannel routing, and automations. That means it can handle a more complex setup and should be able to solve for virtually every routing need a support team might come up with.
We give Gorgias a score of 7 and Zendesk a score of 10.
Test drive Zendesk for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
Building an amazing support team requires analytics.
When you want to know how your support team is performing, you need to track and analyze metrics such as response time, resolution time, customer satisfaction scores, and ticket volume.
Gorgias offers a series of built-in reports and dashboards with comprehensive filters to slice the data in the ways you want. One of the more interesting reports is on revenue statistics, where they combine ticket data with data from Shopify to illustrate the revenue your support team has helped bring in. Connecting customer support and revenue is often a challenge for support leaders, so this report is a definite value-add.
Zendesk also has built-in dashboards with some basic reports and filtering capabilities in their analytics tool called Zendesk Explore. While Zendesk Explore is very powerful and allows you to create a huge variety of reports, it comes with a steep learning curve and an intense time commitment.
Winner: Zendesk
Gorgias provides a limited set of reports, but they make it easy to see the most important data at one glance. Zendesk’s default dashboards are more basic because the tool is capable of so much more — but it requires experience and time (or paying a consultant) to get significant value from it.
We give Gorgias a score of 8 and Zendesk a score of 9. Bigger is not always better, but at the end of the day Zendesk Explore has the capability of doing far more than Gorgias. When comparing Gorgias vs. Zendesk in regard to analytics, think carefully about the level of complexity and customization your team needs.
Test drive Zendesk for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
The secret to an extremely effective support team? Great canned responses.
Canned responses are pre-written replies to common customer inquiries that can be quickly and easily inserted into support tickets. They’re often used to automate other actions as well.
Gorgias offers canned responses in the form of macros, which paste the response and add tags. Gorgias automatically suggests macros that might be relevant for a ticket, and it displays the full macro text when you’re searching, making it easy and convenient to find the right response.
Zendesk macros are similar. You can select a macro that pastes the response and sequence other actions with the macro like adding a tag. Hovering over the macro brings up the option to view the full text as well, although it requires a couple of extra clicks.
Winner: Gorgias
Automatically suggesting a macro is a huge feature for support teams. You can only do that in Zendesk by installing a whole separate app for it. Gorgias’ macro and automation tracking is also easier to do.
We give Gorgias a score of 9 and Zendesk a score of 7. Gorgias could improve by speeding up the keyword search, but out of the box it’s probably the better option when it comes to canned responses.
Test drive Gorgias for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
Related Reading: Best Zendesk Alternatives
The ultimate question every support team should answer is: Why are our customers creating tickets?
Most companies track ticket volume using tags. Tagging allows you to organize support tickets based on categories such as issue type, product, or customer segment.
Gorgias displays all tags at the top of the ticket. Tags can be added manually or applied automatically using rules.
Zendesk displays tags on the left side of the agent interface. Tags can also be added manually or automatically.
Zendesk offers some additional functionality here that sets them apart: ticket forms. You can create custom ticket forms and adjust the fields to include a drop-down menu, a date, or any other type of information. This makes it easier to tag tickets, control the input, and track them.
Winner: Zendesk
While both platforms allow you to create triggers and categorize tickets with them, manual input is much easier on Zendesk. Because Zendesk includes ticket form fields on top of basic tags, it makes categorization much easier and more convenient.
We give Gorgias a score of 5 and Zendesk a score of 8. Zendesk could benefit from offering a better native function for automatic categorization.
Test drive Zendesk for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
Ticket deflection is the primary goal behind self-service.
Great support platforms use machine learning to suggest relevant articles or resources from the help center to customers. The goal is to reduce the number of support tickets that need to be handled by agents.
Gorgias has a self-service feature that provides instant answers and allows you to fully automate some customer requests. It also includes intent and sentiment detection, so you can create different rules for customers who are angry, for example.
Zendesk includes Answer Bot, which automatically suggests articles for a customer based on their ticket. These suggestions are saved in the ticket, and the customer can close it if they find one helpful.
