Tidio vs PepoChat in 2026: Lyro AI, Pricing and Which to Pick

If you are choosing between Tidio and PepoChat, or asking whether PepoChat is a good Tidio alternative for a small business, this page puts the two side by side: how each one charges, what a real month costs, what the AI agent can do, and where each product is the better choice. It is written for store owners, SaaS founders and small support teams who want an AI agent on their website and need to know the bill before they commit.

The two products start from opposite ends. Tidio is live chat, a ticketing inbox and social messaging first, with Lyro, its AI agent, and Flows, its rule-based automation, sold as separate quotas on top. PepoChat is the AI agent first: one meter, AI replies, with a team inbox, 22 prebuilt actions across 13 integrations, calendar booking and, on paid plans, phone calls included.

We read Tidio's pricing page and help center on 12 November 2026, and PepoChat's product and docs, and compared them on the criteria below; we did not run paid trials. PepoChat is our product; we include it where it fits and say where other tools are the better choice. Facts below were checked on vendor pages on 12 November 2026.

Tidio vs PepoChat at a glance

Prices and features from each vendor's own pages, checked 12 November 2026. Tidio prices are monthly billing in US dollars before tax.

How does Tidio pricing differ from PepoChat pricing?

Tidio charges for conversations on two separate meters, one for your people and one for its AI, while PepoChat charges for AI replies on a single meter and lets your team reply for free.

Tidio's pricing page defines a billable conversation as "any live chat, ticket, email or social media channel conversation that includes a message from a human agent (you)." That count sets your plan: Free covers 50 a month, Starter is $29 for 100, and Growth runs from $59 for 250 to $349 for 2,000. A Lyro conversation is "a customer interaction initiated through any channel integrated with Tidio that has at least one reply from our AI Agent," counted once however often Lyro replies. Lyro steps cost $39 for 50, $75 for 100, $110 for 150, $140 for 200, $210 for 300, $350 for 500, $525 for 750 and $700 for 1,000 a month, with sales quotes above that.

Two rules in Tidio's Lyro AI agent limit article, updated 7 November 2026, move that count. A thread closes after 15 minutes of inactivity, so a visitor who writes again later starts a new counted conversation, and nothing is deducted when Lyro hands a chat to a person immediately. When Lyro answers first and a person finishes, one chat is counted on both meters, a double meter.

PepoChat bills an AI reply, which is one answer the agent sends; a conversation where the agent answers three times uses three, and messages your team types in the inbox use none. Free includes 100 replies a month, Starter $39 for 1,000 with 3 members, Growth $149 for 5,000 with 10 members, and Scale $499 for 17,000 with 20 members. Past a paid allowance, replies cost $39 per 1,000, and extra seats are $15 a month.

Each unit favours someone. Tidio's suits long AI conversations, since ten Lyro replies cost the same as one. PepoChat's suits AI-heavy months and teams that also answer themselves, since human replies are free. Both vendors charge ten months for a year of plan price, and our Tidio pricing guide covers every step, the automatic upgrades and the plan history.

What does a month cost on Tidio and on PepoChat?

On monthly list prices checked on 12 November 2026, the three months below cost $169, $409 and $789 on Tidio and $39, $52.65 and $149 on PepoChat, under these assumptions:

1. The AI answers first in every conversation and resolves 60% alone; a person replies in the other 40%. Tidio claims a 75% average for Lyro; 60% is the share our Tidio pricing guide uses.
2. We assume 3 AI replies per conversation, as our Tidio pricing guide and Tidio alternatives roundup do. Your number is on PepoChat's Analytics page, which shows conversations and messages.
3. On Tidio, every conversation is a Lyro conversation and the 40% a person answers are also billable. Each visitor writes once, Flows stay within 100 free visitors, the badge stays on, and no step is filled past 90%, so Tidio's automatic upgrade at 95% does not fire.
4. Each vendor's cheapest plan that covers the people and the volume.

Prices from each vendor's own pages, checked 12 November 2026, monthly billing, before tax.

A solo store owner with 180 conversations. A person answers 180 × 0.4 = 72, more than Free's 50, so Tidio needs Starter at $29. Lyro answers all 180, which lands on the 200 step at $140: $29 + $140 = $169. PepoChat needs 180 × 3 = 540 AI replies, past Free's 100 and inside Starter's 1,000: $39.

A team of three with 450 conversations. People answer 450 × 0.4 = 180, past Starter's 100, so Tidio needs Growth's 250 step at $59, and Lyro's 450 land on the 500 step at $350: $59 + $350 = $409. PepoChat needs 450 × 3 = 1,350 replies; the 350 past Starter's 1,000 cost 350 × $0.039 = $13.65, so $39 + $13.65 = $52.65, with the three people inside Starter's 3 members. Starter plus overage stays cheaper than Growth until about 3,800 replies.

A team of six with 900 conversations. People answer 900 × 0.4 = 360, inside Growth's 400 step at $89, and Lyro's 900 need the 1,000 step at $700: $89 + $700 = $789, ten seats included. PepoChat needs 900 × 3 = 2,700 replies. Starter would be $39 + 1,700 × $0.039 = $105.30 plus 3 extra seats × $15 = $45, so $150.30; Growth includes 5,000 replies and 10 members for $149.

