Tidio vs Crisp vs PepoChat: Live Chat With an AI Agent

If you are searching "tidio vs crisp", you are probably a small team choosing a live chat tool and wondering whether the AI add-ons are worth it. This post compares Tidio and Crisp head to head, then adds a third option that is built differently: PepoChat, an AI support agent rather than a chat suite. The three products overlap on the widget and the inbox but differ sharply on pricing model, channels and what the AI is actually allowed to answer from.

It is written for founders, support leads and marketers who will set the tool up themselves. Every price and limit below was checked on the vendors' own pages in September 2026; check their pricing pages for current numbers before you buy.

One framing before the details. Tidio and Crisp are broader products: they cover email, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram, and the AI is one feature among many. PepoChat is narrower on purpose: a web-only widget, an agent that answers only from your knowledge base, a team inbox for the handoff, and booking and meeting memory that the other two do not have.

Tidio vs Crisp vs PepoChat at a glance

How is each product priced?

The three pricing models are different enough that "which is cheaper" depends entirely on your volume and team size.

Tidio: plans metered by billable conversations, AI sold separately

Tidio's pricing page shows, as of September 2026 with annual billing selected, a Free plan, Starter at $24.17 per month, Growth from $49.17 per month, Plus from $300 per month plus usage, and a custom-priced Premium tier. Check their pricing page for current numbers; the figures shown are the annual rate, and monthly billing costs more.

The unit that matters is the billable conversation, which Tidio defines as "any live chat, ticket, email or social media channel conversation that includes a message from a human agent (you)." Unanswered visitor messages are not counted, and a thread counts once no matter how many messages it contains. Free includes 50 billable conversations a month, Starter 100, Growth from 250.

Lyro, Tidio's AI agent, is metered separately. A Lyro conversation is "a customer interaction initiated through any channel integrated with Tidio that has at least one reply from our AI agent," according to the Lyro page. Every account gets 50 one-off Lyro conversations; after that the add-on starts at $32.50 per month for 50 conversations, and the Lyro page quotes $0.50 per conversation. The two quotas are independent: a chat the AI resolves alone uses a Lyro conversation, and a chat a human answers uses a billable conversation.

Crisp: flat price per workspace, AI credits per tier

Crisp's pricing page lists, as of September 2026 at monthly billing, Free at $0, Mini at $45 per month, Essentials at $95 per month, Plus at $295 per month, and a custom Enterprise tier. Yearly billing is enabled from inside the app after you subscribe. All prices are per workspace, and paid plans describe conversation handling as unlimited.

Seats are the second axis. Free includes 2, Mini 4, Essentials 10 and Plus "20+"; the pricing page lists additional seats at $10 per month each. AI is metered in credits: Mini bundles $5 of credits described as "around 90 automated conversations", Essentials $25 for around 450, and Plus $75 for around 1,350. Crisp's AI page also describes fair-use AI with no per-conversation fee, so read the credit lines as the practical ceiling per tier.

PepoChat: one flat plan, no metering by seat or channel

PepoChat has two plans and no usage tiers. Free gives you 500 AI replies a month and 10 knowledge sources, with every feature enabled, no credit card, and month to month billing. Pro removes the reply and source limits, allows up to 5 team members and adds priority support; the pricing page has the price. There is no annual plan and no per-seat pricing beyond the Pro member cap, which is the honest answer if you were hoping for a volume discount.

A flat plan means the bill does not change when a busy month doubles your conversations. The trade-off is that you do not get the long list of channels the metered suites include.

What do you get on the free plan?

All three have a free tier, and they are aimed at different people.

Tidio Free is a working live-chat and ticketing product for a small team: 10 seats, 50 billable conversations a month, and a one-off allowance of 50 Lyro conversations to try the AI. Once that allowance is used, ongoing AI replies need the paid Lyro package.

Crisp Free is the widest free inbox of the three: 2 seats, but every channel from the chat widget to WhatsApp Business, Telegram and SMS, plus integrations with WordPress, Shopify, WooCommerce, Slack, HubSpot and Zapier. What it does not include is AI credits or the knowledge base, so Free Crisp is a human-answered inbox.

PepoChat Free is the whole product with a cap: 500 AI replies a month and 10 knowledge sources, where a full site crawl or a sitemap import counts as one source. Booking, meeting memory, integrations and the team inbox are all on it. When a free workspace hits the reply cap, new conversations are handed to the team inbox with a friendly message instead of failing, so visitors are never left with a dead widget.

