Mike HeapMike is an experienced Product Manager who focuses on all the “non-development” areas of My AskAI, from finance and customer success to product design, copywriting, testing and more.
Table of Contents
- My AskAI vs Zipchat at a glance
- What AI can I use to reply in Shopify?
- How does an AI customer service agent work in Shopify?
- What are the different ways I can use an AI agent in Shopify?
- Direct replies
- Copilot replies
- Internal note replies
- Which is easier to set up, Zipchat or My AskAI?
- How do My AskAI and Zipchat differ in what they can be trained on?
- Static content
- Dynamic content
- Which has better answer quality, Zipchat or My AskAI?
- Which AI agent is easier to improve over time: Zipchat or My AskAI?
- Which has more features, Zipchat or My AskAI?
- Is it easy to customize My AskAI and Zipchat?
- What about vendor lock-in?
- Switching from Zipchat: what carries over, what gets rebuilt
- Does Zipchat or My AskAI have any other AI features?
- Tagging
- Agent translation
- Help center quick answers
- Sentiment and CSAT prediction
- What about security, is Zipchat more secure than My AskAI?
- Which costs more, Zipchat or My AskAI?
- The pricing model
- The overall cost
- Conclusion - should I choose Zipchat or My AskAI?
- FAQs
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My AskAI takes six of the eleven scored categories here, Zipchat two, and three finish level. Zipchat gets a Shopify storefront answering shoppers sooner and ships storefront features faster; the post-purchase queue is the job we are scored on.
Zipchat's entry plan buys 500 AI replies for $49 a month, and every reply past that bundle costs roughly double; we bill per ticket instead, at about ten cents. Under about 1,500 tickets a month Zipchat is the cheaper meter, and above that the two lines cross and keep separating in our favor. Zipchat answers the shopper still deciding whether to buy; we answer the support queue that follows the order.
I co-founded My AskAI, so one of the two products here is mine and you should read the scorecard with that in mind.
Search for either one of us and the other turns up in the same shortlist. Zipchat sits on the product page and works to turn a browsing shopper into an order. Our agent picks up the ticket that arrives after that order, in the inbox your team already works in.
A Shopify merchant with 40 pre-sales chats a day and a merchant with 4,000 post-purchase tickets a month want different tools.
The buying mistake I see is a support team buying a sales agent and then wondering why the ticket backlog has not moved.
My AskAI vs Zipchat at a glance
My AskAI | Zipchat | |
What it is | AI support agent inside your helpdesk | AI sales and support agent on your storefront |
Headline price | About $0.10 a ticket, from $199/mo | From $49/mo, metered per AI reply |
How you buy it | Self-serve, 30-day free trial | Self-serve, 7-day trial, card required |
Best for | Post-purchase support volume | Pre-sales conversion on Shopify |
Not a fit for | Storefront conversion campaigns | Teams on Gorgias, Intercom, Freshdesk or HubSpot |
Biggest limitation | No voice channel | One helpdesk integration (Zendesk) |
Scorecard | 6 of 11, 3 tied | 2 of 11, 3 tied |
What AI can I use to reply in Shopify?
TL;DR: Shopify stores choose between two kinds of AI. Zipchat is a storefront agent that sits on the shop and optimizes for sales. My AskAI is a support agent that works inside your helpdesk and absorbs ticket volume.
Zipchat installs on the storefront. Its homepage leads with "Proactive AI that sells, recovers carts, and supports", and its dashboard documentation shows what it counts as success: Sales including a conversation, Total Orders, Chat-to-Sale Conversion Rate and Average Order Value.
Its integrations page lists six ecommerce platforms: Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop and Wix.
We work from the inbox side. My AskAI installs into the helpdesk your team already runs and answers in the threads that are there already. That means Gorgias, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom or HubSpot (one at a time, for most teams), using the same inbox, the same tags and the same routing you have today.
We get measured on how many tickets the agent closes without a human touching them.
The two sides overlap in one place. We added a Shopify Task that gives product recommendations, so the pre-sales questions about size, stock and compatibility are covered on our side too.
