Providing an excellent customer experience and maximizing your product sales can often come down to the speed of your customer support team's service. That’s a key reason to use Tidio, with their powerful AI-powered chatbots and live chat there to help you help your customers.
However, if you’re looking to include great self-service and educational information to speed up help — in addition to your chat-bots, live chat, and ticket support — you may be outgrowing Tidio. Or perhaps you’re just looking to grow your team beyond the five operators Tidio allows, or you’re frequently running into their engagement limits.
Our unbiased guide will help you shortlist alternatives to Tidio and look for the right replacement for your needs.
If you're in a hurry and don't want to read the whole post, here is our conclusion about the best Tidio alternatives: Gorgias for e-commerce, Intercom for chatbots and AI, or a Zendesk-Tidio combo for added support features.
If you'd like to find out how we came to this conclusion, continue reading further.
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To compile this list and help you in your software purchasing decision, we looked at a multitude of criteria for tools, with a focus on:
With those criteria in mind, we selected the following 11 tools as the best Tidio alternatives in 2023:
Gorgias is a customer service software designed for e-commerce stores. This Tidio alternative integrates with Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, and more - much like Tidio. It’s packed with features, and while it offers a live chat experience, it also offers additional channels, including an easy interface for your team to reply to social media questions and even sms. Better yet, it scales well as your team scales and offers a powerful help center with self-service upgrades that integrate with your e-commerce platform.
If you’re using Tidio for your e-commerce business, especially if you’re a Shopify customer, Gorgias offers a depth of integration that will greatly speed up the service you can offer. It automatically pulls in Shopify data to agent responses and allows customers to find shipping information, manage orders, and more from within your support center.
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Pricing
Gorgias starts at $10 monthly for their Starter plan, but you’ll likely want to be on their Basic plan ($60 month-to-month/$50 annually) or Pro plan ($360/$300). Rather than priced per user, Gorgias prices based on your support volume.
Test drive Gorgias for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
Zendesk is the leading name in customer support, and they have the features to back that up. Zendesk makes it possible for agents to provide omnichannel support , including email, live chat, and social media. Because they take an everything-for-everyone stance it can be extremely powerful but often confusing and with the price tag to match.
If your team offers service via multiple platforms and wants to offer an agnostic user experience, Zendesk can be a great alternative to Tidio. It’ll allow you to offer the same depth of help via email, live chat, and even phones. You can also create a self-service help center and ensure that it matches your company brand. However, it isn’t as strongly targeted towards e-commerce and doesn’t offer the same combination of features.
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Zendesk pricing starts at $19 user/mo (annual only) for their foundational Support Team plan. But you’ll likely prefer to look at their Support Professional plan ($49 user/mo annual only) for its live chat support or go up to their Professional plan ($99 user/mo annual only) to allow for more automation and deeper reporting.
Test drive Zendesk for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
Related Reading: Gorgias vs. Zendesk
Freshdesk is a comprehensive cloud-based SaaS providing customer support teams with everything they need in one tidy package. This Tidio competitor includes features such as a multi-channel help desk, knowledge bases, chatbots, and a ticketing system. And best yet, according to user reviews, it's continually evolving and updating features.
Much like Zendesk, though, because Freshdesk is built to solve as many problems as possible, it can be overly complex and hard to update. It also doesn’t have the same depth of AI included in their built-in chatbot Freddy.
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$15-$69 user/mo (billed annually). Freshdesk also offers a “free forever” basic plan if you’re looking for fewer features than Tidio offers.
Test drive Freshdesk for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
Help Scout's approach to providing personalized customer support is obvious in their feature set and how their product was built. Tickets, for instance, are referred to as Conversations to set the right helpful tone. Help Scout also emphasizes usability with an intuitive interface. With their Beacon and Messages features, you can help your customers within your software or website. You can also automatically trigger messages to visitors and build message series.
Help Scout also lets you create multiple Beacons with different settings and customer experiences but then manage the queue of work from one inbox. You’ll find this handy if you have one team supporting and selling for multiple brands. Help Scout still comes with limitations on the number of in-app messages you can trigger, but their lowest priced plan allows for 2,000 visitors
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Help Scout’s pricing starts at $25 user/mo ($20 if paying annually) on their standard plan up to $65 user/mo (annual only) on their Pro plan. Triggered messages are based on your number of visitors each month and plans start at 2,000.
