The best Gorgias alternative is PepoChat

Short answer

People usually look for a Gorgias alternative for one of three reasons. The first is the ticket meter: a conversation becomes billable the moment anyone replies, including the AI, and Starter charges $0.40 for every ticket past its 50. The second is the plan ladder: Starter has 3 seats and no AI Actions, brand voice or guardrails, BigCommerce needs Basic, and Magento, revenue attribution and audit logs need Pro at $300 a month on annual billing. The third is fit: Gorgias is built for ecommerce, so a SaaS team or a clinic pays for order management it never uses, and there is no free plan, only a 7-day trial.

This page compares the two products feature by feature, works the cost at two order volumes, explains how a migration goes, and says plainly where Gorgias is still the better choice. If you are weighing full helpdesks for a store, the Zendesk alternative and Tidio alternative pages cover the other common shortlist entries, and our Shopify order status guide shows PepoChat's order lookup in a live chat.

Who should switch from Gorgias to PepoChat

The clearest signal is a store paying two meters at once. On Gorgias, as of October 2026, a conversation becomes a billable ticket as soon as a person, a Rule or AI Agent replies, and a conversation the AI resolves without a human within 72 hours is also an automated interaction at $1.00 on monthly billing. The bundles are small, 30 on Starter and Basic, 190 on Pro and 530 on Advanced, so most AI resolutions are paid one by one, and Starter adds $0.40 for every ticket past its 50. PepoChat counts AI replies on flat plans: 200 free, 2,000 for $49, 10,000 for $149, then $10 per 1,000.

The second signal is a team that does not sell on Shopify, or sells there but gets its questions on the website. Gorgias's price covers email, SMS and social routing, Order Management and 500 seats; a two-person SaaS company, a clinic or an agency uses none of that and still pays the ticket rate. PepoChat's free plan includes the team inbox, the Stripe, Shopify and WooCommerce actions, PepoSmart booking and custom HTTPS actions, described on the integrations page. The third signal is wanting AI Actions, brand voice and guardrails without leaving Starter, which has none of them; PepoChat puts every action and guardrail on the free plan.

When Gorgias is still the better choice

Being fair matters, so here is the counterpoint. Gorgias is a helpdesk and PepoChat is not. If customers write to a support address, text you, or message your Instagram or Facebook page, Gorgias puts all of it in one inbox and lets AI Agent answer on chat, email and SMS, with Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp in beta. PepoChat has no WhatsApp, email, SMS, Instagram or Messenger channel; it answers on your website and a hosted chat page. For a brand whose volume arrives through those channels, pick Gorgias.

Gorgias also wins on what the AI can do to an order. Its Actions cancel orders, edit shipping addresses, remove or replace items, reship, generate discount codes and pause or skip subscriptions through Recharge, Skio and Loop, and its AI Agent page counts more than 130 prebuilt actions. PepoChat's Shopify and WooCommerce actions report status and find orders; they do not change them. Add Rules, Macros and Flows, revenue attribution and audit logs from Pro, 500 seats from Basic and SAML SSO on Enterprise, and a high-volume Shopify Plus brand has every reason to stay. Gorgias lists GDPR and CCPA compliance on every plan; PepoChat has not published any certification.

Gorgias vs PepoChat: a support week, side by side

Picture a Monday with forty new conversations. In Gorgias, the weekend's emails, chats and Instagram messages are tickets in one view, Macros are ready for the common replies, and AI Agent has closed what it could, each one counting as a ticket and an automated interaction. In PepoChat, the agent kept answering from your knowledge base on the website and the hosted page, the ones it could not resolve sit in the team inbox marked escalated, and on the free plan any chats beyond the 200-reply cap went to the inbox with a friendly message. There are no email tickets, because there is no email channel.

On Tuesday a customer asks where order 1042 is. Gorgias answers through Order Management or AI Agent from Shopify data and can offer a return or cancellation in the same thread. PepoChat's Shopify action returns the payment and fulfilment status and the WooCommerce action finds the order by number or email, as the order status guide shows; a cancellation becomes a handoff to your inbox. On Wednesday a frustrated customer wants a person: Gorgias routes by Handover Topics, PepoChat escalates the moment the visitor asks. On Thursday a prospect asks for a call: Gorgias lists no booking feature, PepoChat books a PepoSmart slot in the visitor's timezone. On Friday, Gorgias shows support and automation statistics; PepoChat shows satisfaction votes and auto-labelled topics, with no volume charts.

What it actually costs

Take a store with roughly 700 conversations a month, 300 of them resolved by the AI, as of October 2026. On Gorgias the cheapest fit is Basic on monthly billing: $60 for 300 tickets, plus 400 extra tickets at $40 per 100, which is $160, plus the $30 AI Agent bundle for 30 automated interactions, plus 270 more at $1.00 each, which is $270. That is about $520 a month, or about $480 on annual billing with Basic at $50, the bundle at $27 and $0.90 per interaction. Gorgias's pricing explainer puts overage above a bundle at $1.00 to $2.00 per interaction on monthly plans, so treat $520 as the floor. PepoChat counts AI replies rather than conversations; at two replies per conversation, 700 conversations are about 1,400 replies, inside Starter's 2,000 for $49.

