Tidio alternative: Asktopus vs Tidio and Lyro compared

Tidio is a popular customer service platform for small businesses, especially online stores. It combines live chat, a helpdesk and Lyro, its AI agent. People usually look for a Tidio alternative for one of three reasons: Lyro is priced separately on top of the helpdesk plans, the conversation limits and automatic upgrades make the monthly bill hard to predict, or they only need the AI part.

This is a comparison between Tidio and Asktopus, the AI chatbot we build. They're different kinds of tools, and we'll be clear about where Tidio is the better choice.

What Tidio does well

• Live chat and a helpdesk on every plan. Human agents can answer in live chat and tickets, even on the free plan, which includes 10 seats.¹
• Many channels. Lyro and your team can answer on your website, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and email.⁷
• Built for online stores. Lyro can sync products from Shopify and WooCommerce,⁶ and Tidio integrates with Shopify, WordPress, Zapier, Zendesk, Salesforce and Adobe Commerce.⁸
• Handoff inside the same tool. When Lyro can't answer, or the visitor asks for a person, it can transfer the chat to a live agent or create a ticket.⁷
• Many languages. Lyro supports 48 languages, including Danish and Spanish.⁹
• A free plan. Free forever, with no payment details,⁴ plus a 7-day trial of the paid features.⁵

If your team wants to chat with visitors live, or you want one inbox for chat, social messages and email, Tidio is built for that and Asktopus isn't.

Where Asktopus is different

The AI is included, not a separate package

Tidio's helpdesk plans (Starter from $29 a month, Growth from $59) are priced by the conversations your human agents handle. Lyro, the AI agent, is a separate package: from $39 a month for 50 Lyro conversations up to $700 for 1,000, and more than 1,000 needs the Plus plan.^{1, 2} The free plan's 50 Lyro conversations are a one-time allowance that doesn't renew.^{1, 4}

Asktopus is only the AI part, and the AI is the price: Starter is €39 for 300 conversations, Pro €99 for 1,500 and Business €249 for 5,000. One visitor's chat is one conversation, whether they ask one question or 25.

No automatic upgrades

On Tidio's monthly plans, automatic upgrade is on by default for new projects, and moves you to the next tier when you reach 95% of a quota.¹⁴ When you reach the limit of human-handled conversations without upgrading, you can no longer reply to incoming messages or see their details.³

Asktopus never changes your plan on its own. We email you at 80% and 100% of your monthly conversations. At the limit, you can buy 500 extra conversations for €39 (they're used after the month's and never expire) or upgrade from the billing page, and either takes effect straight away. Otherwise the assistant stops starting new conversations until your next billing cycle, and visitors see a short notice in their own language.

Room for your whole website

Lyro can learn from website URLs, Q&A pairs, CSV and PDF files, solved chats and help centres. Its website scan covers up to 60 priority pages, with a limit of 500 URLs unless you're on Plus.⁶

Asktopus reads your sitemap, groups your pages by URL pattern and learns from the sections you tick: up to 500 pages per site on Starter, 5,000 on Pro and 25,000 on Business, shared with the pages of the PDF, Word and CSV files you upload and the products you sync. For a large site, that's the difference between the AI knowing your whole site and a selection of it.

Branding removal is included on Pro

On Tidio, removing the Tidio branding is a $20 monthly add-on on Growth, and included on Plus and Premium.^{1, 13} On Asktopus, branding removal is included on Pro (€99) and Business. On our free plan and Starter plan, the widget shows our name too.

Weekly knowledge updates from €99

Lyro's automatic weekly re-syncs are only on Plus ($300 a month and up) and Premium, and re-syncing a website replaces its Q&A pairs, so manual edits to them are lost.^{1, 6} Asktopus updates each site's knowledge automatically every week on Pro (€99) and every 3 days on Business, and you can update right away with one click on any plan. Your hand-written knowledge articles are kept separate from the crawled pages, so an update never overwrites them.

Data protection

Tidio's contracting party is Tidio LLC in San Francisco, with Tidio Poland as a sub-processor.^{10, 11} Its DPA says data is processed primarily within the EEA,¹¹ and its help centre says data is stored on servers in EEA countries,¹² while its AI terms list Anthropic, hosted in the US, among the AI sub-processors.¹⁰

Asktopus is made by Uneven Bits ApS in Copenhagen. We're an EU data processor with a DPA, our servers and database are in a data centre in France, and the content of chat conversations is deleted automatically after 90 days. The language models come from OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI and run in the US, under the EU's standard contractual clauses. Our GDPR guide covers what to check with any vendor.

Asktopus vs Tidio: comparison table

Who should choose which

Tidio is the better fit if you:

• want your team to chat with visitors live, or answer email and social messages in one inbox
• want the AI to hand a chat to a live agent, or create a ticket, in the same tool

Asktopus is the better fit if you:

• want AI answers from your whole website, documents and product catalogue, without running a live chat team
• want the AI included in one monthly price, with no automatic upgrades
• have a large site that doesn't fit in 60 priority pages or 500 URLs
• want your knowledge updated every week and your own branding, both from the €99 plan

How to switch from Tidio to Asktopus

1. Start a trial. 14 days, no credit card.
2. Add your site. Asktopus scans your sitemap and groups pages by URL pattern. Tick the sections you want the assistant to learn from.
3. Move your knowledge. Upload your PDF files, and the Q&A pairs you wrote for Lyro as a CSV file with the question in the first column and the answer in the second. If you sell online, turn on product sync under Knowledge → Products.
4. Set up handoff. Choose where visitor messages go: email, Slack or a webhook.
5. Test in the "Try it" tab with your visitors' real questions.
6. Swap the embed code for the Asktopus script tag. The installation guide shows where it goes on WordPress and other platforms, and how the Asktopus app adds the chat on Shopify without code.

If Asktopus sounds like the better fit, see the plans and prices or try it free for 14 days on your own site.