A complete Lyro AI review for 2025: Features, pricing & alternatives

Trying to pick the right AI agent for your business can feel like navigating a maze. There are so many options out there, all promising to completely change your customer support. It's hard to tell what's real and what's just marketing fluff. Tidio's Lyro is one of those names that pops up a lot, especially for small and medium-sized businesses trying to get a handle on customer service automation. But is it as good as they say?

This complete Lyro AI review will give you a straight-up, honest look at what Tidio’s AI agent can actually do. We'll walk through its main features, how you train it, its slightly confusing pricing, and, most importantly, the big limitations you should be aware of. By the end, you'll have a much clearer idea of whether Lyro is the right tool for your team or if you might be better off with a more modern alternative.

What is Lyro AI?

So, what’s Lyro AI all about? In a nutshell, it’s a conversational AI agent made by Tidio, designed to work as a 24/7 customer service rep on your website, Messenger, and other channels. Unlike the old-school chatbots that just follow a strict script, Lyro is built on more advanced tech. It uses Claude, a Large Language Model (LLM) from Anthropic, mixed with Tidio's own AI. This combo helps it understand what customers are really asking and have conversations that feel more natural and human.

The whole point of Lyro is to give small and medium-sized businesses an automated support tool that’s easy to get started with. Instead of needing to code, you train Lyro by feeding it your existing help content, think FAQ pages, help center articles, or product info. Lyro reads all of it, digests it, and uses that information as its single source of truth to answer questions. It's like a smart assistant that learns from your documents to offer instant support, any time of day.

A deep dive into core features

Lyro's real value comes down to two main things: how it learns and what it can do with what it knows. It brings together conversational skills, integrations, and tools for working alongside your human agents. Let’s take a closer look at what it offers.

How Lyro learns: Data sources and training

An AI agent is only as smart as the information you give it. Lyro has a few ways to build its knowledge base, but the process has some real-world bumps you should know about.

• Website Scraping: The quickest way to get Lyro going is to give it links to your website content. You can point it to your FAQ page or help center, and it will scan those pages to pull out information and create Q&A pairs. The catch? The "Scan priority pages" feature is capped at 60 pages, which might not cut it if you have a lot of documentation.

• Manual & File Imports: If some of your knowledge isn't on your website, you can add it manually. Lyro lets you type in question-and-answer pairs one by one. You can also import knowledge with a CSV file, but each file is limited to just 500 entries. This can turn into a serious time-sink for teams with a lot of info to upload.

• Learning from Conversations: Lyro has a feature that can look at past chats between your agents and customers to suggest new Q&A pairs. This sounds fantastic in theory, but it isn't fully automatic. Your team still has to go through each suggestion, edit it, and manually approve it before it gets added to the knowledge base.

This heavy reliance on perfectly structured, pre-existing content can be a big roadblock. If all your team's expertise is buried in old support tickets or spread across random documents, getting Lyro ready to go will involve a ton of manual effort. In contrast, an AI Agent from eesel.ai is built to learn from the messy reality of your support history. It can sift through thousands of your past tickets on its own, picking up your brand voice, common issues, and complex solutions from day one, without you needing to write a single FAQ article.

Conversational capabilities and user interaction

Once you've trained it, Lyro does a pretty good job of chatting with customers in a natural way.

• Natural Language Processing (NLP): Lyro is good at figuring out what customers mean, even if they have typos or use slang. It tries to understand their intent rather than just looking for keywords.

• Clarifying Questions: If a customer's question is a bit vague, Lyro is smart enough to ask for more details. For instance, if someone types, "Where's my order?", Lyro will ask for the order number to give them a real update.

• Multilingual Support: If you have customers around the world, Lyro can help. It supports dozens of languages by translating a customer's question into English, finding the answer in your (English) knowledge base, and then translating it back to the customer.

Moving beyond answers: Lyro Actions

Answering questions is helpful, but an AI agent that can actually do things is a whole lot better. Lyro's "Actions" feature lets it connect to other systems using APIs to handle specific tasks. For example, you could set up an Action to:

• Check a customer's order status in your Shopify store.

• Update a shipping address before an order goes out.

• Start the return process for a product.

While this is a powerful feature, setting up Actions isn't exactly a walk in the park. It requires some technical skill, so it's really aimed at developers or more advanced users. This can be a point of friction for teams who just want to automate workflows without having to mess with code.

Collaboration with human agents

No AI is perfect, so a smooth handoff to a human is essential. Lyro manages this by passing conversations to your team when it gets stumped or when a customer asks to talk to a person. The full chat history is included, so your agents have all the context they need to take over without making the customer repeat everything.

You can also customize these handoff rules based on whether your team is online or offline. Plus, your agents can see all of Lyro's conversations in a special folder and can jump in to take over a chat whenever they want.

Key limitations

While Lyro is a decent tool for basic automation, our Lyro AI review uncovered a few major limitations that could be deal-breakers for businesses that need a truly modern and scalable AI solution.