Now take 2,000 conversations a month with 800 resolved by the AI. Gorgias Pro covers the tickets at $360 monthly or $300 annual and bundles 190 automated interactions for $190 or $171; the other 610 cost at least $610 on monthly billing or about $549 on annual, so roughly $1,160 a month, or $1,020 on an annual contract. The same traffic on PepoChat is about 4,000 replies: Starter plus 2,000 extra replies at $10 per 1,000 is $69, or Growth at $149 brings 10,000 replies, 10 members and no PepoChat badge. Gorgias includes 3 seats on Starter and 500 on the other plans; PepoChat includes 1, 3 or 10, with extra seats at $15 a month. Check the Gorgias pricing page and the PepoChat pricing page before deciding.

How to move from Gorgias to PepoChat

A migration is a rebuild of inputs, not of tickets. List what Gorgias's AI Agent was drawing on: the help center, the Guidance notes, the Macros and any uploaded documents. In PepoChat, add your store as a crawl of up to 200 pages, three levels deep, with include and exclude filters, or import the sitemap; a larger site is covered with two crawl sources, for example one for policy pages and one for the rest, as the add your website page explains. Upload the same shipping and returns documents, and turn Macro and Flow answers into Q&A pairs or text snippets, which count nothing against the source limit.

Next, reconnect the store. The Shopify, WooCommerce and Stripe cards take a pasted API key, and Zoho Desk, Salesforce, Slack and HubSpot connect with one-click OAuth; every action starts disabled and can be run with a real order number before you switch it on. Set the greeting, suggested questions and brand colour, choose when lead capture asks for an email, and try the agent in the Test the agent drawer, where chats never count toward billing. Then replace the Gorgias chat snippet with PepoChat's single script tag, described in the install guide, or use the WordPress plugin on a WooCommerce store. Keep Gorgias for the email and social queue until the inbox looks right, and export any ticket history you want.

Where PepoChat's inbox, booking and actions change the outcome

For a small store, the questions that fill the inbox are order status, returns and shipping times, which our ecommerce chatbot questions post catalogues. PepoChat answers the first from live Shopify or WooCommerce data and the others from your crawled policy pages, then hands the rest to the team inbox, where an operator replies as themselves and leaves internal notes. Gorgias does more per order but charges per ticket for every one of those exchanges. For a SaaS company, the win is the Stripe action: the agent finds the customer, checks the plan and renewal date and, on request, schedules a cancellation at period end.

For a clinic, agency or consultancy, booking is the differentiator. Gorgias lists no appointment feature, which is reasonable for a tool built around orders. PepoChat connects to a PepoSmart calendar, lets you choose which meeting types the agent may offer and when, shows slots in the visitor's local time, re-validates at booking so there is no double booking, assigns a host round-robin, creates the Google Meet, Zoom or Teams link and sends reminders, as the appointment booking guide explains. When that prospect returns and verifies their email, meeting memory lets the agent recall what they asked about. Neither has a Gorgias equivalent.

Do Gorgias and PepoChat work together?

Not on the same page: you run one chat widget per site, so the realistic split is by channel. Some stores put PepoChat on the website, where the free inbox, order lookups and booking matter most, and keep Gorgias for email, SMS and social, where PepoChat has nothing to offer. The cost is two knowledge bases to keep current, so it only makes sense when the email and messaging volume is real. PepoChat has no Gorgias ticket action; its helpdesk actions cover Zendesk, Freshdesk, Zoho Desk, HubSpot and Salesforce, and a Zapier Catch Hook or a custom HTTPS action can pass an escalation to anything with an API. The Zendesk alternative page shows what one suite costs for the same team.

The bottom line for founders, support leads and agencies

For a founder running a small store or a SaaS product, the maths is simple: PepoChat's free plan covers the whole website workflow, including the inbox, order lookups and the Stripe action, for as long as 200 replies a month covers you, and Starter at $49 is the first step after that, with no ticket or resolution meter to forecast. For a support lead at a multichannel Shopify brand, Gorgias is the right tool; price its Pro bundle against your real automation rate, because 190 included interactions run out fast and each AI resolution is also a ticket. For an agency, PepoChat gives each client an isolated workspace on the free plan until volume justifies paying, while Gorgias starts every client on a 7-day trial and a per-ticket plan.

Whichever way you lean, test with real traffic. Put PepoChat on the site for a month, watch the team inbox and the topics report, and compare the result with your Gorgias invoice for the same period, tickets and automated interactions included. If the per-ticket price is what pushes you away, our free AI chatbot comparison and small business chatbot guide put the alternatives on one table.