Test drive Help Scout for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
Front provides a multi-channel customer service solution, offering email, live chat, and social media support. Its design, reminiscent of Gmail's, combines an intuitive inbox-style interface with powerful features like automated workflows and internal collaboration tools to enhance your team’s performance while maintaining healthy customer relationships.
If you’re finding you’re not using Tidio’s messaging features and just need a simple way to talk to your customers without a lot of added complexity, Front is ideal. On the flip side, though, if you want to go deeper into automation or AI Front isn’t what you’re looking for.
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Front’s pricing plans starts at $19 user/mo (annual only) on their Starter plan, but you’ll most likely find yourself wanting their Growth plan ($49 user/mo) or Scale plan ($99 user/mo). They also offer a Premier plan ($229 user/mo) with additional features and enterprise-level service.
Test drive Front for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
Related Reading: Best Front Alternatives
Intercom has positioned itself as the “Engagement OS.” A platform that makes it easy for businesses to talk to their customers. Instead of handling various channels separately, Intercom offers a single inbox for all chat, email, and other channels. Intercom also offers marketing features that allow you to build chatbots as well as automated in-app and email messaging. You’ll also find Intercom can act as a CRM, and it includes a knowledge base feature, allowing you to build self-serve education for your customers.
Intercom also recently released “Fin,” a ChatGPT-powered chatbot to automatically answer your customer’s questions. Fin allows Intercom customers to reply to customer questions without an agent and learns over time from your message history.
Compared to Tidio, though, Intercom offers less powerful e-commerce integrations. Intercom also has unintuitive pricing, and it’s hard to predict your monthly costs ahead of time.
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Intercom’s pricing starts at $74 for very small businesses and increases from there. They don’t currently offer flat rate plans based on users and features, and instead, they calculate their pricing by:
Test drive Intercom for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
Related Reading: Best Intercom Alternatives
Trengo is a powerful and versatile all-in-one communication platform for businesses that offers a range of features specifically designed to help companies improve their customer interaction processes. Some of the key features of Trengo include instant messaging, email, social media, and telephone channels, allowing businesses to manage all their conversations in one easy-to-use platform. In addition to customer support tools, Trengo allows businesses to proactively engage with website visitors through live chat and guide them through their journeys.
Trengo offers a similar feature set to Tidio, including tools to increase your sales. Trengo doesn't offer as strong of AI chatbot functionality, but they balance that with clearer pricing and the ability to create a help center - both of which Tidio lacks.
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Trengo pricing starts at $110 per month for a minimum of 5 users on their Grow plan and increases to $245 per month for a minimum of 5 users on their Enterprise plan. Annual plans offer a discount on their monthly prices.
Test drive Trengo for free using TestBox and compare it side-by-side with other popular customer support tools.
Olark is a straightforward Tidio chat alternative for your website, and if your goal is live chat, they check that box well. Their live chat tool includes general functionality like customization, automation, forms, and reports. You can also integrate your Olark software with leading e-commerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce.
Olark also offers a powerful chatbot option with their CoPilot tool; however, it requires you to let them build it for you. Unlike Tidio, Olark doesn’t have limits to how many visitors you can reach, which can take one worry off your mind.
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Olark pricing starts with a free plan for up to 20 chats a month and increases to $29 user/mo. Pricing for their more powerful tiers is available only via their sales team.
Drift is undeniably all about live chat, and if that’s what you’re looking to offer, it’s a great option. It features a no-code chatbot builder like Tidio, so you can automate customer conversations for more efficient servicing. Drift also has a user-friendly interface that makes it easy to manage customer conversations and the ability to tie into other systems, including leading CRMs, to improve sales.
Unfortunately, much like Tidio, Drift focuses heavily on chatbots and automation and doesn't offer the ability to set up a knowledge base. Drift is also quite expensive, but their pricing is based on the number of users, so you won't run into any message limitations.