If Lyro hands the 40% to a person at once instead of trying first, Tidio deducts nothing for those chats, and the Lyro count falls to 108, 270 and 540, on the 150, 300 and 750 steps: $29 + $110 = $139, $59 + $210 = $269 and $89 + $525 = $614. We left PepoChat at three replies a conversation throughout, which overstates its bill for quick handoffs.

At 2,000 conversations a month Lyro passes its 1,000 self-serve ceiling, and Tidio's Plus starts at $300 a month plus usage rates it does not publish, so that month is a sales quote. On PepoChat, 6,000 replies cost $149 + 1,000 × $0.039 = $188 on Growth.

What can you test before you pay?

Both have a free plan, but Tidio's is human live chat with a one-off AI sample, while PepoChat's is the AI agent itself with a monthly allowance.

Tidio Free includes 10 seats, 50 billable conversations a month, live chat, ticketing, the email and social integrations, the mobile app, 100 Flows visitors and one Lyro Action. Every account gets 50 Lyro conversations once; when they are used, Lyro stops and the quota does not reset. A 7-day trial unlocks paid features without a card, then drops the account to Free. At the monthly limit, Tidio's help center says you "will no longer be able to respond to incoming messages, nor see their details" until the reset or an upgrade.

PepoChat Free includes 100 AI replies a month, 5 knowledge sources and 1 member, with every chat feature: team inbox, human handoff, all actions, booking, analytics, the API and webhooks. Voice, phone and new-lead emails need a paid plan. When the 100 replies are used, new conversations go to the team inbox with a friendly message instead of failing.

At three replies a conversation, 100 replies is about 33 AI-answered conversations, so Free is a test bed and a plan for very small sites. Its advantage over a 7-day trial is time: start a free PepoChat workspace without a card, add your website as one knowledge source, and watch a month of real conversations before deciding.

What can each AI agent learn from?

Both agents answer from content you supply; Tidio adds product catalog sync, while PepoChat adds larger crawls, connected apps and automatic re-fetching from its $39 plan.

Tidio's data sources article, updated 8 November 2026, lists website scans (up to 100 pages a scan and 500 URLs in total), Q&A pairs, CSV files (500 entries each, 10,000 in total), PDFs (10 an upload, 30 MB each), public Zendesk Help Center articles, and product sync from Shopify, WooCommerce or Tidio's API. Weekly automatic re-sync is a Plus and Premium feature; otherwise you re-sync by hand. Tidio's help center lists 51 languages for Lyro.

PepoChat's knowledge base, the private collection of pages and documents the agent searches before every answer, takes a site crawl of up to 200 pages, a sitemap import of up to 200 URLs, single links, files (PDF including scans, DOCX, Markdown, HTML, TXT, CSV, JSON and images), Q&A pairs, Notion and Google Drive, and a built-in Help Center. A whole crawl counts as one source: Free allows 5 sources, the paid plans unlimited. On paid plans URL sources are re-fetched weekly, re-indexing only changed pages.

For stores, Tidio reads your product catalog and can recommend products, while PepoChat learns products only from pages it crawls.

How do human handoff and the team inbox compare?

Tidio is the fuller inbox, with ticketing, email, social channels and mobile apps, while PepoChat's team inbox is built around the AI's handoff on the website and phone.

Tidio's Lyro article, updated 9 November 2026, sets the handoff separately for online and offline hours: transfer to an agent (the default), keep the chat with Lyro, or create a ticket, where Lyro collects an email and files the transcript. Lyro can respond always or only when agents are offline. Agents work from the browser, a desktop app or the iOS and Android apps.

PepoChat's team inbox shows conversations live with unresolved, escalated and resolved statuses, assignment, tags, priority, macros, internal notes and an Enhance button that rewrites a draft. The agent hands off when it cannot answer from the knowledge base or the visitor asks for a person. A Team availability card sets whether your team answers live, only during business hours, or by email later; the AI keeps answering in every mode, and each handoff sends an email alert, a webhook and an optional Slack message.

PepoChat is not a help desk: there is no shared email mailbox, no email ticketing and no SLA timers, and no native mobile app, although the dashboard works in a phone browser.

Which actions and integrations can the AI agent use?

PepoChat puts 22 prebuilt actions and custom API actions on every plan, while Tidio allows one Lyro Action on Free and three with a Lyro package, with its ready-made templates on Plus and Premium.

Tidio's Lyro Actions article describes API calls Lyro can make and two ready-made Shopify steps that look up an order or change its shipping address, limited to 1 active Action on Free, 3 with the Lyro AI Agent package, 10 on Plus and more on Premium, "meant for advanced users or developers." The Action templates (Calendly booking links, Shopify order status with a tracking link, contacts in Klaviyo, Mailchimp and HubSpot) are "available to all subscribers of the Plus and Premium packages, as well as selected subscribers of the Lyro AI Agent package." Growth adds native Shopify actions for your human agents.

