Zendesk vs Gorgias, what you pay for agents, tickets and AI

Zendesk and Gorgias are both helpdesks with an AI agent, but they bill in different units. Zendesk charges for each agent and for AI resolutions past an allowance. Gorgias charges for tickets, and an answer from its AI Agent is billed as a ticket and again as an automated interaction. Gorgias is built for online shops, and its AI Agent can change Shopify orders. Here they’re compared on price, limits and what the AI can do. The third column is Deacon, an AI customer support agent for founders who answer support themselves. It has a free plan, and it needs no card.

Prices read on zendesk.com/pricing and gorgias.com/pricing on 23 September 2026

How Zendesk and Gorgias turn support into a bill

Zendesk charges for each agent, then for resolutions

Every agent is a seat. Support Team covers email and ticketing, and its AI agents answer by email, since answering in chat needs messaging, which starts on Suite Team. Each plan includes an AI allowance. The pricing page counts it as 5 automated resolutions an agent a month on Support Team and Suite Team, 10 on Suite Growth and Suite Professional and 15 on Suite Enterprise, up to 10,000 a year. The help centre describes resolution tiers instead, with the allowance held as money, $2 an agent a month on Suite Team and the Support plans, $5 on Suite Growth and Suite Professional and $10 on Suite Enterprise, up to $5,000 a year. Past the allowance, a resolution costs $2.00, or $1.50 if you commit in advance, and the AI keeps answering unless you switch overage off.

Gorgias charges for tickets, and the AI spends them too

Gorgias never charges by the seat. Each plan includes a number of tickets, 50 on Starter and 300 on Basic, and a ticket past that costs $0.40 on both. The AI Agent is priced on top in automated interactions, 30 a month for $30 on Starter, and $1.50 each past that. An automated interaction is a request settled with no agent replying within 72 hours, and it also counts as a helpdesk ticket. So an answer the AI settles on its own is billed twice, once as a ticket and once as an interaction. If an agent does step in, only the ticket is charged.

The figures in these cards are from zendesk.com/pricing, Zendesk’s help centre, gorgias.com/pricing and Gorgias’s billing guide, read on 23 September 2026. Zendesk AI pricing prices a month of Zendesk’s AI for one or two agents, and AI help desks sets out how more helpdesks bill theirs.

Here’s what that means for a one-person shop whose AI settles 100 questions a month with nobody stepping in. On Gorgias Starter, that’s 100 tickets and 100 automated interactions. The $40 plan covers 50 tickets and 30 interactions, so the other 50 tickets cost $20 and the other 70 interactions $105, and the month comes to $165. On Zendesk, chat on your site means Suite Team, $69 for one agent on monthly billing. Counting the pricing page’s 5 included resolutions, the other 95 cost $190, and the month comes to $259. That’s our arithmetic from the two pricing pages, before tax.

The shape matters more than the totals. Gorgias’s bill grows with every conversation, whoever answers it. Zendesk’s grows with every agent you add, and with every question the AI settles past its allowance. Either way, the better the AI gets, the more it costs.

Zendesk, Gorgias and Deacon, row by row

Built for

Zendesk
Support teams in any line of business, working tickets from email, chat, social channels and the phone
Gorgias
Online shops. Its AI Agent needs a Shopify store connected before it can go live
Deacon
Founders and small teams who answer support themselves, on any website

Free plan

Zendesk
None. A 14-day trial of Suite Professional, with no card
Gorgias
None. A 30-day trial with every feature, and no payment details asked for
Deacon
50 answers a month on one seat, with every feature, no card and no end date

Cheapest paid plan

Zendesk
Support Team, $19 an agent a month billed yearly, or $25 monthly, for email and ticketing. Chat on your site starts on Suite Team, at $55 or $69
Gorgias
Starter, $10 a month for 50 tickets and 3 seats, on monthly billing only. With the AI Agent, which the page adds by default, it’s $40
Deacon
Starter, $50 a month, or $40 a month billed yearly, for 1,000 answers on three seats

