Tidio Live Chat Widget: Setup, Plan Gates and Limits (2026)

Tidio's live chat widget comes with every plan, including the permanent Free plan: $0 for 50 billable conversations a month, with 10 seats included. Most of the setup costs nothing. Colors, position, the offline form, the pre-chat survey and page rules all work on Free. Paying changes what your agents see. Starter costs $29 a month billed monthly, or $24.17 a month billed annually, for 100 billable conversations, and adds the live visitors list and operating hours. Growth starts at $59 a month billed monthly, or $49.17 billed annually, for 250 conversations, and adds live typing preview, viewed pages history and automatic assignment.^[1] Our verdict: start free, then upgrade when agents need to see visitors before they type.

Make the widget look like part of your site

Appearance sits in the Channels settings. The widget can sit in the bottom right or bottom left corner, set separately for desktop and mobile. On desktop you pick a Corner or a Sidebar button; on mobile, one of three button sizes. A button label can sit next to the closed widget, but it does nothing in Sidebar mode. Moving the widget higher or lower needs custom code through tidioChatApi.adjustStyles. Tidio is retiring the older trick of styling the chat iframe with CSS, so build any offset on adjustStyles, not on old stylesheet rules.

The home screen shows up to five conversation starters at once.^[2] Tidio ships pre-translated widget packs for English, the default, plus French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. Any other language is edited phrase by phrase. The multilanguage setting translates the widget's texts and buttons only. Conversations are not translated. Lyro, the AI agent, handles languages separately from the widget packs. Inside the widget, only bold Markdown renders, so keep canned replies plain. Visitors can send files up to 10 MB each; exe, dmg, mov, rar and zip files are blocked.

Branding has two levels. Uploading your own logo to replace Tidio's is a Plus feature, and Plus is sold through sales from $300 a month plus usage. Removing the Tidio logo is a separate add-on on Growth, listed at $16.67 a month on the pricing page. The two top plans include it. Free and Starter keep the badge.

Online, offline and operating hours

The widget shows online when at least one agent is logged in with an online status. It goes offline only when every agent is offline, and a logged-out agent counts as offline. Each agent sets their own status; the Project Owner can change other agents' statuses while they are logged in. Offline visitors see an Offline Message form that always asks for an email address. That cannot be disabled. You can swap it for a ticket form, where the visitor leaves one email and one message and cannot chat again until someone comes back online.

The widget stays visible while everyone is offline unless you switch off the setting that displays it then. Live sound and popup notifications reach agents only while they are online. Offline messages arrive by email instead, bundled into one notification five minutes after the last message, and skipped if an agent goes online or takes the chat first. You can forward those emails to extra addresses, and a reply from the mailbox reaches the visitor. Flows also have a Chat Status condition, so an automated greeting can say something different at night.

Operating hours start on Starter. They switch an agent's status on a schedule, but only while that agent is logged in. A schedule cannot force a logged-out agent online, and the desktop app disconnects when the computer sleeps. For after-hours coverage, Lyro can be set to answer only when agents are offline; its handoff rules (transfer to an agent, keep the chat, or create a ticket) are set separately for online and offline times. Beyond the 50 free Lyro conversations each project gets once, that coverage needs a paid Lyro quota, from $39 a month billed monthly or $32.50 billed annually for 50.

Choose where it appears, and how it loads

By default the widget appears on every domain where its code sits. Trusted domains restrict it to a list. Country rules show or hide it by visitor IP address without blocking anyone from the site. URL rules hide it on exact addresses or on any address containing a string, with separate settings for desktop and mobile. You can also disable it without uninstalling, or ban a single visitor by IP, which hides the chat from them. For installing the code itself on WordPress, Shopify or other builders, see our Tidio install guide.

Showing the widget only on chosen pages is the reverse problem, and it needs the widget SDK, tidioChatApi, which works on every plan. A short script calls show and hide by URL. The same calls let you hide the bubble and open the chat from your own button or link. Other snippets open the chat automatically on page load, with a desktop-only variant, or delay loading by five seconds by default. One trap: hiding the widget does not stop chatbots, which can still run inside it. Tidio support does not help with custom SDK code, so plan on a developer.