How does each AI agent ground its answers?

Grounding is the practice of making an AI answer only from content you supplied, rather than from whatever the underlying model remembers. It is the single most important property of a support agent, because an ungrounded bot will confidently invent return policies. All three ground their agents; they differ in what you can feed them and what happens when nothing matches.

Tidio's Lyro "automatically scrapes your support content and uses it as its knowledge base," and the vendor's framing is that it stays "on script." When a question falls outside that content, Lyro creates a ticket so a human can answer, and you can set handoff rules for high-value customers or sensitive topics. Tidio claims users automate around 67% of inquiries on average; treat that as a vendor figure, not a benchmark for your site.

Crisp's AI agent, named Hugo, can be trained on four source types according to its training article: crawled web pages, knowledge-base articles (re-trained automatically when you edit them), files in TXT, CSV or PDF, and Q&A snippets. Import limits scale with the plan: 1 domain and 1 file on Mini, 3 domains and 5 files on Essentials, 10 domains and 100 files on Plus. The getting-started article says Hugo can run on OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or Mistral models, or on models hosted by Crisp, with default escalation rules that route to your inbox when it has no answer or the visitor seems frustrated. Crisp also offers a MagicReply bot block with a confidence setting for a suggested-reply mode.

PepoChat runs retrieval-augmented generation on every reply: the agent searches your workspace's private knowledge base, answers from what it finds, and streams the reply. Sources include PDFs (scanned pages go through a vision model), DOCX, Markdown, HTML, TXT, CSV, JSON and images, plus single URLs, sitemap imports and a same-site crawl of up to 50 pages, re-fetched weekly.

When nothing relevant is found, or the visitor asks for a person, the conversation escalates to the team inbox rather than the model guessing. Retrieved page content is wrapped as untrusted data in the prompt to resist injection from crawled pages. The training guide walks through the setup.

The practical difference: Crisp meters knowledge by domains and files per tier, Tidio meters the AI by conversations, and PepoChat meters by sources on Free and not at all on Pro.

Which one has the better human inbox and team seats?

A team inbox is the shared view where human operators pick up conversations the AI could not or should not handle. Every product here has one; the differences are about scale features and seat counts.

Tidio gives 10 seats on Free, Starter and Growth, and custom seat counts on Plus and Premium. Ticketing and email management are on every plan; automatic chat assignment, macros and permissions arrive at Growth, departments and multi-project at Plus. Tidio's own comparison page claims multiple team inboxes against what it describes as Crisp's single team inbox per organisation; if routing between departments matters to you, verify that in a trial of both.

Crisp's inbox is the product's core: on every plan, every channel lands in it, with seats scaling from 2 on Free to 20-plus on Plus and $10 per extra seat. Knowledge base and the omnichannel chatbot builder start at Essentials, unlimited task automations and white-labelling at Plus.

PepoChat's team inbox shows conversations live with unresolved, escalated and resolved statuses, filters, the full transcript and visitor details. Operators reply as themselves, an Enhance button rewrites a draft with AI, visitors can leave a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, and analytics show volume, votes and auto-labelled topics in weekly buckets. Members are invited by email with owner, admin and member roles. The cap is 5 members on Pro, which is fine for a small support team and not fine for a 20-agent contact centre; the human handoff post covers how escalation is designed to work.

Which channels does each product cover?

This is where the three separate most cleanly.

Tidio and Crisp are omnichannel inboxes: one queue that receives messages from the website widget and from external messaging apps. Tidio's pricing page lists live chat, ticketing, email and live video calls on every plan, plus Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp integrations. Crisp's Free plan alone lists the chat widget, contact forms, email, Telegram, Messenger, X, Instagram, SMS, Viber, phone, Line and WhatsApp Business, and Hugo can be assigned to specific channels while everything else goes to humans.

PepoChat is a website widget. It installs with one script tag, and there are no native Slack, WhatsApp, Messenger or Instagram channels; Slack and Discord appear only as actions the agent can trigger, not as places customers message you. The one extension is optional voice in the widget through your own Vapi account, and that voice assistant does not yet share the chat agent's knowledge base or appear in the inbox.

Can the chatbot book appointments from a real calendar?

Neither Tidio's nor Crisp's pricing page mentions calendar booking, so if you need it there, plan on wiring a third-party scheduler through their integration directories and check what each supports before you commit.

