Chatwoot vs Tidio
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Editorial assessmentTidio compared with Chatwoot
Chatwoot's cloud Startups tier at $19 per agent includes WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, and a help centre with 300 Captain AI credits, and the self-hosted Community Edition costs nothing at all. Tidio is more polished, far easier to install on Shopify, and stronger on commerce automation, but every meter moves with your growth. Choose Tidio if you want it working this afternoon on a store; choose Chatwoot if you have engineering capacity and want the cost curve and the data under your control.
Choose Chatwoot if
Technically capable teams that need data residency, source-code control, or a genuinely zero-cost support platform: EU and regulated companies with sovereignty requirements, agencies deploying per-client instances, and cost-constrained startups with an engineer willing to own a server.
Choose Tidio if
Small and mid-sized ecommerce businesses, especially Shopify and WooCommerce stores, that want a live chat widget running today, AI handling order-status and shipping questions, and no per-seat charge for a rota of part-time agents.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Chatwoot | Tidio |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Support | Support |
| Starting price | $0 (Community Edition self-hosted, or cloud Hacker tier); $19/agent/mo for cloud Startups billed annually (free plan available) | $24.17/mo (Starter, as published on the pricing page) (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Two parallel ladders: a per-agent cloud subscription (Hacker free, Startups, Business, Enterprise, billed annually) and a self-hosted ladder (Community Edition free under MIT, Premium Support, Enterprise Edition). Captain AI is metered by credits on both, with allowances by tier and overage sold per 1,000. | Volume-based subscription metered by billable conversations rather than by agent, with Lyro AI conversations and Flows visitors sold as separate add-on meters. Annual billing offers two months free; the top Premium tier is quote-only and uses pay-per-resolution AI billing. |
| Free plan | Two free options: cloud Hacker for up to 2 agents with 500 conversations a month, live chat only, and 30-day data retention; or self-hosted Community Edition, free forever with unlimited agents but no Captain AI, voice, custom branding, or SSO. | Free tier with 50 billable conversations, 50 one-time Lyro AI conversations, 100 Flows visitors reached, and 10 seats. |
| Free trial | 15 days on cloud plans | 7 days, no credit card required |
| Best for | Technically capable teams that need data residency, source-code control, or a genuinely zero-cost support platform: EU and regulated companies with sovereignty requirements, agencies deploying per-client instances, and cost-constrained startups with an engineer willing to own a server. | Small and mid-sized ecommerce businesses, especially Shopify and WooCommerce stores, that want a live chat widget running today, AI handling order-status and shipping questions, and no per-seat charge for a rota of part-time agents. |
| Setup time | Cloud: minutes to a working inbox with a 15-day trial. Self-hosted: a competent engineer can have a Docker deployment running in a few hours, but a production-grade install with backups, monitoring, TLS, S3 storage, and an upgrade plan is realistically two to five days of work plus ongoing maintenance. | Under thirty minutes for a live widget through the Shopify or WordPress app. Connecting Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp, building Flows from templates, and training Lyro on your content is realistically one to two weeks, most of it spent making the knowledge content good enough for the AI. |
| Learning curve | Low for agents; the inbox behaves as expected. Moderate for administrators configuring automation rules, macros, SLA policies, and Captain AI. High for whoever owns a self-hosted deployment, since that person needs to be comfortable with Postgres, Redis, object storage, and version upgrades. | Low throughout. The interface is designed for non-technical owner-operators, Flows starts from templates rather than a blank canvas, and Lyro ingests content automatically rather than requiring a scripted bot. The genuinely hard part is not the software: it is tuning Lyro's handoff rules and monitoring the three meters so the bill does not surprise you. |
| Platforms | Web app, Self-hosted (Linux with PostgreSQL, Redis, S3-compatible storage), Cloud SaaS, iOS and Android apps, REST API | Web app, iOS and Android apps, Windows and Mac desktop apps, Chat widget, OpenAPI access (Plus tier) |
| Compliance | SOC 2 Type II (cloud service), with documented personnel, development, testing, and cloud security practices, Encryption, audit logs, and role-based access controls, GDPR: self-hosting allows full control over data location, which is the practical route to residency compliance | GDPR handling as a company operating from Poland under EU law, Detailed certification evidence is not published on the main marketing pages |
| Founded | 2017 | 2013 |
| Headquarters | Distributed; Chatwoot Inc, with roots in Kerala, India and a Y Combinator (W21) background | Szczecin, Poland, with offices in Warsaw and San Francisco |
| Ownership | Venture-backed (early stage), with an MIT-licensed open-source core | Venture-backed |
Strengths and limitations
Chatwoot
Strengths
- MIT-licensed source with 25,000+ GitHub stars and 300+ contributors, which means no vendor can take the product away from you, raise your price unilaterally, or sunset your deployment.
- Genuine self-hosting on modest infrastructure (4GB RAM, 2 CPU cores minimum) solves data residency and sovereignty requirements that most competitors answer only on a custom enterprise contract.
- Broader channel coverage than most paid rivals at this price: eleven-plus channels including WhatsApp Business API, Instagram, TikTok, Telegram, LINE, SMS, and native voice.
- Cloud Startups at $19 per agent undercuts nearly everything comparable while including all channels except voice, a help centre, and 300 Captain AI credits.
Limitations
- Self-hosting is free of licence cost, not free of cost. Running PostgreSQL, Redis, S3, upgrades, and backups is ongoing engineering work, and teams routinely underestimate it into a bad decision.