Speed is mostly handled for you. The script loads with the async attribute, so it does not block the rest of the page. Widget files sit on Tidio's servers in OVH data centers, which is why performance tools may flag external resources. Tidio says it ran ten Lighthouse test cases with and without the widget on a clean Shopify store.^[3] Sites with a Content Security Policy must allow Tidio's hosts. The accessibility features Tidio documents (screen readers, Tab navigation, contrast settings) cover the agent panel.

Use the pre-chat survey to capture leads

The pre-chat survey can ask for a name, email, phone number, GDPR consent and newsletter permission. When it is on, the visitor must complete it before the first message, online or offline. If it collects an email, the offline form does not ask again. Email matters for two reasons. A visitor appears on the Contacts list only once an email is registered, and an agent can continue a chat by email only if the visitor left one. Letting visitors pick a department in the survey is meant for Plus, where departments live.

Survey contacts can flow straight into email tools on every plan. Mailchimp, Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign, Brevo and Omnisend all take subscribers from the pre-chat survey, but consent handling differs. ActiveCampaign lists and Klaviyo default to double opt-in, while Brevo and Omnisend add contacts without it. Salesforce receives contacts and solved-chat notes. In Google Analytics 4, the tidio_prechat_finished event carries a consent parameter. If a form feels too blunt, a Flow can ask the same questions in conversation with email validation; our Tidio Flows guide covers that build.

Run live conversations from the inbox

New chats land in the Unassigned folder. By default assignment is manual: the first agent to join takes the chat. Automatic assignment starts on Growth and offers two methods.^[4] Round robin hands chats to online agents in a fixed queue with no cap per agent. Load balancing sets a maximum of open chats per agent and parks new ones in Unassigned when everyone is full. It covers live chat, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp only. Emails stay unassigned. It also affects only conversations that arrive after you switch it on.

Starter's live visitors list, under Customers > Now live, shows each visitor's name or email, last visited page, country, browser, entry time, tags and whether they are new or returning. An agent can open a chat proactively from there, and the list also appears in the mobile app. Expect its counts to differ from Google Analytics, because it lists every visitor on pages with the chat, inactive ones included. Growth goes further: agents watch a visitor's message as it is typed, see the pages viewed, keep notes and use macros, which can also assign or tag.

Video calls work on Free, but only in the website widget, and only an agent can start one; a voice-only call is an option. The Chat Page, a standalone page holding just the chat, starts on Starter and needs individual approval from Tidio Support first. Live conversations with no visitor reply for 30 days are solved automatically on every plan.

What counts as a billable conversation, and what happens at the limit

A billable conversation is any live chat, ticket, email or social conversation that includes a message from a human agent. It counts once, however many messages follow. Unanswered visitor messages do not count. Replies from Flows and Lyro do not count either, so a chat a bot handles alone stays off the meter. The quota is per project, not per agent, and widget chats share it with tickets and social messages. A banner appears at 80%. At 100%, agents cannot see or answer new conversations until the monthly reset or an upgrade.

Automatic upgrades are on by default for new projects on monthly self-serve packages. You get an alert at 80%, and at 95% the package moves up a level, for example from 250 to 400 conversations. You can switch it off; it never applies on Free, the trial, annual plans or Plus. Separately, Tidio's Terms let it upgrade an account whose use exceeds its plan, with notice. Lyro and Flows carry their own separate quotas, explained in our Tidio pricing guide. The trial runs seven days without a card, then drops to Free at no charge.

The tier choice is simple arithmetic. Starter works out at $0.29 per conversation billed monthly, while Growth 250 works out at about $0.24, by our arithmetic. Up to 50 human-answered chats a month, Free covers you. From 51 to 100, Starter does. From 101 to 250, Growth 250 is the step, costing $30 more a month billed monthly than Starter, or $25 more billed annually. Volume drives that step, not headcount, since all three plans include 10 seats.

The bottom line

Tidio's widget is generous where it counts for a first install: appearance, page rules, the offline form and the pre-chat survey all work on Free, and the SDK is open to every plan. The paid steps are about the inbox, not the bubble. Starter earns its price when you want the visitors list and scheduled hours; Growth earns it when several agents need typing preview and automatic routing. Watch the conversation meter closely, because at the limit new chats disappear from view until you upgrade or the month resets.