PepoChat's prebuilt actions cover Stripe subscriptions, Shopify order status by order number, WooCommerce orders by number or email, Zendesk, Freshdesk and Zoho Desk tickets, HubSpot and Salesforce lookups, Slack and Discord alerts, Jira, Mailchimp and Zapier. Custom actions call any HTTPS endpoint with up to 10 inputs. None moves money, and execution is at-least-once, so never wire refunds or payments as actions.

Tidio wins three details: its Shopify template returns a tracking link, where PepoChat gives status by order number without one; its Shopify step changes an order's shipping address, which no PepoChat action does; and its templates create HubSpot and Klaviyo contacts, which PepoChat's actions do not. PepoChat wins on access, with no plan gate. Booking follows the same pattern: Tidio's Calendly template sends a link, while PepoChat checks live availability in Cal.com or PepoSmart and books inside the chat on every plan, with no Calendly or Google Calendar option; the appointment booking docs list what it cannot book.

Which channels does each product cover?

Tidio covers far more channels: email, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp sit in its inbox on every plan, Free included, and Lyro can answer on each.

Tidio also offers live video calls in the widget, a chat page from Starter and a mobile SDK on Premium, and since 26 October 2026 Lyro follows whole email threads. PepoChat answers in a website widget, added with one script tag or the WordPress plugin, and on a hosted chat page; WhatsApp and Messenger are in limited rollout while Meta's app review is pending, and there is no Instagram, email or SMS channel. If a real share of your customers write on Instagram or WhatsApp, this row decides it for Tidio.

Do Tidio or PepoChat answer phone calls?

PepoChat answers voice calls in the widget and inbound calls on your own number on its paid plans, while Tidio has no AI voice or phone agent as of November 2026.

Tidio's 2026 Edition page lists Lyro Voice under "Exploring," described as "In discovery with customers, no date yet."

On PepoChat's Starter, Growth and Scale plans, visitors can start a voice call in the widget, and a Twilio number or SIP trunk lets the agent answer your line, with the same knowledge base, actions, booking and handoff as chat. An optional transfer number passes callers who ask for a person; otherwise the agent takes a message. One started minute counts as 6 AI replies, so Starter's 1,000 replies cover about 166 minutes, and a minute past the allowance costs about $0.23; your carrier bills the line. There is no outbound calling, call recording or SMS, and Free has no voice. See the voice docs.

Where each product is stronger

Tidio is stronger on:

• Channels: email, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp in one inbox on every plan.
• Mobile apps for iOS and Android, plus a desktop app.
• Seats: 10 on every self-serve plan, Free included.
• Flows: a visual drag-and-drop builder for proactive messages, with steps from $29 a month.
• Ecommerce depth: catalog sync, product recommendations, Shopify tracking links and shipping address changes.
• Track record, as of November 2026: 4.8 stars from 1,357 reviews on the Shopify App Store, 4.8 from 395 ratings on WordPress.org, and a SOC 2 Type II examination cited in its FAQ.
• Badge removal for sale, from $20 a month on Growth.

PepoChat is stronger on:

• The AI agent inside every plan: 100 replies a month free, 1,000 for $39, and no meter on human replies.
• Lower bills for AI-heavy months: $52.65 against $409 in the three-person example.
• 22 prebuilt actions and custom HTTPS actions on every plan, Free included.
• Booking into Cal.com or PepoSmart from the chat.
• Voice calls and phone answering on the same agent from $39.
• Weekly re-fetching of website sources from Starter, plus Notion and Google Drive.

PepoChat is a young product with few public reviews and publishes no compliance certifications, and its badge shows on every plan.

Which one should you pick?

Shopify store whose customers DM on Instagram and WhatsApp. Tidio. Those channels sit in its inbox on every plan and Lyro answers them; PepoChat cannot answer Instagram.

Five or more people answering chats by hand, often from a phone. Tidio. Ten seats on every self-serve plan and native mobile apps suit a staffed inbox.

Store that wants proactive messages and quote forms without code. Tidio. Flows is a visual builder for rule-based campaigns; PepoChat has no equivalent.

Website-first SaaS, agency or service business that wants the AI to answer most questions. PepoChat. At 450 conversations a month the worked example costs $52.65 against $409, with actions and handoff included.

Clinic, consultant or local business that books appointments and takes calls. PepoChat. It books into Cal.com or PepoSmart and answers your phone line from Starter; Tidio has no AI voice.

A business testing AI support before spending anything. PepoChat. Its Free plan runs the full chat agent every month, where Tidio's AI sample is 50 conversations once.

What to do next

• Read Tidio pricing explained for every Tidio step and the badge fee.
• Compare more options in the best Tidio alternatives, or add Crisp with Tidio vs Crisp vs PepoChat.
• Check which plan covers your volume and team on the PepoChat pricing page.
• Start a free PepoChat workspace, add your site as one knowledge source, and compare a week of conversations with your Tidio usage.
• Weighing other tools as well? Read Intercom vs PepoChat, Crisp vs PepoChat and Chatbase vs PepoChat, or see every comparison on one page.