Tidio

What it is

Tidio is a chat widget for your website with an AI agent behind it. Visitors ask a question in the chat; Lyro, Tidio's AI agent, answers the routine ones itself, in the visitor's own language, using your help content and store data. For a webshop that includes the classic volume-eaters: order status, shipping times, returns. Conversations from WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger land in the same inbox, and a Flows builder lets you add simple automations like a proactive message on the pricing page.

Who it's for (and who it isn't)

Tidio fits small businesses and webshops where the same questions arrive every day and there's no support team to absorb them. It's especially at home on Shopify and WordPress, where the store integration lets the AI answer order questions with real data. If your evenings currently go to answering "where is my order" messages, this is the profile of tool built for offering support outside office hours and answering repeat customer questions automatically, with a free plan to prove it on your own traffic first.

It's a weaker fit for teams that need deep ticketing: multi-step internal workflows, SLAs, or support spread across many colleagues points toward a helpdesk like Freshdesk or Zendesk instead. Tidio is chat-first, and its structure reflects that.

Pricing

Tidio is freemium. The free plan covers 50 conversations per month, enough for a small site to see the value on real visitors. Paid plans start from $24.17 per month, billed annually. Conversation volume is the axis that moves the price, so check your actual monthly chat volume against the plan tiers rather than guessing.

Set it up

Official guide: Lyro - a quick setup

1. Create a Tidio account on the Free plan, which has 50 conversations a month (a conversation is one visitor chatting with your business). Have your website address ready. After you sign up, you see a product tour with a few short questions on your business.
2. Install the chat widget, the small chat bubble on your site. On WordPress, open your Dashboard, go to "Plugins" > "Add Plugin", search "Tidio", click "Install Now", click "Activate", then log in. On other site builders, search the Tidio help center for "Install Tidio on" and your builder's name. You now see the chat bubble in the lower right-hand corner of your site.
3. In Tidio, go to the "Lyro AI Agent" section and open the "Data sources" panel. Lyro is Tidio's AI agent, and data sources are the knowledge it answers from. Click "Add knowledge", choose the website option, paste the addresses of your FAQ or service pages, and pick "Scan priority pages" or "Scan single page". Lyro now shows the question-and-answer pairs it built from your pages, and you can edit them.
4. Open the "Playground", a test area where only you chat with Lyro, and ask the questions your customers really ask. If an answer is wrong or missing, go back to the "Data sources" panel and edit, delete or add a question-and-answer pair. You now see the answers Lyro will give.
5. Open "Behavior" > "Handoff" and decide what happens when Lyro cannot answer. A handoff means the conversation passes to you or your team. You now see the handoff messages your visitors will get.
6. Open the "Channels" tab and activate Lyro. This turns off your "Visitor says" flows (automatic chat scripts), which you can turn back on later. Lyro then answers real visitors, and your account has 50 Lyro conversations in total, not per month; more are billed separately. Lyro now answers visitors on your website.
7. After a few days, open the "Conversations" section and read what Lyro said. Open the "Suggestions" list, which collects questions Lyro could not answer, and add those answers to your data sources. Lyro now has answers to the questions it missed.

When this works, a visitor who asks a question in your chat bubble gets an answer written from your own pages, and anything Lyro cannot answer is passed to you.

Strengths and limitations

Tidio's strengths are speed to value and fit for small commerce: a widget you install today, an AI that answers store questions in the customer's language tonight, and a free plan that lets you verify it on your own traffic before paying.

The limitation is depth: it's not a full helpdesk, and a growing team will eventually want heavier ticketing structure. The conversation-based limits also mean a traffic spike can push you into a higher tier, so know your volume.