A Gladly alternative for teams that live in the inbox.
Gladly is a voice-first, omnichannel platform built for large consumer brands. If your support actually lives in shared email inboxes, that is a lot of contact centre to buy, and a sales call to get a price. Solves is the email-first, UK-first alternative: owned tickets, SLAs and multi-brand, with clear GBP pricing that starts at £29.
Honest comparison. Competitor details verified on 13 June 2026 and may change; re-check Gladly's own pages before deciding.
The short answer
Different jobs, sized for different teams
Gladly and Solves both help you answer customers, but they are built for opposite ends of the market. Gladly is a voice-first, omnichannel customer-service platform for enterprises with large contact centres. Solves is an email-first support desk for small UK teams. Choosing well is about fit, not winning a feature count.
Gladly organises everything around a single, lifelong customer conversation that spans phone, SMS, live chat, social and email. That model is genuinely strong for big consumer brands whose customers call in. It also comes with enterprise weight: a sales-led purchase, no public free plan or self-serve trial, no published price list, and third-party estimates near USD 180 to 210 per agent per month on annual contracts with agent minimums and voice or SMS billed separately. Treat those figures as estimates only; Gladly does not publish them, and the company now trades at gladly.ai.
Solves does one thing on purpose. It turns shared support inboxes into owned tickets with assignment, public replies and private notes, saved replies, first-response and resolution SLA timers, saved queue views and reports, all multi-brand from one queue. There is no phone line, no live chat, no SMS and no social inbox. If your support genuinely runs on email, that focus is the point, and the price reflects an SME tool rather than a contact-centre suite.
Why teams look past Gladly
When an enterprise contact centre is more than you need
Common reasons a small UK team chooses an email-first desk instead.
You can see the price
Solves publishes GBP team bands on the pricing page, ex VAT, with annual billing priced as twelve months for ten. Gladly publishes no price and routes you through a demo; estimates run into the low hundreds of dollars per agent per month.
Start without a sales call
Solves has a Starter at GBP 29 you can sign up for today. Gladly has no free plan and no public self-serve trial, so evaluation means booking a guided tour with their team first.
Email is your real channel
If most tickets arrive by email, you do not need a voice-first contact centre. Solves is built around the inbox; Gladly is built around the phone call and the omnichannel conversation.
Multi-brand without the tier tax
Run several brands from one queue with per-brand mailboxes and brand-locked sending, on mid-tier Solves plans rather than an enterprise contract.
Built for UK SMEs
GBP invoices with VAT visible, first-response and resolution SLA timers with a breaching view, and copy written in British English, not a US enterprise rollout.
Privacy you can describe plainly
Support content is encrypted at rest with authorised access only, and logs are metadata-only with no message bodies or addresses.
Be fair
Where Gladly is the better choice
This is an alternatives page, not a hit piece. For a large brand whose support runs on the phone, Gladly is built for exactly that, and Solves is not. Buy the tool that matches your channels.
Gladly is the better fit when voice is your primary channel and you are an enterprise team. Its customer-centric, voice-first model unifies phone, SMS, chat, social and email into one ongoing conversation, with the routing, integrations and contact-centre tooling large consumer brands rely on. If your customers expect to call and be recognised instantly, and you staff a real contact centre, that is Gladly's home ground.
Solves cannot and does not replace that. It has no phone, no SMS, no live chat and no social channels, and it makes no omnichannel or contact-centre claim. It will not win a feature count against an enterprise suite, and it is not designed for enterprise scale. What it does is give a small UK team that mostly answers support email a focused, affordable desk with ownership, SLAs and multi-brand, without buying a phone system it will never switch on.
Honest comparison
Solves vs Gladly at a glance
An email-first SME desk next to a voice-first enterprise platform. Different tools for different teams.
| Solves | Gladly | |
|---|---|---|
| Best fit | Email-first support for UK SMEs | Voice-first, omnichannel enterprise customer service |
| Free plan | Starter at GBP 29 | No free plan published |
| Self-serve trial | Sign up and start today | No public self-serve trial; demo and sales-led |
| Published pricing | GBP team bands, ex VAT, on the pricing page | None published; demo for a quote |
| Indicative cost | GBP 29 to GBP 299/month per plan | Est. ~USD 180-210 per agent/mo (third-party estimate only) |
| Phone, SMS, chat, social | Not included, by design | Core to the platform |
| Email tickets, notes, SLAs | Shipped and email-first | Included within a broader suite |
| Multi-brand from one queue | Shipped, per-brand mailboxes | Enterprise-oriented configuration |
Competitor facts last verified 13 June 2026. Re-check the vendor's current plans before deciding.
