whats-best.ai

Customer Service & Helpdesk

Gladly

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Panel rating · 6 judges · How to read the stars

Category median

Sovereignty: not determined

0–5 in half steps. 5 means the rubric's top anchor is met on the evidence.

by Gladly, Inc. · www.gladly.com

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Gladly: AI-assisted analysis on whats-best.ai Gladly: AI-assisted analysis on whats-best.ai (dark)

Add ?theme=dark to the image address for dark backgrounds. The badge shows the category and the month of the latest evaluation, and EU-Made where that is the product’s provenance. It never shows a score.

Gladly at a glance

Vendor
Gladly, Inc.
Headquarters
Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 3 Nov 2026
Data hosting
Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 3 Nov 2026
Free plan
Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 3 Nov 2026
Panel verdict
The AI panel rates Gladly 3/5, the mean of 6 judges. Gladly — the platform now named Gladly Team — earns its highest marks on omnichannel, 7-8, where judges found eight channels (voice, chat, SMS, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, WhatsApp, email, voicemail) meeting in one conversation timeline per customer under a single SLA model. how scores are made
As of
Vendor pages captured 3 Nov 2026; evaluated by the panel 4 Nov 2026. all sources

Gladly alternatives, European ones first →

Read this page as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.

The Agent Advocate

Weighted verdict

Has answered tickets for six years and judges every tool by the hundredth reply, not the first. Wants search that finds the old thread, macros that save real keystrokes, and one screen rather than four tabs. Treats agent-activity dashboards as a smell.

Same scores as the panel view — this lens weights them the way this judge cares.

Scored by The Agent Advocate

Panel median The Agent Advocate This judge’s scores over the panel median. Each label opens its reasoning below.
Scores per criterion, in stars out of 5
Criterion Panel median The Agent Advocate
Ticketing, queues & SLA 3.5 of 5 3 of 5
Channels in one queue 3.5 of 5 3.5 of 5
Knowledge base & deflection 3 of 5 2.5 of 5
Customer data protection 3.5 of 5 3.5 of 5
Integrations & API 3 of 5 3 of 5

Ticketing, queues & SLA

How this is scored

The engine: how work is routed, prioritised, escalated and measured — and whether an agent can find the ticket they need among ten thousand.

0 — Not a ticketing tool: requests stay in a shared mailbox or chat with no ticket, owner or status of their own.

3 — Tickets with assignment, a status and a conversation history, worked from a shared inbox with views or filters.

5 — Tickets routed by rules or automations to teams or agents, priorities and statuses, SLA targets or response-time reporting, and search across tickets.

8 — Business-hours-aware SLA policies per queue or customer with breach warnings and escalation, macros and triggers, merge and split, skills- or load-based assignment, and reporting on first-response and resolution time by agent and queue.

10 — The workload is managed rather than merely tracked: capacity-aware assignment, SLA per contract with reporting an account manager could show a customer, audit of every status change, and search that finds the ticket from a half-remembered phrase.

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The Agent Advocate

The routing engine is real: SLA targets sit on entry points and inboxes with documented precedence on transfers and reassignment, due dates drive queue priority, and replies can be pinned to the same agent within a time window or pushed to the next available one. Canned responses and rules are documented and SLA attainment is reported by channel and available via API, though that report and the channel-mix report are both stated to be sunset soon, and I found no public information on search across tickets, merge and split, or breach warnings and escalation. 2 3 5

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Channels in one queue

How this is scored

Email, chat, phone, portal, messengers and social — judged on what actually lands in the same queue with the same history, not on how many channel logos the marketing page carries.

0 — No customer channel of its own; the product only works on tickets entered by hand or by another system.

3 — Email turned into tickets, with a web form or one further channel.

5 — Email, a web form or portal and live chat or a messenger landing as tickets in one inbox, with the customer's earlier conversations visible to the agent.

8 — The above plus telephony integration with call logging, at least one messenger (WhatsApp or similar) with its consent handling stated, social channels, and a customer portal where a requester can see their own tickets — all in one history.

10 — Channel is an implementation detail: every channel including voice and messengers writes to one conversation with one history, agents answer from one screen, and the customer can move between channels mid-issue without repeating themselves.