A complex and fragmented setup process

Tidio pitches Lyro as a simple, one-click solution, but the reality is a bit more complicated. The platform is split into a few different systems that don't always play nicely together: you have Lyro for AI chats, "Flows" for rule-based bots, and separate settings for live chat. This can create a disjointed experience where you're trying to manage different types of automation that can end up conflicting. For example, Tidio’s own documentation points out that certain rule-based bots are turned off by default when Lyro is active just to stop them from getting in each other’s way.

This piecemeal approach is a far cry from the unified and incredibly simple platform you get with eesel AI. With eesel AI, you can be up and running in minutes on a platform that was designed to be self-serve. It brings all your knowledge sources and automation into a single, clean dashboard, no developer required.

A reactive model

One of the biggest limitations, mentioned right in Tidio's help center, is that Lyro is purely reactive. It can only answer questions a customer asks first. It can’t proactively start a conversation with a visitor based on what they're doing, like if they've been stuck on your pricing page for a while or seem to be having trouble at checkout. That kind of proactive help is handled by Tidio's other system, "Flows," which is based on rigid, pre-built rules, not AI.

This means you're missing out on huge opportunities to guide customers and boost sales at just the right moment. Modern platforms like the eesel AI Chatbot are built for both reactive and proactive conversations. This allows you to use smart AI to engage customers at the perfect time to close a sale or stop them from leaving your site.

Lack of robust testing

How can you be sure your AI is actually ready to talk to your customers? Lyro gives you a "Playground" where you can type in questions and see how it responds. This is fine for a quick spot-check, but it doesn't tell you how the AI will perform in the real world. There’s no way to test Lyro against hundreds or thousands of your actual past support tickets before you go live.

This is a major gap. It’s like launching a new feature without any real testing. It’s also where other platforms really shine. For instance, eesel AI's powerful simulation mode lets you safely test your entire setup on your past conversations in a sandbox. You get accurate predictions on how many issues it will resolve and how much money you'll save, and you can spot gaps in your knowledge before a single customer interacts with your AI.

Lyro AI pricing

Tidio's pricing can be a little confusing. Lyro isn't something you can buy on its own; it's an add-on you have to purchase on top of a main Tidio plan. The cost is mostly based on how many "Lyro conversations" you use each month. A new conversation is counted as soon as Lyro sends its first message in a chat.

Here's a quick rundown:

• Tidio Free Plan: This plan gives you 50 free Lyro conversations, but they're a one-time deal. Once you use them, they're gone for good.

• Tidio Paid Plans (Starter & Growth): These plans start at $24.17/month and $49.17/month, respectively (if you pay annually). But here’s the kicker: they do not include any Lyro conversations. You have to buy the Lyro AI Agent package separately.

• Lyro AI Agent Package: This is another subscription that you pay for based on volume. Prices change, but it usually starts around $39/month for 100 conversations.

The biggest issue with this model is that paying per conversation can lead to some unpredictable and surprisingly high bills, especially if you have a busy season or a sudden spike in website traffic. This is completely different from eesel AI's transparent and predictable pricing. With eesel AI, plans are based on the features you need, not how many chats your AI has. You get a predictable bill every month without worrying about surprise fees just because you had a successful month.

Plan	Base Price (Annual)	Lyro Conversations Included
Free	$0	50 (one-time)
Starter	$24.17/mo	Lyro is a paid add-on
Growth	$49.17/mo	Lyro is a paid add-on
Lyro Add-on	Starts from $39/mo	Starts at 100/mo

The verdict

So, after all that, what’s the final word? Lyro AI is a solid, entry-level AI agent for small businesses already using Tidio that just need to automate some basic FAQs. It can hold a decent conversation, it’s easy to train with existing web pages, and it can handle simple queries.

However, the drawbacks are pretty big. The fact that it's purely reactive means it can't proactively engage customers, the setup is clunky and spread across different systems, it's missing at-scale testing tools for a confident launch, and the per-conversation pricing model can get expensive fast.

This video provides a full tutorial on how to set up Lyro, which is helpful for anyone considering it after this Lyro AI review.

A better alternative for unified and proactive AI support

For businesses looking for a more powerful, integrated, and easy-to-manage solution, eesel AI is the clear alternative. It was built from the ground up to solve the exact problems found in tools like Lyro.

Here's what sets eesel AI apart:

1. Go live in minutes: It’s a genuinely self-serve platform. With one-click integrations for help desks like Zendesk and Intercom, you can be up and running almost instantly.

2. Learn from real conversations: Instead of just learning from static FAQs, eesel AI automatically trains on your team's past support tickets, learning your actual voice and solutions.

3. Test with confidence: Use the powerful simulation mode to see how your AI will perform and fix any issues before you launch, taking all the guesswork out of it.

4. Transparent pricing: Get powerful features with predictable monthly plans that don't punish you for having more customers.

Ready for an AI agent that just works, right out of the box? Try eesel AI for free and launch your AI support in minutes.

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