Tidio Lyro vs Intercom Fin vs Zendesk AI Agents: 2026 Comparison

Most comparisons of Tidio, Intercom and Zendesk compare the suites. This one compares only their AI agents, Lyro, Fin and Zendesk's AI agents, because that is often the real decision: which AI answers first, what each conversation costs and what the agent can do before a person steps in. The comparison is for founders, store owners and support leads who pay the bill.

Every price, billing rule and capability below was read on the vendor's own pricing page or help center on 19 October 2026, at monthly-billing rates. Costs use the assumptions of our AI customer support pricing index, so the totals match it, and help-center rules the index does not cover are noted where they apply. PepoChat is our product and appears as a fourth column for reference, limits included.

For the suites themselves, Intercom vs Zendesk compares seats, channels and reporting, and Tidio vs Crisp vs PepoChat covers Tidio's inbox and plans.

Who is each AI agent built for?

Each agent is built for the customers of its own platform, and that matters more than any feature list.

Tidio Lyro is the AI agent in Tidio, a live chat and helpdesk app popular with online stores. Lyro can be bought on its own, on top of Tidio's free chat plan with 10 seats, and answers on the website widget, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and email. Tidio says Lyro runs on Anthropic's Claude and its own models and resolves 75% of conversations on average.

Intercom Fin is included in every Intercom plan and also runs on Zendesk, Salesforce, HubSpot, Freshdesk and other helpdesks for a $49 monthly base. Intercom's helpdesk is built around its Messenger, so Fin suits chat-first and software teams; its cost calculator assumes a 76% average resolution rate.

Zendesk AI agents come with Zendesk's Suite and Support plans, for teams that already run email, messaging and voice through Zendesk tickets. Zendesk says they resolve up to 80% of interactions, and admins describe policies in plain language as generative procedures.

PepoChat, our product, is a standalone AI support agent: a chatbot that answers from your own content and hands the conversation to your team when it cannot help. PepoChat runs as a website widget with a team inbox on flat monthly plans and publishes no resolution rate, so treat every vendor rate above as an average, not a forecast.

How do Lyro, Fin and Zendesk AI agents compare side by side?

The three agents differ most in the unit they bill and the plan they need, and least in what they can read, since all three answer from help-center content and files. The table adds PepoChat as a flat-plan reference column.

Last verified 19 October 2026 on each vendor's pricing page and help center, including the Tidio pricing page and Fin's pricing page. Prices are in US dollars at monthly billing.

Two rows decide most purchases. The unit row shows whether a better knowledge base raises your bill: Fin and Zendesk bill success, Lyro every conversation it joins, PepoChat replies. The plan row shows what you pay before the first AI answer: nothing for Lyro, a seat or a $49 base for Fin, a $69 seat for Zendesk.

What counts as a billable conversation or resolution on each?

Each vendor bills a different event, and the rule that decides your count sits in its help center, not on the pricing page.

Tidio Lyro: a conversation with at least one Lyro reply

Tidio's pricing page defines a Lyro conversation as a customer interaction with "at least one reply from our AI Agent", counted once however often Lyro answers. Tidio's help article on the Lyro limit, updated 15 September 2026, adds that a thread closes after 15 minutes of inactivity, so a visitor who writes again later starts a new counted conversation, and that an immediate handoff is not counted.

Tidio's pricing FAQ says a returning customer still counts once, so ask Tidio which rule applies. On email, Lyro answers only a ticket's first message, and Tidio's Premium plan, from 3,000 Lyro conversations a month, offers pay-per-resolution billing through sales.

Intercom Fin: an outcome

Intercom bills Fin per outcome, a resolution or a Procedure handoff, at most once per conversation. A resolution counts when the customer confirms the answer helped or "exits the conversation without requesting further assistance", in the words of Intercom's outcomes article, and Fin's pricing help sets that silence at 24 hours. A Procedure handoff counts when Fin completes a Procedure you configured to end with a person or a workflow.

Intercom does not bill a conversation in which the customer asks for a human, Fin's default escalation hands over or a Procedure fails, and it refunds an outcome when the customer reopens the conversation. Our Fin pricing breakdown works through these rules at three resolution rates.

Zendesk AI agents: a verified automated resolution

Zendesk bills automated resolutions and, since 18 May 2026, sorts every AI conversation into three tiers. An assisted escalation, finished by a person, and a contained resolution, which an AI check could not confirm, cost nothing; only a verified resolution draws on your allowance. Zendesk's resolution tiers article, updated 15 October 2026, says a language model reads the transcript when the conversation ends: by default 2 hours after the first message on messaging, and 72 hours after the first email.

PepoChat: an AI reply

PepoChat counts AI replies: each answer the agent sends counts once, whether or not the conversation resolves. Replies your team types in the inbox, the greeting, system messages and test chats do not count.