Zipchat has built much further down the conversion path than we have, with product cards, add-to-cart from search and revenue attribution. Most of what a shopper asks before buying is a policy question: shipping times, return windows, sizing, whether an item fits the one they already own. Those are the questions we answer all day.
Both products review well on G2:
My AskAI | Zipchat | |
Rating | 4.5 / 5 | 4.8 / 5 |
Reviews | 21 | 9 |
Reviews-page link |
Our complete guide to Zipchat has the full feature and pricing breakdown, and a separate post covers how My AskAI's pricing works.
How does an AI customer service agent work in Shopify?
TL;DR: Both products read your content and answer in natural language. The difference is where the answer is produced, and what the vendor measures it against.
The mechanics are similar on both sides. You point the agent at your content, it indexes it, and when a customer asks something the agent pulls the relevant material before writing a reply. The retrieval step keeps the answers yours, because the reply is built out of your own pages.
Zipchat produces the answer in a chat bubble on the storefront, then optionally passes it into Zendesk. We produce the answer inside the helpdesk ticket itself, so the reply lands in the same thread as every human reply, with the same tags and the same escalation path.
The models differ too. Zipchat names no AI model on any page frozen for this comparison.
We run several models together, mostly OpenAI, with Google and Anthropic used for the tasks where they do better. Small fast models handle routing and classification, and the larger ones write the customer-facing reply.
Our own AI resolution rate benchmark study covers 195 rated deployments and puts the field median around 70%. That aggregate mixes many vendors' own definitions of resolved, so it places the field without ranking any two products inside it.
What are the different ways I can use an AI agent in Shopify?
TL;DR: My AskAI can reply directly, draft for an agent, or post silently as an internal note so you can grade it before it ever faces a customer. Zipchat replies directly, hands over to a human, and can hold replies in draft for approval.
Direct replies
This is the default on both. The agent answers the customer itself, in the chat widget on Zipchat's side and inside the helpdesk thread on ours.
On Zipchat, a human can take the conversation over with a "Take Over" button in the top right corner of the conversation, which pauses the AI until you hand it back. We do the same thing through Human Escalation, and we write a summary of the conversation as an internal note so the agent picking it up does not make the customer repeat themselves.
Copilot replies
Our copilot is the AI Copilot Chrome Extension. It works inside any of our integrated helpdesks, drafts replies and does lookups in the agent's normal workflow, and carries no seat charge (on every plan, for everyone on the team).
Zipchat's nearest equivalent is Draft mode. The agent writes the reply and holds it until a person approves it. Zipchat's changelog announces that "Zipchat can now draft replies instead of sending them automatically", giving your team control before any message reaches the customer.
The same release note says "Draft messages count as AI replies". Draft mode bills every message the agent writes, including the ones a human decides not to send.
Internal note replies
This one is ours alone. Most of our customers start here. The AI drafts a reply on every single ticket and writes it as an internal note, and the customer sees nothing.
Your team reads the draft next to whatever the ticket actually needed. After a week or two you know what your resolution rate would have been, before you ever flip it live. It is also the way to run us alongside a tool you already have without turning anything off.
Which is easier to set up, Zipchat or My AskAI?
TL;DR: Zipchat is faster to a first reply on a Shopify store: install it and let it crawl the catalog. My AskAI takes about ten minutes and connects to your helpdesk, where the tickets already are.
This one goes to Zipchat. On a Shopify storefront its setup is the one to beat, and setup is the strongest single theme in its reviews: a small-business reviewer on G2 had worked with competing tools before and rated Zipchat's the smoothest they had done.
We take about ten minutes for the standard install, and no developer is needed. You sign up, connect your knowledge, and install our app from your helpdesk's marketplace. Teams switching from an AI agent they already run are usually fully across inside a day.
Zipchat's own site claims "Native Shopify integration, Shopify Certified, go live in under 5 minutes".
Its integrations FAQ puts a longer number on the same job. It says "Full configuration of brand tone, escalation rules, proactive triggers, and channel pairing typically takes 2 to 4 hours."
Zipchat's five minutes and our ten differ because of what each product has to be pointed at. Zipchat reads a storefront, which it can find on its own. We read your help center, your past tickets and your internal documents, which takes a few extra clicks because nobody else can guess where those live.
