Functionality | 6 <p>Tidio covers some essential features for SMBs, including live chat, email, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp support. Its AI chatbot and chat automation are excellent. Yet, the human support tools—like ticketing and routing—are basic, and it doesn’t offer help center creation and phone support.</p> | 7 <p>As a product tailored to e-commerce brands, Gorgias offers a fairly robust range of features. It offer support for all the channels you'd expect including email, live chat, phone, text and socials. Additionally, you'll also find a decent help centre offering and AI agent functionality provided natively too. Though Gorgias does not excel in any one particular area, we did find each feature to be relatively well executed.</p> | 7 <p>Dixa is built for B2C companies. As such its feature list is focused on channels such as live chat, phone (a particular focus), SMS and socials and omits channels such as Slack or MS teams. Additionally, we appreciated the ability to create a help centre and power an AI chatbot off of that all natively (even if neither is that powerful or customizable). One area where Dixa performs well is its routing automations - for example, instead of offering a shared inbox where agents self-assign tickets, agents are shown an inbox filled only with tickets that they are qualified to answer.</p> | 7 <p>Help Scout is a lightweight tool that offers some support functionality that most SMBs will need. Help Scout allows you to offer support via live chat, email, social channels, and create your own Help Centre. It also has some basic automation, reporting and AI functionality.</p><p>However, it lacks support for phone, SMS and WhatsApp and a no-code chatbot builder to automate chat-related workflow.</p> |
Ease of Use | 7 <p>Tidio’s chat automation is powerful but remains relatively easy to use. Templates and clearly labeled actions simplify setup. That said, the inbox is not omnichannel, which can quickly overwhelm teams handling high ticket volumes as they have to switch between inboxes. The biggest issue? You can’t see the customer’s past conversations, which complicates support.</p> | 5 <p>Though individual screens were generally well presented, we did find the sheer breadth of features slightly overwhelming at times. Gorgias' sidebar navigation system is non-standard which initially made it hard to navigate between core features swiftly (like between inboxes and analytics pages).</p> | 6 <p>Dixa is a very feature rich product, and as such some interfaces took some time to learn how to use due to the volume of information being presented. That being said, most screens were well designed and presented, which lightened the burden. It would take an average SMB employee around 30 minutes to get familiarised with the core interfaces of the product.</p> | 8 <p>Help Scout is easy to pick up, even for beginners. Its inbox feels just like an email inbox—clean, simple, and intuitive. In fact, it’s one of the most user-friendly interfaces we’ve seen.</p><p>That said, there are some pain points: Unlike most customer support tools, Help Scout doesn’t have a sidebar for quickly navigating to other tickets. Setting up custom views isn’t straightforward. Instead of filtering an existing view, you have to build a new workflow, which feels unnecessarily complicated.</p> |
Look and feel | 9 <p>Tidio’s interface is modern and sleek, with just the right balance of colors and icons. Page loads are fast, typically under one second.</p> | 6 <p>Overall, we found Gorgias to be relatively well designed and intuitive to use. Most interfaces were modern and fast to load (load times < 2 seconds). However, some interfaces did lack refinement or were hidden away in settings - for example, creating chatbots with the same interface used to generate other rules/workflows in the product presented some challenges - a simple drag and drop interface would have been preferable here.</p> | 6 <p>When tested, we found Dixa to have a modern look and feel. Whilst its design aesthetic is nothing special, we did find most interfaces to be well laid out and not overwhelming. Most pages were very fast to load (often <1s).</p> | 9 <p>Help Scout’s interface is clean, colorful, and easy on the eyes. It’s fast, responsive, and pleasant to use.</p> |
Customisability | 6 <p>Tidio lets you create highly customized chat automation flows, including custom-coded actions. You can also add custom tags for tickets and create custom inbox views. However, ticket routing automation is limited, and you can’t build custom reports.</p> | 6 <p>At present, Gorgias offers a fairly standard set of customization options for both internal and external interfaces. For its live chat widget and help centre, you can customize the usual elements including logos, colours and titles. For internal facing screens we appreciated the ease of saving custom views or adding custom tags to tickets to suit your specific business needs.</p> | 6 <p>Dixa's internal facing interfaces offer a lot of room for customizability - from custom tags/fields, to rich automation capabilities, to tweaking knowledge bases for the Mim AI chatbot - there's a lot you can play around with to optmize your experience. That being said, we were slightly disappointed by the lack of customizability for external facing screens such as live chat widgets and help centres. For these, you're only really allowed to tweak colours, positions and logos.</p> | 3 <p>Customization is where Help Scout falls short. Without code, you can only make very basic adjustments to the live chat widget and help center. Automation workflows are limited, and creating custom reports from scratch isn’t possible. If you need heavy customization, you’ll likely find Help Scout restrictive.</p> |
