Tidio vs Zendesk, paying per conversation or per agent

Pick Tidio if a few of you answer customers in one inbox and you’d like to start free. Live chat, ticketing, email, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Instagram are all on the free plan, for up to 10 teammates. It suits an online shop too. There are plugins for Shopify, WordPress, Wix and other platforms, Lyro can learn your products from Shopify or WooCommerce, and from Growth your team can cancel a Shopify order, change its address or offer a refund without leaving the chat.

Pick Zendesk if support is a team with queues, service levels and a phone line. Suite Team brings messaging, live chat, social channels and voice into one place, and Suite Professional adds phone menus, callbacks, skills-based routing and community forums. You decide before a busy month whether the AI agent keeps answering past its allowance or hands the work to your agents. And if you qualify, Zendesk for Startups can make the first 6 months free.

Or run both. Tidio’s Zendesk integration works on every plan, Free included, and turns a chat into a Zendesk ticket with the customer’s details and messages. Lyro can import your Zendesk help centre, and Tidio says it can answer inside Zendesk too, through Lyro Connect, which its plan table lists on Plus and Premium. Then Tidio bills the AI, per Lyro conversation, and Zendesk bills your agents.

Either way, you’re buying tools for a team. If you answer support yourself, between building, a seat price or a shared inbox is the wrong shape of bill, and there’s a third option.

A helpdesk and a live chat inbox both assume someone is sitting in them. When that someone is you, the same questions keep pulling you away from the product. Deacon answers them on your site in seconds, day or night, from your own docs and in the language each customer writes in, with no flows or macros to set up first. When your docs don’t cover a question, it tells the visitor it doesn’t know rather than inventing an answer, and asks for their email. You’re emailed when they leave one or ask for a person, and your reply from Deacon’s dashboard lands in their chat if it’s still open. That’s human handoff without a queue to staff.

Each gap turns into an answer once. The questions your docs missed are listed with an Answer this button, and what you write becomes part of what Deacon knows. Save & check then asks Deacon the question again, shows you the reply it gives now and counts how many other open questions your answer covers. The more you answer, the less it needs you.

You also see what your customers need, not only what the loudest few send you. Every conversation is saved and searchable by what visitors asked. Topics group the questions, count the people behind each one and label most of them, as a bug report, a feature ask, a how-to and so on, so you know what to fix and what to build. That’s on every plan, the free one included, where Tidio lists AI insights with Premium and Zendesk’s intelligent triage starts on Suite Professional. The same script counts your visitors, where they came from and which goals they reach.

And what you pay never waits on a model’s verdict about whether a conversation was resolved, because Deacon counts its own replies. Every feature is on every plan, and the plans differ only in answers, knowledge, crawled pages and seats, with the seats included. Nothing is billed past a plan’s answers, no plan moves itself up, and there’s no badge to pay to remove. The free plan gives you 50 answers every month, needs no card and has no end date.