LiveChat vs Tidio: Different Price Points, Same Trick With the AI

People searching for this comparison are usually asking a budget question. It turns into a structural one about two paragraphs in, because the two products meter completely different things and both of them keep the AI outside the price on the plan card.

LiveChat sells seats. Tidio sells conversations. That single difference decides more of your invoice than any feature on either page.

And on the AI: neither company includes an agent that answers customers on its own in the plan you sign up for. LiveChat points you at ChatBot.com, a separate subscription from the same parent company. Tidio points you at a Lyro AI Agent quota, a separate meter that lands on the same invoice. If the reason you're shopping is that you want something answering questions at 11pm, you are buying two products either way. The comparison becomes which base tool you want the AI attached to, and what the pair costs together.

Everything below comes from LiveChat's pricing page and Tidio's pricing page, both captured on 2026-08-21. Prices move. Treat all of it as accurate as of publication and read the live pages before you commit.

What each one publishes

LiveChat, priced per person per month:

There's a 14-day free trial with no credit card required, and no permanently free plan.

Tidio, priced per account per month:

Tidio runs a 7-day free trial of every feature, no card required, after which the account drops to the Free plan rather than switching off.

Ten seats on every self-serve Tidio plan is the most merchant-friendly number in this whole comparison, and Tidio's FAQ confirms it: "You can add up to 10 agents on self-serve plans and custom numbers on the Plus package." LiveChat's FAQ says the opposite as plainly: "we charge a fee for every user account created, regardless of whether the user is logged in or not." An account that gets opened twice a month still bills at full rate.

LiveChat's page contradicts itself on user counts

The Team plan card lists "Unlimited users" as a feature. The FAQ on the same page says: "You can invite up to 400 users with the Team and Business plans. Please note that the Starter plan only allows one user. For the Enterprise plan, we can set a custom number of users."

Those cannot both be right. I'm not going to pick one silently, so: the card says unlimited, the FAQ says 400, and the FAQ is the more specific of the two claims. For anyone reading a page like this the difference is academic, since 400 seats is unlimited in practice for a store with a support team you could fit in a car. It matters mainly as a reminder to verify the seat terms in writing rather than off a marketing card.

The Starter cap is the number that actually bites at small scale. One user means one login in total. If you and a business partner both want to answer chats, Starter is unavailable to you and your entry price is two Team seats, which is $98 a month on annual billing.

What Tidio's page doesn't tell you

Tidio's published pricing is genuinely thin, and most of the missing figures live behind an interactive calculator that computes prices in the browser. Rather than guess at them, here is the list of what is not on the page:

• Whether $24.17 and $49.17 are the annual-equivalent or the month-to-month prices. A toggle labelled "Annually (2 months free)" sits directly above them, and cents ending in .17 look like an annual figure divided by twelve, but Tidio does not print both columns in plain text.
• What Growth costs at any volume above its 250-conversation entry. The plan is labelled "starts at" and runs up to 2,000.
• Any Lyro price above the $32.50 entry point. The calculator offers 50, 100, 150, 200, 300, 500, 750 and 1,000 conversations a month and prices none of them publicly.
• The "+ monthly usage" rates that sit on top of the $300 Plus base.
• Premium's price, and the rate for its pay-per-resolution billing.
• Any overage rate, or what happens when a quota runs out mid-month.

LiveChat publishes more, though not everything. Enterprise carries no price. And a single FAQ answer introduces a per-agent figure that appears nowhere else on the site: "You'll pay $52 for one chatbot, and the cost for each agent starts at $41... for 10 agents and one chatbot, the total live chat price starts at $462 per month." The arithmetic checks out at $52 plus ten agents at $41, but $41 matches none of the six seat prices LiveChat publishes. There's no volume rate card explaining it. Both of these gaps are questions for a sales rep, not things to model around.

Adding AI to either one

This is where the two products stop looking different and start looking like the same deal at different sizes.

LiveChat bundles a feature set called Text Intelligence into all four tiers. It's real, and it points at your agents rather than your customers: Copilot answers your team's questions about the product, reply suggestions draw on knowledge sources you import (3 sources on Starter, 10 on Team and Business), plus tag suggestions, chat summaries, text enhancement and an Insights digest of common customer questions. Every one of those makes a human in a seat faster. None removes the need for the human.

The bot that talks to customers is ChatBot.com, and LiveChat's own pitch on the pricing page is "Solve up to 80% of cases with AI chatbots." It starts at $52/mo billed annually.

Tidio's split is the same shape with different labels. Copilot, the AI reply assistant, is on every tier. Lyro, the agent that answers customers, "solves up to 67% of customer problems" per Tidio's FAQ and starts at $32.50/mo from 50 Lyro conversations. Every Tidio account gets 50 Lyro conversations free, and the comparison table is specific about the terms: "Your first 50 conversations are free (lifetime). You can upgrade your monthly limit to 50 - 1 000." Lifetime, not monthly. Paying $24.17 for Starter doesn't refresh it either.