What the price counts

Zendesk
Agents. Every teammate who works tickets is a paid seat
Gorgias
Tickets. Seats are free up to the plan’s limit, 3 on Starter and 500 on Basic, Pro and Advanced
Deacon
Answers, the replies Deacon writes on your live site. The seats come with the plan

How the AI is billed

Zendesk
An allowance comes with each plan. Past it, $2.00 a resolution pay as you go, or $1.50 bought in advance
Gorgias
$1.00 an automated interaction on monthly plans or $0.90 on yearly ones, and $1.50 past the plan’s allowance. Each one also counts as a helpdesk ticket
Deacon
It isn’t billed on its own. Every reply is one of the plan’s answers, on the same model on every plan

What counts as an AI result

Zendesk
A request the AI agent resolved without passing it to a person. On the newer resolution tiers, only a verified resolution uses up the allowance
Gorgias
A request settled with no agent replying within 72 hours, by the AI Agent or another automation such as Flows
Deacon
Each reply on your live site. Chats in the Playground and on localhost never count

Past the allowance

Zendesk
The AI keeps answering and the overage is billed monthly, unless you switch overage off. Then it pauses and conversations go to your agents
Gorgias
Each extra ticket and interaction is charged as overage, and Gorgias suggests an upgrade when that would cost you less
Deacon
Nothing more is billed. Visitors get a short reply saying Deacon can’t look into that one right now, and are asked for their email unless they’ve already left it

Changing orders

Zendesk
Your agents can refund or cancel a Shopify order from the ticket, through Zendesk’s Shopify integration. AI agents can act in other systems through integrations, on every plan
Gorgias
From Basic, the AI Agent can cancel an unfulfilled Shopify order, edit its shipping address, remove or replace items, reship a lost or damaged order for free and add an order note
Deacon
Never. Deacon takes no actions in other systems and always declines questions about a visitor’s own order

What the AI learns from

Zendesk
Your Zendesk help centre, plus outside content brought in by a web crawler or a knowledge connector
Gorgias
Help centre articles, website content, documents, written guidance and your Shopify data
Deacon
A crawl of your website or single pages, files (PDF, Word, Markdown, text, CSV or HTML), pasted text and the answers you write

Channels

Zendesk
Email and the web widget on every plan. Messaging, live chat, social channels and voice from Suite Team
Gorgias
Email, chat, social channels and a help centre on every plan, with voice and SMS as add-ons
Deacon
The chat widget on your own website

Shop platforms

Zendesk
Shopify through its own integration, which shows agents a customer’s orders. Its marketplace lists more than 1,800 apps
Gorgias
Shopify and WooCommerce on every plan, BigCommerce from Basic and Magento from Pro
Deacon
Any site that takes a script tag, Shopify’s theme.liquid included. There’s no link to your store’s orders

Zendesk’s prices come from zendesk.com/pricing and Gorgias’s from gorgias.com/pricing, both read on 23 September 2026. Gorgias’s Shopify actions are from its help docs, and the other pages used are listed at the end.

When Zendesk fits, and when Gorgias does

Zendesk fits when support is a team’s whole job, or when you don’t only sell online. Suite Team puts messaging, live chat, social channels and voice in one workspace, and Suite Professional adds phone menus, callbacks and routing by skill. Its marketplace lists more than 1,800 apps. You also decide, before a busy month, whether the AI keeps answering past its allowance or hands the extra work to your agents.

Gorgias fits a Shopify store whose customers mostly write about their orders. From Basic, its AI Agent can cancel an order that hasn’t shipped, fix a shipping address, swap or remove an item, or reship a lost parcel for free, and it answers from your Shopify data as well as your help centre. Seats aren’t the cost, so the whole team can log in. Basic is $90 a month with the AI Agent, or $77 billed yearly, for 300 tickets.

Both are helpdesks first, built for people working through a queue. If you run the shop or the product yourself and answer customers between everything else, there’s a third option.

Deacon, for founders who answer their own customers

Most of what customers ask is already on your site, in your delivery page, your returns policy or your docs. Deacon answers those questions for you in seconds, at any hour and in the customer’s own language, from your own content. It goes on with one script tag, on a Shopify theme or any other site, and there are no flows to build. When your content doesn’t cover a question, Deacon says it doesn’t know rather than making something up, and asks for the visitor’s email. You get an email when they leave one or ask for a person, and your reply from Deacon’s dashboard appears in their chat if it’s still open.