How do My AskAI and Zipchat differ in what they can be trained on?
TL;DR: Zipchat learns from your site, PDFs, CSVs, your sitemap and your source code. My AskAI adds your help center behind login, your past tickets, and your wiki and cloud drives.
Source type | My AskAI | Zipchat |
Site crawl | ✅ | ✅ |
PDF / CSV / sitemap upload | ✅ | ✅ |
Public help center | ✅ | ✅ |
Help center behind login | ✅ | ❌ |
Historic tickets | ✅ | ❌ |
Notion / Confluence | ✅ | ❌ |
Google Drive / OneDrive / Dropbox / SharePoint | ✅ | ❌ |
Salesforce | ✅ | ❌ |
Shopify products | ✅ | ✅ |
Shopify customer and order data | ✅ | ✅ |
Source code (GitHub / GitLab) | ❌ | ✅ |
Static content
Zipchat's Add new source modal offers six options: a single page, a multi-page website, a PDF, custom text, a list of links as CSV, and an XML sitemap. Every one of them is a web page or a file you upload. That covers a storefront well, because a storefront is a website.
We read the same things and then keep going into the places support knowledge actually lives: Google Drive, Notion, OneDrive, Dropbox, SharePoint, Confluence and Salesforce, plus Zendesk, Intercom and Freshdesk help centers, including the articles behind a login. Most refund and warranty policy I see sits in a Notion page or a locked help-center article that no site crawler can reach.
Dynamic content
Both sides read live Shopify data, so both can answer "where is my order" with the actual order status. Zipchat also indexes source code from GitHub and GitLab, public or private, into an isolated sandbox, which earns its place if your product is software and half your support answers live in the repository.
Our side of dynamic is Train on Historic Tickets. It reads your last 5,000 historic conversations by default, more on request, and drafts knowledge articles from how your team answered. A store with a thin help center is not starting from nothing.
A G2 review flagged that the agent could not bind to live documents, so product information had to be re-uploaded as PDFs by hand. Zipchat re-scans crawled site pages on a published schedule: weekly on Starter and Growth, daily on Pro, Scale and Enterprise. Nothing in its documentation states a refresh cadence for content uploaded directly as a file, like those PDFs.
Which has better answer quality, Zipchat or My AskAI?
TL;DR: Zipchat publishes a 90%+ handling rate. That is not the same measurement as a My AskAI resolution rate, so neither number separates the two products. Both answer clean tier-one questions well.
A My AskAI resolution rate and a Zipchat resolution rate are not the same measurement, so setting the two side by side would tell you nothing you could act on.
The figure Zipchat repeats most is 90%+: its homepage and its pricing page both say "Zipchat handles 90%+ of inquiries automatically". A published rate like that is only worth something once you know what it counts, and no vendor in this field, ours included, counts it the same way.
Our own resolution rate benchmark study says the same thing from the other side. The deployments in it are self-selected and each vendor's definition of resolved is its own, so its field median tells you roughly what normal looks like and not what any one vendor will do for you.
Zipchat's dashboard documentation defines its Good Replies metric as "Replies that didn't receive ratings", which it calls "neutral but successful interactions".
An unrated reply is counted as a successful one, which is a generous reading of silence.
On our side, a conversation counts as resolved when the AI handled it without escalating to a human. That definition does not claim the customer's problem was solved. To find out why a particular answer came out the way it did, you ask Echo, the team-side assistant in our dashboard, and it names the knowledge source the agent used.
Both agents answer clean tier-one questions well, and because the two published rates measure different things, neither number separates them.
Which AI agent is easier to improve over time: Zipchat or My AskAI?
TL;DR: My AskAI drafts new knowledge articles from your agents' own replies every week. Zipchat improves through chat corrections and a weekly low-confidence digest.
I like Zipchat's improvement loop. It is built with care and it runs entirely by hand. When the agent gets something wrong, you open a Create correction box from the conversation, write the reply it should have given, and can set the correction to expire.
There is also a weekly email digest of the questions the agent was least confident about. Somebody has to sit down and do it.
Our self-learning does that comparison for you. Every time a conversation is handed to a human, we read what the AI said and what the agent sent, and draft a new knowledge article out of the difference.
