Ada vs Hiver

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.

Hiver is a help desk built inside Gmail, made by a company founded in India and designed for Google Workspace teams. Instead of moving support, finance or HR email into a separate ticketing tool, Hiver turns shared addresses like support@ or billing@ into shared inboxes that appear in each agent's Gmail sidebar.

Agents can assign conversations, change status, add internal notes, see collision alerts when a colleague is replying and use shared templates. Managers get SLAs, rule-based automations, round-robin assignment, CSAT surveys and analytics on response and resolution times. The platform has expanded with live chat, a knowledge base, WhatsApp and voice channels, plus AI features that draft replies, summarize long threads and tag conversations. Pricing is per user per month across Growth, Pro and Elite tiers: Growth covers the shared inbox, AI agents and omnichannel basics, Pro adds a customer portal, SLAs and CSAT, and Elite adds AI quality assurance and AI insights.

Hiver suits small and mid-sized support, finance, operations and HR teams that live in Gmail and want structure without retraining. Adoption is fast because there is almost nothing new to learn. It is tied to Google Workspace, and very high-volume support teams with complex routing, multi-brand setups or deep reporting will find Zendesk, Freshdesk or Help Scout more capable. Front is a closer alternative for teams that want a dedicated shared inbox app across Gmail and Outlook.