Gorgias Users, Teams & Permissions Explained

Where users live in Gorgias

Everything to do with people is in one place. Per Gorgias' Users documentation, you manage the roster under Settings → Account → Users, where a table lists each user, their email, their role, and their 2FA status, with a Create user button to invite the next one.

Adding someone works one of two ways. You can send an email invitation to the address they'll sign in with — the invite stays live for seven days and the recipient activates it by clicking a link. Or you can turn on auto-join, which lets anyone with an approved email domain sign up without an individual invite. There's one detail worth remembering here: auto-join users (and invited users, by default) land on the Basic role until an admin changes it — so if you enable domain auto-join, decide in advance whether Basic is the access level you're comfortable handing to anyone at your company who signs up.

The six roles, from read-only to owner

Gorgias controls access through roles, and a user's role decides exactly what they can touch. Per the User permissions documentation, there are six, and they stack — each one includes everything below it plus a bit more.

1. Observer — view-only. Can read tickets, customers, and message history, and can leave internal notes and attachments, but cannot reply to customers or modify tickets. Good for auditors, analysts, or a manager who only needs visibility.
2. Lite — everything Observer can do, plus customer communication: reply to customers, merge tickets, change statuses, and set priorities. What Lite can't do is trigger third-party actions — so no issuing a Shopify refund from the ticket.
3. Basic — Lite plus integration actions. This is the everyday frontline agent: they can perform third-party actions like refunds, cancellations, or order edits directly from the ticket. Basic is the default for both invited and auto-join users.
4. Lead — Basic plus workflow authorship. Leads can create and manage macros, rules, SLAs, views, and tags — the automation and routing layer. It's the highest non-admin role, built for senior agents and supervisors running day-to-day ops, but it deliberately stops short of billing and user management.
5. Admin — full system access: billing, user management, integrations, ticket fields, and API tokens. Only admins can view the user list, invite people, change roles, or delete users.
6. Account Owner — the person who created the helpdesk. Permissions are identical to Admin, but there is exactly one Account Owner per account, and that user cannot be deleted or downgraded — you have to transfer ownership first.

A quick decision table

Not sure which role a given hire should get? Map the job to the least access that lets them do it.

The principle to copy is least privilege: give the smallest role that gets the job done, and promote when someone actually needs the extra reach. It's far easier to bump a Lite agent up to Basic than to walk back a workspace where three people accidentally have Admin.

How Teams scope assignment

Roles decide what a user can do; Teams decide which tickets they work on. Per Gorgias' Teams documentation, a team is simply a named group of users, and it's "especially useful in multi-brand accounts" where you want returns going to one group and wholesale going to another.

You create one under Settings → Users & Teams → Teams → Create Team, where you pick an emoji, give it a name and description, and add the members. From there, teams do three useful things:

• Assignment and routing. Rules can auto-assign matching tickets to a specific team, and Views can be scoped so a group only sees its own queue. A "subscriptions" team can own every ticket tagged subscription-related without touching the WISMO pile.
• Multi-brand separation. If you run two Shopify stores through one Gorgias account, teams keep each brand's tickets in front of the right agents.
• Analytics. Reporting can slice performance by team, so you can compare the returns squad against the pre-sales squad without exporting anything.

Teams pair naturally with macros and rules — role sets the trust level, the team sets the queue, and rules move the work into it automatically.

The billing part everyone gets wrong: seats vs tickets

Here's the thing that surprises teams coming from a per-agent help desk: Gorgias does not bill per seat on its paid plans. Per Gorgias' pricing page, paid plans include effectively unlimited agent seats — whether you have 5 agents or 50, the subscription cost is the same. What you actually pay for is ticket volume: Basic, Pro, and Advanced plans are priced by how many tickets you handle per month, not by how many people are in the workspace.

Two caveats worth stating honestly:

• The entry-level Starter plan caps you at 3 users. Seat-free scaling really begins on Basic and above, which support up to 500 user seats.
• AI Agent is the exception to the "no per-action billing" rule. A Gorgias AI Agent resolution is billed per interaction — roughly $0.90 on annual billing / $1.00 monthly — and, notably, each AI Agent interaction also counts as a helpdesk ticket against your plan. So automation adds cost on two axes at once. We break the whole model down in Gorgias pricing explained.

