Is Gorgias or Tidio cheaper?

Gorgias starts at $10 per month (Starter, 50 tickets, 3 seats) (7 days trial). Tidio starts at $24.17/mo (Starter, as published on the pricing page) (free plan available).

Gorgias 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 assessment

Gorgias compared with Tidio

Tidio is chat-first with Lyro AI priced per AI conversation, and it is the cheaper way to deflect high-volume storefront questions before they ever reach a queue. Gorgias is a full help desk with email, social, voice, SMS, and order actions behind it. Pick Tidio if your problem is pre-purchase chat volume on a small store; pick Gorgias if your problem is post-purchase ticket handling across channels and you need agents to act on orders rather than just answer.

Choose Gorgias if

Direct-to-consumer Shopify stores doing between a few hundred and a few thousand support conversations a month, especially ones with seasonal volume spikes and a part-time or agency support rota, where most tickets are order-status, returns, and exchanges and where the fastest fix is an agent acting on the order from inside the ticket.

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	Gorgias	Tidio
Category	Support	Support
Starting price	$10 per month (Starter, 50 tickets, 3 seats) (7 days trial)	$24.17/mo (Starter, as published on the pricing page) (free plan available)
Pricing model	Volume-based subscription metered by billable tickets rather than agent seats, with a separate usage meter for AI Agent resolutions and further usage-based add-ons for voice and SMS.	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	No	Free tier with 50 billable conversations, 50 one-time Lyro AI conversations, 100 Flows visitors reached, and 10 seats.
Free trial	7 days, capped at 10 email ticket messages	7 days, no credit card required
Best for	Direct-to-consumer Shopify stores doing between a few hundred and a few thousand support conversations a month, especially ones with seasonal volume spikes and a part-time or agency support rota, where most tickets are order-status, returns, and exchanges and where the fastest fix is an agent acting on the order from inside the ticket.	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	Half a day to be answering tickets, one to two weeks to be answering them well. Connecting the store and forwarding the support address is quick; building the macro library, the rules, and the help center content that actually reduces handle time is the part teams underestimate.	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, who mostly need to learn that the order actions are in the sidebar. Moderate for the person who owns the account, because Rules, Macros, Views, and AI Guidance interact, and a badly written auto-reply Rule can make otherwise free tickets billable.	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, iOS, Android, Embeddable chat widget, Shopify app, BigCommerce app, Adobe Commerce module	Web app, iOS and Android apps, Windows and Mac desktop apps, Chat widget, OpenAPI access (Plus tier)
Compliance	SOC 2 Type II (report available on request via the trust center), HIPAA capability documented in the trust center, GDPR	GDPR handling as a company operating from Poland under EU law, Detailed certification evidence is not published on the main marketing pages
Founded	2015	2013
Headquarters	San Francisco, California, United States	Szczecin, Poland, with offices in Warsaw and San Francisco
Ownership	Venture-backed, independent	Venture-backed

Strengths and limitations

Gorgias

Strengths

The only mainstream help desk that does not price by seat above the entry tiers, which is a structural advantage for stores with seasonal, part-time, or agency support staffing.
Shopify actions inside the ticket are the real product. Refunding, cancelling, and editing orders without leaving the conversation removes the tab-switching that is most of the actual work in ecommerce support.
Revenue statistics attribute sales back to support conversations, which is the single most useful reporting feature in this category and is not offered by Help Scout, Freshdesk, or Front.
Honest AI billing boundary: you are charged for a conversation the AI resolves or for the human ticket it becomes, not for both.

Limitations

The AI Agent requires Shopify. BigCommerce, Adobe Commerce, and WooCommerce merchants get the 2022 help desk while paying for a company whose entire current positioning is the AI.
Two meters running at once makes the bill hard to forecast, and voice and SMS add two more. Budgeting for Gorgias is a modelling exercise, not a line item.
The three-seat cap on Starter and Basic quietly undermines the marketing claim of never charging per agent, and pushing to Pro for a fourth agent is a jump from $60 to $360.
Nothing here fits non-commerce businesses. Strip out the order object and you have an ordinary shared inbox priced against a commerce feature set you cannot use.

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

Gorgias

Volume-based subscription metered by billable tickets rather than agent seats, with a separate usage meter for AI Agent resolutions and further usage-based add-ons for voice and SMS.

Starter$10
Basic$60
Pro$360
Advanced$900
EnterpriseCustom

For a Shopify store doing 1,000 to 3,000 tickets a month with a fluctuating agent count, Gorgias is the best-priced serious help desk on the market, and it is not close: Pro at $360 with unlimited seats beats six or eight Help Scout seats plus a Shopify connector, and the order actions save real minutes per ticket. Below about 300 tickets a month the calculation inverts, because you are paying a platform fee to answer a volume that a shared Gmail with labels handles for nothing. And the AI Agent should be judged as a separate purchase with its own business case, not as a feature of the plan: at roughly a dollar a resolution it is priced like a contractor, and it deserves the same scrutiny you would give one.

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

Gorgias

Gorgias is the right answer for Shopify stores and close to the wrong answer for everyone else. The ticket meter and unlimited seats above Pro genuinely suit a support team whose headcount moves with the season, the order actions inside the ticket save minutes on every conversation that a general help desk cannot, and revenue attribution is the only reporting feature in this bracket that lets a support lead argue in the language finance speaks. What has to be modelled before you buy is the second meter: at roughly $0.90 a resolution the AI Agent can cost more than the help desk itself, and it does not run on BigCommerce or Magento at all, which makes the 2026 marketing story inapplicable to a meaningful chunk of the addressable market. Buy it if you are on Shopify, doing more than a few hundred tickets a month, and willing to treat the AI as a separate purchase with its own business case. Skip it if your customers do not have order numbers, if your volume is small enough that a shared Gmail still works, or if a variable invoice is something your finance team will not tolerate.

Read the full Gorgias profile

Tidio

Momentum

Tidio 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 profile

Gorgias 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.