We run that comparison on every handover. Your part is reading the draft article and approving it.
Two G2 reviews sit on this loop. One asked Zipchat to reindex pages periodically so the agent would stop serving obsolete information. Zipchat runs scheduled scans that do exactly that for crawled pages (weekly on Starter and Growth, daily on Pro, Scale and Enterprise), though it publishes no cadence for content uploaded directly as a file.
The other complained that the agent had no memory of the customer: it could not tell a first-time buyer from a loyalty member. Zipchat's changelog has since answered that one. The agent now remembers customers across conversations and builds a persistent profile of who they are and what has happened before.
Which has more features, Zipchat or My AskAI?
TL;DR: Zipchat is comfortably ahead on storefront revenue features. My AskAI is ahead on support-operations features.
Capability | My AskAI | Zipchat |
Add-to-cart from AI search | ❌ | ✅ |
Product-page question answering | ✅ (via a Shopify Task) | ✅ |
Proactive chat triggers | ❌ | ✅ |
Revenue and AOV attribution | ❌ | ✅ |
WhatsApp / Instagram / Messenger | ✅ (whatever your helpdesk routes in) | ✅ (native) |
Persistent customer memory | ✅ | ✅ |
Agentic multi-step workflows | ✅ (Tasks and Tools) | ✅ (Skills) |
Runs inside the helpdesk inbox | ✅ (Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, Gorgias, HubSpot) | — (Zendesk only) |
Automatic ticket tagging | ✅ | ❌ |
Conversation topic insights | ✅ | — (sentiment only) |
Multi-brand agents | ✅ | ✅ |
Live agent translation | ✅ | ❌ |
Zipchat takes this one. Its release pace on anything that touches a storefront has been faster than ours: Skills with Claude Code integration and a public gallery, add-to-cart from AI search, a Shopify Sidekick integration, an official WooCommerce plugin, a Shopify reviews-app integration, a backend API that can update prompts and skills programmatically, and persistent customer memory.
Zipchat can connect internal MCP servers as a data source, the same way it connects any custom API. MCP is the open standard that lets an AI agent call other systems without a bespoke integration for each one.
Zipchat connects to WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger directly. We answer those conversations once your helpdesk routes them into the inbox, which Gorgias and Zendesk both do. If you sell through DMs, the question is whether you want that traffic in the storefront widget or in your ticket queue.
![Zipchat's Chat settings → Channels tab, showing three stacked channel cards: Shopify App, Chat Bubble (Active), and Whatsapp [Beta] (Active), with credential and phone-number fields covered by red redaction bars.](https://www.notion.so/image/attachment:1cf51bb0-f5da-4aa4-80d3-c3cb6fa7e11f:my-askai-zipchat-comparison-2026-screenshot-6.png?table=block&id=3c9cbb2d-d767-81e4-814f-f05dd3919e3c&cache=v2)
What we have instead is the support operations layer:
- Automatic tagging across your existing helpdesk tags, at $0.05 per attribute per ticket. It doubles as a spend control, because you can tag a class of tickets the AI should not answer and pay only for the tag.
- Insights that group every conversation into topics and score all of them for AI CSAT, where most tools sample between 2% and 10%.
- Guidance rules for tone, clarification and forced handovers.
- Tasks and Tools for refunds, cancellations and account updates, defined as procedures in plain English (no decision tree to maintain).
Whether the AI actions a refund itself or flags it for a person is a setup decision you make. Most teams build the Task for order lookups and address changes, then use Handover guidance for anything with money or fraud attached.
Is it easy to customize My AskAI and Zipchat?
TL;DR: Both are configured in plain English, with no flow-builder to learn. Zipchat exposes Skills and a backend API. My AskAI exposes guidance, custom answers, tools and tasks.
Zipchat's Prompt and Tools screen gives you a fixed core prompt you cannot edit, plus free-text boxes for contact information and additional instructions. Those boxes carry a 2,000-character limit, with a note telling you to contact support if you need it raised.
