Gorgias vs Tidio: One Is Where a Store Starts, the Other Is Where It Arrives

Gorgias and Tidio land on the same shortlist constantly, and they are rarely competing for the same purchase. Tidio is what a store installs in year one, when there is a chat bubble on the site and no support process behind it. Gorgias is what a store buys once support has become a job somebody holds, with a queue that has a predictable shape and a volume you can forecast.

So the useful version of this comparison is not a feature table. It is a question about where your store is, and the input that settles it is how many tickets a month you handle.

Every figure below comes from each vendor's own pricing page as captured on 2026-08-21: Gorgias and Tidio. One asymmetry shapes everything that follows. Gorgias publishes essentially its whole price ladder. Tidio publishes entry prices and hands you a browser-side calculator for everything above them, so several numbers you would need to compare the two at volume do not exist in public text. Where that happens below, I say so instead of filling the gap.

What Gorgias charges

Four tiers, each with a ticket bundle, an AI allowance, and two overage meters running underneath the headline price.

Automated interactions past the allowance cost $1.50 on all four tiers, with no volume discount anywhere. Voice starts at $25 a month on annual pricing and SMS at $17, both available on any plan. Enterprise carries no published price and targets teams over 5,000 conversations a month.

What Tidio charges

Tidio sells three products that meter independently. A customer service plan, a Lyro AI Agent quota, and a Flows quota. Its FAQ confirms each can be bought alone or bundled "in any configuration."

On top of a plan, Lyro starts at $32.50/mo from 50 Lyro conversations, and Flows starts at $24.17/mo from 2,000 visitors reached. Every account gets 50 Lyro conversations free, but the comparison table is explicit that this allowance is "free (lifetime)" and the FAQ adds that "you need to upgrade to the Lyro AI Agent plan to refresh it monthly." Removing Tidio's branding is a separate $16.67/mo add-on on Growth, included on Plus and Premium.

The two products do not count the same thing

This is the part that makes side-by-side arithmetic misleading if you skip it.

A Gorgias ticket is a conversation arriving in the helpdesk, and the AI meter is resolution-based: "AI Agent on every plan, pay only when it resolves a conversation." Gorgias does not spell out whether an AI-resolved conversation also consumes a ticket from your bundle, which moves an estimate a long way at high automation rates.

Tidio's meter is narrower by design. A billable conversation is one "that includes a message from a human agent (you)," and unanswered messages from visitors are never counted. Critically: "Responses from Flows and Lyro AI Agent are not counted as 'agent replies'." A conversation Lyro handles end to end consumes a Lyro conversation, not a billable one.

So a Tidio store running heavy automation can sit on a small chat plan while its Lyro quota carries the load, and a store where humans answer everything burns through the plan quota and never touches Lyro. Two very different invoices from the same tier table.

Where they are directly comparable

Two points on the ladder where both companies publish enough to run the numbers honestly.

Entry. Gorgias Starter is $40 a month, billing monthly only, for 50 tickets, 30 automated interactions, and 3 user seats, with brand voice controls and AI Agent actions locked out. Tidio Starter is $24.17/mo for 100 billable conversations and 10 seats, and adding an ongoing AI quota takes it to $56.67 with the entry Lyro tier. Tidio Free is $0 for 50 billable conversations, 10 seats, and 50 lifetime Lyro conversations, which is a real free plan rather than a trial.

The step where Shopify actions unlock. Tidio Growth starts at $49.17/mo, and native Shopify actions are marked unavailable on Free and Starter, so Growth is the floor if order lookups in chat are the reason you are shopping. Lyro Actions and product recommendations need a paid Lyro quota on top of that, putting the realistic Growth bundle around $81.67 at entry volume. Gorgias Basic is $90 a month billed monthly, $77 on annual, for 300 tickets and 30 automated interactions, and Basic is where Gorgias unlocks brand voice and AI Agent actions like cancel, discount, and apply.

