Chatcast vs Gorgias: AI Sales Assistant or AI Support Desk?

The short answer: Gorgias is an AI-powered helpdesk built to resolve customer support tickets across email, chat, social media, SMS, and voice. Chatcast is an AI sales assistant and agentic commerce platform built to answer pre-purchase questions from your live Shopify catalog and make your store discoverable to AI agents like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. They overlap on AI-generated answers, but they solve different jobs — and plenty of stores run both.

If you searched "Chatcast vs Gorgias," you're probably trying to figure out whether you need one, the other, or both. This post lays out what each tool actually does, where the overlap is real, where it's superficial, and how the pricing models differ — because they differ a lot.

One disclosure up front: we build Chatcast. We've tried to be genuinely fair to Gorgias here, because the comparison only helps you if it's honest. Where we cite Gorgias facts, we link to their own pages.

What is Gorgias?

Gorgias is a customer support helpdesk built specifically for ecommerce, and it's one of the most established players in the category. It launched on the Shopify App Store in March 2017 and today positions itself as "the Conversational AI platform for Ecommerce," claiming 17,000+ ecommerce brands on the platform.

The core product is a unified inbox: every customer conversation — email, live chat, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, plus SMS and voice as add-ons — lands in one place where support agents can see the customer's Shopify order history alongside the message. Macros, rules, and automations let teams answer "where is my order?" without typing the same reply two hundred times a week. This is the job Gorgias has been refining for nearly a decade, and it does it well — the 646 reviews averaging 4.3 stars on the Shopify App Store reflect a mature, widely deployed product.

On top of the helpdesk sits the Gorgias AI Agent, which goes beyond drafting replies: it can take actions like issuing refunds, editing subscriptions, and updating shipping details, and Gorgias claims it resolves 60% of inquiries instantly. There's also a Shopping Assistant capability aimed at pre-purchase conversations — product recommendations, discounts, upsells — which we'll come back to, because it's the most direct point of overlap with Chatcast.

Pricing is ticket-based. As of June 2026, Gorgias's helpdesk plans run from $10/month (Starter, 50 tickets) through $50/month (Basic, 300 tickets), $300/month (Pro, 2,000 tickets), and $750/month (Advanced, 5,000 tickets), with custom Enterprise pricing above that. Overage tickets are billed separately. The AI Agent is priced per resolution on top of the helpdesk plan: $1.00 per resolved conversation on monthly billing, $0.90 on annual, charged only for fully automated interactions. Seats are unlimited on all plans, which is genuinely merchant-friendly — you pay for conversation volume, not headcount.

What is Chatcast?

Chatcast is a brand-trained AI shopping assistant and self-updating FAQ widget for Shopify, plus the infrastructure to make your store legible to the AI agents your future customers are already using.

The on-site assistant answers pre-purchase questions — sizing, compatibility, shipping policies, "which of these two is better for X" — directly from your live catalog and store policies. The architectural difference from most AI chat tools matters here: Chatcast's answers come from deterministic skills that query your actual product data, not from an LLM generating prose and hopefully not inventing a return policy. When a shopper asks about stock, the answer comes from inventory. When they ask about returns, the answer comes from your policy pages. The conversation is cart-aware, so "will this work with what I've already picked?" gets a real answer.

Routing those questions correctly is its own engineering problem, and we didn't outsource it. Chatcast runs a purpose-built 66M-parameter intent classifier that classifies shopper messages into 13 ecommerce intent types in 37ms — and in our evaluation across 12,400 labeled queries, it was 11 points more accurate than GPT-4o at exactly this task. Small, fast, and specialized beats large and general when the job is "figure out what this shopper wants before they bounce."

The second half of Chatcast is the part no helpdesk offers: agentic commerce infrastructure. Every Chatcast store gets a public MCP server, which means ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and other AI agents can query your catalog, FAQs, and policies directly through a structured protocol instead of scraping your product pages and guessing. And because agent-driven discovery is a channel that needs economics, Chatcast includes agentic affiliate commissions — AI agents that send you customers can register, get attributed, and earn a commission, giving them a reason to recommend your store over the one next door.

Chatcast also captures leads from conversations and streams events out via webhook integrations to HubSpot, Klaviyo, Zendesk, Intercom — and yes, Gorgias.

Pricing is flat-rate: plans run from $0 to $199/month, the free plan requires no credit card, and billing goes through Shopify. No per-ticket charges, no per-resolution charges.

How do Chatcast and Gorgias compare side by side?

The table makes the shape of the comparison clear: this is less "which one is better" and more "which job is on fire."

When should you choose Gorgias?

Honestly: in several common situations, Gorgias is the right call and Chatcast isn't a substitute.

Your support inbox is the bottleneck. If your team is drowning in "where is my order?", return requests, and subscription changes across five channels, you need a helpdesk. Chatcast does not triage email, route tickets, or manage agent workflows. Gorgias was built for precisely this, and a decade of ecommerce-specific refinement shows.