Two thousand characters fills up fast once you start writing out return and warranty policy. Beyond the prompt, Skills (renamed from Tools) let you build reusable behaviors with variables shared across them. There is a public gallery to publish a Skill to, and a backend API can update prompts and skills programmatically.
We split the same job across four surfaces. Guidance covers behavior rules, in three types: communication and style, context and clarification, and handover and escalation.
Custom Answers cover the questions where the wording has to be exact, which is also how teams import their existing helpdesk macros. Tools handle individual API calls, and Tasks handle multi-step procedures that ask the right questions and confirm with the customer before acting.
Normal configuration needs no developer on either side, and custom API work needs one. Zipchat's backend API updates prompts and skills programmatically. Our side keeps more of the configuration as text a support lead can write.
What about vendor lock-in?
TL;DR: Zipchat is built around one storefront and one helpdesk. My AskAI's trained agent moves with you across Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, Gorgias and HubSpot, so changing helpdesk does not mean retraining the AI.
Zipchat integrates with exactly one helpdesk. Its integrations page FAQ says "It runs as an AI agent inside Zendesk, and connects to GitHub and GitLab for code-aware support."
That page's Helpdesk tools section lists Zendesk and nothing else. It is the only helpdesk Zipchat runs inside as an AI agent, and the Zendesk setup guide is the only helpdesk guide Zipchat publishes.
If you run Gorgias, the helpdesk built around Shopify stores, Zipchat sits beside it as a second inbox to watch.
We install into Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, Gorgias or HubSpot. You keep your agents, macros, tags and routing rules, so adopting us is an install.
Most customers run us in one helpdesk at a time. The value shows up when you change helpdesk later, because the trained agent, the custom answers, the guidance and the tasks all come with you.
Switching from Zipchat: what carries over, what gets rebuilt
What carries over is your knowledge, mostly. Both products index the same storefront, the same PDFs and the same sitemap, so pointing us at what you already pointed Zipchat at is a ten-minute job.
You connect Shopify again on our side, over the same products, orders and customers. Your tone of voice and escalation rules are written in plain English on both sides, so they transfer as text you can paste across.
What gets rebuilt is your Skills. A Zipchat Skill and a My AskAI Task are both natural-language procedures, but there is no export path between them, so each one gets written again.
Budget an hour per workflow you use. Your corrections history does not transfer either, though our historic-ticket training reads the conversations underneath it and drafts knowledge from those.
What breaks is anything storefront-specific. Proactive chat triggers, add-to-cart from search and the revenue attribution reporting are Zipchat's own. Your WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger conversations keep working through your helpdesk if it routes them there.
If those are pulling their weight on your store, keep them. Run us in the helpdesk for post-purchase tickets and leave Zipchat on the storefront doing what it does well.
Our trial runs 30 days and takes no card, so you can run us alongside Zipchat for a month before anyone signs anything.
Does Zipchat or My AskAI have any other AI features?
TL;DR: My AskAI tags tickets and translates live for agents. Zipchat scores conversation sentiment and answers product questions from the search bar.
Tagging
We tag every incoming ticket automatically, across your existing helpdesk custom fields, inside Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk and Freshchat. It works off the tags you already have. Each one gets expanded into a full written definition you can review and edit, and classification runs against those definitions by meaning, so a reworded ticket still lands in the right place.
Each tag also carries a reply setting, so you can decide that tickets under a given tag go straight to a human. No ticket-tagging feature appears anywhere in Zipchat's documentation.
Agent translation
We support 95 languages, detected per message, and the agent replies in the customer's language by default. Live Translation goes a step further for Intercom teams: it translates the incoming conversation into your agent's language as an inline note, then translates the agent's reply back on send.
That solves the moment a human takes over a conversation they cannot read. Zipchat also states 95+ languages on its widget, so on raw language coverage the two are level.
Help center quick answers
Zipchat's well-built AI Search is the counterpart here. It answers product questions from the storefront search bar and can add the product to the cart from the result. Our version answers from your help center inside the ticket, and Custom Answers let you pin exact wording for the questions where you cannot afford a paraphrase.
Sentiment and CSAT prediction
Our Insights scores all of your conversations for AI CSAT, groups them into topics, and emails you when a new topic appears across three or more conversations. Zipchat has added conversation sentiment to its conversations view and to the rebuilt dashboard.
