A Gorgias alternative for email-first support.

Gorgias and Solves solve different shapes of the same problem. Gorgias is a chat-first helpdesk built around Shopify and other storefronts, with automations tuned to ecommerce and pricing that scales with your ticket volume. Solves is an email-first support desk: it owns your support inboxes, gives every message an owner, a state, a priority and an SLA timer, and bills by team band in GBP.

The honest summary is this. If most of your support is email and you do not need a live chat widget glued to a storefront, Solves can be simpler and more predictable to run. If your support is chat-led on a Shopify shop and you depend on ecommerce-native automation, Gorgias is the better fit, and no amount of comparison copy should pretend otherwise.

This page is deliberately kept out of search indexes because it quotes competitor pricing that changes often. The Gorgias figures below are a dated snapshot, partly drawn from third-party trackers, so treat them as a starting point and re-verify on the Gorgias pricing page before you make a call.

Gorgias prices by monthly ticket volume rather than per agent, so the cost tracks how busy your support is. On the verified snapshot, the Starter plan is around USD 10 a month for roughly 50 tickets, with higher plans for larger volumes and per-ticket overage when you go over your allowance. Its AI Agent is billed separately at about USD 1 per AI-resolved ticket.

That model rewards quiet months and bites in busy ones, which can suit a seasonal ecommerce store that wants cost to flex with demand. It also means a sudden spike, a sale or a delivery problem can move your bill, and the AI Agent adds a per-resolution charge on top. Whether that is a feature or a worry depends on how spiky and how ecommerce-shaped your support is.

Solves takes the other approach. You pick a GBP team band that matches your team, and the price stays put whether you handle fifty tickets or five hundred in a week. There is no per-ticket overage and no per-resolution AI charge, because Solves does not bill that way. Both models are defensible; they simply suit different businesses, and the right one is whichever makes your costs predictable for how you actually work.

Switch to Solves if your support is email-first and you do not need a chat widget. Shops and service businesses that adopted Gorgias for its ecommerce angle but spend their days in email often pay for chat and storefront automation they rarely touch. If most of your work is answering support@, accounts@ or info@, an email-first desk with GBP team-band pricing is usually the simpler home, especially if you run more than one brand.

Where Gorgias is the better choice

Stay with Gorgias, or choose it over Solves, if your support is chat-led on a Shopify store and you rely on its ecommerce-native automation. Gorgias is built for that: a live chat widget, deep storefront integration and automations tuned to orders, returns and product questions at scale. Solves does none of that and is not an ecommerce-widget tool, so for a busy chat-first shop Gorgias wins, and we would rather tell you that than oversell.

Moving off a shared inbox is the easy part

If you are still on a Gmail or Outlook shared inbox and only trialled Gorgias, getting started with Solves is straightforward: our guided, forwarding-first mailbox setup walks you through pointing your support address at Solves and verifying it before live sending, so email becomes owned tickets without a risky big-bang move. A guided import from other helpdesks is on our roadmap and still in pilot, so we describe that as coming rather than a finished one-click transfer.

Where Solves is strong is the email work an ecommerce widget tends to treat as secondary. Inbound email becomes an owned ticket with a state, a priority, tags and an assignee. Public replies and private notes are kept hard apart, so an internal aside can never reach a customer, and a stale-reply guard stops you answering a thread that moved on while you were typing.

Saved replies can be scoped per brand or shared across the organisation, with no fake placeholders. First-response and resolution SLA timers carry per-brand or organisation targets, with a breaching view that surfaces overdue tickets. Saved queue views and filters keep a busy inbox readable, and reports show what is breaching before a customer chases. Multi-brand is core, not an upsell: several brands in one queue, each with its own mailbox and signature, and a guard that stops a reply going out as the wrong brand.

Under the hood, support content is encrypted at rest with per-organisation keys, access is authorised only, and logs hold metadata rather than message bodies or email addresses. Solves is designed for UK SMEs and targets WCAG 2.2 AA. We do not claim live chat, phone, social or omnichannel, and we will not invent certifications or uptime numbers we cannot stand behind.