The best Tidio alternatives for a store or small business come in three shapes: other live chat platforms with an AI agent, help desks built for bigger teams, and one agent that answers every channel for a flat price. Here are six, with who each one suits, what each one counts, and when staying on Tidio is the better call.
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Tidio is often the first support tool a small online store installs, and for good reasons. It brings live chat, a help desk with ticketing, the Lyro AI Agent and Flows for automation into one place, it connects to Shopify, WordPress, Squarespace and more than a hundred other tools, and it has a free plan and a 7-day free trial. Lyro answers from the support content you give it, and when a question falls outside that content, Tidio's site says Lyro creates a ticket so a person can answer.
People start looking at Tidio alternatives when the business grows and the plan starts to have several moving parts. Tidio counts billable conversations by plan, which its pricing page defines as any live chat, ticket, email or social conversation that includes a message from a human agent: at the time of writing, Starter is $24.17 a month with 100 of them. Lyro is counted separately, by the Lyro conversation, with the add-on starting at $32.50 a month. Flows has its own allowance, counted in visitors reached. Each is a reasonable way to price software. Together they are three numbers to size, and resize, as volume changes.
The other trigger is reach. A store's customers do not only use the chat bubble. They text the number on the invoice, ring the shop, message on Instagram or WhatsApp, and in some markets use Telegram, LINE or Viber. A business that wants all of that answered by the same agent from the same knowledge base, in one inbox, looks for a tool whose channel list matches its customers rather than its website.
So this list covers the realistic directions out of Tidio. Crisp is another chat platform with a free plan and an AI agent, priced per workspace. Gorgias is a help desk for Shopify stores. Intercom Fin is the step up to a full help desk. Chatbase is for building your own AI agent. Manychat is for businesses whose conversations start on Instagram and TikTok. And Bold Agent Kit is one agent on every channel at $25 a month. Each entry says what it charges for, according to its own site, and who should choose it.
Each one follows from how Tidio publishes its plans and its scope, not from how well it answers. Whether any of them matters depends on how big you are and where your customers write.
Billable conversations are set by plan, Lyro conversations are bought separately, and Flows is counted in visitors reached. A growing store has to watch all three and pick a tier for each, and a busy month for sales can move more than one of them at once. Some owners are happy to do that. Others would rather have one number that does not move, however many customers write in.
Lyro is sold by the Lyro conversation, which Tidio counts as any customer interaction on a connected channel with at least one reply from the AI agent, and the add-on starts at $32.50 a month at the time of writing. A store that wants the AI to take most of its questions is buying an allowance for it on top of the plan, and resizing that allowance as volume grows.
Tidio's plans cover live chat, email and the Meta messaging apps well. A business that also wants texts to its own number and phone calls answered by the same agent that runs its chat widget, from the same notes, and wants Telegram, LINE or Viber in the same inbox, looks for a tool that lists all of those channels on one plan with one knowledge base behind them.
Tidio is built for small and growing businesses, from a free plan upwards. Some teams grow toward a full help desk with the routing and reporting a large support floor needs. Others find they want less software than they have: one agent that answers, one inbox where a person can step in, and no tickets to manage at all. Both are good reasons to look around.
Three questions decide most of it. Answer them from your own last three months of customer messages, not from a feature list.
Count where last month's questions arrived: the chat widget, email, Instagram, WhatsApp, texts, phone calls. Then check each alternative answers on those channels with the same AI agent and the same knowledge base, and puts every conversation in one inbox. A tool that covers the chat widget well but leaves the texts and calls to someone else has only moved part of the job.
Tidio counts billable conversations and Lyro conversations. The alternatives count workspaces, tickets, outcomes, message credits, active contacts, or nothing per conversation at all. Work out which unit each vendor charges in, and how many separate allowances you would be watching. Fewer moving parts usually means fewer surprises at the end of a busy month.
For a store, "where is my order?" is most of support. Check whether the alternative reads your Shopify, WooCommerce, Wix, Squarespace or Stripe account before it replies, and what it is allowed to do with that record. Some tools act on the order themselves; others read it and hand refunds and changes to a person. Decide which you want before you choose.
Bold Agent Kit is first because we make it, and it is built for the store or small business that wants every channel on one flat plan. The rest are ordered by how closely each matches a typical Tidio buyer, a small store or service business with a chat widget and an AI agent: another chat platform of the same shape first, then help desks for bigger teams, then an AI agent builder, then a tool for Instagram-first businesses. Each says when it is the better choice.
