Richpanel is the closest thing to Relay Panel on this list: an e-commerce helpdesk rather than a generic ticketing tool, with a self-service portal and an AI agent that handles common requests. The two differences that matter are which store platform it was built around, and what the AI is permitted to do without you.
| Relay Panel | Richpanel | |
|---|---|---|
| Store platform it was built for | ✓WooCommerce and WordPress, natively | Shopify first; WooCommerce through an integration |
| What the AI does by default | ✓Writes a draft and stops. A person sends it. | Resolves on its own, as the product is designed to |
| Where an answer comes from | ✓Your product pages, policies and stock — with the link shown on the reply | A help centre and macros you write and maintain |
| Reaching a person | ✓On the first ask, from the first message | Deflection first; a person after the flow |
| Writing to your store | ✓Draft orders and edits are queued for approval, never written directly | Actions run against the store |
| Freight and anything it cannot price | ✓Refuses and hands to a person, by design | Depends on how the flows are built |
| Where the data lives | ✓Your own server if you want it — the whole thing self-hosts | Their cloud |
| Shape of the bill | ✓Per seat, per company. AI answers cost nothing extra. | Per seat, with resolution-based tiers |
Richpanel's AI agent is good at what it is for. If your goal is to reduce the number of conversations a human ever sees, that is what it was built to do, and Relay Panel is deliberately worse at it.
Relay Panel is built for a store where a wrong answer costs a pallet of panels going to the wrong address, and where the person asking is often a contractor who will spend forty thousand dollars this year. The assistant is there so your team answers in two minutes instead of two hours — not so your team answers less.
It cannot answer without something from your own site behind it. If it cannot find that, it does not write a plausible answer more slowly. It hands over and says so, which is the whole reason a merchant can leave it switched on.
The honest way to compare an assistant is to ask it something only your store can answer. That is what the waitlist is for — you will get one email when signups open, and nothing else.
Moving from Richpanel? Your conversations are yours; there is nothing here that holds them.