Comparing Gladly Sidekick and Salesforce Agentforce? Both are AI Agents & Chatbots tools in the directory, which is why buyers put them on the same shortlist. Below is a side-by-side look at how they price, what they integrate with, and when each is the better fit, so you can pick on the facts rather than either vendor's own sales page.
| Attribute | Gladly Sidekick | Salesforce Agentforce |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Paid · ~$180/seat/mo | Per resolution · $2/conversation |
| Founded | 2014 | 1999 |
| Categories | AI Agents & Chatbots E-commerce Support Help Desk & Ticketing | AI Agents & Chatbots Enterprise |
| Integrations | Shopify Salesforce Zendesk Twilio Amazon Connect Slack | Slack Salesforce CRM Data Cloud MuleSoft Tableau WhatsApp |
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 →
Agentforce is Salesforce's platform for autonomous AI agents, with customer service as its flagship act. Because it is grounded in your CRM through Data Cloud, an Agentforce service agent can resolve cases using live customer records, knowledge articles, and Flow automations, all inside the guardrails your admins define, then escalate to a human in Service Cloud when needed. Its Atlas reasoning engine works out intent, gathers the right data, and executes actions, and a low-code Agent Builder lets teams assemble agents from topics and actions without deep engineering. In late 2025 Salesforce added Agentforce Voice, giving those agents a natural phone presence.
Salesforce is not shy about eating its own cooking. The company runs Agentforce on itself as what it calls customer zero, and CEO Marc Benioff has said AI now handles roughly half of Salesforce's own support, letting it shrink support headcount substantially. At the 2024 Dreamforce launch, attendees reportedly built around ten thousand agents in just three days, which tells you something about how quickly the low-code builder puts people to work.
The results customers report are eye-catching: 1-800Accountant says it resolves the majority of its chat conversations autonomously, OpenTable reports similar deflection, and Reddit cut its resolution time dramatically after switching on service agents. Pricing is flexible, spanning a per-conversation rate and a consumption-based credit model, plus per-user editions for teams that want a predictable add-on.
For the vast population of companies already running sales and service on Salesforce, Agentforce is the natural next step, because the agent lives right next to the data and processes it needs and requires no separate integration project to get going. If your business is already built end to end on the Salesforce platform, this is the AI agent that fits your world with the least possible friction and the most context.
Read the full Salesforce Agentforce listing → · See Salesforce Agentforce alternatives →
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