Tidio overview: A complete review of its features and pricing in 2025

You’ve probably heard of Tidio. It’s a pretty big name in customer service, especially for smaller businesses that want one tool to do it all. It packs live chat, a help desk, and AI chatbots into one platform, promising to make talking to customers a whole lot easier. But with so many options out there, is it really the right one for your team?

Let's cut through the noise with an honest look at Tidio. We'll get into its main features, from its AI agent Lyro to its rule-based Flows, and check out its integrations and pricing. The goal here is simple: to give you a clear picture of what Tidio is good at and where it might not be the best fit, so you can decide if it's right for you.

What is Tidio?

At its heart, Tidio is a customer service toolkit that bundles four main things: a live chat widget for your website, a help desk for managing tickets, rule-based chatbots called "Flows," and a conversational AI agent named "Lyro." The whole point is to give you a single dashboard to handle conversations from your website, email, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

It’s mostly built for small to medium-sized businesses and e-commerce stores that need an affordable, all-in-one tool for both support and sales. With over 300,000 businesses using it, Tidio is definitely a major player. It aims to be the command center for every customer chat, helping your team stay organized without having to jump between a bunch of different apps.

Breaking down the main features of Tidio

Tidio is built around a few key parts that are supposed to work together. Let’s take a look at each one and see how it fits into a real support workflow.

Lyro: The Tidio conversational AI agent

Lyro is Tidio's star AI agent. It's designed to have natural, human-like conversations with customers. Fun fact: it's powered by Claude from Anthropic, not ChatGPT, which is known for being pretty helpful and safe.

So, how does it learn? Well, you have to teach it. Lyro can pull information from your website or FAQ page, or you can feed it knowledge manually by adding Q&A pairs or uploading a CSV file. You can also connect it to your Zendesk Help Center. This gets Lyro up to speed with the basics of your business pretty quickly.

But this method has its limitations. It's fine for answering simple questions that are already in your FAQs, but it’s completely dependent on the content you create and keep updated. If your business deals with complex problems or has years of customer conversations, creating all this content by hand is a massive time-sink and often misses the little details found in real support tickets.

This is where the manual approach shows its cracks. For a deeper level of automation, some platforms take a different path. For example, eesel AI can train its AI agent on thousands of your actual support tickets. It automatically picks up on your brand’s voice, common issues, and what solutions have worked in the past, all without you having to write out every possible question.

Tidio says Lyro can solve up to 67% of conversations on its own and can be set up to pass tricky questions to a human agent, which is a nice safety net.

Flows: The Tidio rule-based chatbot builder

Flows are Tidio’s no-code tool for building rule-based chatbots. Imagine you're drawing a simple flowchart for a conversation, and that’s pretty much what Flows are. They’re best for straightforward tasks like capturing leads ("Could I get your email?"), dealing with abandoned carts ("Looks like you left something in your cart!"), or walking users through a basic menu.

It’s important to know that Flows and Lyro are two different things. Flows are rigid; they follow a script you design. If a customer asks something you didn't plan for, the bot hits a wall. Lyro, using AI, can understand and reply to a much wider variety of questions.

The biggest issue with rule-based bots like Flows is that they can feel a bit clunky. Customers with slightly different or unique questions can get stuck easily, which is just plain frustrating. This is where a more flexible AI platform really comes in handy. For instance, the workflow engine in eesel AI lets you choose exactly which types of tickets you want to automate with AI, while safely sending everything else to your team. You get the smarts of conversational AI combined with the control of business rules, so you’re not stuck with inflexible scripts.

Tidio live chat and ticketing

When you strip everything else away, Tidio is a live chat and help desk tool. These are the features your human agents use to talk directly with customers. Tidio pulls conversations from your site’s chat, email, and social media into one shared inbox, which makes it easier for your team to keep track of everything.

Some of the neat features here include a live typing preview (so you can see what customers are typing in real-time), pre-chat surveys to grab contact information, and the ability to turn any chat or email into a support ticket. This is the human-powered foundation that all the AI and automation features are built on top of.

