Chatbase vs Tidio: an AI agent builder or a live chat suite?

Chatbase vs Tidio is a choice between an AI agent builder and a live chat suite. Chatbase sells AI first, with message credits that depend on the AI model, and lists its help desk for people from the $150 Standard plan. Tidio starts with live chat and ticketing on every plan, including free, and sells its Lyro AI separately.

Every fact below comes from each company's own pages, checked on 13 October 2026. Prices and plans change, so look again before you pay. Where a page did not list something, we say that rather than guess.

Chatbase vs Tidio at a glance

Sources: Chatbase's pricing page and Tidio's pricing page, both checked on 13 October 2026. Chatbase shows monthly prices by default and offers 20% off yearly plans. Tidio's default prices are its annual-billing prices, which it says give two months free.

How Chatbase and Tidio charge you

Chatbase meters AI. Its pricing FAQ says each request to the AI model costs a number of message credits that depends on the model you choose, and that an agent with actions may make more than one request per answer. Its own example is a booking: one request to fetch free calendar slots and a second to write the reply, so twice the credits. Credits renew at the start of each calendar month, whenever you subscribed, and unused ones do not carry over. If you run low, auto-recharge adds credits at $40 per 1,000, and those do not expire.

Tidio meters people and AI separately. Its plans are sized by "billable conversations", meaning conversations that include a message from a human agent: 50 a month on Free, 100 on Starter, up to 2,000 on Growth. Replies from Lyro do not count toward that. Lyro has its own allowance: every account gets 50 Lyro conversations once, then you buy a Lyro plan for a monthly amount.

Is Chatbase cheaper than Tidio?

It depends on who answers. If your team handles most chats, Tidio is cheaper on paper: its Free and Starter plans include live chat and ticketing, while Chatbase lists its help desk from Standard at $150 a month. If the AI handles most chats, the two are hard to compare exactly. Chatbase's 700 credits on Hobby are spent per AI request at a rate that varies by model, and its pricing page does not list the rate for each model. Tidio's smallest Lyro plan is $32.50 a month, billed annually, for 50 AI conversations.

The fair test is to load your real content into both trials and count what a week of your own chats would use.

What the AI can do on each

Chatbase. Chatbase's home page describes procedures written in plain language that the agent follows step by step, with actions built in, such as looking up an order. Its chat page says the agent can reply with cards rather than only text, including product cards, order trackers and slot pickers, and shows where an answer came from. The pricing table ticks Shopify, Calendly, WordPress and Slack on every plan, adds Stripe, Zendesk, HubSpot and other integrations from Standard, and lists voice and telephony from Standard too.

Tidio. Tidio's AI agent page says Lyro answers from your support content and describes Smart Actions for order updates, lead qualification and routing tickets. The pricing table lists FAQ upload, an FAQ scraper, a website scraper and Zendesk article import as knowledge sources on every plan. Tidio also has Flows, a visual builder for rule-based automations, which every plan includes for up to 100 visitors a month.

Handing a chat to a person

Chatbase's help desk page describes two ways to hand over: the AI opens a ticket so a teammate follows up by email, or a person joins the live chat with the full conversation. A teammate can also step into any live conversation, and its FAQ says the AI then stops replying in that conversation. You can use Chatbase's own help desk or connect one you already have, such as Zendesk, Freshdesk or Help Scout. On the pricing page, the help desk appears on the Standard plan card.

On Tidio, the inbox comes first: live chat and ticketing are on every plan, Lyro lists human handoff, and Tidio's AI agent page says you can set handoff and escalation rules and join any conversation. Operating hours start on Starter, and automatic chat assignment and offline auto-reply on Growth.

Limits worth checking before you choose

• Chatbase includes one AI agent on each plan; more cost $25 a month each.
• Chatbase's training content is capped at 10 MB of extracted text on Hobby, 20 MB on Standard and 40 MB on Pro.
• Chatbase's Hobby plan has 2 team members and 5 AI actions per agent.
• Tidio's 50 free Lyro conversations are a one-off, and its FAQ says self-serve plans take up to 10 agents.
• Tidio's $0 tier leaves out operating hours and the live visitors list.

Which to pick when

Chatbase is likely the better fit if

• you want the AI to do most of the work and want to choose the AI model;
• you want the agent to take actions and reply with cards, such as order trackers or booking slots;
• you may want voice or phone agents later, listed from Standard;
• you already run a help desk such as Zendesk and want the AI on top of it.

Tidio is likely the better fit if

• your team answers many chats and needs live chat and ticketing from day one, even on the $0 tier;
• you need up to 10 people in the inbox without a large plan;
• you want rule-based Flows for proactive messages next to the AI;
• you prefer AI counted per conversation, whatever model runs it.

A third option

If you want AI answers and a team inbox with human hand-over in the same plan from the start, or you want to use your own AI key and pay the AI provider directly with no message cap from us, MagizAI is a third option. Every plan is paid. Our comparison with Chatbase and comparison with Tidio set it against each tool, and the plans are on our pricing page.