Capacity vs Gladly Sidekick (2026)
Comparing Capacity and Gladly Sidekick? Both are AI Agents & Chatbots and Help Desk & Ticketing tools in the directory, which is why buyers put them on the same shortlist. Below is a side-by-side look at pricing and an estimated monthly bill, channels, compliance claims, and integrations, plus when each is the better fit, so you can pick on the facts rather than either vendor's own sales page.
At a glance
| Attribute |
|
 Gladly Sidekick
|
|---|---|---|
| What it is | AI-powered support automation platform: helpdesk, knowledge base, and chatbots that answer from everywhere. | Gladly's AI-powered Customer Service Platform centers on people, not tickets, leading to delightful experiences and revenue growth while cutting costs. |
| Pricing | Paid · Custom | Paid · ~$180/seat/mo |
| Est. monthly cost | No published price to estimate | $1,800/mo $180 per seat/mo; Approximate, reported figure |
| Founded | 2017 | 2014 |
| Categories | AI Agents & Chatbots Help Desk & Ticketing Knowledge Base & Self-Service | AI Agents & Chatbots E-commerce Support Help Desk & Ticketing |
| Channels | ||
| Chat | ✓ | ✓ |
| ✓ | ✓ | |
| Voice | ✓ | ✓ |
| SMS | ✓ | ✓ |
| Social | — | ✓ |
| Compliance (vendor-claimed) | ||
| SOC 2 | ✓ | ✓ |
| HIPAA | ✓ | ✓ |
| GDPR | ✓ | ✓ |
| PCI DSS | — | ✓ |
| Data residency | Not verified | Not verified |
| Languages | 30 languages (voice agent) | Most ISO 639-1 languages |
| What the AI can do | ||
| Takes actions | ✓ | ✓ |
| Hands off to a human | ✓ | ✓ |
| Choice of LLM | Not verified | Not verified |
| Buying | ||
| Free trial | Not verified | Not verified |
| How you buy | Sales-led (demo first) | Not verified |
| Minimum commitment | Annual contract (platform subscription) | — |
| Company | Independent, venture-backed | Independent, venture-backed |
| Works with | Salesforce Zendesk ServiceNow Slack Microsoft Teams Genesys | Shopify Salesforce Zendesk Twilio Amazon Connect Slack |
| Key features |
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| Next step |
Full listing Visit site → |
Full listing Visit site → |
Estimates assume 5,000 conversations a month, 60% handled by AI and 10 agent seats, at each vendor's published list price (the cost calculator's model); treat them as a floor, not a quote. Compliance rows are what vendors publicly claim, and “Not verified” means we have not confirmed that fact yet, not that the tool lacks it.
Choose Capacity or Gladly Sidekick?
Choose Capacity if
Best for: Organizations that want customer support and internal help desk automation from one vendor, across chat, voice, SMS and email, with agent assist, auto-QA and knowledge orchestration included, on Salesforce, Zendesk, ServiceNow, Slack or Genesys, with SOC 2, HIPAA and GDPR coverage.
- you need a knowledge base and self-service
Look elsewhere if you want to see a price before talking to sales: Capacity bills an annual platform fee plus usage and publishes no figures. Teams that only need a chat agent will be buying a much broader platform than they use.
Choose Gladly Sidekick if
Best for: Consumer brands that treat support as a loyalty channel and want one lifelong customer thread across voice, chat, SMS, email and social, with an AI agent that tracks orders, starts returns and hands off with full context, with SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR and PCI DSS coverage.
- you need deep e-commerce and Shopify support
- you need Social coverage
- you need a vendor that publicly claims PCI DSS
Look elsewhere if you are a small team or price-sensitive: Gladly is enterprise-priced at roughly $180 a seat with seat minimums, Sidekick is billed on top per conversation, and there is no free trial or self-serve start.
About Capacity
Capacity is the consolidator of this category. Founded in St. Louis in 2017 by David Karandish and Chris Sims after Karandish's roughly $900 million exit as CEO of Answers.com, it has grown as much by acquisition as by code: eleven companies and counting, including Lucy, Linc, Textel, SmartAction, and in 2025 Call Criteria and Barcelona's Verbio Technologies. Each deal added a capability, and the result is a genuinely broad CX automation platform: AI agents across chat, voice, SMS, and email, real-time agent assist, automated QA and conversation intelligence, outbound campaigns, and a knowledge orchestration layer that answers from documents and apps across your stack.
The same platform serves customer support and internal helpdesk use cases, which suits organizations tired of buying those separately, and it automates workflows across integrations with Salesforce, Zendesk, ServiceNow, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Genesys, and many more. The company says it is profitable, past $60 million in annual recurring revenue, with over 20,000 organizations on the platform; 2025 brought another $92 million in funding to keep the acquisition engine running.
Pricing is a hybrid: an annual platform fee in three tiers plus usage, per response for chat and email, per minute for voice, per message for SMS. No dollar figures are published, so budget for a sales conversation.
Capacity fits buyers who want one throat to choke: a mid-size or larger organization consolidating support automation, internal helpdesk, and contact-center AI into a single vendor. Teams that prefer sharp best-of-breed point tools may find it broad rather than deep in places, but as a platform bet it is one of the more complete in the directory.
Read the full Capacity listing → · See Capacity alternatives →
About Gladly Sidekick
Gladly organizes support around people instead of tickets, and that one decision changes everything about how it feels. Every customer gets a single lifelong conversation thread that follows them across voice, chat, SMS, email, and social, so they never have to repeat themselves and your agents always see the full story. Sidekick, its AI agent, lives inside that thread, resolving requests using real customer context and taking genuine actions like tracking an order, starting a return, or making a change, then handing off to a human with everything already in view.
A recent standout is Sidekick on Voice, which Gladly bills as the industry's only AI voice agent powered by that lifelong, multichannel history, so a phone conversation picks up right where a chat left off. The company has kept expanding the family with Sidekick Sales for product recommendations, Sidekick Email, and versions that extend the agent onto Zendesk and Salesforce, so teams on other platforms can borrow its brain.
Gladly was founded in 2014 by Joseph Ansanelli and his co-founders, and it has leaned cheerfully into its theme, naming its pricing tiers Hero and Superhero. It is very much an enterprise product, sold largely by quote with seat minimums, and its Sidekick AI is billed per conversation or resolution on top. That positioning fits its customer base of consumer brands that treat support as a loyalty channel, including Crate and Barrel, Ulta Beauty, and Breeze Airways.
The through-line here is emotional as much as it is technical: Gladly wants every interaction to feel like talking to a company that genuinely remembers you and your history. If you sell to consumers who expect a personal, continuous relationship rather than a cold, fresh ticket every single time they reach out, Gladly and its Sidekick agent are built from top to bottom around exactly that promise.
Read the full Gladly Sidekick listing → · See Gladly Sidekick alternatives →
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