Is LiveChat or Tidio cheaper?

LiveChat starts at $19 per person per month billed annually ($25 monthly) on the Starter plan, limited to one user (14 days trial). Tidio starts at $24.17/mo (Starter, as published on the pricing page) (free plan available).

LiveChat 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

Both sides assessed

LiveChat compared with Tidio

The clearest structural contrast in this category: LiveChat bills per person, Tidio bills per billable conversation with 10 seats even on its free plan. For a team of eight part-timers covering evenings and weekends, Tidio is dramatically cheaper because headcount is not the meter; for a team of three full-time agents handling very high volume, LiveChat's fixed per-seat cost is the predictable one. On product, LiveChat is deeper on reporting, routing, staffing, and the developer API, while Tidio is faster to install on Shopify, has a real free tier, and ships an AI agent (Lyro) inside its own product rather than on a separate platform. Pick Tidio if you are a small store that wants chat live this afternoon with AI included; pick LiveChat if chat is a staffed function with reporting and API requirements attached.

Tidio compared with LiveChat

LiveChat is the older, more corporate sibling: a mature agent workspace with routing, work scheduling, and staffing prediction, sold per person from $19 a month with no free plan and a 14-day trial. Tidio is cheaper to start, has a genuine free tier, installs on Shopify in minutes, and bundles Lyro as a metered add-on rather than a separate subscription. LiveChat's autonomous AI agent lives on Text's separate platform, so a buyer comparing the two pricing pages is not comparing like with like. Pick LiveChat when several agents share shifts and supervision matters; pick Tidio when a small store wants chat and automation working the same afternoon.

Choose LiveChat if

Sales-led and support teams of roughly 3 to 50 agents that want a fast, dependable chat widget with proactive campaigns, real reporting, and a broad developer API, from a profitable public company with a twenty-year operating record, and that are comfortable paying a fixed per-agent price rather than chasing a usage meter.

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	LiveChat	Tidio
Category	Support	Support
Starting price	$19 per person per month billed annually ($25 monthly) on the Starter plan, limited to one user (14 days trial)	$24.17/mo (Starter, as published on the pricing page) (free plan available)
Pricing model	Strictly per person per month, billed annually or monthly, with annual materially cheaper. There is no usage meter on the classic LiveChat plans and no free tier. The autonomous AI Agent is not included and is sold on Text's separate platform plans, metered by resolution. ChatBot, HelpDesk, and KnowledgeBase are separate subscriptions rather than modules of a LiveChat plan.	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	14 days, no credit card required	7 days, no credit card required
Best for	Sales-led and support teams of roughly 3 to 50 agents that want a fast, dependable chat widget with proactive campaigns, real reporting, and a broad developer API, from a profitable public company with a twenty-year operating record, and that are comfortable paying a fixed per-agent price rather than chasing a usage meter.	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	A working widget takes under thirty minutes through a script tag or the Shopify, WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, or Webflow app. Getting to a properly configured deployment (groups, routing rules, chat limits, canned responses, targeted message campaigns, knowledge sources for reply suggestions, and reporting tags) realistically takes one to two weeks. Some verified reviewers describe initial setup as convoluted and difficult to get working correctly, so budget more than the marketing implies if your routing is non-trivial.	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 and moderate for administrators. The agent application is conventional and a new hire is productive within a day. The administrative surface is larger than most chat tools because of routing rules, groups, campaign targeting, and the reporting suite, and the two genuinely tricky parts are designing targeted message triggers that help rather than annoy, and understanding which capabilities live on which tier before you commit to a plan.	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 application, Windows and macOS desktop apps, iOS and Android apps, Chat widget with native apps for Shopify, WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, and Webflow	Web app, iOS and Android apps, Windows and Mac desktop apps, Chat widget, OpenAPI access (Plus tier)
Compliance	GDPR, as an EU company operating from Poland, HIPAA compliance offered on the Enterprise tier per the published pricing page, Formal SOC 2 or ISO 27001 attestation not verifiable from the vendor's own published pages at the time of review	GDPR handling as a company operating from Poland under EU law, Detailed certification evidence is not published on the main marketing pages
Founded	2002	2013
Headquarters	Wrocław, Poland, with an office in Boston, Massachusetts	Szczecin, Poland, with offices in Warsaw and San Francisco
Ownership	Publicly listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange as Text S.A. (ticker TXT, ISIN PLLVTSF00010), a WIG30 index component. Renamed from LiveChat Software S.A. in 2023.	Venture-backed

