The short answer
Pick Tidio if you run an online shop, want the AI to deal with order and shipping questions, and are happy to manage two meters: billable conversations for your team and Lyro conversations for the AI. Pick Crisp if you want a predictable monthly price per workspace with the AI credits already inside it, and channels such as WhatsApp, Instagram and SMS in one inbox from the Essentials plan up. As of October 2026, Tidio starts at $24.17 a month billed yearly ($29 billed monthly) with 50 one-off AI conversations, and Crisp starts at $45 a month per workspace with about 90 AI conversations a month included.
Most Tidio vs Crisp comparisons stop at the headline price. This one also works out what a typical small team pays once AI is switched on, what happens when you run more than one website, and what each vendor’s own page actually says about its AI agent. Every figure below comes from the vendor’s own page, checked on October 30, 2026, with the link beside it. Prices change often, so check both pages again before you buy.
Pricing side by side (as of October 2026)
Both tools have a free plan and three or four paid ones. The difference is the unit: Tidio charges by conversations, Crisp charges by workspace.
| Tidio | Crisp | |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | 50 billable conversations, 50 Lyro AI conversations for life, 100 Flows visitors | 2 seats, no AI credits, 100 customer profiles |
| Entry paid plan | Starter: $24.17 a month billed yearly, $29 billed monthly. 100 billable conversations, 50 one-off Lyro conversations | Mini: $45 a month per workspace. 4 seats, $5 of AI credits (about 90 automated conversations) |
| Middle plan | Growth: from $49.17 a month billed yearly, from 250 billable conversations | Essentials: $95 a month per workspace. 10 seats, $25 of AI credits (about 450 automated conversations) |
| Upper plan | Plus: from $300 a month plus monthly usage | Plus: $295 a month per workspace. 20+ seats, $75 of AI credits (about 1,350 automated conversations) |
| Top plan | Premium: price on request, Lyro from 3,000 conversations, pay-per-resolution billing | Enterprise: price on request |
| Seats | 10 on Free, Starter and Growth; custom on Plus and Premium. The page gives no extra-seat price | Included per plan (2, 4, 10, 20+); $10 a month per extra seat |
| AI sold separately? | Yes. Lyro from $32.50 a month for 50 conversations | No. AI credits are part of each paid plan |
| Tax | Not stated on the page | VAT not included; businesses with an EU VAT number and non-EU customers aren’t charged it |
Sources: Tidio pricing and Crisp pricing, both as of October 2026.
Two things are easy to miss on the Tidio page. First, $24.17 is the yearly rate. The page offers yearly billing as “2 months free”; month to month, Starter is $29. Second, Tidio counts three separate things: billable conversations (chats and tickets your team handles), Lyro conversations (chats the AI answers) and Flows visitors (people reached by automations). Each has its own allowance and its own upgrade path.
Crisp’s catch is the step between plans. Mini covers 4 seats. If you have 5 people, you either pay $10 for the fifth seat or move to Essentials at $95. The jump from Essentials (10 seats) to Plus is $200 a month.
What a three-person team pays with AI switched on
Take a small shop with three people on chat, one website, about 300 chats a month answered by the AI and 200 handled by the team.
- Crisp: Mini’s credits cover about 90 automated conversations, so 300 needs Essentials at $95 a month, which covers about 450. Seats and team chats are inside that price.
- Tidio: 200 team chats is more than Starter’s 100 billable conversations, so you’d need Growth, from $49.17 a month on yearly billing ($59 billed monthly). The AI is on top: the pricing page’s Lyro tier for 300 conversations is $175 a month billed yearly, or $210 billed monthly. That comes to $224.17 to $269 a month in total.
Crisp’s figure is a monthly price; Tidio’s range runs from yearly billing to monthly billing, both from Tidio’s pricing page. Our Tidio pricing guide lists every Lyro tier. For a wider look at how AI chat tools charge, including per-resolution pricing, see our AI chatbot pricing study.
The AI agents: Lyro vs Hugo, how each is metered
Both AI agents do the same basic job: read your content, answer customers, and pass the chat to a person when they can’t help. The differences are in what they read, what they can do, and how they’re counted.
Tidio Lyro
According to Tidio’s Lyro page:
- Knowledge: Lyro reads your support content and uses it as its knowledge base.
- What it does: answers questions such as order status, shipping policy and product availability. It can also automate order updates, qualify leads and route tickets to the right department. The page says Lyro now supports MCP.
- Handover: when a customer needs a person, Lyro alerts your team. When a question is outside its knowledge, it creates a ticket for a human agent.
- How it’s counted: a Lyro conversation is any customer conversation, on any channel connected to Tidio, where Lyro replies at least once. Several questions in one conversation count once, and a customer coming back later to the same conversation still counts once. Limits refresh 30 days after payment.
- Price: 50 free Lyro conversations per account, then tiers on the pricing page from $32.50 a month for 50 billed yearly ($39 monthly) up to $583.33 for 1,000 ($700 monthly), about $0.58 to $0.78 each. The Lyro page also mentions $0.50 a conversation, with full pricing on a sales call. Premium adds pay-per-resolution billing and what Tidio calls a “Guaranteed 50% Lyro AI resolution rate”.
Crisp Hugo
According to Crisp’s AI page and its pricing page:
- Knowledge: five sources. Q&A snippets (up to 1,000 characters each), your Crisp knowledge base (re-indexed when an article changes), a crawl of your website, past conversations (including ones imported from another tool), and files such as PDFs and CSVs.
- What it does: workflows built with a no-code builder or from templates, deployed on web chat, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram and email.
- Handover: when a handover is needed, the AI passes the conversation to your team with its context. When it can’t find an answer, Crisp says it says so, and your team follows up.