- Captain AI is entirely excluded from the free Community Edition, so the open-source story stops precisely at the feature most teams now want.
- Captain credit consumption per action is not published, making the included 300 to 800 credit allowances difficult to translate into an expected number of automated conversations.
- SSO and SAML sit at $99 per agent on both ladders, a jump from $39 that is out of proportion to the feature for mid-sized teams.
Tidio
Strengths
- The fastest path from nothing to a working chat widget in this category, with native Shopify, WordPress, and WooCommerce apps and 120-plus integrations.
- Conversation-based rather than seat-based pricing, which is genuinely better for teams running a large rota of part-time agents; even the free plan includes 10 seats.
- Lyro is well suited to its actual job: order status, shipping, and availability questions grounded in your own content, with configurable handoff and Smart Actions for lead qualification.
- A free plan that is a real product, not a demo, including the widget, the help desk, and a one-time Lyro allowance.
Limitations
- Three separate meters (billable conversations, Lyro AI conversations, Flows visitors) make the real monthly cost genuinely hard to forecast, and all three move with success.
- Lyro bills per AI conversation rather than per resolution on every self-serve tier, so you pay when the AI participates even if it fails and a human finishes the job. Pay-per-resolution is reserved for the quote-only Premium tier.
- Conversation caps on the lower tiers are tight: 50 on Free and 100 on Starter, which a modest store will exceed in a week.
- The free plan's 50 Lyro conversations are one-time, not monthly, which is easy to misread as an ongoing allowance.
Pricing compared
Chatwoot
Two parallel ladders: a per-agent cloud subscription (Hacker free, Startups, Business, Enterprise, billed annually) and a self-hosted ladder (Community Edition free under MIT, Premium Support, Enterprise Edition). Captain AI is metered by credits on both, with allowances by tier and overage sold per 1,000.
- Hacker (cloud)$0
- Startups (cloud)$19
- Business (cloud)$39
- Enterprise (cloud)$99
- Community Edition (self-hosted)$0
- Premium Support (self-hosted)$19
- Enterprise Edition (self-hosted)$99
Chatwoot has the best floor and a competitive middle. Community Edition at zero licence cost with unlimited agents is unmatched by any proprietary product here, and cloud Startups at $19 per agent undercuts Help Scout's $21 while including WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram, and a help centre. Captain AI at $20 per 1,000 credits is far more forgiving than $0.75 per resolution once volume climbs. The honest accounting is that free self-hosting has a labour cost that most teams undercount: Postgres, Redis, S3, upgrades, backups, and the incident at 2am are real work, and one engineer-day a month at market rates already exceeds a $19 cloud seat. Chatwoot is outstanding value if data control is a requirement you would otherwise pay a premium for, and merely good value if you were only chasing a lower invoice.
Tidio
Volume-based subscription metered by billable conversations rather than by agent, with Lyro AI conversations and Flows visitors sold as separate add-on meters. Annual billing offers two months free; the top Premium tier is quote-only and uses pay-per-resolution AI billing.
- Free$0
- Starter$24.17
- GrowthFrom $49.17
- PlusFrom $300
- PremiumCustom
For a small ecommerce team, Tidio is easy to justify at the bottom: a free plan with 10 seats, a same-day Shopify install, and a genuinely competent widget. The economics get harder as you grow, because three meters move at once and none of them is headcount. A store handling 2,000 conversations a month with 1,000 of them going through Lyro is looking at the Growth plan plus roughly $500 of AI on top, and the discounted usage rates that fix this arrive at the $300 Plus tier. Compared with Crisp's flat $95 workspace with bundled AI credits, Tidio is more expensive at moderate volume and better at very low volume. Buy Tidio for the widget, the Shopify depth, and the free tier; watch the Lyro meter closely from the first month, because it bills on AI participation rather than on AI success.
Editorial verdict on each
Chatwoot
Chatwoot is the only product in this category that lets you own the software outright, and for teams with a data-residency mandate or a genuinely zero software budget that single fact settles the decision. The channel breadth is better than most paid rivals, the cloud pricing undercuts them, Captain AI is metered by credits rather than punished per resolution, and SOC 2 Type II on the cloud service is more formal assurance than several better-funded competitors publish. Be honest about two things before choosing it. Self-hosting has a labour cost that reliably exceeds a $19 cloud seat once you count the maintenance, and the free Community Edition deliberately excludes Captain AI, so the open-source pitch stops exactly where the modern feature set begins. Choose it for control, not because free sounds cheaper than $19.
Read the full Chatwoot profileTidio
MomentumTidio is the most commercially polished SMB chat product in this set and the easiest to put live on a store, and its conversation-based pricing is a genuine kindness to teams with many part-time agents. Lyro is a competent agent aimed at exactly the right questions for its audience. What holds it back is the metering: three independent meters, all moving with your success, and an AI that bills on participation rather than on resolution everywhere except the quote-only Premium tier. That is the least buyer-friendly structure among the AI models in this category, even though the $0.5 unit price looks cheaper than Help Scout's $0.75. Choose Tidio for the widget, the Shopify depth, and the free tier, measure your real Lyro resolution rate during the trial, and compare the resulting number against Crisp's flat workspace fee before you commit at volume.
Read the full Tidio profileChatwoot profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Tidio last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.