Those two configurations sit within about ten dollars of each other, which is a reasonable reason people struggle to choose. What separates them at that price is not the money.

Above roughly 2,000 conversations a month, the comparison stops being computable. Gorgias publishes Pro at $550 for 2,000 tickets and Advanced at $1,430 for 5,000, plus both overage rates. Tidio's Growth tops out at 2,000 billable conversations with no published price above its 250-conversation entry, Plus is $300 plus unpublished usage rates, and Premium has no price. You can budget Gorgias from a webpage; past a certain size you cannot budget Tidio without a sales call.

What Tidio does better

Starting from nothing costs nothing. Fifty billable conversations, ten seats, live chat, ticketing, and an email management system at $0. For a store doing its first hundred orders a month, that is the correct amount to spend on support tooling, and Gorgias has no equivalent.

Ten seats on every self-serve plan. Free, Starter and Growth all include ten agents. Gorgias caps Starter at 3 seats, so a store with four people answering messages is on Basic at $90 regardless of how little volume it has. Above Starter, Gorgias lists 500 seats and the advantage flips hard.

You can buy the pieces separately. Lyro is sold standalone and Lyro Connect lets you attach it to Zendesk, Salesforce or another helpdesk, though that feature is limited to Plus and Premium. If you already own a helpdesk you like and want AI on top of it, Tidio sells that shape and Gorgias does not.

Billing only when a human replies. Spam costs nothing, a forty-message thread counts once, and AI replies do not consume the plan quota. For a store with a noisy inbox, that definition is meaningfully cheaper than one that counts every inbound.

Premium offers pay-per-resolution billing with a guaranteed 50% Lyro resolution rate. Contact-sales only and no rate published, but Gorgias's page offers no guaranteed resolution floor at any tier.

What Gorgias does better

Ecommerce depth is the whole reason it exists. Shopify, Shopify Plus and WooCommerce connect on every tier including the $40 one, BigCommerce from Basic, Magento from Pro, with unlimited multi-stores throughout. The integration library lists 254 apps and covers the stack most stores already run: Klaviyo, Recharge, Yotpo, Smile. Gorgias claims it powers customer conversations for 40% of Shopify brands. Tidio lists Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and email integrations plus generic "app integrations," and publishes no integration count.

Published pricing at every size below Enterprise. Both overage rates, both allowances, four tier prices, and a full feature comparison table. That transparency is worth real money when you are forecasting a peak month.

SSO on all four tiers. Tidio's comparison table marks SSO as available on Premium only, its contact-for-pricing tier. If your store has a compliance requirement, that is a large gap at the low end.

Channel coverage on the cheap tier. Email, live chat, contact form, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and TikTok Shop are all on Starter at $40, with Voice and SMS available as add-ons from $25 and $17 a month on annual pricing. Tidio covers Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp on every tier including Free, so the two are close here, but Tidio's page shows no TikTok Shop, voice or SMS channel at all.

Automation tooling built for a team. Macros, rules, intent and sentiment detection, chat campaigns and 10 Help Centers on every tier, with AI Agent pre-trained on 18+ verticals. Tidio gates macros, ticketing automations, chat assignment and permissions behind Growth.

A sourced automation claim. Orthofeet's customer service lead says they targeted 30% automation in 30 days and are "now above 50% automation, and we're still climbing." Tidio's page states Lyro "solves up to 67% of customer problems" without attaching a customer to the figure. One named case is not a benchmark, but it beats a marketing ceiling.

What neither one tells you

Gorgias hides Enterprise entirely, though it lists what Enterprise adds: SAML SSO, audit logs, SCIM provisioning, unlimited Help Centers, an API at 4 requests per second against 2 on every published tier, a custom DPA or MSA, and a dedicated CSM. It also publishes only starting prices for the Voice and SMS add-ons, never the per-ticket rates.