The definitions decide who pays for a wrong answer. A customer who gives up silently after a poor reply is a billed resolution at Intercom, billed at Zendesk only if the AI check judges the request satisfied, and billed at Tidio and PepoChat either way.

What do 500 and 2,000 AI conversations a month cost?

At 500 AI conversations a month the four agents cost $49 to $1,059 on October 2026 list prices, and at 2,000 they cost $69 to $4,059, with Tidio's price set in a sales call. The totals use the pricing index's assumptions:

• Billing: monthly list prices, with no annual, startup or volume discounts.
• Seats: one seat, where the AI needs one.
• Units: every conversation counts as one billable unit under the vendor's own definition, the ceiling for per-resolution tools.
• Replies: two AI replies per conversation, which matters only for PepoChat.

Last verified 19 October 2026. Totals are estimates from published monthly list prices, not quotes, and match the AI customer support pricing index.

The per-resolution rows are ceilings. If half your conversations end in a billable outcome, Fin falls to $39 + 250 × $0.99 = $286.50 at 500 and $39 + 1,000 × $0.99 = $1,029 at 2,000, and Zendesk to $69 + 245 × $2.00 = $559 and $69 + 995 × $2.00 = $2,059. Lyro's $350 and PepoChat's $49 or $69 do not move with the resolution rate.

Three variations change the rows. Fin on another helpdesk swaps the seat for a $49 base with 50 outcomes, so 2,000 outcomes cost $49 + 1,950 × $0.99 = $1,979.50 on top of that helpdesk. A Zendesk team that commits to a volume in advance pays $1.50, making the 2,000 row $69 + 1,995 × $1.50 = $3,061.50. Zendesk's help center also states the included allowance in dollars, $2 per Suite Team seat a month, rather than as 5 resolutions, so get yours in writing.

Tidio publishes no price above 1,000 Lyro conversations a month. Its Lyro page advertises $0.50 a conversation, so 2,000 on Plus would be about $300 + 2,000 × $0.50 = $1,300 if that rate applied: a floor for the sales call, not a quote. PepoChat's row depends on the replies assumption; at three replies per conversation, 2,000 conversations cost $49 + 4 × $10 = $89 on Starter. Our conversation sizing guide helps you size yours.

What can each AI agent learn from?

All four agents learn from help-center articles, web pages and files. They differ in how pages are imported, how often content refreshes and which apps they read.

Lyro turns your content into question-and-answer pairs you can edit. Tidio's data sources article, updated 17 October 2026, lists a website scan of up to 100 priority pages at a time and 500 URLs in total, Q&A pairs, CSV and PDF uploads, a public Zendesk help center import and answers extracted from solved chats. Re-syncing a page replaces its pairs, manual edits included, and weekly automatic re-sync needs Plus or Premium.

Fin learns from Intercom help articles, snippets and PDFs and syncs your website, Zendesk or Notion. Intercom says Fin answers in more than 45 languages, even from content that was never translated.

Zendesk AI agents search your Zendesk help centers live and read external content from a web crawler or a knowledge connector, such as Google Drive, synced about every 24 hours.

PepoChat imports a website crawl or sitemap of up to 200 pages, PDF, DOCX, Markdown, HTML, TXT, CSV, JSON and image files, Notion and Google Drive pages that re-sync daily, and Q&A pairs. Website pages re-fetch weekly on every plan, and a whole-site crawl counts as one of the Free plan's 5 knowledge sources.

Which AI agent can check an order or take other actions?

All four agents can look up live data such as an order's status. What differs is whether the connection comes ready-made and how many actions your plan allows.

Lyro Actions call an API from inside a conversation. Tidio allows 1 Action without a Lyro plan, 3 with the Lyro AI Agent plan and 10 on Plus, and its templates for Shopify order status, Calendly, Klaviyo, Mailchimp and HubSpot are open to Plus, Premium and selected Lyro subscribers. Lyro Connect, which puts Lyro on Zendesk, Intercom or Salesforce, needs Plus or Premium.

Fin reaches other systems through data connectors over an API or an MCP server, and through Procedures that mix plain-language steps, code and connectors. Fin's integrations page lists 60 connectors, including Shopify, Stripe, WooCommerce and Jira.

Zendesk AI agents use configured actions for session data and labels, action flows for multi-step work, and custom actions that call an API you specify. Generative procedures decide when to call them, so an order lookup is usually a custom action your admin builds against the store's API.

PepoChat ships 13 prebuilt integrations, including Shopify and WooCommerce order status, Stripe subscriptions and Zendesk, Freshdesk and Zoho Desk tickets, plus custom HTTPS actions, up to 20 per workspace on every plan. Because actions run at least once, refunds and payments should never be wired as actions. The integrations overview lists every action, the order status guide shows the Shopify setup, and our explainer on agentic AI in customer service covers which actions are safe to automate.

