crew bot vs Tidio

Tidio is a mature, affordable customer service platform for small businesses and online shops: live chat, one inbox for email, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp, and Lyro, an AI agent sold by the conversation. crew bot is a Tidio alternative for a business that wants its website chat answered from its own pages on a flat plan, with a crew behind it that does the rest of the work; it doesn't match Tidio's social channels or its ecommerce depth.

Here's a detail worth knowing before you sign up for either. Tidio's free plan includes 50 Lyro AI conversations. Not 50 a month: 50 for the life of the account. After that, AI answers are a paid add-on, priced in packs of conversations. That's a reasonable model, but it shapes your bill, so this page sets out Tidio's real prices, checked today, next to how crew bot charges for the same job.

What is Tidio?

Tidio says more than 300,000 businesses run on it. Its main pieces:

• Live Chat and Help Desk: a chat widget for your site and a shared inbox where your team answers live chat, email, Instagram, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp in one place, with tickets.
• Lyro AI Agent: answers customers "only from your data", detects each customer's language and answers in it across chat and email, recommends products, and hands over to your team. Tidio says its customers average a 75% resolution rate with Lyro.
• Flows: "a visual, no-code automation and chatbot builder" for reaching visitors at the right moment: collecting details, quote requests, missed conversations.
• Integrations: Tidio cites 120+, with free plans on Shopify, WordPress and Wix, and channels such as Instagram and WhatsApp.

Tidio's plans and prices

Billable conversations are the live chats and tickets your team handles. Paying yearly gives two months free, which is why Tidio's page shows $24.17 for Starter and from $49.17 for Growth. Paid plans come with a 7-day free trial, no card needed. Plus adds a success manager, departments, multiple projects and custom branding; Premium adds a guaranteed 50% Lyro resolution rate and pay-per-resolution billing.

Lyro AI pricing and limits

Lyro is an add-on on top of any plan:

• Free and Starter include 50 Lyro conversations once, for the life of the account.
• Paid Lyro quotas run from 50 to 1,000 conversations a month: 50 for $39, 100 for $75, 300 for $210 and 1,000 for $700 on monthly billing, with two months free on yearly billing. That's roughly 70 to 78 cents an AI conversation. Plus and Premium can go higher; Premium starts from 3,000.
• Actions, such as order updates, lead qualification and routing tickets (now with MCP), need a paid Lyro quota; your first one is free.
• Lyro Connect puts Lyro on Zendesk, Intercom, Salesforce and 20+ other platforms, from $0.50 a conversation, on Plus and Premium only.

Flows is also an add-on: from $29 a month for 2,000 visitors reached.

What that comes to for a small shop

Say your team handles 100 conversations a month and you want Lyro to take 300 more. That's Starter at $29 plus 300 Lyro conversations at $210: $239 a month, or about $199 a month on yearly billing.

What crew bot's website chat does

crew bot's Support puts a chat bubble on your websites, answered by a bot you choose for each site and by your team.

• Install with one line. Paste it before </body>. Each site gets its own bot, greeting, colour and knowledge, and one workspace can run many sites.
• It learns your site for you. crew bot reads your pages (up to 150, again every week), then writes an overview of the business and 15 to 60 questions visitors ask, each answered from your pages. Your team's own answers come first, and you can add documents and instructions on tone.
• Answers you can trust. Replies arrive within seconds, in the language the visitor writes in, with the pages they came from underneath; the window's own words come in 13 languages. When the knowledge doesn't cover a question, the bot says so and offers a person. It never invents prices, discounts or dates.
• Your team takes over. A visitor waiting for a person shows in Needs you, sounds an alert, and is emailed to your team if nobody replies within two minutes. The visitor sees your reply live, or by email if they've left.
• Analytics built in. Visitors, pages, time on site, bounce, where people came from and the paths they take, plus how the chat did. No cookies, and addresses (IPs) are never kept.
• Files both ways, up to 20 MB: pictures, PDFs, Office files and short videos, opened right in the chat.

Replies come out of your plan's AI allowance, then your wallet. Each site has a monthly spending cap, $10 by default, which covers about 10,000 replies. And the website bot has no tools: it answers and hands over, but it can't change an order or an account, so a visitor can't talk it into anything.

crew bot as a Tidio alternative, side by side

Where Tidio is ahead

Social and messaging channels. Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp and email land in the same inbox as your website chat. crew bot's support is a website chat, with emailed replies to visitors who have left.

Made for online shops. A Shopify app, product recommendations from Lyro, and Actions for things like order updates. If you sell online, Tidio was built around you.

Flows. A no-code builder for proactive messages and lead capture. crew bot's chat greets a first-time visitor with a short hello, then answers when asked; it has no campaign builder.

A free plan for a whole team. Ten seats and 50 conversations a month for nothing is a generous start for live chat alone.

It can sit on another helpdesk. Lyro Connect brings Lyro to Zendesk, Intercom or Salesforce if you don't want to move.

Scale and track record. 300,000+ businesses, 120+ integrations, and on Premium a guaranteed 50% Lyro resolution rate.

Where crew bot is ahead

No packs of AI conversations. Lyro's paid quotas work out at roughly 70 to 78 cents an AI conversation on monthly billing. crew bot's replies come out of the plan you already pay for, with a per-site cap you set, $10 a month by default for about 10,000 replies.

It writes its own knowledge. Point it at your site and it reads the pages, writes the overview and the common questions with their answers, and shows the source page under every reply. Anything your team edits stays as they wrote it, and questions the bot couldn't answer are listed so you can fill the gaps.

Many sites, one workspace. Each site gets its own bot, greeting, colour and knowledge on any plan. Tidio offers multiple projects on Plus, from $300 a month.

Website analytics, not just chat stats. Who's on the site now, where they came from, what they read, where they left and the paths between pages, with robots kept apart.

A crew behind the chat. The same workspace clears your inbox, runs routines on a schedule, answers from your databases, works on your servers and deploys your apps, asking before anything that writes.

Which to choose

Choose Tidio if

• Your customers write to you on Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp as much as on your website
• You run an online shop, especially on Shopify, and want product recommendations and order updates from the AI
• You want proactive Flows, or a free live-chat plan for a team of up to ten

Choose crew bot if

• Your support happens mostly on your website and you want it answered from your own pages, with your team taking over
• You'd rather not buy AI answers in packs of conversations
• You want the same AI crew working on your inbox, systems and routines

To weigh more options, read the best AI chatbots for websites and how to add AI chat to a website, or see crew bot's support chat.

FAQ

Is Tidio free?

Yes. Tidio's Free plan has 50 billable conversations a month, 10 seats, 100 visitors reached with Flows a month, and 50 Lyro AI conversations for the life of the account. Paid plans start at $29 a month for Starter, or $24.17 a month billed yearly.

How much does Tidio's Lyro AI cost?

After the 50 free lifetime conversations, Lyro is an add-on from $39 a month for 50 conversations, up to $700 a month for 1,000, on monthly billing; yearly billing gives two months free. Larger volumes are on the Plus and Premium plans.

Does crew bot's chat work on Shopify or WordPress sites?

If you can add a line of script to your site's pages, it works: you paste one line before </body>. crew bot then reads the site's pages itself, so there's no knowledge base to fill in first.

Can I bring my existing FAQ from Tidio to crew bot?

You don't need to copy it over: crew bot reads your website and writes the common questions and answers itself. You can also paste text or upload documents (PDF, Word, Excel or text) such as a price list or a policy, and save any good reply from a conversation as an answer with one click.