We make Bold Agent Kit, which is why it is first on this list. Every other entry is described from its own website, including when it is the better choice.
Bold Agent Kit is one AI agent that answers your website chat, your support@ mailbox, texts to your own number, phone calls and DMs on eleven platforms, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, LINE, Viber, Slack, Discord, Bluesky, Reddit and X, from one knowledge base. It answers from your documents, your Q&A pairs, your prices, delivery times and returns window as data points, and the pages of your own site it may link to, and it stores every reply beside the material it came from, so you can always see why it said what it said.
For a store, it reads the order first. Connect Shopify, WooCommerce, Wix, Squarespace or Stripe and it looks the customer up before replying, so "where is my order?" is answered from their record. It cannot issue refunds or change orders; those are the moments you name in its instructions, and the thread comes to one inbox with the agent standing down until you hand it back. It is not a ticketing help desk: there are no ticket priorities or routing rules, and it does not host a help centre.
Choose it when the conversation counts are the part of Tidio you want to leave behind. The plan is $25 a month or $200 a year for the account, with unlimited agents and conversations and a 7-day free trial, and the AI runs on your own key with one of sixteen providers, billed at cost. The same plan runs reorder campaigns to past customers and books real calendar slots. It has no free plan, so if a free tier matters most, the next entry has one.
Crisp describes itself as an AI customer support platform for every business, and in shape it is the closest thing on this list to Tidio: a chat widget, a shared inbox and an AI support agent, which Crisp calls Hugo, that you train and put to work through workflows. Its paid plans list the chat widget, email, Messenger, Instagram, SMS, WhatsApp Business and phone, and its Plus plan adds an omnichannel inbox with LINE, Viber and more.
The pricing unit is the main difference. Crisp charges per workspace rather than by conversation. At the time of writing, there is a free plan with two seats and no AI credits, and paid plans start at $45 a month per workspace, with the Essentials and Plus tiers above it. AI usage is counted in credits, with an allowance included on each paid plan that Crisp expresses as an approximate number of automated conversations.
Choose Crisp when you like Tidio's shape, a chat widget with an AI agent and a shared inbox, but would rather pay per workspace than track billable conversations, and want a free plan to start on. It is a like-for-like move for a small team. The AI still draws on a credit allowance, so a busy month is sized in credits rather than in conversations.
Gorgias is a help desk and AI Agent built for e-commerce, and specifically for Shopify brands. Its site brings email, chat, SMS, WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook into one view, lists a native Shopify integration alongside more than 300 others, including Klaviyo, Recharge and Yotpo, and says its AI Agent can cancel, discount or upsell inside a conversation, as well as offering product tips to shoppers.
Gorgias prices the help desk by tickets a month rather than per agent, and charges for the AI Agent per automated interaction. At the time of writing, plans start at $40 a month on its Starter tier, with a set number of tickets and automated interactions included and a published fee for each beyond the limit. SMS and voice are listed as add-ons, and there is a free trial.
Choose Gorgias when your Shopify store has grown into a support team that works in tickets and you want the AI to act on orders inside the conversation rather than hand them over. It is a natural step up from Tidio for a store whose support volume is outpacing its team. A store that wants the AI to read orders but leave every refund to a person, on more channels and at a flat price, is closer to Bold Agent Kit.
Fin is Intercom's AI agent, and Intercom is a full customer service help desk around it: a shared inbox and ticketing system, a public help centre, workflows on the higher plans, and live chat, support email and in-app messages on every plan. Fin's channels page lists voice, email, live chat, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, SMS, Slack and Discord, and Fin's site says it can also be used with other help desks, naming Salesforce, HubSpot and Freshdesk among them.
Fin is priced per outcome, which Intercom describes as a customer confirming their issue is resolved, not asking for more help after Fin's answer, or Fin completing a workflow. At the time of writing, its published price is $0.99 per outcome, charged once per conversation. Intercom's help desk plans start at $29 per seat a month, billed annually, and there is a 14-day free trial with no credit card required.
Choose Intercom Fin when a Tidio store or software business has grown a real support team, with people whose job is support, and wants a full help desk with an AI agent that is billed only when it produces an outcome. It is the step up, not the step sideways. The side-by-side with Bold Agent Kit covers the difference in pricing model and channels.
Chatbase is for building an AI agent rather than running a chat platform. You connect your sources, which its FAQ lists as websites, documents, text snippets, Q&A pairs and a Notion workspace, define the agent's role and guardrails without code, and deploy it on your website, Meta apps, Slack and email. Its site shows agents looking up orders and retrieving payment details and products, and includes a help desk where people and the AI work from the same conversation.