Gladly publishes no public pricing; the cost figure is a third-party estimate, treated as an estimate only, and Gladly now trades at gladly.ai. Solves does not claim feature parity with Gladly and is not the better choice for voice-first enterprise customer service. Re-verify both products' current pages before deciding.
Email-first, on purpose
Solves handles support email: tickets, ownership, public replies, private notes, SLAs and multi-brand. It does not run phone lines, SMS, live chat or social inboxes, and makes no contact-centre claim. If you need voice-first omnichannel, Gladly is built for it and Solves is not.
Switching honestly
Moving from a shared inbox, not a magic Gladly export
If you are leaving a voice-first platform because your support has quietly become an email job, the move that is genuinely available today is forwarding-first mailbox setup, not an automated data transfer.
There is no one-click Gladly-to-Solves importer, and we will not pretend there is. What is shipped is guided mailbox setup: you forward a support address such as support@ or accounts@ to Solves, verify it with plain-English DNS steps, and live sending stays gated until the checks pass. From that point, email arrives as owned tickets with assignment, notes, SLAs and brand badges. Moving historical conversation data across is a guided pilot conversation we are happy to have, not a button you press.
If you are among the first 20 paid customers, the early-adopter pilot gives you Team at GBP 49 per month for six months (then GBP 79), with setup help, saved-reply setup and guided domain and mailbox checks, in exchange for a testimonial or feedback. It is the closest thing to a hands-on trial, sized for a real UK team rather than an enterprise procurement cycle.
FAQ
Gladly alternative questions
Does Gladly have a free plan or a free trial?
No. Gladly does not publish a free plan or a public self-serve trial. Evaluation is demo and sales-led, through a live tour or a guided "try it yourself" experience arranged with their team. There is no published price list either; third-party trackers estimate roughly USD 180 to 210 per agent per month on an annual contract with agent minimums and voice or SMS billed separately, but treat those as estimates only. Solves, by contrast, has a Starter at GBP 29 you can start without a sales call, and clear GBP team-band pricing on the pricing page.
Is Solves a like-for-like Gladly replacement?
No, and we will not pretend otherwise. Gladly is a voice-first, omnichannel contact-centre platform built for large consumer brands that run phone, SMS, chat and social alongside email. Solves is email-first and SME-first: owned email tickets, assignment, notes, SLAs and multi-brand, with no phone, SMS, live chat or social channels. If your support lives mainly on the phone, Gladly is the better fit. If it lives in shared inboxes, Solves replaces the inbox sprawl without the contact-centre weight or price.
When is Gladly the better choice?
When voice is your primary channel and you are an enterprise team. Gladly is designed around a customer-centric, voice-first model: a single lifelong customer conversation across phone, SMS, chat, social and email, with the kind of contact-centre tooling, routing and integrations that large brands need. If that describes you, Gladly is built for it and Solves is not. Solves is for a small UK team that mainly answers support email and wants ownership, SLAs and multi-brand without an enterprise rollout.
Can I move off Gladly to Solves today?
There is no automated Gladly-to-Solves transfer, and we will not claim one. What is genuinely available now is guided, forwarding-first mailbox setup: you point a support address at Solves, verify it with plain-English DNS steps, and start owning email as tickets. Bringing historical conversation data across is a guided pilot conversation, not a one-click import. If a clean break from a voice-first platform towards email-first ticketing is what you want, we will help you set it up; if you depend on Gladly's phone and omnichannel features, staying put is the honest advice.
Is Solves cheaper than Gladly?
On paper, yes, but they are not the same product. Solves paid plans run from GBP 29 (Starter) to GBP 299 (Agency/MSP) per month ex VAT, with annual billing priced as twelve months for ten. Gladly publishes no price; third-party estimates put it near USD 180 to 210 per agent per month on annual contracts with minimums, treated as estimates only. The price gap reflects scope: you are comparing an SME email helpdesk with an enterprise voice-first contact-centre suite, so weigh fit before cost.
If email is your real channel, start there
Start at £29, or see the GBP team bands before you talk to anyone. If you need voice-first enterprise customer service, Gladly is the better fit and we will say so.