How does each agent hand off to a person?

All four agents hand off when a customer asks for a person. They differ in where the conversation lands and whether the handoff is billed.

Lyro transfers the chat to the Tidio inbox by default, online or offline, or can keep the conversation or create a ticket, asking for the visitor's email and attaching the transcript. Handoff audiences route chosen visitors, by country or channel, straight to your team.

Fin escalates by default when a customer clearly asks for a human, shows strong frustration or repeats themselves. Escalation rules and guidance override those defaults, the conversation lands in the Intercom inbox or your helpdesk, and only a handoff at the end of a Procedure is billed.

Zendesk AI agents escalate a messaging conversation as a ticket to the Support group named in the agent's transfer setting, and an assisted escalation is never billed.

PepoChat escalates when the visitor asks for a person or accepts an offer of help after the agent finds no answer, and offers a person when a tool fails or the visitor is frustrated. The conversation moves to the team inbox, members are emailed the reason and the last three messages, and the Team availability setting decides whether the agent promises a live reply or collects an email, as the human handoff docs describe.

What happens when the AI allowance runs out?

At the limit, Lyro upgrades you, Fin and Zendesk keep billing unless you set a stop, and PepoChat's Free plan hands new chats to people.

Tidio gives every account 50 free Lyro conversations once, and Lyro stops when they are used. On a paid monthly Lyro plan, Tidio's automatic upgrades article describes an alert at 80% of the quota and a move to the next tier at 95%, on by default; after the 500 tier the next step is 750 conversations for $525. Annual and Plus subscriptions are not upgraded automatically, and the article does not say what Lyro does at 100% with the switch off, so ask Tidio.

Intercom includes no outcomes on its own plans, so Fin bills every outcome until you set a limit. Usage alerts only send email; a hard limit, available after the trial, switches Fin off for the rest of the billing period and sends new conversations straight to your handover steps, as Intercom's usage article explains.

Zendesk keeps AI agents answering past the allowance by default and bills the overage monthly at the pay-as-you-go rate. The Don't allow overage setting pauses the AI agent at the limit and routes requests to people, according to Zendesk's allowance article.

PepoChat's Free plan hands new conversations to the team inbox with a friendly message once its 200 monthly replies are used, until the first of the next month. Starter and Growth keep answering and bill $10 per 1,000 extra replies.

How much setup does each need, and where does each break for a small team?

Lyro is the quickest to switch on for a Tidio user and Fin for an Intercom user, while Zendesk's AI agents assume a Suite with messaging and a help center already in place, though Zendesk says they deploy in minutes. Each one has a point where a small team pays for more than it uses.

Lyro breaks on growth and depth. Above 1,000 conversations a month the price becomes a sales quote, 3 Actions may not cover order status, returns and booking together, pages re-sync by hand below Plus, and the 15-minute thread rule can count one question twice.

Fin breaks on the bill. Outcomes rise as your knowledge base improves, a silent customer counts as resolved, and connectors and Procedures take real configuration. Outside Intercom, the $49 base sits on top of a helpdesk you keep paying for.

Zendesk AI agents break on seats. Five included resolutions per agent give a two-person team 10 a month, and each Suite Team seat costs $69 a month however busy the AI is. For a team already in Zendesk those costs are sunk, and the verified-resolution rule is the strictest billing definition of the three.

PepoChat breaks on channels and scale, and we would rather say so. PepoChat answers on a website widget and hosted chat page only, with no WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, SMS or email channel, and voice runs on your own Vapi account, apart from the chat agent and inbox. Plans include 1, 3 or 10 members, there are no routing rules or SLAs, actions stop at 20 per workspace, and PepoChat publishes no SOC 2 or ISO certification.

Which AI agent should you choose?

Choose the agent that matches the helpdesk you already run, then check the bill at your real volume, not the vendor's average resolution rate.

• Choose Lyro if you run Tidio, sell online, want Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp in the same inbox and stay under 1,000 AI conversations a month. The Tidio alternative page compares the whole suite with PepoChat.
• Choose Fin if your team works in Intercom, or wants one agent across chat, email, Slack, Discord and the phone, and a conversation is worth far more than $0.99 to you. The Intercom alternative page prices the seats as well.
• Choose Zendesk AI agents if Zendesk already holds your tickets, macros and reports and you want to pay only for verified resolutions. Our Zendesk AI agent decision guide covers the tiers and a hybrid setup, and the Zendesk alternative page compares the suite.

What to do next

• Count last quarter's monthly AI conversations, then run them through the cost table above and the pricing index for the vendors that fit your helpdesk.
• If the suite decision is still open, read Intercom vs Zendesk before you pick an agent.
• To test the flat-plan route, compare PepoChat's plans on the pricing page or create a free workspace with 200 AI replies a month and every feature on the free plan.