It is priced in message credits. At the time of writing, there is a free plan with 50 credits a month, and paid plans start at $40 a month on Hobby with 700 credits. Its FAQ says a response uses between one and six credits depending on the model, and that credits renew on the 1st of each month. Voice and telephony are listed from the Standard plan, and extra agents are a published add-on.
Choose Chatbase when Lyro is the part of Tidio you use most and you want more control over the AI agent itself: which sources it learns from, which model it runs on and which actions it can take. It suits a store or software company that is happy to build. The comparison page sets out how it differs from Bold Agent Kit on credits and channels.
Manychat is built for chat marketing on social platforms. It automates replies to comments, DMs and story mentions, sends a DM to people who comment or follow, collects email addresses and phone numbers from those conversations, and runs broadcasts on WhatsApp, Telegram and Messenger. Its plans connect Instagram, TikTok, Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS and email, and its Pro and Business plans add Manychat AI, which you teach about your business so it can reply in DMs and comments.
Manychat prices by active contacts. At the time of writing, there is a free plan with 25 active contacts a month on two channels, and paid plans start at $14 a month, billed annually, on Essential, with Pro, which includes Manychat AI, at $29 a month, billed annually. Each paid plan includes a number of active contacts and then charges per contact, and the Essential and Pro tiers offer a 14-day free trial.
Choose Manychat when your store's conversations start in the comments on Instagram or TikTok rather than on your website, and the job is turning those comments into DMs, leads and sales. It is a different job from Tidio's, and some stores run both. Bold Agent Kit answers DMs on eleven platforms but does not reply to comments or send DM broadcasts.
Who each tool suits, the channels it names and what its pricing counts, as each website stated them when we checked. For a Tidio customer, the last column is usually the reason for reading.
| Tool | Best for | Channels | How it charges |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bold Agent Kit | stores that want every channel on one flat plan | Email, website chat, texts, phone calls and eleven social DM platforms | $25 a month or $200 a year for the account, with your own AI key at cost; nothing per conversation, resolution or seat |
| Crisp | small teams that want a chat platform priced per workspace | Chat widget, email, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, SMS and phone on paid plans | Per workspace a month, with AI credits included on paid plans; free plan, and paid plans start at $45 a month |
| Gorgias | Shopify stores ready for a ticket-based help desk | Email, chat, WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook, with SMS and voice as add-ons | By ticket volume rather than per agent, with AI Agent charged per automated interaction; plans start at $40 a month |
| Intercom Fin | growing support teams stepping up to a full help desk | Chat, email, voice, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, SMS, Slack and Discord | Per Fin outcome, plus per-seat help desk plans if you use Intercom's; $0.99 per outcome at the time of writing |
| Chatbase | businesses that mainly want an AI agent trained on their content | Website chat, email, Slack, WhatsApp and Messenger; voice from the Standard plan | Message credits by plan, with extra agents as an add-on; free plan, and paid plans start at $40 a month |
| Manychat | shops whose customers arrive through Instagram and TikTok | Instagram, TikTok, Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS and email | By active contacts a month; free plan, and paid plans start at $14 a month, billed annually |
Tidio itself has a free plan and paid plans from $24.17 a month at the time of writing, counted in billable conversations, with Lyro AI conversations and Flows sold separately. Crisp, Chatbase and Manychat have free plans. Gorgias and Intercom Fin are help desks for teams that work in tickets. Bold Agent Kit is one agent with its own inbox at a flat price; it is not a ticketing help desk and has no free plan.
We checked each tool’s public website on 11 September 2026 for this page. Plans and features change, so check each vendor’s own site for the current detail. Product names are trademarks of their owners, and Bold Agent Kit is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them.
If you like how Tidio works and only want a different pricing unit, Crisp is the closest like-for-like, with a chat widget, a shared inbox, an AI agent and a free plan, priced per workspace. If your Shopify store has grown a support team that works in tickets, Gorgias is built for exactly that store, and Intercom Fin is the step up to a full help desk for a team of any kind. If Tidio still fits and the bill is predictable for you, staying is a perfectly good answer.
If the AI agent is the part you care about and you want to build it yourself, Chatbase gives you that on a credit plan. If your customers start in your Instagram or TikTok comments, Manychat is built for that job. And if you want one agent that answers the chat widget, email, texts, phone calls and eleven DM platforms from your help docs, reads the order before it replies, hands refunds to a person and costs $25 a month however many conversations it has, Bold Agent Kit is built for that.