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The Agent Advocate

Voice, voicemail, chat, SMS, email, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Twitter all land as channels under one conversation timeline with one routing and SLA model, and call events are logged as conversation items — the one-screen promise. The captured pages state no consent handling for the messengers, and I found no public information on a portal where a requester sees their own tickets. 2 4 5 11

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Knowledge base & deflection

How this is scored

Whether the product reduces the number of tickets as well as organising them: public help centre, article workflow, suggestions to agents and to customers.

0 — No knowledge base or self-service of any kind; the product is a ticket inbox only.

3 — A knowledge base or FAQ with articles, internal or public, that agents can link in replies.

5 — A searchable public help centre with categories and its own branding, draft and publish states, and agents able to insert or suggest an article in a reply.

8 — Article suggestions to the customer before they submit and to the agent while they answer, multilingual articles, review dates or versioning that flag stale content, and reporting on which articles deflect.

10 — Knowledge is a managed asset: gaps identified from unanswered tickets, article performance measured against ticket volume by topic, versioned content with approval, and deflection reported as a number the team can act on.

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The Agent Advocate

The help centre is genuinely public and searchable, with sections, per-language and per-brand centres, up to 1,000 public answers per language or audience, and embeddable on your own site or Shopify inheriting your CSS. Answer search and usage reports exist, but I found no public information on draft and publish states, suggestions before a customer submits or to an agent mid-reply, or versioning that flags stale content. 6 7 11

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Customer data protection

How this is scored

A ticket archive is personal data written by the data subject. Retention, deletion, access control, subject rights under DSGVO, and what the vendor does with attachments — judged on what the product documents it executes.

0 — The vendor's own terms state that ticket content is used for purposes beyond providing the service, or that a data processing agreement is not offered.

3 — A privacy policy and a data processing agreement (DPA) offered, with agent roles that limit what an agent can do.

5 — A DPA published or signable online, agent roles and group- or queue-level visibility, and deletion of tickets or of a requester's data documented in the help centre.

8 — Automatic retention or deletion rules per queue or data category, attachment handling stated, an audit log of agent access or changes, documented support for access and erasure requests, and redaction of ticket content.

10 — Built for a data-protection audit: retention executed and evidenced per category, field-level redaction, full audit trail, subprocessor list published, and the vendor's own support access to customer instances documented and consent-gated.

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The Agent Advocate

Retention can be set platform-wide to auto-delete profile data after a configurable number of days from last contact with a 365-day floor, and deletion is documented at profile, message, thread, attachment and call-recording level, with deleted messages keeping a placeholder in the timeline. Subject-rights support runs end to end — GDPR and CCPA retrieval via API, a compliance-admin JSON export per customer, and a redaction workflow with an event log — though that tool is stated to be currently available only for Shopify, and I found no public information on a data processing agreement or an audit log of agent access. 8 9

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Integrations & API

How this is scored

The systems a helpdesk has to reach — CRM, shop, order management, identity — and whether the API is documented for building or gated behind a partner conversation.

0 — A closed tool with no API and no integrations; context is copied in by hand.

3 — A handful of named integrations or a connector service such as Zapier, or an API with basic documentation.

5 — Named integrations for common CRM, shop or collaboration tools, a documented REST API, and webhooks or triggers that call other systems.

8 — An app marketplace with maintained bidirectional integrations, customer context from other systems shown inside the ticket, SSO and SCIM provisioning, documented rate limits and a sandbox.

10 — A component rather than a destination: versioned API with a deprecation policy, event streaming both directions, an app framework for in-ticket extensions, and integrations the vendor maintains rather than lists.

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The Agent Advocate

The REST API is documented with developer references, API tokens with rotation and shown-once handling, and webhooks carrying custom headers, basic auth and automatic disable after failed retries — real plumbing, not a partner gate. Shopify is named as an integrated platform and apps like Klaviyo post activity into customer profiles, but I found no public information on an app marketplace, SSO or SCIM provisioning, documented rate limits, or a sandbox. 3 10 11

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European sovereignty

How this is scored

Where the ticket archive lives, who the contracting entity is, which subprocessors touch it, and whether vendor support can read customer data. Independently sourced by the sovereignty pipeline; scored here as this buyer weighs it. Dimensions the evidence does not establish are unknown, not non-EU.

0 — Proven non-EU on every dimension the evidence covers: non-EU vendor and contracting entity and non-EU hosting, with no EU option stated.

