Ada vs Gorgias

Ada is an AI customer service platform from Toronto, founded in 2016 by Mike Murchison and David Hariri. It started as a no-code chatbot builder and has repositioned itself as an agentic customer experience platform: AI agents that answer and resolve customer inquiries end to end across messaging, email and voice, rather than deflecting them to a help article.

The agent orchestrates several large language models, reads your knowledge base, and uses Actions to call your systems so it can look up orders, change bookings or issue refunds. Playbooks encode multi-step standard operating procedures, and the platform includes testing, coaching, analytics and an automated resolution metric to track how many conversations finish without a human. Ada lists SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR and PCI DSS compliance. There is no self-serve plan: pricing is quote-based after a sales demo.

Ada fits large consumer brands with hundreds of thousands of support conversations a year, such as Pinterest, monday.com, Grab and Life360. Smaller teams usually get faster value from Intercom Fin or Tidio Lyro, which price per resolution and install in an afternoon. Zendesk AI agents make more sense if you want to stay inside one helpdesk vendor, and Decagon and Sierra are the main newer enterprise rivals.

In February 2026 Ada launched a unified Reasoning Engine that powers its agents across all channels from one intelligence layer. When evaluating, ask for a pilot on your own transcripts and compare the automated resolution rate, not deflection, against your current baseline.

Gorgias is a help desk built specifically for e-commerce brands, especially those on Shopify. The company was founded in Paris and is now based in San Francisco. Its core idea is that support agents should see and act on order data inside every conversation: tickets from email, live chat, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, SMS and voice appear in one inbox next to the customer's orders, and agents can edit orders, issue refunds or apply discounts without switching to the store admin.

Rules and macros automate repetitive work such as tagging, routing and replying to order status questions, and the AI Agent can resolve common requests like "where is my order", returns and product questions on its own, billed per automated resolution. Gorgias also tracks revenue generated through support conversations, so teams can show sales influenced by chat. Pricing is based on billable tickets per month rather than agent seats, starting with a small Starter plan and scaling through Basic, Pro and Advanced to custom Enterprise tiers.

Gorgias fits Shopify, BigCommerce and Magento brands with seasonal spikes, because adding agents for peak periods does not raise the bill. Costs grow with ticket volume, and the AI Agent is a separate charge. It is less suited to SaaS or B2B support, where Zendesk, Help Scout or Intercom offer better knowledge bases and workflows. Among e-commerce help desks, Re:amaze and Richpanel are the closest competitors, and Tidio is a cheaper option for small stores.