You need AI that takes post-purchase actions. Gorgias's AI Agent can issue refunds, edit subscriptions, and update shipping details inside automated conversations. That's deep, action-level automation on the post-purchase side, and it's not a job Chatcast does.

You live in omnichannel. If a meaningful share of your support arrives through Instagram DMs, WhatsApp, SMS, or phone calls, Gorgias's unified inbox across all of those channels is the product category you're shopping in.

You want unlimited seats. Gorgias doesn't charge per agent, which matters for stores with large or seasonal support teams.

One thing to model carefully before you commit: the pricing compounds. A fully automated AI resolution costs $0.90–$1.00 on top of your plan, and that conversation also counts toward your ticket allowance. At scale, "automation savings" and "automation costs" both grow with volume. That's not a criticism of the value — resolving a ticket for a dollar is often a great trade — but it's a different cost curve than a flat subscription, and you should forecast it against your actual ticket volume.

When should you choose Chatcast?

Your problem is pre-purchase, not post-purchase. If shoppers land on your store, hesitate over a sizing question or a compatibility doubt, and leave — that's not a support ticket, it's a lost sale that never generated a ticket at all. Chatcast's assistant exists to catch that moment, answer from the live catalog, and keep the cart moving. Gorgias's Shopping Assistant gestures at this job, but it's a feature inside a helpdesk; for Chatcast it's the entire product, down to the custom intent classifier trained on ecommerce shopping queries.

You can't afford a hallucinated answer. Generative AI agents produce fluent answers, and fluency is exactly what makes a wrong answer dangerous — a confidently invented discount or return window is a real liability. Chatcast's deterministic-skills architecture means policy and product answers are retrieved from your store's actual data, not composed by a language model. For the questions that touch money and trust, that distinction is the product.

You want to be visible to AI agents. This is the category difference. A growing share of product discovery now starts inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude rather than Google — we've written about why AI agents are the new front door. A helpdesk, however good, does nothing for that channel. Chatcast's public MCP server makes your catalog queryable by any AI agent, and agentic affiliate commissions give those agents an economic reason to send you buyers. No helpdesk vendor offers this, because it isn't a helpdesk problem.

You want predictable costs from day one. Chatcast's free plan needs no credit card, paid plans top out at $199/month, and there's no per-conversation meter running. For a store testing whether conversational commerce moves revenue, the cost of finding out is zero.

Can you use both?

Yes — and this is the configuration we'd recommend to a store that has both problems.

The tools sit at different points in the customer journey. Chatcast works the top: answering discovery and consideration questions on-site, capturing leads, and representing your catalog to external AI agents. Gorgias works the bottom: resolving the post-purchase tickets that inevitably arrive, across every channel, with action-taking automation.

They connect directly. Chatcast streams conversation events and captured leads into your support stack via webhooks, and Gorgias is one of the supported destinations — alongside Zendesk, Intercom, HubSpot, and Klaviyo. A shopper who starts in a Chatcast conversation and turns out to need a human lands in your Gorgias inbox with context, instead of starting over.

There's also no budget conflict. Because Chatcast resolves pre-purchase questions before they become tickets, it doesn't consume your Gorgias ticket allowance — if anything, it reduces the volume you're paying Gorgias to handle. The two pricing models don't overlap because the two workloads don't.

Frequently asked questions

Is Chatcast a Gorgias alternative?

Only for one slice of the job. If you're evaluating Gorgias primarily for its Shopping Assistant — AI that answers pre-purchase product questions and guides shoppers to checkout — then yes, Chatcast is a direct alternative, and a more specialized one. If you're evaluating Gorgias as a helpdesk — unified inbox, ticket routing, post-purchase automation across email, social, SMS, and voice — Chatcast is not an alternative. It's a different product for a different job.

Can Chatcast send conversations to Gorgias?

Yes. Chatcast's webhook integrations stream conversation events and captured leads into Gorgias (and Zendesk, Intercom, HubSpot, and Klaviyo), so escalations from the shopping assistant arrive in your helpdesk with full context.

How much does each cost?

As of June 2026, Gorgias runs from $10/month (50 tickets) to $750/month (5,000 tickets) plus custom Enterprise pricing, with the AI Agent billed at $0.90–$1.00 per automated resolution on top; overage tickets are billed separately. Chatcast runs from $0 to $199/month flat, with no per-conversation charges, no credit card required on the free plan, and billing through Shopify.

The bottom line

Gorgias is a strong, mature support desk with serious AI resolution capabilities — if tickets are your problem, it deserves its install base. Chatcast is a sales and discovery assistant plus the agentic commerce layer no helpdesk provides — if lost pre-purchase revenue and AI-agent invisibility are your problem, that's the job we built for. They're complementary more often than they're competitors.

The cheapest way to find out what conversational commerce does for your store is to start where the meter isn't running: Chatcast's free plan takes a few minutes to install and no credit card to try.