Gorgias vs Tidio Lyro (2026)
This is the small-store starter comparison: Tidio's Lyro agent with a genuine free plan against Gorgias's $10-a-month Shopify-native help desk. Tidio is the cheapest way to automate a handful of FAQs, while Gorgias offers deeper order context and workflow automation as volume grows. New stores start with Tidio and graduate to Gorgias when the ticket count climbs.
At a glance
| Attribute |
 Gorgias
|
 Tidio Lyro
|
|---|---|---|
| What it is | The conversational AI platform for e-commerce brands, deeply integrated with Shopify. | AI customer service agent for small and mid-size businesses, bundled with live chat and a simple help desk. |
| Pricing | Paid · $10/mo | Freemium · Free; Lyro AI from $32.50/mo |
| Est. monthly cost | $10/mo $10/mo | $33/mo $32.50/mo; Lyro AI Agent plan, from 50 conversations/mo; free plan available |
| Founded | 2015 | 2013 |
| Categories | AI Agents & Chatbots E-commerce Support Help Desk & Ticketing | AI Agents & Chatbots E-commerce Support |
| Channels | ||
| Chat | ✓ | ✓ |
| ✓ | — | |
| Voice | ✓ | — |
| SMS | ✓ | — |
| ✓ | — | |
| Social | ✓ | — |
| Compliance (vendor-claimed) | ||
| SOC 2 | ✓ | ✓ |
| HIPAA | ✓ | — |
| Data residency | EU (for EU merchants), plus other regions | EU |
| Languages | 80+ languages | 45+ languages |
| What the AI can do | ||
| Takes actions | ✓ | ✓ |
| Hands off to a human | ✓ | ✓ |
| Choice of LLM | Not verified | Not verified |
| Buying | ||
| Free trial | Free trial (length not stated) | Free plan; 7-day free trial of all plans, no credit card |
| How you buy | Self-serve signup | Self-serve signup |
| Minimum commitment | — | — |
| Company | Independent, venture-backed | Independent, venture-backed |
| Works with | Shopify Klaviyo Instagram WhatsApp Slack Recharge | Shopify WordPress Instagram Messenger WhatsApp Zapier |
| Key features |
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| Next step |
Full listing Visit site → |
Full listing Visit site → |
Estimates assume 5,000 conversations a month, 60% handled by AI and 10 agent seats, at each vendor's published list price (the cost calculator's model); treat them as a floor, not a quote. Compliance rows are what vendors publicly claim, and “Not verified” means we have not confirmed that fact yet, not that the tool lacks it.
Choose Gorgias or Tidio Lyro?
Choose Gorgias if
Best for: Shopify, BigCommerce and Magento stores that want a help desk whose AI agent answers order, shipping and return questions from live store data and can edit orders or issue refunds, across chat, email, voice, SMS, WhatsApp and social, from $10 a month with a self-serve start.
- you need a full help desk and ticketing suite
- you need Email, Voice, and SMS coverage
- you need a vendor that publicly claims HIPAA
- you want the lower list-price bill (about $10/mo vs $33/mo at 5,000 conversations a month)
Look elsewhere if you are not an online store: Gorgias is built for e-commerce and its value comes from the commerce integrations. Ticket-based pricing also climbs with volume, so model your busiest month.
Choose Tidio Lyro if
Best for: Small and mid-size businesses and e-commerce stores that want live chat, a simple help desk and an AI agent in one package, starting free with a 7-day trial of every plan and no card, Lyro from $32.50 a month, 45+ languages, EU hosting and SOC 2 coverage, with Shopify, WordPress, Instagram and WhatsApp built in.
- you want to start on a free or low-cost plan
Look elsewhere if you need voice or email as verified channels, or an enterprise compliance portfolio: Tidio's verified channel is chat, and it is built for SMBs rather than large regulated operations.
About Gorgias
Gorgias is a help desk built specifically for online stores, and it knows its lane cold. It integrates deeply with Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento, so its AI Agent can answer customer emails and chats about orders, shipping, returns, and products using live store data, then take real actions like editing an order or issuing a refund right inside the ticket. A Copilot assists human agents with drafts and summaries, and because Gorgias tracks the revenue that support conversations drive, it treats your help desk as a place that can make money, not just spend it.
The origin story is delightfully accidental. Gorgias started in Paris in 2015 as a humble Chrome extension for email templates, until the founders noticed that support agents were the ones actually using it and pivoted the whole company toward them. It shares its name with Gorgias of Leontini, the ancient Greek orator immortalized in one of Plato's dialogues, a fittingly talkative namesake for a conversation platform. Today it is a certified B Corporation and Shopify's only Premier Partner for customer experience, powering a large share of the biggest Shopify brands.
That focus has won a who's who of direct-to-consumer names, including Steve Madden, Glossier, Dr. Bronner's, and Marine Layer, with more than sixteen thousand brands on board in total. Pricing starts at just ten dollars a month and is based on ticket volume with unlimited users, so growing teams are not punished for adding people, and the AI Agent is billed per resolved conversation.
Its 2.0 release added a shopping assistant, image analysis, and cart-recovery flows in more than eighty languages, pushing Gorgias further into the world of support-driven selling. For any e-commerce brand living on Shopify that wants an AI agent tuned to the specific rhythms of online retail rather than a generic one, Gorgias is the obvious specialist pick.
Read the full Gorgias listing → · See Gorgias alternatives →
About Tidio Lyro
Tidio bundles live chat, ticketing, and Lyro, its autonomous AI agent, into one package aimed squarely at small and mid-size businesses and the e-commerce brands among them. Lyro answers common questions from your own support content, strictly on script and on brand, and now handles email tickets as well as live chat, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, and SMS. Smart Actions let it do more than talk, updating addresses, logging leads, checking order status, and recommending products through your systems, and it hands off cleanly to a human in the same shared inbox when a conversation calls for one.
The company has a satisfyingly unglamorous origin: it was founded in 2013 in the Polish port city of Szczecin by Tytus Golas and Marcin Wiktor, and grew from those roots into a business that now serves hundreds of thousands of companies with a US headquarters in San Francisco. Along the way it picked up backing from the billionaire behind parcel-locker giant InPost, which is not the sort of investor most chat widgets can claim.
Lyro is priced per AI conversation and starts genuinely free, with a one-time batch of free conversations so a small team can put a competent AI agent in front of customers without spending a cent up front. Newer touches like native support for the Model Context Protocol and Lyro Connect, which drops the agent into Zendesk, Intercom, Salesforce, and twenty-plus other platforms, mean you are not locked into Tidio's own help desk to use its brain.
Customers report resolution rates that climb into the eighties once Lyro is tuned to their own content, with menswear brand Suitor among the standouts. If you run a lean team and want one of the fastest and cheapest routes to real, working AI support, Tidio with Lyro is genuinely very hard to beat.
Read the full Tidio Lyro listing → · See Tidio Lyro alternatives →
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