Best help desk for Shopify stores

Gorgias: the best help desk for Shopify, until it isn't

For most Shopify stores, Gorgias is the one to beat. Order status, shipment tracking, and purchase history load straight into every ticket, and the vendor's own numbers say it powers support for roughly 40% of Shopify brands. That's what makes it the best help desk for Shopify stores by default, though not for every store. Once your team runs support across more than chat and email, wants a flat, predictable bill instead of a ticket meter, or handles tickets that have nothing to do with ecommerce, Zendesk, Front, Help Scout, or Freshdesk each beat it for a specific reason.

Here's how to tell which one is actually you.

Gorgias is the right default for a store whose queue is mostly order status, shipping, and returns; it becomes the wrong default the moment your volume swings hard or your tickets stop being about orders.

Why Gorgias is the default answer

Gorgias was built for ecommerce from day one. Every ticket shows the customer's order status, shipment tracking, and past purchases pulled directly from Shopify (it also supports BigCommerce, Magento, and WooCommerce). Its AI Agent can be configured with "Skills" and "Actions" to actually process a return or a cancellation instead of only answering a question about one. Agent seats are unlimited on every plan, so growing your support team doesn't raise your base bill.

The catch is how it charges. Gorgias bills by monthly "billable ticket" volume instead of seats, starting at $10/month for the Starter plan (50 tickets, $0.40 per ticket over that), up to $900/month for Advanced (5,000 tickets). The AI Agent is billed separately again, at roughly $0.90 to $1.00 per resolved conversation, and voice and SMS are per-ticket add-ons on top of all of that. If your ticket volume is steady and mostly order-status and returns questions, that math works fine. If it swings, or you lean hard on the AI Agent, the bill gets harder to predict than a flat per-seat price.

Gorgias is the default because it is the only tool here that puts Shopify order data inside the ticket and charges by ticket rather than by seat, which means a large team on steady volume pays less than it would anywhere else. It is the wrong tool for a store whose queue is padded with pre-sales questions, B2B wholesale threads, or technical issues, because those tickets meter at the same rate as an order lookup while getting none of the ecommerce benefit.

When the other four win

Each of the four wins on exactly one axis Gorgias does not compete on: channel breadth, cross-team collaboration, email-style simplicity, or a flat seat bill.

Zendesk: you want one platform for chat, voice, and a mature app marketplace

If your store has outgrown ecommerce-only ticketing and needs phone support, skills-based routing, or a large app marketplace to connect other business tools, Zendesk is the safer bet. It bills per seat with no overage fees: Support Team starts at $19/agent/month for ticketing only, and Suite Team ($55/agent/month) adds chat and messaging, which is closer to what Gorgias already gives you in one plan. Since May 2026, Zendesk's AI agent features ship bundled with Suite and Support plans rather than sitting behind a separate paid tier. The tradeoff against Gorgias is real: you lose the native Shopify order data inline with tickets, so agents work from Shopify in a separate tab instead of one screen.

Pick Zendesk when the breadth of the platform matters more than the Shopify integration, and compare Suite Team rather than Support Team, since the $19 tier is ticketing only. It is the wrong choice for a two-person store with a light queue, where you would pay per seat for routing and marketplace depth nobody has time to configure.

Front: support isn't the only team working the inbox

Front makes sense when support, sales handoffs, and customer success all work out of the same shared inbox instead of a support ticket queue. Its model is built for internal comments and cross-department assignment on one thread, a different job than Gorgias's single-purpose ecommerce ticketing. Starter runs $25/seat/month but caps at 10 seats and one channel, and Professional ($65/seat/month) adds SMS and social channels plus a 50-seat cap. Watch the add-ons: Copilot, Smart QA, and Smart CSAT are unbundled extras ($10 to $20/seat/month each) on Starter and Professional, and only come free at Enterprise ($105/seat/month).

Front earns its price only when people outside support are genuinely working the thread; if support owns the inbox alone, you are paying for collaboration you will never use. Note the shape of the jump too: the 10-seat and single-channel limits on Starter mean a growing team lands on Professional at $65/seat/month sooner than it expects.

Help Scout: you're small and want support to read like email, not a ticket queue

If you're a lean team, roughly 2 to 50 agents, and the visible ticket-number feel of most help desks doesn't fit how you want to talk to customers, Help Scout is worth a look. Its shared inbox reads like a normal email thread, and it has a genuinely free plan for up to 5 users, not a time-limited trial. Standard ($25/user/month) adds live chat, Instagram and WhatsApp channels, and an AI inbox assistant. What you give up versus Gorgias is the Shopify order-data integration itself. Help Scout's own integration list includes Shopify, but it doesn't surface order status inline with a ticket the way Gorgias does.