So the combined floors, both figures quoted from the vendors' own pages:

• Cheapest LiveChat setup with a customer-facing bot: Starter at $19 per person on annual billing, plus ChatBot.com at $52/mo. That's $71/mo for one seat.
• Cheapest Tidio setup with a renewing AI quota: the Free plan at $0, plus a Lyro quota at $32.50/mo. That's $32.50/mo, with 50 human-answered conversations included.

Tidio's floor is less than half of LiveChat's, and it's the only one of the two where you can run an AI without paying for a chat plan at all.

One wrinkle flips that for Shopify stores. Tidio marks "Native Shopify actions" as unavailable on Free and Starter, so order lookups inside the chat push you to Growth. Growth at $49.17 plus Lyro at $32.50 is $81.67/mo, which is more than the $71 LiveChat floor. LiveChat lists a Shopify integration as included on all four of its plans, and a WooCommerce and BigCommerce one too. What the ChatBot.com side can do with those integrations isn't described on the LiveChat pricing page, so that's worth confirming before you treat the $71 as a like-for-like number.

Where LiveChat is the better buy

You have one or two people and very high chat volume. LiveChat publishes no conversation limit anywhere. Its only volume figures are visitor tracking caps: 100 on Starter, 400 on Team, 1,000 on Business, custom on Enterprise. Two people on Team is $98/mo on annual billing whether they handle 300 conversations or 3,000. Tidio's Growth tops out at 2,000 billable conversations and the next step up is Plus at $300/mo plus usage. If you are a small team drowning in volume, seat pricing is on your side.

You're running an actual support department. Business at $79 per person buys work scheduling, staffing prediction, agent performance reporting, on-demand exports and advanced reporting. These are shift-management tools, and they exist because LiveChat is built for teams big enough to need them. Its Enterprise tier is where the white-label widget, SSO, HIPAA compliance, SLAs and audit logs live.

You run multiple storefronts. LiveChat states twice that the widget works on unlimited websites at no additional charge, on every plan. Tidio also allows multiple sites, with a caveat in its FAQ: "the live chat widget will share all the appearance and behavior settings across all your websites/stores." Same colors, same offline hours, same messages, everywhere.

Where Tidio is the better buy

You have more than two people answering. Ten seats included on every self-serve plan, against $49 or $79 per head. A five-person team on LiveChat Team pays $245/mo on annual billing. The same five people fit inside Tidio Growth at $49.17.

You want to start at zero. Tidio's Free plan is a plan, not a trial. Fifty billable conversations, ten seats, live chat, ticketing, email management, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp integrations, and fifty lifetime Lyro conversations to see whether the AI is any good on your content. LiveChat's answer to the same question is fourteen days.

Your customers message you on social. Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and email integrations are marked available on all five Tidio tiers. On LiveChat, Facebook Messenger is included on every plan, but SMS, email, Instagram, X and WhatsApp are all listed as "available in the marketplace," and the email link points at HelpDesk.com, a separate $29/mo product. For a store whose inbox is chat plus email, that's another line on the LiveChat bill.

You only pay when a human replies. Tidio's billing unit is unusually fair. A billable conversation is one "that includes a message from a human agent," so spam nobody answers never counts, a forty-message thread counts once, and "responses from Flows and Lyro AI Agent are not counted as 'agent replies'." A conversation Lyro handles end to end doesn't touch your chat quota at all.

The short version

Pick LiveChat if you have few agents and lots of chats, if you need shift scheduling and per-agent performance data, if you run several branded storefronts, or if compliance requirements are going to send you to an Enterprise call anyway.

Pick Tidio if you have several people answering, if you want a free plan rather than a countdown, if social channels matter, or if your volume is spiky enough that paying per human-answered conversation beats paying per login.

Pick neither if what you're actually buying is the AI. Both of these are live chat consoles with an AI product sold alongside, and you'll be running two subscriptions and two forecasts to get there. That's the case Ernest is built for: a Shopify and WooCommerce agent where AI resolution is included in the base price at every tier, metered on one number. Free is $0 for 100 conversations that don't expire, then $49/mo for 500, $149/mo for 2,000, $299/mo for 10,000, with no per-seat and no per-resolution fees. The honest limits, since both products above beat it on breadth: it runs on the storefront widget and email only, escalating to a human by email, so no WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger or SMS. It has no white-label option. It won't act as a general-purpose chat console for a support department with shift rotas. And refunds always require merchant approval.

If you want the same numbers with more of the detail, we've broken down LiveChat's pricing and Tidio's pricing separately, and our roundup of customer service chatbots sorts the wider field by the reason you're shopping rather than by price.