Tidio vs Gorgias: which is better for your online store?

Tidio and Gorgias both promise to make support easier for online stores, and both connect to Shopify. That's where the similarity ends. Gorgias is a help desk: tickets, rules, macros and order actions for a team whose job is support. Tidio is a chat-first tool: live chat, an AI agent and an inbox for a store owner or small team who also do everything else.

The short answer: if you run a high-volume Shopify brand with a dedicated customer experience team, Gorgias is built for you. If you run a small or mid-size store, or sell on WooCommerce or BigCommerce, Tidio fits better and costs less to run. Black Friday is November 27, so if you are weighing a switch, only migrate now if you can finish by mid-October; otherwise read this to plan.

Tidio and Gorgias at a glance

	Tidio	Gorgias
Built for	Small and mid-size stores, owner-run teams	Shopify brands with a support team
Pricing model	By conversations a person replies to; Lyro billed separately	By billable ticket, with overage; unlimited users
AI agent	Lyro, billed by AI conversation volume	AI Agent add-on, billed per interaction; each also counts as a ticket
AI on WooCommerce or BigCommerce	Yes	No, Shopify only
Free plan	Yes, including 50 Lyro conversations	No; 7-day trial
Channels	Chat, email, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp	Chat, email, social, SMS, voice
Order actions	View carts and orders, recommend products, send discounts	Refund, cancel and edit orders inside the ticket
Sales features	Cart recovery, product recommendations, proactive chat	Mostly support-focused
Setup	An afternoon	Days, with rules, macros and integrations

Order handling inside conversations

Gorgias's best feature is what agents can do without leaving the ticket. They can see Shopify orders, issue refunds, cancel or edit orders and update shipping, and the same works partly for Magento and BigCommerce. For a team handling dozens of "please change my size" requests a day, that saves real time.

Tidio shows the customer's cart and orders next to the conversation, so agents never ask for an order number twice, and Lyro can check order status on its own. Changes to the order still happen in your store admin.

Winner: Gorgias.

AI agent

Both tools have AI agents that answer from your help content and store data. The differences are where they run and how they're billed.

• Gorgias AI Agent works only for stores on Shopify. It is billed per automated interaction, and each one also counts as a billable help desk ticket.
• Tidio's Lyro works on Shopify, WooCommerce and BigCommerce stores, answers in 45+ languages and recommends products from your catalogue. It is billed by AI conversation volume, separately from the conversations your team handles.

On Shopify, both handle typical shopping questions well. Off Shopify, only one of them has an AI agent.

Winner: Tidio, for its reach across store platforms; tie on Shopify.

Pricing in peak months

Neither tool is flat-priced, so the question is how the bill behaves when volume triples.

• Gorgias counts every conversation that gets a reply from an agent, a rule or the AI Agent as a ticket. Go over your plan and you pay per extra ticket, and AI interactions add their own fee on top.
• Tidio counts conversations a person replies to. Visitors you never answer aren't billed. Lyro conversations are billed separately, so a busy month raises the AI bill, not your human conversation count.

Before you compare plans, export your ticket counts for last November and December and price both tools at that volume.

Winner: Tidio, for small and mid-size stores. At very high volume with a large team, Gorgias's unlimited users can balance it out, while Tidio's Premium plan moves to pay-per-resolution billing with a guaranteed 50% Lyro resolution rate.

Channels and ecosystem

Gorgias covers email, chat, social, SMS and voice in one queue, and connects to more than a hundred e-commerce apps for returns, reviews, loyalty and subscriptions, including Recharge. Tidio covers chat, email, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp, which is what most small stores need, but has no voice or SMS and no native Recharge integration.

Winner: Gorgias.

Selling, setup and day-to-day running

Tidio treats chat as a sales channel. It has Flows for cart recovery, product recommendations and discount offers, and proactive messages on product and cart pages. It's also simple enough that the person who packs orders can run it.

Gorgias needs rules, macros, views and integrations set up properly to shine, which is fine for a team whose full-time job is support, and a lot for a store owner.

Winner: Tidio.

Choose Tidio if… / Choose Gorgias if…

Choose Tidio if:

• your store has one to ten people and no dedicated support manager;
• you sell on WooCommerce or BigCommerce, or plan to, and want an AI agent;
• you want chat to help sell, not just to answer tickets;
• you'd rather pay for conversations you answer than for every ticket and AI interaction;
• you want to start on a free plan;
• you're a high-volume brand that wants Tidio's services team to set up and keep improving the AI agent and its knowledge base for you (the Premium plan).

Choose Gorgias if:

• you run a high-volume Shopify brand with a customer experience team;
• your agents edit, cancel and refund orders all day;
• you need voice or SMS support in the same queue;
• you rely on subscription, returns or loyalty apps that Gorgias integrates with, such as Recharge;
• unlimited users matters more to you than per-ticket pricing.

What to do before Black Friday

1. Don't start a migration after mid-October. Moving help desks in the last weeks before the peak puts your busiest days on an untested tool. With about nine weeks to go, only a small, quick switch still fits.
2. Export last year's peak ticket counts and price both options at that volume.
3. If you're already on one of them, tune it: update help content, turn on AI for the top questions, and prepare saved replies. Our Black Friday checklist covers the rest.
4. Otherwise, plan the switch for late January, after the returns wave, using our guide to switching help desks without losing data.

Still deciding? See our list of Gorgias alternatives for small stores or every ranked alternative to Gorgias.