The practical upshot: because seats are essentially free, there's no billing reason to be stingy about adding observers or leads. The lever that moves your bill is ticket volume — which is exactly where an AI layer changes the math.

The honest limits — where the native model stops

Gorgias' users-and-teams model is clean and does its job well: six clear roles, least-privilege control, team-based routing, and billing that doesn't punish you for headcount. But it's worth being clear-eyed about what it doesn't do.

The roles are fixed, not custom. You get the six-rung ladder as-is. You can't build a bespoke role that, say, allows refunds but blocks ticket deletion, or grants macro editing without SLA editing. If your real-world permission needs fall between two rungs, you round to the nearest one — usually granting a little more access than you'd like.

Permissions gate humans, not outcomes. A role decides whether an agent can issue a refund; it does nothing to make that refund happen faster, or to handle the 200 identical "where's my order?" tickets before an agent ever opens them. And several of the actions a Basic agent performs — the Shopify refund, the order lookup, the subscription change — depend on integrations being connected; the permission is there, but the work is still fully manual.

Seats are free, but people aren't. The billing model rewards adding agents, yet every ticket those agents work is still a human writing a reply. When volume spikes, "add more seats" is cheap on paper and expensive in practice.

This is the seam where an AI agent layer fits — and to be clear, that's a layer on top of the Gorgias you already run, not a replacement for it. The broader category of AI agents for customer service exists to do the reasoning-heavy, repetitive work that roles and teams route but can't perform. Macha connects to Gorgias through a live native connector (see the Macha ↔ Gorgias integration): it reads and writes the same tickets your roles and teams already govern, drafting or posting grounded replies to WISMO, returns, and subscription questions, and looking up order or account status through a custom tool that turns a REST API into something the agent can call.

The important contrast with Gorgias' own AI Agent is the billing shape. Gorgias' automation is billed per resolution, and each one also counts as a ticket. Macha's credits are consumed per AI action — a draft, a lookup, a reply — not per resolution, so the cost tracks the work done rather than a fuzzy outcome. There are no seats to buy for the AI either; you can see the model on the pricing page. Keep Gorgias as your system of record for people, roles, and routing, and layer an agent on top for the volume no amount of seat-shuffling will absorb.

FAQ

Where do I add and manage users in Gorgias? Go to Settings → Account → Users. You'll see a table of every user with their email, role, and 2FA status, plus a Create user button to send an email invitation (valid for seven days). Only Admins can invite users, change roles, or delete them.

What are the Gorgias user roles? Six, from least to most access: Observer (view + internal notes), Lite (reply, merge, set status/priority), Basic (adds third-party integration actions like refunds — the default role), Lead (adds macros, rules, SLAs, views, and tags), Admin (billing, users, integrations, API tokens), and Account Owner (same as Admin, one per account, can't be deleted or downgraded).

Does Gorgias charge per user seat? No — paid plans (Basic and above) include effectively unlimited agent seats, so you're billed on ticket volume, not headcount. The exceptions: the Starter plan caps you at 3 users, and Basic-and-above support up to 500 seats. Gorgias' AI Agent is billed separately per interaction, and each interaction also counts as a ticket.

What do Teams do in Gorgias? A Team is a named group of users, created under Settings → Users & Teams → Teams. Teams scope assignment: Rules can auto-assign tickets to a team and Views can be limited to one group's queue, which is especially useful for multi-brand accounts. Reporting can also break performance down by team.

Can I add AI to Gorgias without replacing it or buying more seats? Yes. Macha connects to Gorgias through a live native connector and runs on top of your existing help desk, roles, and teams — it doesn't replace them. It helps handle volume by drafting or sending grounded replies and looking up order status, and its credits are billed per AI action rather than per resolution.

Ready to cover more tickets without adding seats? Start a free trial of Macha and connect it to your Gorgias in minutes.