Tidio vs Crisp: plans, AI and channels compared for a small business

The main difference in Tidio vs Crisp is how you pay. Tidio sizes its plans by the conversations your team answers and sells its Lyro AI agent separately. Crisp charges one flat price per workspace, whatever the volume, with a small AI credit from its Mini plan up. Both include live chat, a shared inbox and an AI agent.

Everything below comes from each company's own pricing and product pages, checked on 13 October 2026. Prices and plan contents change often, so look at both pages again before you pay. Where a page did not list something, we say so rather than guess.

Tidio vs Crisp at a glance

Sources: Tidio's pricing page and Crisp's pricing page, both checked on 13 October 2026. Tidio's page offers monthly or annual billing, with two months free on annual, and its default prices are the annual ones. Crisp shows monthly prices and lets you switch to yearly in its app after you subscribe.

How Tidio and Crisp charge you

Tidio counts "billable conversations". Its pricing page defines one as a live chat, ticket, email or social media conversation "that includes a message from a human agent". Unanswered messages and spam do not count, and replies from Lyro or from Tidio's Flows automations are not counted as agent replies.

AI has its own meter. A Lyro conversation is any conversation with at least one reply from the AI agent, however many replies it takes. Every Tidio account starts with 50 Lyro conversations. To get an allowance that renews each month, you buy a Lyro plan, which Tidio also sells on its own.

Crisp works the other way round. Its pricing page says you pay "a single, consistent price regardless of the number of conversations" in a workspace, and plans are billed per workspace, not per website domain. The meter sits on AI instead: each plan includes a dollar amount of AI credits, and Crisp turns that into an estimate of automated conversations.

In practice, a team that answers many chats by hand gets a steadier bill from Crisp, while Tidio's Starter covers 100 answered conversations a month before you need Growth. If the AI will handle most chats, both tools meter it, so compare the AI allowance, not the headline price.

Is Tidio cheaper than Crisp?

On the entry plans, yes on paper: Tidio Starter is $24.17 a month billed annually against $45 a month for Crisp Mini. The catch is what each includes. Starter gives you 50 AI conversations once, and the smallest Lyro plan adds $32.50 a month, which brings Tidio to $56.67 a month on annual billing. Mini includes $5 of AI credits, which Crisp puts at around 90 automated conversations. For WhatsApp, Tidio ticks it even on its $0 tier, while Crisp starts at Essentials, $95 a month.

Tidio Lyro vs Crisp AI: what each AI agent can do

Tidio. Tidio's AI agent page says Lyro answers from your support content, and its FAQ there says Lyro runs on Claude from Anthropic plus Tidio's own models. The pricing table lists FAQ upload, an FAQ scraper, a website scraper and Zendesk article import as knowledge sources on every plan. Lyro can also act: the page describes Smart Actions for order updates, lead qualification and sending tickets to the right department. On the pricing table your first Action is free; full access to Actions, and product recommendations, need a paid Lyro quota. Lyro Connect, which adds Lyro to another help desk such as Zendesk or Salesforce, is listed for the Plus and Premium plans.

Crisp. Crisp calls its AI agent Hugo. Crisp's AI page lists five ways to train it: question and answer snippets, your Crisp knowledge base, a website crawl, past conversations and a file importer for documents such as PDFs and CSVs. It also says an AI reply step can be given a confidence level, and when the AI cannot find an answer it says so and your team follows up. On the pricing table, "AI Agent" is ticked from Mini, while "AI Knowledge training", the no-code AI chatbot builder and "AI-generated answers" are ticked from Essentials. The Plus plan lists unlimited task automations that connect the AI agent to other tools.

Channels: WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger and email

On Tidio's plan table, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and email integrations are ticked on every plan, Free included. Crisp's table ticks email, Messenger, Telegram and X (Twitter) from Mini, then Instagram, WhatsApp Business, SMS, Viber, Line and phone from Essentials. Crisp's FAQ adds that a workspace connects one of each messaging channel, except email, and more need higher limits.

For online stores, Tidio's table lists native Shopify actions from Growth. Crisp's table lists Shopify, WooCommerce, Adobe Commerce, PrestaShop and WordPress integrations on every plan.

Limits worth checking before you choose

• Tidio's FAQ says self-serve plans take up to 10 agents; a larger team needs Plus.
• Tidio's $0 tier leaves out operating hours and the live visitors list, which start on Starter.
• If you put Tidio on several websites, its FAQ says they share one set of appearance and behaviour settings.
• Crisp's $0 tier holds up to 100 customer profiles and Mini up to 5,000.
• Crisp's table lists extra seats, at $10 a month each, on Plus only.
• Crisp's AI credits are a dollar amount. "Around 90 automated conversations" is Crisp's own estimate.

Which to pick when

Tidio is likely the better fit if

• you want WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger in one inbox without paying for a mid-range plan;
• your team answers few chats by hand, so a cap on answered conversations matters less;
• you want visual Flows for proactive messages, which every plan includes for up to 100 visitors a month at no extra cost;
• you may later want the AI agent on its own, or inside another help desk.

Crisp is likely the better fit if

• your team answers many chats by hand and you want a bill that does not grow with volume;
• you want a help center, conversation ratings and round-robin routing in the same plan, which Crisp ticks from Essentials;
• where your data is stored matters to you: Crisp's plan table says its data is hosted on European servers, on every plan;
• you want SMS, Viber, Line or Telegram next to WhatsApp.

Whichever you try, load your real help content during the trial and ask the AI the ten questions your customers ask most. The answers will tell you more than either pricing page.

A third option

If you want a flat monthly plan where AI replies pause at the plan's cap instead of costing more, 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 Tidio and comparison with Crisp set it against each tool, and the plans are on our pricing page.