How Tidio plays with other tools

Tidio tries to be a central hub that plugs into the other software you use. It offers a bunch of integrations with e-commerce platforms, CRMs, and marketing tools.

Some of its most common native integrations are with Shopify, WordPress, Zendesk, HubSpot, and thousands of other apps through Zapier. This lets you do things like sync customer data from your CRM or add new contacts to your email list.

But trying to be the "central hub" can cause problems. If your team is already comfortable using a powerful help desk like Zendesk or Freshdesk, adding Tidio can feel like you’re trying to manage two separate systems. This means your agents might end up flipping back and forth between Tidio and your main help desk, which can be a real headache.

This is where a tool like eesel AI offers a much smoother experience. Instead of making you learn and manage another inbox, the eesel AI Agent plugs right into the help desk you already use with one-click integrations. It adds a powerful AI layer to the tools your team already knows, so you don’t have to change your workflow or learn a new platform.

Category	Examples
E-commerce Platforms	Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Adobe Commerce
CRMs	HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Zendesk Sell
Email Marketing	Mailchimp, Klaviyo, Active Campaign, MailerLite
Help Desk	Zendesk, Gorgias
Automation	Zapier

Tidio pricing explained

Alright, let's talk money. Tidio's pricing structure can be a little confusing because it’s split into different parts. You don't just pick one plan; you mix and match subscriptions for the Customer Service suite, the Lyro AI Agent, and Flows, and each has its own limits.

Here’s a quick guide to their terms:

• Billable Conversations: A chat with a human agent. You get 50 of these per month on the free plan.

• Lyro AI Conversations: A chat handled by the Lyro AI. The free plan gives you 50 to try it out, but it's a one-time thing.

• Flows Visitors: The number of unique people a rule-based chatbot can talk to each month. The free plan includes 100.

On the paid plans, the price goes up based on how much you use each of those three things. This means your monthly bill could change and be tough to predict, especially if you have a busy period.

This is a big difference from the straightforward pricing of a tool like eesel AI. With eesel AI, you pay based on one clear metric (AI interactions) and you're never charged per resolution. It makes it much easier to budget and you won't get any surprise charges.

Here’s a simplified look at Tidio’s plans if you pay annually:

Plan	Base Price/mo	Billable Conversations	Lyro AI Conversations	Flows Visitors
Free	$0	50	50 (one-time)	100
Starter	$24.17	100	Starts at $32.50/mo for 50	Starts at $24.17/mo for 2k
Growth	$49.17	Starts at 250	Starts at $32.50/mo for 50	Starts at $24.17/mo for 2k
Plus	$749	Custom	Starts from 300	Custom

The verdict: Is Tidio right for you?

So, what’s the final word? Tidio is a decent all-in-one option for small businesses and e-commerce stores, particularly if you’re just starting out and don't have a help desk you're attached to. It gives you a simple, affordable way to keep all your customer conversations in one place.

But there are a few things to keep in mind. The AI is only as smart as the content you give it, which can be a real drag for teams that need automation that truly understands context. The pricing, with its three different meters, can also get complicated and hard to predict. And if your team already has a solid help desk, Tidio can feel like an extra, clunky layer on top of your existing process.

This brings up a pretty important question: what if you like your current help desk and just want to add a smarter, more integrated AI on top of it?

In that case, eesel AI is probably what you're looking for. It's built for teams who want to automate support inside their existing tools, not replace them.

Here’s what makes eesel AI different:

1. Live in minutes: It connects to your help desk with a single click. No complex setup, no migrating data.

2. Learns from everything: It pulls knowledge from all your sources, including past support tickets, Confluence, Google Docs, and more, to give truly helpful answers.

3. Test it safely: You can run simulations on thousands of your past tickets to see exactly how the AI will perform and get a clear forecast of your automation rate before you even show it to customers.

4. Clear pricing: The pricing is simple and predictable, with no confusing quotas or hidden fees.

Ready to add powerful AI to the help desk you already use? Take a look at the eesel AI Agent today.

This beginner's tutorial provides a complete walkthrough of how to use Tidio's all-in-one customer communication platform.

---