Sentiment and CSAT are not the same measurement. Across both of Zipchat's dashboard surfaces, its own documentation and its own release notes, there is no CSAT score, no first-response-time metric, no resolution rate and no deflection rate named. I would want a resolution rate on that screen before I signed anything.
The rebuilt dashboard does add a support-staff savings tile, described as showing "how much it would've cost to handle your conversations with a human agent, using a $4 per conversation default that you can adjust to your own numbers". Alongside it sit revenue attribution, a working-hours breakdown and a vendor-computed value figure.
What about security, is Zipchat more secure than My AskAI?
TL;DR: My AskAI publishes a SOC 2 Type II report and a GDPR DPA. Zipchat publishes encryption, data residency and enterprise access controls in its integrations FAQ, and no independent audit.
Security here means what each vendor publishes about it. A vendor can hold a control it has never written about.
We hold SOC 2 Type II and we are GDPR compliant. Data is encrypted with AES-256 at rest and TLS in transit, sits in isolated containers per customer, and is never used for model training or anything beyond serving that customer's own tickets.
The SOC 2 report is available to customers on request.
Zipchat's security answers live inside its integrations FAQ. It says "Customer data is encrypted in transit and at rest. EU and US data residency are both available on request." It adds that "PII redaction, audit logs, and SSO are available on Enterprise plans." (PII being personal information like a customer's name, email address or order details).
The same page badges the product as GDPR and AI Act compliant, and the agent defaults to labeling itself as AI to meet the EU AI Act.
Zipchat publishes no SOC 2 report, no ISO 27001 certificate and no trust portal, and SAML and SCIM appear nowhere on its site. Its documentation carries no security, trust or compliance page at all.
If your procurement process asks for an independent auditor's report, that is the gap to raise on the call. We answer that one with the SOC 2 Type II report.
Which costs more, Zipchat or My AskAI?
TL;DR: Zipchat meters every AI reply and roughly doubles the rate on overage. My AskAI charges about $0.10 a ticket. Which is cheaper depends on your volume, and the crossover is lower than either of us markets it.
The pricing model
Zipchat sells reply bundles. The pricing page starts at $49 a month for 500 AI replies and climbs through $129, $249 and $499 to an unlimited tier from $999.
When you run out, "Extra reply packages are available at $49 for 250 additional replies", which is about $0.196 a reply, roughly double the rate you pay inside the entry plan. Every plan comes with a 7-day free trial and asks for a card.
We bill per ticket. Pro is $199 a month with 1,000 credits included, Scale is $499 with 2,000 credits, and Enterprise starts at $999 with everything metered.
On helpdesk chat, two AI replies make one credit, so a typical chat ticket lands around $0.10. Email tickets run closer to $0.15, because the first reply is a full credit.
Two figures on our own pricing get confused. The headline rate is about $0.10 a ticket, the Scale and Enterprise credit rate.
The Pro plan's rate for tickets beyond its included 1,000 is $0.12. They are different lines on different plans, and neither is an average of the other.
The structural difference is what happens as the agent improves. We bill when the AI does the work, so your bill stays flat as your resolution rate climbs, while per-resolution models charge you more as the AI gets better at its job.
Before any of this, there is a 30-day free trial on our side with every feature unlocked, unlimited tickets and no card required. Run your own volume through it and you will have your number.
The overall cost
Assume two AI replies per conversation, which is our own billing assumption for chat, and take the cheapest plan on each side that covers the volume.
Tickets / month | AI replies | Zipchat | My AskAI |
250 | 500 | $49 (500-reply plan) | $199 (Pro, 1,000 credits included) |
1,500 | 3,000 | $249 (3,000-reply plan) | $259 (Pro $199 + 500 credits at $0.12) |
3,000 | 6,000 | $499 (6,000-reply plan) | $439 (Pro $199 + 2,000 credits at $0.12) |
6,000 | 12,000 | from $999 (unlimited tier) | $899 (Scale $499 + 4,000 credits at $0.10) |
At 250 tickets a month it is $49 on their side against $199 on ours, and no amount of feature argument closes that for a store that size.