3 — One European element proven — an EU hosting option, an EU contracting entity or EU representative, or a published DPA — with the rest of the chain unstated.

5 — EU hosting stated as standard or selectable and an EU contracting entity or EU representative, with a DPA offered; the subprocessor chain is unstated or partly non-EU.

8 — EU or DACH hosting with a named data-centre provider, EU contracting entity, subprocessor list published with locations, and any non-EU processing named with its legal basis.

10 — Sovereign end to end and evidenced: vendor, entity, hosting and every subprocessor in the EU, certification published, and a self-hosted or private-cloud option for buyers who need the archive on their own infrastructure.

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The Agent Advocate not rated — no public information

I found no public information on where the ticket archive is hosted, the contracting entity behind the vendor, its subprocessors, or a data processing agreement; every sovereignty attribute came back unknown on the captured pages, so this buyer's question cannot be scored either way. 1 8

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Pricing transparency not rated — the vendor publishes no price

How this is scored

Whether a support lead can compute the real annual invoice for their agent count — including the channels and features they actually need — from public pages alone.

0 — No public prices at all; every tier is a sales conversation.

3 — A public "from" price or one priced tier, per agent or flat.

5 — Per-agent prices public for the main tiers with the billing period stated and the main features per tier listed.

8 — Every tier and add-on priced publicly with per-agent maths, telephony or messenger costs and light-agent or contact limits given, billing period, minimum term and VAT treatment stated; only genuinely custom enterprise work lacks a number.

10 — Complete price computability: a calculator or table producing the annual invoice for a given agent count and channel selection, including usage-metered channels and overage.

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The Agent Advocate not rated — no public information

I found no public information on pricing — no per-agent price, tier list, billing period or add-on cost appears on the captured pages, so a support lead cannot compute an annual invoice from them. 1

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European sovereignty — proven facts

0 of 6 dimensions proven

Built only from facts shown on the vendor's own pages. A dimension we could not prove is left open, not scored as zero.

Hosting location Not determined — uncited Report an error
Hosting options Not determined — uncited Report an error
Open source Not determined — uncited Report an error
Data processing agreement Not determined — uncited Report an error
Transfer impact assessment Not determined — uncited Report an error

Questions about Gladly

Is Gladly European?

Not determined: the vendor’s pages as captured do not say where Gladly is based.

Where does Gladly store data?

Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 3 Nov 2026.

Does Gladly have a free plan?

Not stated on the vendor’s pages as of 3 Nov 2026.

What are the best alternatives to Gladly?

As of 4 Nov 2026, the panel rates Zendesk (3.5/5), HubSpot Service Hub (3.5/5) and Deskpro (3.5/5) highest among the other 35 Customer Service & Helpdesk products evaluated. Ratings that look equal are rounded to half stars; the order uses the unrounded rating, then the name. The highest-rated European alternative is Zammad (EU-Made). Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: how scores are made. The full list, with European products first: Gladly alternatives.

Where this could be wrong

What we left out

A claim that does not survive our checks costs us the claim, not the page. This is what was taken off this one.

Sources (11)

The pages every claim on this page was read from — each one checked, dated, and kept verifiable.

  1. 1 Vendor page www.gladly.com Checked 3 Nov 2026 Details →
  2. 2 Ticketing, queues & SLA — found from sitemap help.gladly.com Checked 3 Nov 2026 Details →
  3. 3 Ticketing, queues & SLA — found from sitemap help.gladly.com Checked 3 Nov 2026 Details →
  4. 4 Channels in one queue — found from sitemap help.gladly.com Checked 3 Nov 2026 Details →
  5. 5 Channels in one queue — found from sitemap help.gladly.com Checked 3 Nov 2026 Details →
  6. 6 Knowledge base & deflection — found from sitemap help.gladly.com Checked 3 Nov 2026 Details →
  7. 7 Knowledge base & deflection — found from sitemap help.gladly.com Checked 3 Nov 2026 Details →
  8. 8 Customer data protection — found from sitemap help.gladly.com Checked 3 Nov 2026 Details →
  9. 9 Customer data protection — found from sitemap help.gladly.com Checked 3 Nov 2026 Details →
  10. 10 Integrations & API — found from sitemap help.gladly.com Checked 3 Nov 2026 Details →
  11. 11 Integrations & API — found from sitemap help.gladly.com Checked 3 Nov 2026 Details →