Strengths and limitations

LiveChat

Strengths

Exceptional vendor stability: founded 2002, listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange since April 2014, consistently profitable, with audited quarterly results and group ARR above $89.5 million as of mid-2026. Almost nothing else in this category can be diligenced that thoroughly.
The agent experience is genuinely refined after twenty years, with message sneak-peek, fast canned responses and tagging, chat supervision and whisper, transfer between groups, and per-agent concurrent chat limits all working the way an experienced chat team expects.
A complete developer platform available on standard plans rather than gated to enterprise: Customer SDK, webhooks, chat widget JavaScript API, chat APIs, configuration API, and a Reports API, alongside a marketplace of over 200 integrations.
Deeper reporting than most chat-first competitors, including ecommerce attribution, a per-conversation revenue counter in LiveChat 2.0, agent performance metrics, and Business-tier staffing prediction that forecasts required coverage by time slot.

Limitations

Strictly per-person billing with no shared licences. Multiple verified Capterra reviewers name this directly, one noting they now need a licence per user rather than a chosen number of licences shared across unlimited users as before. For a rota of part-time agents this is the single most expensive structural choice in the product.
The autonomous AI Agent is not included in LiveChat plans. Text's own AI page states it is not automatically included and that customers move to the Text platform to get it. Buyers comparing LiveChat against Intercom's Fin or Tidio's Lyro on the LiveChat pricing page are comparing the wrong thing.
The $19 Starter tier supports exactly one user and keeps only 60 days of chat history, so the advertised entry price is unavailable to any actual team. The step to Team at $49 is a 158 percent increase.
Repeated price increases are a recurring complaint in verified reviews, with one long-standing customer stating the price has increased dramatically over recent years and the tool is becoming less viable, and another that it is not affordable for small businesses. The September 2025 increase and the end of grandfathering are documented in Text's own investor communications.

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

LiveChat

Strictly per person per month, billed annually or monthly, with annual materially cheaper. There is no usage meter on the classic LiveChat plans and no free tier. The autonomous AI Agent is not included and is sold on Text's separate platform plans, metered by resolution. ChatBot, HelpDesk, and KnowledgeBase are separate subscriptions rather than modules of a LiveChat plan.

Starter$19
Team$49
Business$79
EnterpriseQuote

Judged as a live chat product on its own, LiveChat is fairly priced in the middle of the market: $49 per person on Team buys unlimited history, unlimited campaigns, full widget customisation, a broad channel set, and a developer API that several competitors reserve for their top tier. Judged as a customer support platform, the arithmetic is less kind. The $19 headline is a one-seat price, the real team entry is $49, ticketing and a help centre are separate subscriptions, the AI agent lives on a different product line, and SSO is quote-only. A five-agent team wanting chat, tickets, and AI deflection is realistically looking at a LiveChat or Text plan plus a HelpDesk plan plus resolution overage, which lands well above Crisp's flat $45 workspace fee and above what Zoho Desk or Freshdesk charge for a bundled equivalent. Buy LiveChat when chat itself is the point, when the reporting and API depth earn their keep, and when a twenty-year-old profitable public vendor is worth something to your procurement process. Do not buy it as the cheap option, because on total cost it is not.

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

LiveChat

LiveChat is the most institutionally solid product in small-business live chat, and that is both its argument and its limitation. Twenty-four years of continuous development, a Warsaw Stock Exchange listing with audited quarterly results, consistent profitability, and $89.5 million of group ARR make it the easiest vendor in this category to diligence, and the product earns the reputation: the agent experience is refined, the proactive campaign tooling is genuinely good for sales-led chat, the reporting goes deeper than chat-first rivals attempt, and the developer platform is open on standard plans rather than held hostage to an enterprise contract. What holds it back is commercial structure rather than craft. The $19 headline buys one seat, the real team price is $49 per person, ticketing and a help centre are separate subscriptions, the autonomous AI agent lives on a different product line entirely, SSO and HIPAA are quote-only, and price rises plus the end of grandfathering are a live grievance in verified reviews. Buy LiveChat when chat itself is a staffed, measured function, when reporting and API depth pay for themselves, and when vendor stability is worth a premium. If you want a bundled support stack, a free tier, or AI deflection as the centrepiece, the better answers in this category are elsewhere.

Read the full LiveChat profile

Tidio

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

LiveChat profile last reviewed 2026-08-30; Tidio last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.