- How it’s counted: by AI credits in dollars, included in each paid plan: $5 on Mini, $25 on Essentials, $75 on Plus. Crisp gives approximate conversation counts (90, 450, 1,350) but doesn’t publish a per-credit price on the pricing page. The Free plan has no AI credits.
- When credits run out: the pricing page doesn’t say. Check the billing settings in your workspace before a busy month.
What neither page tells you
Neither vendor page says much about two things that matter more than the meter:
- Does the AI show the customer where the answer came from? A link to the page it read lets the customer check a price or a returns window themselves, and lets you spot a bad answer quickly.
- What does the AI do when your pages disagree, or say nothing? A bot that guesses a refund rule does more harm than no bot. Ask both vendors, and test it: put a question to the AI that isn’t answered anywhere on your site, and see whether it guesses or hands over. Our guide on stopping chatbot wrong answers has a short test list.
Channels and team features
This is where the two tools differ most, and where your choice may already be made for you.
| Tidio | Crisp | |
|---|---|---|
| Website chat | All plans | All plans |
| Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, email | Listed as included on every plan, Free included | Shared email inbox from Mini; WhatsApp Business, Instagram DMs, SMS, Line and Viber from Essentials |
| Mobile apps for the team | Mobile app listed on every plan | Mobile apps and push notifications on every plan, Free included |
| Automations | Flows, metered by visitors reached; standalone from $24.17 a month for 2,000 visitors | Workflows in the AI agent builder |
| Integrations | Ecommerce-focused; Lyro Connect on Plus and Premium | 100+ integrations from Plus |
| Separate inboxes in one workspace | Not stated on the pricing page | Sub-inboxes: 2 on Essentials, 5 on Plus |
Sources: Tidio pricing, Tidio help: switching between projects, Crisp pricing, as of October 2026.
In short: Tidio gives social and messaging channels on its cheaper plans, which suits a shop answering Instagram and WhatsApp messages alongside the website. Crisp keeps those channels for Essentials and above, but includes more seats per plan and a larger integration list at the top.
Several websites: Crisp per workspace
If you run more than one website, or you’re an agency setting up chat for clients, read this part closely.
Crisp says plainly that its plans are billed per workspace, not per domain or subdomain. One website in its own workspace means one subscription. Ten client sites on Mini is ten subscriptions: $450 a month before VAT, with about 90 AI conversations in each. There is a 20% discount on up to three extra workspaces, but only on Essentials and Plus. You can put several sites in one workspace, but then they share one AI knowledge base, one set of credits and one inbox, with sub-inboxes on the higher plans.
Tidio lets you create several projects under one login and switch between them (Tidio help). Its pricing page doesn’t say whether each project needs its own plan. Ask before you commit, because every project has its own billable conversations and Lyro limits to plan for.
Neither tool is built around the case where each website needs its own look, its own knowledge and teammates who see only the sites they look after. If that’s you, see our page on live chat for multiple websites or the one for agencies.
Verdict by scenario
| Your situation | Better fit | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Shopify or WooCommerce shop that wants the AI to answer order and shipping questions | Tidio | Lyro is built around ecommerce questions and order updates |
| You answer customers on Instagram and WhatsApp as well as the website, on a small budget | Tidio | Those channels are listed on every Tidio plan; Crisp starts them at Essentials ($95) |
| Team of four to ten people who want one predictable bill | Crisp | Seats and AI credits sit inside a per-workspace price |
| You want the AI to learn from PDFs, your help center and past chats | Crisp | Its AI page lists all of those as knowledge sources |
| More than 500 AI conversations a month | Get quotes from both | Tidio’s published Lyro tiers stop at 1,000 ($700 monthly); Crisp’s Plus covers about 1,350 |
| Several client websites | Neither, by default | Crisp is one subscription per workspace; Tidio doesn’t publish how extra projects are billed |
| Only website chat, with AI answers and a team taking over | Consider a third option | See below |
For a shop owner choosing Tidio or Crisp for a small business, the question to settle first is channels. If most of your messages arrive on Instagram or WhatsApp, Tidio’s cheaper plans cover them. If they arrive on your website and you want to know your bill in advance, Crisp is the steadier choice.
If you’ve already decided neither fits, our pages on Tidio alternatives and Crisp alternatives go through the other options.
A third option for website chat with AI answers and a team inbox
If your customers mostly reach you through your website, you may not need a full messaging suite. SupportVia is an AI chatbot for your website that answers only from your own pages, Q&As and notes, shows up to five “Read more” links to the pages it used, and hands the chat to your team’s shared inbox when it isn’t sure or the customer asks for a person. Once a teammate replies, the AI stops until you hand the chat back.
How it compares on the points above:
- One meter. Plans count AI conversations only. Chats your team answers are unlimited on every plan. Starter is $29 a month for 150 AI conversations; Growth is $79 a month for 500 AI conversations and 5 teammates (see plans).
- Several websites, one sign-in. One snippet covers every website in a workspace, each with its own look and knowledge, and teammates can be limited to the websites they look after. The pricing page lists how many websites each plan covers.
- Your own AI, on every plan. Connect your own OpenAI, Claude or other OpenAI-compatible account on any plan: up to 1,000 conversations a month on Starter, 5,000 on Growth and no monthly cap on Pro. Its answers never use your plan’s AI conversations.
What it doesn’t do, so you can rule it out quickly: no WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger or email channels, no ticketing, no order lookup or refunds, and no mobile app for your team (the inbox runs in the browser, with desktop alerts). If you need any of those, Tidio or Crisp will serve you better. The free trial lasts 7 days or 50 AI conversations, whichever comes first, with no card.