Tidio
Live chat and AI chatbot for customer service
What it does
Tidio is a live chat + AI chatbot + helpdesk built for small ecommerce shops and small service businesses. Drop the widget on a Shopify/WooCommerce/Wix/BigCommerce/website, get a chat box, an AI assistant (Lyro) that answers common questions from your knowledge base, and a shared inbox for the team to reply to conversations across email, chat, Instagram DMs, and Messenger. It sits in the "just works" price tier below Intercom and Zendesk while giving 80% of the useful features.
Free tier
Yes
Starts at
$29/mo
Setup
easy
Key features
Integrates with
Shopify, WordPress, Zapier, Mailchimp, HubSpot
Who this fits
- Shopify / WooCommerce / BigCommerce shops under $500K/yr revenue wanting live chat + AI FAQ deflection
- Small service businesses (medspa, home services, real estate) wanting a chat widget + basic bot on their website
- Solo founders and 2-10 person teams who can't justify Intercom's $99+/mo entry price
- Teams that want the AI chatbot to handle 40-60% of tier-1 questions automatically
Who it does NOT fit
- B2B SaaS with complex support tiers (Intercom or Help Scout wins)
- Enterprise support orgs (Zendesk, Freshdesk)
- Ticketing-heavy operations (Front, Zendesk)
- Any team needing deep CRM sync with HubSpot/Salesforce at the ticket level (Intercom + Zendesk have deeper native syncs)
- Support teams with 10+ agents doing high volume — Tidio's team features get thin
Pricing
Real gotchas
- Free tier's 50 conversation/mo cap is easy to hit on a real ecommerce site
- Lyro AI pricing is per-conversation and can spike if you don't cap it
- Reporting is basic compared to Zendesk
- Team roles are limited on lower tiers
- Not a full helpdesk — no SLAs, macros are basic, no advanced routing
- Integrations with HubSpot/Salesforce exist but are shallower than Intercom's
Integrations that matter
Otto’s take on this tool
Recommend Tidio when: business_type is ecommerce (Shopify/Woo/BigCom), OR business_size solo/small with a customer-facing website, pain_points include "customers ask same questions" / "not responding fast enough to chats" / "need chat on my site". Otto should specifically call out the AI chatbot Lyro as the differentiator vs. Intercom at price. Do NOT recommend for enterprise, high-volume support (>500 tickets/mo), or B2B SaaS with complex tiers.
Affiliate disclosure: if you sign up through the link above, Ottomately may earn a referral commission at no cost to you. We only feature tools we have actually used or vetted through our recommendation engine.Partnership: 20% recurring via Direct.
Editor's curated reviews
224 reviews across TrustPilot - avg 3.8/5Curated by Otto from TrustPilot public reviews (fetched 2026-08-31). 224 total reviews at a 3.8 headline (67% 5-star, 24% 1-star) - real volume with a legitimate bimodal split. The 5-star cluster is dominated by e-commerce store owners praising the free/starter tier's ease of setup, the AI auto-response quality, and named-support responsiveness. The 1-star cluster centers on two specific patterns worth understanding before signing up: (1) sudden account blocks without notice tied to platform moderation, and (2) free-plan-to-paid-plan disclosure friction. Both are policy-review considerations, not general product-quality complaints. G2 and Capterra were consulted for aggregate context but not directly cited here (source-access limits). Not user-submitted on Ottomately.
“This is absolutely the BEST BEST BEST addition to any website you could every have.”
“What I really like about Tidio is they also provide good support themselves.”
“the customer service is good and it's AI features such as auto response is excellent.”
“good product, great customer service”
“Today they blocked us with no notice...no customer support without realising.”
“didnt tell about free plan absolute scam”
“Good user interface, but there's a lot of things wrong with this company.”
“How hard is it to create site or an app which is intuitive in 2026?”
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