Before you switch anything, take last month's twenty most common customer questions and put them to the one or two tools that fit your answer above, on their trials. The replies you get to your own questions will tell you more than any comparison page, including this one.
Each agent uses a model on your own API key, in the same way it sends from your own mailbox and your own phone number. Sixteen providers are supported: OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, xAI and Mistral; DeepSeek, GLM, Kimi, Qwen and MiniMax; Groq, Together, Fireworks and OpenRouter; and Ollama or any other OpenAI-compatible endpoint you host yourself.
Bring your own credentials and you own the whole stack: your model provider, your mailboxes, your carrier, your CRM. We charge for the software and nothing else — no token markup, no metering, no credit packs — so your provider bills you direct at their rates, usually a few dollars a month per agent.
OpenAI
Anthropic
Gemini
xAI
Mistral
DeepSeek
GLM
Kimi
Qwen
MiniMax
Groq
Together
Fireworks
OpenRouter
Ollama
Any OpenAI APINo seat tiers, no credit packs, no per-agent or per-channel pricing, and nothing held back behind an enterprise call.
| Agents | |
|---|---|
| How many | Unlimited — one per business, brand or job |
| Shared brain | The same identity, instructions and knowledge on every channel |
| Knowledge base | Documents, Q&A pairs, data points and pages of your own site |
| Isolation | One agent's content is never used to reply for another |
| Client seats | Invite a client into one agent, with their own login |
| Channels | |
| As many mailboxes per agent as you connect, rotated by campaigns | |
| Text messages | Nine providers — Twilio, Telnyx, SimpleTexting, Plivo, Vonage, Sinch, Bandwidth, MessageBird, ClickSend |
| Phone calls | Answering and dialling, with recordings and transcripts |
| Transcription | Google, or Deepgram nova-3 on your own key |
| Voices | Google, Amazon Polly and ElevenLabs, or your own ElevenLabs / Fish Audio account |
| Voice cloning | Record a voice in the browser and clone it on your ElevenLabs or Fish Audio key |
| Website chat | A widget on your site with your colour, image and greeting |
| Social DMs | Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, LINE, Viber, Slack, Discord, Bluesky, Reddit, X |
| Inbox | |
| One list | Every channel's conversations together, newest first, tagged by channel |
| Filters | By channel, by mailbox or number, or by agent |
| Takeover | Reply yourself and the agent stands down on that thread |
| Hand back | Return the thread to the agent when you are done |
| Campaigns | |
| Multichannel sequences | Email, text and call steps in one campaign, each with its own timing |
| Send conditions | Send a step only if they opened, did not open, clicked or did not click |
| Schedule | The days, hours and time zone anything may be sent |
| Stop rules | A reply, a booking or an opt-out on any channel ends the sequence |
| Pacing | Per-mailbox and per-number hourly limits, pausable and resumable |
| Review before start | The full plan is shown; a campaign sends nothing until you start it |
| Templates | Email, text and call scripts, saved once and reused |
| Analytics | |
| Funnel | Reached, replied, visited, converted, plus value won and time to convert |
| By channel | Where each person started, and the channel they converted on |
| Pages | Which pages known people read, and how many of them converted |
| Journeys | One row per person: every message, visit, call and booking in order |
| Goals | A page rule or a manual "won", each with a dollar value |
| Triggers | A known person returns to a page — notify you, or send a follow-up |
| Open and click tracking | Recorded per campaign and added to that person's history |
| Integrations | |
| Calendars | Google, Microsoft 365, Calendly, Cal.com, Acuity, Zoho, Square, HubSpot Meetings |
| CRMs and commerce | HubSpot, GoHighLevel, Housecall Pro, ServiceTitan, Jobber, Stripe, Shopify, WooCommerce, Wix, Squarespace |
| Booking | Real open slots offered, and only an offered slot can be booked |
| CRM import | Import a segment of customers into a contact list |
| Deliverability and compliance | |
| Mailbox warm-up | Ramped sending across the network, with spam rescue and replies |
| Health score | SPF, DKIM, DMARC, bounce rate and inbox placement, with reasons |
| Auto-rest | A failing address is removed from rotation automatically |
| Unsubscribes | One click, honoured automatically, including on queued mail |
| Reply limits | One reply per thread, per-sender daily and per-channel hourly caps |
| Filtering | Bounces, out-of-office and no-reply addresses ignored |
| List building | |
| Contact extraction | Emails, phone numbers and social profiles, on any site. Unlimited. |
| Deep scan | Follows the pages of a domain most likely to carry contact details |
| Domain queue | Load a CSV of sites and work through them one at a time |
| Contacts and lists | Unlimited, by email or phone, with CSV import and export |
| AI | |
| Your own key | Sixteen providers, including any OpenAI-compatible endpoint you host |
| What we charge for AI | Nothing — no markup, no metering, no credit packs |
| On calls | Uses your provider's fastest model automatically |
| Account | |
| Platforms | Chrome side panel and web dashboard on one login |
| Members' forum | Six boards, visible only once you are signed in |
| Referral program | $50 a year per referral ($5 a month), recurring for the life of the account |
| Support | support@boldagents.co |
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It depends on why you are leaving. For the same shape at a different pricing unit, Crisp: chat, a shared inbox and an AI agent, priced per workspace, with a free plan. For a Shopify store with a ticket-based support team, Gorgias. For a full help desk with an AI agent priced per outcome, Intercom Fin. For an AI agent you build on your own content, Chatbase. For Instagram and TikTok comment automation, Manychat. For one agent on chat, email, texts, calls and eleven DM platforms at a flat $25 a month, Bold Agent Kit.