Tidio's gaps are wider and sit lower in the ladder. There is no published price for Growth at any volume above 250 conversations, no price for any Lyro quota above the $32.50 entry despite the calculator offering steps at 100, 150, 200, 300, 500, 750 and 1,000, no Flows price above its entry, no usage rates on Plus, no Premium price, and no stated overage rate at all. That last one matters: the page does not say what happens when you cross a quota mid-month, or whether Lyro simply stops replying. Our full breakdown of Tidio pricing walks through every published figure and every missing one, and Gorgias pricing does the same for the two-meter structure on the other side.

Situations, and the answer for each

A new store, under 50 conversations a month, nobody dedicated to support. Tidio, on the free plan, and do not think about it again for six months.

A store where four or five people occasionally answer messages but volume is low. Tidio. Ten seats on a $24.17 plan against Gorgias Starter's 3-seat cap is the entire argument.

A Shopify store at 300 to 500 tickets a month with a person who owns support. Gorgias Basic. The order data in the inbox, the AI actions, and the 254-app library are what you are paying the extra for, and at that volume the price gap is small.

You already run Zendesk or Salesforce and want AI bolted on. Tidio, via Lyro Connect, on Plus or above. Gorgias does not sell a detachable AI layer.

Multiple storefronts or brands. Gorgias. Unlimited multi-stores and 10 Help Centers on every tier.

Above 2,000 tickets a month. Gorgias, and largely because you can price it. Pro at $550 for 2,000 tickets is a knowable number; Tidio at that volume is a quote.

You want proactive, rule-based flows firing at cart abandonment or product pages. Tidio. Flows is a first-class product with a visual builder and its own quota, and Gorgias's equivalent surface is chat campaigns rather than a funnel builder.

A compliance requirement for SSO on a small budget. Gorgias, since Tidio puts SSO on its unpriced top tier.

High volume, no support headcount, and no plan to hire. Neither fits cleanly, which is its own section below.

When the stage framing breaks

The framing at the top of this page assumes a store moves from a chat widget to a support function. Plenty never make that move, because volume grows and headcount does not. Two people, 800 conversations a month, nobody who wants to sit in an inbox.

That store gets billed for the wrong thing twice. Gorgias meters tickets and then meters the AI separately at $1.50 an interaction, so the component doing the work carries the highest unit price. Tidio's chat plan is priced for humans answering messages, which is the thing this store is trying to avoid, and the AI quota that would carry the load has only its first rung published.

Ernest is built for that shape specifically: one conversation meter with AI included, free for 100 conversations that never expire, then $49/month for 500, $149 for 2,000, and $299 for 10,000, with no seat fee, no separate AI quota and no per-resolution charge. It reads live Shopify and WooCommerce order data and the product catalog, and it processes cancellations and returns automatically or behind one-click approval, with refunds always held for merchant sign-off. What it gives up is most of this article. The storefront widget and email are the only channels, escalation goes to a human by email, and there is no Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, SMS, phone or TikTok Shop, no shared inbox, no macros or routing rules, no visual flow builder and no app marketplace. If your store needs any of those, buy one of the two products above.

How to decide

Pull last month's conversation count and count the people who answer messages.

Under about 100 conversations a month, install Tidio's free plan and stop shopping. Between roughly 100 and 500, the two land within ten dollars of each other once you add a Lyro quota to Tidio Growth, so choose on product rather than price: Gorgias if the queue is order-shaped and you want the ecommerce inbox, Tidio if you want live chat with proactive flows and a lighter tool. Above 500, Gorgias's economics and its published ladder both start pulling ahead, and above 2,000 you are comparing a price to a quote.

Two overrides settle it regardless of volume. If you need AI attached to a helpdesk you already own, that is Tidio. If you run several storefronts or need SSO without a sales call, that is Gorgias. And whichever way you lean, move the sliders on Tidio's calculator to your real expected volumes before signing, because the entry prices are the only ones on the page. If you have already ruled one of these out, our roundup of Gorgias alternatives covers the migration question.