Ease of Setup | 6 <p>Tidio offers a simple self-serve free trial for their platform. We found the initial setup to be quick, taking less than 10 minutes. Setting up your first channels may take some time though - with no easy one-click email connect option, you’ll have to setup email forwarding manually. When it comes to richer customisation options - the platform is fairly standard when compared to competitors with basic automation flows and custom inbox views being straightforward to configure in a day or two.</p> | 7 <p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">Gorgias offers a simple self-serve free trial for their platform. We found the initial setup to be simple, taking less than 30 minutes. Setting up your first channels is also a simple process - for example connecting your email can be done with just a couple clicks instead of needing to set up email forwarding manually. However, some features do require some up-front investment to get the most out of such as their AI agents feature as well as any ticket-routing automations you might want.</span></p> | 3 <p>Frsutratingly, Dixa does not offer a self-serve trial. Instead you'll need to trudge through a demo call to get initial access to the product. Additionally, they don't seem to offer a trial per say and instead opt to share a link to a sandbox environment (however, some features are omitted from this). Additionally, most plans have a minimum requirement for 7 seats, making it suitable only for larger SMBs and up.</p> | 6 <p>Help Scout offers a simple self-serve free trial for their platform. We found the initial setup to be slightly longer than necessary, taking around 10 minutes. Setting up your first channels may take some time though - with no easy one-click email connect option, you’ll have to setup email forwarding manually. When it comes to richer customisation options - the platform is fairly limited when compared to peers meaning it won't take long to get the most out of it.</p> |
Customer Support | 6 <p>Tidio offers in-app live chat powered by Lyro, its AI chatbot. The experience is mixed—sometimes helpful, but other times failing to answer basic questions, even when the answers are in Tidio’s help center. The help center itself is average in both depth and quality.</p> | 4 <p>You can contact Gorgias' support agents via a live chat widget in their web app. When tested, you initially have to get through an AI agent which we found to be relatively helpful, however, unable to answer more complex queries. Real agents took an average of an hour to respond and though helpful, often seemed biased to wanting to book demo/sales calls if questions around pricing were asked.</p> | 8 <p>Dixa offers customer support primarily via a live chat widget within their web app. On initial interaction, you'll be dealing with Mim, their AI chatbot. When tested, sadly this was not helpful and almost always opted to handover to a real agent. However, we were able to get connected to a real agent in less than 10 seconds and once contacted, they were generally very helpful and knowledgeable.</p> | 8 <p>You can email Help Scout’s support team directly from the app during U.S. business hours. Their responses are generally quick (within a few hours), and Help Scout's agents always go above and beyond. The AI chatbot however, is weak point, offering unhelpful and generic responses.</p> |
Integratability | 4 <p>Tidio’s integrations are heavily focused on e-commerce, supporting popular platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce, as well as marketing and CRM tools. However, it lacks integration with help centers, telephony solutions, or project management tools. While an API is available for custom integrations, the overall options feel limited for non-e-commerce use cases.</p> | 7 <p>For their target customer segment, e-commerce brands, Gorgias offers a very comprehensive integrations store - providing integrations with all the major players like Shopify, BigCommerce etc. Additionally, we appreciated the fact that they also offer a mobile app with which you can handle tickets on the go more easily.</p> | 7 <p>Dixa offers a strong set of integrations including ones with popular CRMs (Salesforce, HubSpot), ticketing tools (JIRA) and e-commerce providers (Shopify). We were also pleased to see a Zapier integration for anything not natively provided. Additionally, Dixa does offer an API so you can directly interact with the product for more custom use cases if needed.</p> | 8 <p>Help Scout offers pre-built integrations with over 100 apps, including commonly needed integrations such as CRMs, calling systems, project management tools, and email marketing platforms. It also has an API for custom integrations.</p> |
Ease of Migration | 8 <p>Tidio allows self-serve export of contacts and reports. Additionally, its API supports other export needs.</p> | 5 <p>Users can export data on tickets and other analytics via a self-serve option directly within Gorgias' dashboards.</p> | 5 <p>Dixa does offer self-serve export functionality for analytics directly within its web app. That being said, the platform is set up such that the focus for exporting data is via its API instead which can be cumbersome if you're simply looking to get data out in a one-click manner.</p> | 3 <p>Help Scout's data export capabilities are somewhat limited. While reporting data for selected reports can be exported directly from within Help Scout, most data can only be exported via API.</p> |