The two lines cross just over 1,500 tickets a month. That is where 3,000 AI replies tips a store past Zipchat's $249 plan, onto either a $49 reply pack or its $499 tier, while our bill climbs $0.12 at a time. Past the cross the gap opens in our favor and keeps opening, because our marginal rate falls to $0.10 while Zipchat's overage runs at about twice its own plan rate.
Two things push the crossover lower. Draft mode messages count as billable AI replies on Zipchat, so a cautious rollout costs full price. A support queue also runs past two replies per conversation more often than a pre-sales chat.
For the full Zipchat plan ladder, our complete guide to Zipchat lays out every tier.
Conclusion - should I choose Zipchat or My AskAI?
TL;DR: Buy Zipchat to sell more on a Shopify storefront. Buy My AskAI to absorb support volume inside the helpdesk you already run.
If shoppers leave the product page without buying, Zipchat is the better tool and I will say so on a call. Post-purchase tickets piling up in Gorgias or Zendesk is the job we were built for, and Zipchat only reaches into one of those two helpdesks.
The 11 categories are modes, ease of setup, training and integrations, answer quality, improving, features, price, customization, lock-in, other AI features and security. Evidence comes from Zipchat's own documentation, pricing page, integrations FAQ and changelog, from My AskAI's own product documentation and pricing, and from G2 reviews of both products. Where neither vendor publishes a figure, the row is scored on what is documented.
My AskAI | Zipchat | ||
Modes | 9/10 | 6/10 | My AskAI win |
Ease of setup | 8/10 | 9/10 | Zipchat win |
Training/Integrations | 9/10 | 5/10 | My AskAI win |
Answer Quality | 8/10 | 8/10 | Tie |
Improving | 9/10 | 6/10 | My AskAI win |
Features | 8/10 | 9/10 | Zipchat win |
Price | 8/10 | 8/10 | Tie |
Customization | 8/10 | 8/10 | Tie |
Lock-in | 9/10 | 5/10 | My AskAI win |
Other AI features | 8/10 | 7/10 | My AskAI win |
Security | 8/10 | 6/10 | My AskAI win |
We win 6 of the 11 categories, Zipchat wins 2, and 3 are tied. The two Zipchat wins are the two a merchant feels first: it is quicker to a live reply, and new storefront features arrive faster than ours.
Answer quality cannot be scored when neither side's number is defined, price flips direction depending on your volume, and customization comes out level because each side hands you a different half of the same job.
Choose Zipchat if:
- Your Shopify store's problem is pre-sales conversion on the product page
- You want revenue attribution, add-to-cart from search and proactive chat on the storefront
- You sell through WhatsApp, Instagram or Messenger DMs
- You are under 1,000 conversations a month, where $49 to $129 is hard to argue with
- You run Zendesk, or you run no helpdesk at all
Don't choose Zipchat if:
- Your helpdesk is Gorgias, Intercom, Freshdesk or HubSpot
- Most of your volume arrives after the order
- Your knowledge lives in Notion, Confluence, Google Drive or a help center behind a login
- Your procurement process needs an independent SOC 2 report before sign-off
- You are past a few thousand tickets a month, where per-reply overage stops being a rounding error
Plenty of merchants run both: Zipchat on the storefront for the sale, My AskAI in the helpdesk for everything after it. Our Internal Notes mode drafts on every ticket without sending anything, so you can watch what a support-side agent would have done for a couple of weeks before deciding.
If your helpdesk is Gorgias, the closer comparison is our head-to-head with Gorgias's own AI Automate agent, which covers the native option you are already paying for.
FAQs
Does Zipchat work with my existing helpdesk, or does it replace it?
Zipchat runs as an AI agent inside one helpdesk, Zendesk. Its integrations page states that it "runs as an AI agent inside Zendesk", and Zendesk is the only entry under that page's Helpdesk tools section. On Gorgias, Intercom, Freshdesk or HubSpot it sits alongside your helpdesk as a separate storefront widget with its own inbox, which means two places to look for a conversation.
It does not replace a helpdesk either: no ticketing or SLA-management feature appears anywhere in its documentation, and there is no agent seat model. My AskAI installs inside Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, Gorgias or HubSpot and answers in the existing thread.
