Looking for a Tidio alternative?

Tidio positions itself as an AI-first customer support tool. The pitch is that its chatbot (Lyro) handles common questions automatically, so your team only deals with conversations the bot can’t resolve. For ecommerce sites on Shopify, it has deep integrations that trigger chatbot flows based on cart activity, order status, and browsing behavior.

The pricing model reflects that AI focus: everything is metered. The free plan gives you 50 conversations per month. Paid plans give you more, but still cap them. Lyro AI is a separate add-on with its own per-conversation billing. For sites with steady traffic, the math gets complicated fast.

The TL;DR

Tidio is a good fit if you want a chatbot handling first contact and only escalating to humans when needed. It’s a poor fit if you just want a chat widget that routes messages to a person. Every tier meters conversations, the AI is a separate line item, and the pricing cliff from Growth to Plus is brutal. Bubblegram is flat-rate, routed to Telegram, with a free tier that gives you double Tidio’s conversation cap and a Pro tier that’s fully unlimited. No bot, no dashboard.

If this sounds like what you need, you can try Bubblegram free at dash.bubblegram.co. No credit card needed.

Why people switch

The conversation cap is a surprise. Teams sign up for Tidio’s free plan, install the widget, and within a few weeks hit the 50-conversation ceiling. The notification that you’ve “used your monthly conversations” comes mid-interaction for some users. On G2, reviewers describe upgrading not because they wanted more features, but because the free plan ran out of conversations.

Metering doesn’t stop on paid plans. Upgrading to Starter ($29/seat/mo) gives you 100 conversations. Growth ($59/seat/mo) gives you 2,000. These aren’t soft limits. And per-seat pricing means a 3-person team on Growth pays $177/mo for 2,000 conversations. Compare that to a Telegram group where there’s no conversation ceiling and no per-person billing.

The Growth-to-Plus cliff. If your site outgrows 2,000 conversations per month, the next tier is Plus at $749/mo. There’s no intermediate option. On Reddit, multiple founders have described this as the moment they started looking for alternatives. Going from $59/mo to $749/mo because traffic grew is a pricing model that punishes success.

Lyro AI is an add-on, not included. Tidio’s main selling point is AI-automated support, but Lyro isn’t included in the base plans. It starts at $39/mo for 50 AI-handled conversations, with higher tiers for more volume. A team on Growth ($59/mo) adding Lyro ($39/mo) is at $98/mo before the second seat. The total cost is harder to predict than the pricing page suggests.

Dashboard-only workflow. Tidio doesn’t offer a way to reply from Telegram. Every conversation happens inside Tidio’s interface. For teams that already use Telegram for internal communication, this means monitoring two separate apps. You get a notification from Tidio, switch to the Tidio dashboard, reply, then switch back to what you were doing.

What Tidio does better

Tidio’s chatbot builder is a real product, not a gimmick. The visual flow editor lets you design conversation trees with conditions, triggers, and fallbacks. For an ecommerce store that gets 50 “where’s my order?” messages a day, having a bot answer those automatically before a human ever sees them saves real time.

The Shopify integration is similarly genuine. Tidio can pull order status, trigger flows based on cart abandonment, and show product recommendations in the chat widget. If you run a Shopify store and want a chat widget that’s aware of your catalog, Tidio is built for that.

Bubblegram has no chatbot, no flow builder, no ecommerce integrations, and no AI. Every message goes to a human in Telegram. If your volume is high enough that you need automation, or your use case is ecommerce-specific, Tidio is the better choice.

Also considering Tawk.to, Crisp, or Chatwoot? We compared those too. Want the pricing math specifically? See our Tidio pricing breakdown, or the direct Tidio vs Crisp comparison.