Tidio vs tawk.to, two free live chats compared

tawk.to charges nothing for the chat. Live chat, an inbox that takes email, WhatsApp, Messenger, SMS and Telegram, ticketing and a knowledge base are free for unlimited team members, with no time limit. The money comes from add-ons, billed per property rather than per seat. Taking the “Powered by tawk.to” badge off is $39 a month, or $29 a month billed yearly, and AI Assist is the AI.

AI Assist has a free Hobby tier with 100 message credits a month, one AI agent and up to 100 web pages to learn from. Its paid plans are $29, $99 and $399 a month, or $290, $990 and $3,990 a year, for 1,000, 5,000 and 20,000 credits. What a reply costs depends on the AI agent’s model. tawk.to’s model guide starts new AI agents on Auto, at 3 credits a reply, and puts Claude Haiku 4.5, GPT-4o mini and Gemini Flash at 1. Smart Reply and AI Commands your team uses spend credits too, and an AI Command costs what the agent’s model does. On a paid plan, more credits cost $30 per 1,000, and those never expire.

Tidio counts billable conversations, the ones someone on your team replies to, once per thread. The free plan covers 50 a month on up to 10 seats, and Starter, at $29 a month or $24.17 a month billed yearly, covers 100. Lyro is sold apart. Every account gets 50 Lyro conversations once, and after that Lyro needs a monthly package, from $39 a month, or $32.50 a month billed yearly, for 50.

So the two AIs are metered differently. tawk.to charges credits for each reply the AI writes, and Tidio counts each conversation Lyro replies in, however many times it replies. A chat where the AI answers three times spends 9 tawk.to credits on Auto, or 3 on a 1-credit model, against 1 Lyro conversation. At that length, by our arithmetic, tawk.to’s $29 plan covers about 111 chats a month on Auto, or about 333 on a 1-credit model, and Tidio’s $39 package covers 50. tawk.to pricing and Tidio pricing work out a small team’s month on each.

Pick tawk.to if people will answer the chats and you want to pay nothing for that. Everyone on your team gets live chat, an inbox for email, WhatsApp, Messenger, SMS and Telegram, ticketing, a knowledge base and a CRM, with native apps for iOS, Android, macOS and Windows. Add AI Assist when you’re ready. The free tier’s 100 credits come to about 33 replies a month on Auto, the model new AI agents start on, and $29 a month buys 1,000 credits with a handover to your team. The badge stays unless you pay $39 a month, or $29 a month billed yearly, to remove it.

Pick Tidio if you sell online and want the AI to know your store. Lyro can learn your products from Shopify or WooCommerce, and from Growth your team can cancel a Shopify order, change its shipping address or offer a refund from the chat window. The free inbox takes Instagram as well as email, WhatsApp and Messenger, and Lyro hands a chat to your team from its first free conversation. The 7-day trial of the paid features needs no card.

Both are built around people answering chats. tawk.to gives the seats away, and Tidio caps the conversations they answer for free.

A free live chat still needs someone watching it, and when that’s you, the same questions pull you off the product every day. Deacon answers them in seconds, at any hour, from your own docs and in the language your customer writes in, with no flows to build first. When your docs don’t cover a question, it admits it doesn’t know instead of guessing, and asks for the visitor’s email. You hear about it by email when they leave one or ask for a person, and your reply from Deacon’s dashboard lands in their chat, which stays open for three days while they wait. That handover works on the free plan too, where tawk.to’s free AI can’t pass a chat to anyone.

Then you answer each new question once, when it suits you, not live while someone waits in the chat. Deacon lists the questions it couldn’t answer, each with an Answer this button, and what you write becomes part of what Deacon knows, so it can answer the next person who asks. Press Save, and Deacon asks itself the question again, shows you the reply it now gives under “Deacon now says” and lists any other open questions your answer covers.

You also see what customers need, not just how busy the chat was. tawk.to’s reports count chats, missed chats and response times, and the words people searched your knowledge base for, and Tidio lists its AI insights with Premium. In Deacon, every conversation is saved and searchable by what visitors asked. Topics group the questions, count how many people asked and label most of them as a feature ask, a bug report, a how-to and so on, so you can see what to fix and what to build next. That’s on every plan, free included.

And the AI never costs more than your plan. tawk.to spends credits on every reply the AI writes, 3 a reply on Auto unless you pick a cheaper model, and auto top-up, if you switch it on, buys more when your balance drops below a threshold you set. Deacon never bills past a plan’s answers or moves a plan up a level, and its free answers come every month, where Lyro’s free 50 come once.