Help Scout is the pick for a small team that wants a free start and email-style threads rather than order data in the ticket. The free tier stops covering you the moment you need live chat, Instagram or WhatsApp, or the AI inbox assistant, or the moment you hire a sixth person into the inbox; all four of those push you onto Standard at $25/user/month.

Freshdesk: you liked Gorgias's ticketing model, just not the per-ticket bill

Freshdesk is the closest match to Gorgias if what you actually want is predictable per-seat billing on a similar ticketing workflow, not a different way of working. Growth starts at $19/agent/month for ticketing, a customer portal, and multilingual support. The Freddy AI Agent, upgraded into a full email responder in May 2026, includes 500 sessions per plan before metered overage kicks in at $49 per extra 100 sessions, an add-on structure similar to how Gorgias prices its own AI Agent. Freshdesk doesn't replace Gorgias's Shopify order-data depth either, but it's the nearest thing to a like-for-like ticketing swap at a flat, forecastable seat price.

Choose Freshdesk when the workflow is already fine and it is only the meter that hurts, because the seat price stays the same in a quiet month and in a Black Friday month. It is the wrong swap if your agent headcount is large relative to your ticket count, since Gorgias's unlimited seats are free and Freshdesk charges for every one of them.

Side-by-side: entry pricing and Shopify fit

Prices are from each vendor's pricing page, checked 2026-07-06. Confirm your own quote, since promotions and negotiated enterprise rates change.

Read the table as two questions rather than one: Gorgias and Zoho Desk are the cheapest ways in, but only Gorgias buys you order data inline, and only the per-seat tools give you a bill you can forecast.

What the billing shape does to a real bill

Two tools at similar headline prices can produce very different invoices, because the meter is attached to different things. Gorgias attaches it to tickets: seats are unlimited, so headcount is free, but a promotion, a shipping delay, or a viral product spikes the bill in the same month it spikes your workload. Zendesk, Front, Help Scout, Freshdesk, and Zoho Desk attach it to seats: volume is free, but every hire raises the invoice whether that person handles ten tickets or a thousand.

That difference flips as you scale. At around 5 seats, per-seat pricing is cheap enough that the $19 and $25 entry tiers barely register, and the free tiers at Help Scout and Zoho Desk may cover you outright. At around 25 seats, seats become the dominant line item, and Gorgias's unlimited-seat model starts looking like the cheaper structure, so long as your ticket volume is predictable enough that the $0.40 overage and the $0.90 to $1.00 AI resolution charge do not surprise you.

Model your worst month, not your average one: per-ticket pricing rewards big teams on steady volume, while per-seat pricing rewards small teams riding volume spikes.

What about Intercom?

Intercom fits a narrower case. You want the deepest AI agent on the market: Fin resolves conversations across chat, email, WhatsApp, SMS, and phone, billed at $0.99 per resolved outcome. And you're not picking primarily for Shopify order data, since Intercom has no ecommerce-specific order-in-ticket feature the way Gorgias does. Intercom is also mid-rebrand to "Fin" and being acquired by Salesforce, so factor that uncertainty in if you're choosing a support vendor for the long term.

Intercom is a bet on AI resolution volume rather than on a Shopify workflow, so it suits teams happy to pay $0.99 per outcome on top of seats that start at $19 and wrong for anyone who needs a fixed monthly number.

What about Zoho Desk?

Zoho Desk is the budget option in this group, starting at $7 per seat with a free tier underneath it, which makes it the cheapest paid seat on the list by a wide margin. It is a general-purpose help desk rather than an ecommerce one, so it does not surface Shopify order status inline the way Gorgias does, and you should expect to click into your store to answer a "where is my order" question. It is most convincing for stores already using other Zoho products, or for teams where support is a shared duty rather than someone's whole job.

Zoho Desk is the right answer when the queue is small, mixed, and price-sensitive, and the wrong answer when order lookups are the bulk of your day.

The actual decision

Start with Gorgias if your support volume is mostly order-status, shipping, and returns questions and you want that data inline without extra setup. Move to Freshdesk if you want that same ticketing feel but a flat seat price instead of a ticket meter. Move to Zendesk if you need chat, voice, and a big app marketplace under one roof. Move to Front if support isn't the only team living in the inbox. Move to Help Scout if you're small and want support to feel like a real conversation, not a queue.

Move to Zoho Desk if the budget is the binding constraint and order data inline is a nice-to-have. Move to Intercom only if AI resolution is the product you are actually buying.

The order-data question has one answer, Gorgias, so make your decision on the other two axes: the shape of your bill and the shape of your team.

For the full ranked comparison and where each tool falls short, see our Gorgias alternatives guide, or start from Zendesk alternatives if Zendesk is your current baseline.