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 $29 a month, 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. Every message the AI sends spends one credit, and so does each Smart Reply or AI Command your team uses. 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 counts each message the AI sends, and Tidio counts each conversation Lyro replies in, however many times it replies. A chat where the AI answers three times spends 3 tawk.to credits or 1 Lyro conversation. At that length, by our arithmetic, tawk.to’s $29 plan covers about 333 chats a month and Tidio’s $39 package covers 50.

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 answers 100 messages a month, and $29 a month buys 1,000 with a handover to your team. The badge stays unless you pay $29 a month 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. If you handle support yourself, between building, the chats still land on you, and there’s a third option.

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 says it doesn’t know rather than make something up, and asks for the visitor’s email. You get an email when they leave one or ask for a person, and your reply from Deacon’s dashboard appears in their chat if it’s still open. That works on the free plan too.

Then you answer each new question once. A question your docs didn’t cover gets an Answer this button, and what you write becomes part of what Deacon knows, so it can answer the next person who asks. Save & check asks Deacon the question again, shows you the reply it now gives and tells you how many other open questions your answer covers. The more you answer, the less Deacon needs you.

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 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 same script counts your visitors, where they came from and which goals they reach.

The price stays plain, too. Every feature is on every plan, and the plans differ only in answers, knowledge, crawled pages and seats. The free plan gives you 50 answers every month, where Lyro’s free 50 come once. Every plan answers with the same model, nothing is billed past a plan’s answers, and no plan moves itself up a level. There’s no badge to pay to remove, and the free plan needs no card, has no end date and deletes nothing for inactivity.