Winner: Gorgias
Both tools are quite limited and could provide so much more when it comes to deflection. Gorgias is tailored to e-commerce support and enables you to automate actions such as tracking, returning, or canceling an order. That means you can use it reliably in some cases. It’s harder to target specific queries with Answer Bot.
We give Gorgias a score of 7 and Zendesk a score of 6. Gorgias’ functionality wins by a slight edge.
Test drive Gorgias for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
You probably already have a tech stack for your support team. Think about all the tools you use across the customer lifecycle. They might include CRM systems, marketing automation tools, and project management software.
Integrating these tools with your support software means you can access more information and level up your personalization of the customer experience.
Gorgias offers deep, native integrations with Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento as well as with 75+ other apps that can be installed through their app store. The e-commerce integrations are particularly powerful and easy to set up.
Zendesk offers a huge number of integrations through their marketplace as well, including with Shopify and Salesforce. Some integrations are easier to use than others, but with about 1500 apps in total, finding something that does what you want is highly likely.
Winner: Zendesk
This one depends largely on the integration you want to use.
Gorgias has specialized in the integrations that matter the most for their customers, namely e-commerce related apps and tools. Zendesk has gone for a broader approach and tried to provide as many integrations as possible. If you’re using Shopify, for example, it’s better to compare that specific app and see if it offers the functionality you need.
We give Gorgias a score of 7 and Zendesk a score of 9. Zendesk wins here because of the sheer number of possibilities they give users, but Gorgias is an excellent choice for their target customers of e-commerce businesses.
Test drive Zendesk for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
Comparing features is important, but don’t forget that your support team will be using this tool day in and day out.
How user-friendly and intuitive are these platforms, really?
Gorgias is a relatively simple tool. Everything is accessible from one place, and it’s easy to build a good understanding of its features and how they work by clicking around. If you’ve worked with any type of ticketing system before, setting up Gorgias isn’t complex.
Zendesk is an extremely powerful software. In fact, it may be better to conceptualize Zendesk as a series of tools. Learning to use Zendesk as an agent isn’t complicated at all — it’s similar to working as an agent in most other ticketing tools. But Zendesk is highly customizable, and learning how to set it up right and being able to take full advantage of its advanced features requires real expertise.
Winner: Gorgias
We give Gorgias a score of 8 and Zendesk a score of 6. As a simpler tool with a narrower use case, Gorgias has an advantage when it comes to ease of use.
Test drive Gorgias for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
Gorgias offers per-ticket pricing, ranging from 50 tickets per month at $10/month to 5000 tickets per month at $900/month. Their enterprise pricing includes higher ticket volume, but pricing isn’t publicly available for that.
Zendesk has a very different pricing model based on the number of agents. They start at $49/agent per month for their lowest plan and go up to $99/agent per month. They also offer enterprise-level pricing, ranging from $150 to $215/agent per month.
Both have add-ons that can be purchased individually at varying price points.
Winner: It's a tie!
Given all of this, we’d rate this a tie. It’s difficult to compare two different pricing models, and the real deciding factors are your ticket volume and the number of tickets each agent works per month.
If you’re dealing with a low volume of support tickets, Gorgias may be more cost-effective. But even if you’ve got a high volume of tickets, with a really efficient support team, Zendesk’s pricing can actually work out to be cheaper.
Gorgias really targets e-commerce stores. It provides all the essential features you need to offer multichannel support to new and existing shoppers:
On the other hand, Zendesk is a very robust and powerful tool that offers almost everything you could need when scaling a support team:
Based on our analysis, Zendesk is a better option for medium-sized to larger companies who are looking for support software. If you want to integrate your customer support with a variety of other tools and pull customer data from a CRM tool, Zendesk is probably the best choice.
Gorgias is a better option for e-commerce companies who want to keep things lean. It’s also better for smaller teams who want to get something up and running quickly and who might not have previous experience with Zendesk.
In-depth analysis of features like this can be super valuable (hopefully you found it helpful!). But there’s nothing like getting hands-on time with different tools to understand what’s possible.
If you’d like to test and compare Gorgias and Zendesk side by side, try using TestBox Compare. It’s 100% free to use, and it’s the best way to understand which tool is right for your customer support team.
Compare Zendesk and Gorgias side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
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