Usually because the plan gets more moving parts as the business grows. Tidio counts billable conversations by plan, sells Lyro AI conversations as a separate add-on, and counts Flows in visitors reached, so a growing store sizes three allowances rather than one. Others switch for reach, wanting texts, phone calls and more DM platforms answered by the same agent, or because their support team has grown into a full help desk. It is rarely one thing, and plenty of small stores stay on Tidio happily.
Tidio is a platform of modules, live chat, a help desk, the Lyro AI Agent and Flows, priced by plan and by conversation, with a free plan. Bold Agent Kit is one AI agent that answers website chat, email, texts, phone calls and eleven social DM platforms from one knowledge base and one inbox, for $25 a month or $200 a year for the account, with the AI on your own key and no conversation allowances. It is not a ticketing help desk and has no free plan. The full comparison is on our Bold Agent Kit vs Tidio page.
Take what Lyro was answering from, the help articles, policies and FAQ content, and load it into the agent's knowledge base as PDF or Word documents, or as pages of your own site it may link to. Add Q&A pairs for the questions your team answers most, and your prices, delivery times and returns window as data points. Then replace the Tidio widget script on your site with Bold Agent Kit's one line, connect your store, support@ and your social accounts, and switch auto-reply on one channel at a time while you read what the agent says.
Yes. At the time of writing, Crisp has a free plan with two seats and the chat widget but no AI credits, Manychat has a free plan with 25 active contacts a month on two social channels, and Chatbase has a free plan with 50 message credits a month for one AI agent. Each is a real way to start, and each has limits worth reading on its own pricing page. Bold Agent Kit is not free: it has a 7-day free trial, then one plan at $25 a month or $200 a year.
It depends on who answers the questions. A store with a support team working in tickets, which wants the AI to cancel, discount or upsell inside the conversation, will find Gorgias built for it. A store run by one or two people, which wants an agent to read the order in Shopify, answer "where is my order?" on every channel and hand refunds to a person, is the case Bold Agent Kit is built for. Bold Agent Kit also reads WooCommerce, Wix, Squarespace and Stripe, if the store is not on Shopify.
Several on this list do. Crisp lists SMS and phone on its paid plans, Intercom Fin lists voice and SMS on its channels page, Gorgias lists SMS and voice as add-ons, and Chatbase lists voice and telephony from its Standard plan. Bold Agent Kit answers texts on your own number through one of nine SMS carriers and calls on your own Twilio number, on the same $25 plan and from the same knowledge base as the chat widget, with the recording and transcript kept in the inbox. It cannot transfer a live call to a person.
Mostly they will notice a different chat widget. In Bold Agent Kit it is one line of script in your colour, with your image and a greeting you write, and it answers from the same help content Lyro used once you have loaded it. Switch auto-reply on for the chat widget first and read the inbox for a day or two before adding email, DMs and texts. Every reply is stored beside the material it came from, so if an answer is wrong you can see which document produced it and fix it there.
The best alternatives to the other tools people shortlist for the same jobs.
Load the help content Lyro was using, swap the widget script and connect support@. Try it on your own customers for 7 days, then decide whether a flat $25 a month beats counting conversations.
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