Be clear about the trade. Deacon doesn’t touch your orders. It won’t cancel one, change an address or say where a parcel is, and it declines questions about a visitor’s own order. What it does is keep the questions your pages already answer off your plate, so the ones that reach you are the ones that need you.

And it gets better as you answer. A question your content missed waits in your dashboard with an Answer this button, and what you write becomes part of what Deacon knows, so it can answer the next person who asks. Save & check shows you its new reply and how many other open questions your answer covers. You also see what customers are stuck on and what they want next. Every conversation is saved and searchable by what visitors asked, and Topics group the questions, count the people behind them and label most of them, for example as a how-to, a bug report or a feature ask.

The AI isn’t a second bill on top of the first. The plans differ only in answers, knowledge, crawled pages and seats, every feature is on every plan, and nothing is billed past a plan’s answers. No plan upgrades itself, and there’s no “powered by” line on any of them, where Zendesk hides its logo in the messaging widget only on Suite Enterprise. The free plan needs no card, has no end date and deletes nothing for inactivity.

Questions about Zendesk, Gorgias and Deacon

It depends on how many people answer and how many tickets you get. Zendesk charges for each agent. Chat on your site starts on Suite Team, at $55 an agent a month billed yearly or $69 monthly. Gorgias charges for tickets and not for seats. Starter is $10 a month for 50 tickets, or $40 with the AI Agent, and Basic is $60 a month, or $50 billed yearly, for 300. So a team with few tickets tends to pay less on Gorgias, and one agent working through a lot of tickets by hand may pay less on Zendesk. The AI then adds to both bills with every answer it settles, and the example near the top of this page shows how quickly.

The helpdesk does. Its pricing page lists Shopify and WooCommerce on every plan, BigCommerce from Basic and Magento from Pro. The AI Agent doesn’t. Gorgias’s set-up guide lists a Shopify store connected to Gorgias as a requirement, and you get one AI Agent for each Shopify store you connect.

Because Gorgias bills the helpdesk and the AI separately, and an answer uses both. Its billing guide says you pay a ticket fee and an automation fee when the AI Agent answers and doesn’t hand the conversation over, and only the ticket fee when it does. An interaction counts as automated if nobody on your team needs to reply within 72 hours.

By default, nothing stops. The AI agent keeps answering and each resolution past the allowance is billed at $2.00 pay as you go, monthly, whatever your subscription term. Zendesk’s help centre describes a second setting, Don’t allow overage, which pauses the AI at the limit and sends more requests to your agents.

No. Deacon answers questions from your content and hands the rest to you. It takes no actions in Shopify or anywhere else, and it always declines questions about a visitor’s own order, account or payment. If most of your messages are “where’s my order” or “please change my address”, Gorgias’s AI Agent is built for exactly that. If they’re about your products, delivery times, returns and sizing, and your pages already answer them, Deacon handles them in seconds.

A lot, if a team shares your support. Deacon is a chat widget for your own website, with no email inbox, phone line, SMS, WhatsApp or social channels. It isn’t a helpdesk, so there are no tickets, queues, routing or service levels, and it connects to no other system. Zendesk and Gorgias do all of that, and Gorgias’s AI Agent can change Shopify orders. If your customers write to you on those channels, or several people answer them, choose one of the two.

Where these figures came from

Every figure above was read on 23 September 2026, from these pages.

Try Deacon for free

Deacon answers your customers in seconds from your own content, tells them honestly when it doesn’t know, and shows you what they’re stuck on and what they want next. Every feature is on the free plan, and it needs no card.

To put Deacon on a store, see an AI chatbot for Shopify, and for how a reply reaches the visitor, see human handoff. Gorgias meets Tidio in Tidio vs Gorgias, and Zendesk meets Freshdesk, HubSpot, Salesforce and Zoho Desk on pages of their own. Deacon is set against Zendesk directly in Deacon vs Zendesk, Zendesk competitors prices eight more helpdesks, and Deacon’s plans are on the pricing page.

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