Tidio vs Crisp: which fits a small business

Tidio vs Crisp is a close call on paper. Both put a chat widget on your site in an afternoon, both sell an AI agent, and both have a free plan. The difference shows up on the bill, and in who each one is built for.

Here's the Tidio vs Crisp comparison a small business actually needs: what each plan costs, how the two bots are metered, which channels you get, and where each one runs out of room. Prices come from both vendors' own pricing pages, verified October 2026. Both change them often, so check the current number before you buy.

We make a support tool too. It gets one short section near the end. Everything before that is a straight read.

Tidio vs Crisp, the short version

Tidio is a chat tool with an online store in mind. It bills by the number of conversations, and its AI agent, Lyro, is a paid add-on. Crisp is a chat and inbox tool for small teams. It bills by workspace, with a set number of seats and a monthly pot of AI credits.

• Better free plan: Tidio. You get 50 conversations a month and up to 10 seats. Crisp's free plan stops at 2 seats.
• Better for Shopify-style stores: Tidio, which is built around order lookups and cart actions.
• Better for a team that wants cheap multi-channel chat: Crisp, especially once you're past two people.
• More predictable bill: neither. Tidio meters conversations, Lyro and Flows separately. Crisp's AI credits can run out early in a busy month.
• Real ticketing and a public help center: neither does this well. Crisp only adds a ticketing system on its top tier.

Tidio vs Crisp pricing, plan by plan

What Tidio costs

Tidio's plans scale with billable conversations, and every self-serve plan caps you at 10 seats.

• Free: $0, 50 conversations a month, 10 seats.
• Starter: $24.17 a month on annual billing ($29 month to month), 100 conversations.
• Growth: from $49.17 a month on annual billing, from 250 conversations up to 2,000.
• Plus: from $300 a month plus usage. Premium is quote only.

Then come the add-ons. Lyro, the AI agent, starts at $32.50 a month with 50 AI conversations. Flows, the automation builder, starts at $24.17 a month. So a Starter plan with both is closer to $80 a month than $24.

What Crisp costs

Crisp charges per workspace, not per person. The price stays put as you add teammates, until you hit that tier's seat limit.

• Free: $0, 2 seats, no AI credits.
• Mini: $45 a month, 4 seats, about 90 automated conversations of AI credit.
• Essentials: $95 a month, 10 seats, about 450 automated conversations, plus a knowledge base and workflow builder.
• Plus: $295 a month, 20 seats and up, about 1,350 automated conversations, plus ticketing. Extra agents cost $10 a month each.

The jump from Mini to Essentials is the one to watch. A fifth teammate costs you another $50 a month.

All prices above verified October 2026. Check Tidio's and Crisp's own pricing pages for today's figures.

How the two AI agents differ

Lyro is the more hands-off of the two. It answers from the content you feed it and is sold in prepaid monthly allowances. Crisp's agent is called Hugo. It draws on a credit balance that comes with your plan, and it takes a bit more setup to get good answers.

Either way, you're managing a meter. Count how many repeat questions you get in a month before you pick one. If it's 300, Crisp's Mini plan covers about a third of them, and Tidio's smallest Lyro bundle covers a sixth.

Channels, setup and the free trial

Both tools bring email, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp into one inbox. Crisp adds Telegram and Line. Tidio's mobile apps are well rated, and its Shopify depth is the best reason to pick it.

Speed matters here more than most owners expect. In one widely cited roundup, about six in ten customers said they want a reply within ten minutes, according to live chat response-time research. Both tools clear that bar for chat. Email is another story.

Tidio gives you a 7-day trial with no card. Crisp gives you 14 days with full access. Setup takes under an hour on either one for a basic widget.

Where each one runs out of room

Tidio stops at 10 seats on every self-serve plan. Its REST API and webhooks sit on the Plus plan, from $300 a month. And its knowledge base is private training data for Lyro, so you can't publish a help center for customers.

Crisp's ticketing only shows up on the $295 tier. Below that you get a shared inbox, which is fine for chat and a few emails but gets messy once requests need owners and due dates.

If your volume is mostly chat, neither limit will bother you for a while. If email is your main channel, you'll feel both of them within a few months.

Who each one honestly fits

Pick Tidio if you run an online store, your volume is modest, and you want order lookups inside the chat. The free plan is a fair way to start.

Pick Crisp if you're a small team that wants one cheap tool across several channels and you can live with a thin ticketing system.

Pick neither if support is one of five jobs on your plate and you'd rather not watch a conversation counter or a credit balance.

What we built instead

That last case is why SupportifyGPT exists. Plans are $15, $39 and $79 a month, with every feature on every plan. The tiers differ only by seats: 1, up to 3, and up to 10.

Our support bot works in two halves. Hand-written rules do the finding. They read the customer's question, check intent and sentiment, and search your own articles. Then a model writes the reply in plain sentences from what it found. It can only use what your business wrote, so it says it doesn't know instead of inventing a policy. If anything goes wrong, it falls back to quoting the article.

New help articles it drafts wait as drafts until you approve them. And the bot is included on every plan, with no per-answer fee. Compare that with the flat SupportifyGPT pricing before you commit to a meter.

We're simpler than both tools above. There's no Shopify order lookup and no Telegram or Line channel. If you need those, Tidio or Crisp is the better fit. If you want one flat bill, a shared inbox, ticketing, live chat and a public help center, start a free 14-day trial.

How to decide this week

1. Count your conversations. Tidio's free and Starter plans have hard monthly limits.
2. Count your seats. Four or fewer fits Crisp Mini. Five or more pushes you to $95.
3. Price the AI add-on. Add Lyro to Tidio, or check how fast Crisp's credits drain.
4. Check your main channel. If it's email, weigh ticketing over the chat widget.
5. Trial two tools, not five. Push a real week of messages through each.

Still undecided? Our side-by-side help desk comparisons cover the rest of the market, and we've written up Tidio alternatives for small business and a similar head-to-head, Crisp vs Intercom.