PepoChat does it natively. Connect a PepoSmart scheduling calendar with an API key, choose which meeting types the agent may offer, and write a short "when to offer this" note per type. The agent then gets a check-slots tool and a book tool for each type. Slots are shown in the visitor's local time and booked in the host's timezone, so the model never does timezone arithmetic.

PepoSmart re-validates the slot to prevent double booking, assigns a host (round-robin supported), creates the Google Meet, Zoom or Teams link and sends confirmations and reminders. Paid event types are excluded; booking uses the visitor's verified email, or the agent collects name and email in the chat. The appointment booking guide has the full flow.

Meeting memory is the companion feature: when enabled (it is off by default) and the visitor has verified their email with a one-time code, the agent can recall that person's past meetings from PepoSmart notes, including dates, key interests, commitments and summaries, and paraphrased bullets from their own transcript notes. Raw transcripts, recordings and third-party details never cross, access is logged on both sides, and without verification nothing is shown. Neither Tidio nor Crisp has an equivalent, because neither owns a meeting product. The meeting memory explainer covers why this matters for returning customers.

Which integrations and actions can the AI actually use?

An integration moves data between two apps; an action lets the AI agent call a system on the visitor's behalf mid-conversation. All three offer the first; look closely at the second.

Tidio lists native Shopify actions from the Growth plan and app integrations on every tier, with Lyro able to hand off into Zendesk, Intercom, Salesforce and other platforms. Crisp's pricing page lists WordPress, Shopify, WooCommerce, Adobe Commerce, Prestashop, Slack, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho, Segment, Zapier, Make, n8n, Stripe and Salesforce across plans.

PepoChat ships prebuilt, editable actions per provider: Stripe (look up, update or cancel subscriptions), Shopify and WooCommerce (live order status), Zendesk, Freshdesk and Zoho Desk (create and check tickets), HubSpot and Salesforce (find contacts, file cases), Slack and Discord alerts, Jira issues, Mailchimp and a Zapier catch hook. Custom actions can call any HTTPS endpoint with typed inputs and an allow-list of response fields the AI may see, and credentials are AES-256-GCM encrypted per organisation. One limit worth knowing: action execution is at-least-once, so a non-idempotent POST can rarely run twice, and refunds or payments should not be wired as actions.

Which should you choose? A decision by scenario

You run a Shopify or WooCommerce store and most support is "where is my order". Tidio's native Shopify actions on Growth and its ecommerce focus make it the conventional pick, especially if you also want Messenger and Instagram DMs in the same inbox. If your store support is web-first, PepoChat's Shopify and WooCommerce actions answer order-status questions from live data on the free plan, and the ecommerce use case shows the setup.

You are a bootstrapped SaaS with a small team and email plus website chat. Crisp's flat per-workspace price with a generous channel list is designed for this, and its Free plan is a real inbox. If you would rather the AI resolve the routine questions and book demos itself, PepoChat's flat plan does that without AI credits or per-conversation metering, and the 5-member Pro cap will not bite a team that size.

Your customers message you on WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS or Instagram. Tidio vs Crisp is the real contest, and Crisp lists more of those channels on its Free plan. PepoChat is not a fit here on its own.

You want an AI agent that books meetings and remembers returning customers. Only PepoChat has native calendar booking with slot validation and meeting memory tied to a verified email. Tidio and Crisp would need a separate scheduler bolted on.

You have 15 or more agents working the inbox. Crisp's 20-plus seats on Plus or Tidio's custom seat counts fit; PepoChat's Pro cap of 5 members rules it out as the primary inbox.

Your volume swings month to month. Metered products punish spikes: a busy month costs more on Tidio's billable-conversation model, and Crisp's AI credits cap automated replies per tier. Run your own numbers with last quarter's conversation counts before trusting any "starts at" figure.

You are evaluating AI-first agents rather than chat suites. Then the closer comparison is with tools like Chatbase, and the Chatbase vs PepoChat post covers that category.

What to do next

Decide the two structural questions first: which channels your customers actually use, and whether you want a bill that moves with volume or stays flat. That usually tells you whether you are choosing between Tidio and Crisp, or between a chat suite and an AI-first agent. If it is the latter, start a free PepoChat workspace, add your site as one knowledge source, and watch a week of real conversations in the inbox before paying anyone. The pricing page lists the free-plan limits, and the handoff post explains what to check when the agent escalates.