How much does Zipchat cost compared with per-resolution pricing?
Zipchat is metered per AI reply, which behaves differently again from a per-resolution model. You buy a bundle of replies and pay about double the plan rate for anything past it.
My AskAI | Zipchat | |
Pricing model | Per ticket | Per AI reply |
Headline rate | About $0.10 a ticket | From $49/mo for 500 replies |
Overage | $0.12 a credit on Pro, $0.10 on Scale | $49 per 250 replies (about $0.196) |
At 3,000 tickets/month | $439 | $499 |
Free trial | 30 days, all features, no card | 7 days, card required |
Against a per-resolution model, per-ticket and per-reply billing both track the volume you receive, so improving the agent does not raise the invoice.
Is Zipchat or My AskAI better for post-purchase support rather than pre-sales?
For post-purchase support, My AskAI. The work after an order is ticket work: returns, warranty, delivery exceptions, address changes, refunds. That lives in your helpdesk, needs your policy documents and your past tickets, and usually needs an escalation path to a named human.
We read help centers behind a login, Notion, Confluence, Google Drive and your last 5,000 historic tickets, and we reply inside Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, Gorgias or HubSpot.
For pre-sales on a Shopify storefront, Zipchat is stronger: it answers on the product page, adds to cart from search, fires proactive triggers and reports the revenue it influenced. We cover the recommendation half of pre-sales with a Shopify Task, and the conversion tooling around it is Zipchat's.
What can My AskAI and Zipchat each be trained on?
Zipchat takes a single page, a multi-page website crawl, a PDF, custom text, a CSV list of links or an XML sitemap, plus your Shopify catalog and order data, plus source code from GitHub and GitLab. My AskAI takes all of the web and file sources, plus your Zendesk, Intercom or Freshdesk help center including behind-login articles, plus Google Drive, Notion, OneDrive, Dropbox, SharePoint, Confluence and Salesforce, plus your historic tickets and direct API connections to your own backend. Those internal sources put refund and warranty policy in reach, content that usually sits behind a login and that Zipchat's public-page and file sources never see.
How long does setup take, and do we need developers?
Neither needs a developer for a standard install. Zipchat claims under five minutes to go live on a Shopify store, and its own integrations FAQ says full configuration of tone, escalation rules, proactive triggers and channel pairing takes 2 to 4 hours.
We take about ten minutes for the install: sign up, connect your knowledge sources, add our app from your helpdesk's marketplace. Teams moving across from an AI agent they already run are usually live the same day.
A developer is only needed on either side if you want custom API calls into your own systems.
Can they handle multilingual support and agent translations?
Both cover 95 or more languages and detect the customer's language per message, so on raw coverage they are level. Handover is where they behave differently.
My AskAI's Live Translation, on Intercom, translates the incoming conversation into your agent's own language as an inline internal note, then translates the agent's reply back when it sends. A monolingual team can handle escalations from anywhere. Zipchat does not document an equivalent agent-side translation feature.
How do My AskAI and Zipchat compare on security and compliance?
Security here is a question of what each vendor publishes about itself, and a vendor can hold a control it has never published. My AskAI holds SOC 2 Type II and is GDPR compliant, with AES-256 encryption at rest, TLS in transit, per-customer isolated containers, and no use of customer data for model training.
Zipchat publishes encryption in transit and at rest, EU and US data residency on request, and PII redaction, audit logs and SSO on Enterprise plans, all inside its integrations FAQ, plus GDPR and EU AI Act compliance badges. It does not publish a SOC 2 report, an ISO 27001 certificate or a trust portal, and SAML and SCIM are not named on any of its pages.
My AskAI | Zipchat | |
Independent audit | SOC 2 Type II, report on request | Not published |
Encryption | AES-256 at rest, TLS in transit | In transit and at rest |
Data isolation | Isolated container per customer | Not published |
Data residency | Not published | EU and US, on request |
Enterprise access controls | Not published | SSO, PII redaction, audit logs |
Customer data used for model training | Never | Not published |
If your reviewer needs an independent audit report, ask Zipchat for it directly before you assume either way.