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While Drift has a free plan offering 100 contacts a month, their paid plans start at $2500 per month on an annual plan.
Crisp is a live chat software offering a free plan with limited functionality. Crisp isn't just about chat, though. It lets you do many things outside of chat, including offering an integrated knowledge base and sending email responses. You can also share files, videos, and images. You can even invite customers to play a game to kill time waiting for a response for a bit of added amusement.
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Crisp offers a free forever plan for up to 2 users and unlimited chats, but with limited features. Paid plans start at $25mo for up to 4 seats and 5,000 contacts. Their Unlimited plan is $99mo for 20 seats and 50,000 contacts.
LiveAgent is a help desk software that provides a unified solution for customer communication. It allows businesses to manage communication channels like emails, chat, social media, phone calls, and knowledge base from a single platform.
While LiveAgent doesn’t go as deeply into chatbots as Tidio, it’s the perfect option for a team that offers phone as a channel because it offers call center-specific features. LiveAgent also offers an installable on-premise version for those enterprises with strict security protocols, which is rare in a cloud-driven software world.
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LiveAgent offers a free plan that offers one user, sharp reporting limitations, and other feature limitations compared to paid plans. Paid plans start at $12 user/mo ($9 annually) for their Small Business plan up to $85 user/mo ($69 annually) for their Enterprise plan.
The best alternative to replace Tidio comes down to what features you’re using. While Tidio has an all-in-one approach with live chat and email, it undeniably focuses on live chat and chatbots, and most of its customers do the same. If you’re looking for another all-in-one tool, you’ll want to consider different options than if you’re focused on that live chat experience.
Depending on what you’re looking for, these are the three alternatives we most recommend.
Option A: Gorgias
For an e-commerce team that wants everything Tidio offers while offering stronger integrations and support tools
While Gorgias hasn’t gone as strongly in the direction of chatbots, it has quite a lot of other features that will help you drive more sales and help your customers - all in one package. Gorgias also offers such deep integrations with e-commerce platforms that you can’t do better.
Option B: Intercom
For teams not focused on e-commerce who want to go deep into chatbots and AI
Stacked up side-by-side with Tidio, Intercom offers a similar feature set with much to recommend. Especially with their introduction of “Fin,” Intercom is focusing on automation and AI that will save you time and effort. Their pricing can be complex, though, and creating chatbots isn’t anywhere near as simple as it is with Tidio. However, Intercom allows for the creation of automated message series and a knowledge base for your customers.
Intercom offers a similar feature set with some notable improvements as long as you're not using Tidio for its e-commerce-specific features, or if you don't care about going as deep in that direction.
Option C: Zendesk + Tidio
For a smaller team that really loves Tidio’s chatbots and live chat but needs additional support-focused features
This is a bit of a rogue suggestion, but sometimes keeping your current platform and finding something else to fill in the gaps is the right way to go. Tidio has a native Zendesk integration that allows you to keep using Tidio for your live chat and website chatbots but then create tickets from chats.
You can even use Zendesk’s help center functionality with just a single seat. Even Tidio uses Zendesk for its help center, and nothing is stopping any business from doing the same. So if those basic tools are your main reason for moving on, adding another platform vs. a full migration is worth considering.
Overall, we think Gorgias will be your best option in the largest number of cases. Tidio's use case focuses heavily on e-commerce and sales, and Gorgias targets the same audience with its feature set. While it doesn't offer the same depth of chatbot functionality as Tidio, Gorgias does provide a great balance of automation and e-commerce integrations. And most importantly, it’s a well-rounded feature set for any customer support team.
A dedicated customer service solution with an integrated knowledge base is crucial for providing your best customer experience. Finding the right fit for your team, however, can be daunting. There are dozens of alternatives to Tidio out there, and the process of buying software is rarely fun. Endless demos, gated products, obscure pricing, and non-stop phone calls. Plus, after all that, there’s no guarantee that you’ll feel confident in your decision. It’s not a great use of your time.
Testing and comparing different tools side-by-side will help you evaluate software faster, and in the end, you’ll be more confident with your choice.TestBox allows you to test and compare the top customer support software solution side-by-side—for free. Start testing software now!
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