Ethora: The Tidio Alternative for an AI Chat Agent You Own
An AI agent that answers website visitors from your own knowledge, with a person able to join the same conversation. Pick the model, including one you host, run it on our cloud or your servers, and build on it with chat SDKs and an API. Free plan with 1,000 monthly active users.
The honest short answer
Ethora vs Tidio: the honest short answer
Tidio is a customer service platform for online stores and small businesses: live chat, a help desk inbox for email and social channels, and Lyro, an AI agent that answers from your help center, policies and store data. Ethora is an open-source chat and AI platform: an AI agent trained on your website and documents that you embed with one line, on the model you choose (including one you host), with human handoff in the same conversation and SDKs to put the same chat inside your own apps.
Stay with Tidio if
- You mainly need a ready help desk inbox where several human agents handle live chat, email, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger
- Your AI agent must look up Shopify or WooCommerce store data out of the box
- You use its marketing automation Flows for lead capture and sales
Choose Ethora if
- You want the AI agent on your own model and infrastructure, with your data in a region you choose
- Developers will build on it: open API, chat SDKs for web and mobile, an MCP server
- You serve a regulated audience and need a BAA and a self-hosted or dedicated deployment
Best for: Tidio for an e-commerce support team that wants live chat, help desk and AI in one hosted tool; Ethora for an AI website agent you own and can grow into a full chat product.
Side by side
Ethora vs Tidio: capabilities at a glance
The ten questions buyers ask most when choosing an AI chat agent for their website. Tidio facts come from its public website and pricing page.
Ethora
How to read this table
Tidio facts are taken from tidio.com, its pricing page and its Lyro page, checked 16 October 2026. Tidio shows monthly and annual prices on the same page, so check it for the billing period and current limits. If something here is out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
Why teams switch
Why teams move from Tidio to Ethora
Teams rarely leave Tidio for its live chat. They leave because the AI agent became the main event, and they want control over how it is built, where it runs and what it costs.
Tidio
Help desk with an AI agent
Ethora
Open-source chat and AI platform
An honest view
When Tidio is the better choice
Ethora is not a help desk. If these describe you, Tidio is likely the better fit, and some teams use both: Tidio for email and social, Ethora for the AI agent on the website.
A help desk for a team of agents
Tidio gives several human agents one inbox across live chat, email, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, with assignment and macros on its paid plans.
Store data in the answers
If the AI agent must work with live Shopify or WooCommerce data out of the box, Tidio is built for that. Ethora reads your store’s pages, not its order system.
Marketing automation
Tidio Flows handle lead capture, quote requests and missed conversations. If that automation is what you use most, stay with it.
Build it on Ethora
Everything you need to replace Tidio’s AI agent
The pieces most teams use when they move their website AI agent to Ethora.
AI chat widget for your website
One script tag adds a floating AI chat widget to any site. Visitors chat without signing in.
See the AI chat widgetRAG chatbot on your own content
Crawl your website, upload your help articles and policies, and see which sources each answer used.
How the RAG chatbot worksWordPress and WooCommerce sites
Install the Ethora Chat Assistant plugin from wordpress.org and connect it to your agent.
Get the pluginSelf-hosted LLM AI agent
Point an agent at Ollama, vLLM or another OpenAI-compatible endpoint and keep prompts and answers on your servers.
Run it on your own modelPricing
Free plan with 1,000 monthly active users and no credit card, then Small Business at $149/mo and Enterprise from $599/mo.
Compare plansAlso comparing Chatbase?
If you are weighing a hosted AI agent builder trained on your content, see how Ethora compares with Chatbase.
Ethora vs ChatbaseAI agents on customer websites, built with Ethora
Healthcare: HIPAA-compliant AI assistant (RAG) over a medical video library
Dr. Talks is one of the most prominent organizers of online healthcare conferences and summits.
Ethora enabled them to create a context-aware AI-powered chatbot to help users navigate thousands of pages of medical content, correctly referencing pages, authors, videos and timestamps. 100% secure and HIPAA-compliant.
This assistant enhances user experience by simplifying interaction with the platform and reducing search time.
- 1000+ summits indexed by AI bot
- Instant user engagement
- Vector embeddings enable intelligent domain expert AI responses
Communities: fan chat app with second-screen rooms and digital collectibles
A cross-platform social app uniting the automotive community around racing events.
Fan rooms for teams and drivers, second-screen events, and collectibles handed out and traded through chat bots.
- Cross-platform iOS and Android app
- Fan rooms and second-screen events
- Collectibles distributed in chat
Energy: dedicated chat server, AI-agent rooms and a React Native app for a procurement platform
Preshent is a US platform for energy-project procurement with AI-driven decision support.
Ethora provides the conversation layer: a chat room per project workspace shared by people and the AI agent, a dedicated chat server in Preshent’s own cloud, push notifications and a React Native app.
- 1,130 chat rooms, one per workspace
- AI agent as a participant in every room
- Dedicated chat server, 99.99%+ uptime
Professional services: a private, self-hosted AI assistant for a corporate intelligence firm
A London corporate intelligence and investigations firm whose analysts could not use public AI assistants on confidential client work.
Ethora designed a private AI assistant: a single-tenant server with AI agents, document search and an open-weight model on the firm’s own GPU, managed by Ethora in a London cloud region or installed on a workstation in the office.
- Local open-weight LLM, no public AI services
- Single-tenant server, UK hosting
- Cloud GPU or on-premise workstation
Virtual worlds: a 3D multiplayer world built from a book, with AI characters, in one weekend
An internal R&D showcase by Ethora’s founder: Alice in Wonderland, The Tempest and A Christmas Carol as 3D worlds you walk through in first person.
Each room is an Ethora chat, each character an Ethora AI agent with the book as its knowledge; a generator and the hosted MCP server build a new world from any book in about four minutes.
- Built in a weekend on the public SDK, API and MCP
- Characters answer in character from the text
- Daily AI budget keeps a public world affordable
AI agents on customer websites: support, intake and teaching assistants
Clinics, schools and small businesses build AI agents on Ethora themselves and put them on their own websites, often on the day they sign up.
3 examples, from a US mental health provider and a wellness brand to a university pharmacology course.
- WordPress plugin or one script tag
- Answers from the customer’s own pages and documents
- Self-serve, no developer needed
Migration
Moving your AI agent from Tidio to Ethora
You can run both for a few days and switch when the answers match. A US mental health provider went live on Ethora the same day it signed up; see the AI website agent case studies.
Export your knowledge
Collect the help center articles, FAQs and policy pages Lyro answers from, plus the URLs of your shipping, returns and product pages.
Crawl your site in Ethora
Sign up free, create an app and an AI agent (start from the support agent template), crawl your website and upload the documents.
Set the instructions
Write the agent’s system prompt: tone, what it must not answer, and when to ask for a person. Set its name, avatar, greeting and colours with the live preview.
Swap the embed script
Remove the Tidio snippet or plugin and add
<script src="https://widget.chat.ethora.com/assistant.js" data-app-id="YOUR_APP_ID"></script>before</body>, or install the Ethora plugin on WordPress.Test 10 real questions
Take ten questions from your Tidio conversation history and run them in the Try it chat. It shows which sources each answer used.
Watch conversations for a week
Read the widget conversations in the admin, add missing knowledge, rebuild, and join the conversations where a person should answer.
Tidio alternative FAQ
Is Ethora an alternative to Tidio’s Lyro AI agent?
Yes. Ethora gives you an AI agent that answers website visitors from your own content (website crawl and uploaded documents), with human handoff in the same conversation. Unlike Lyro, you choose the model for each agent, including a model you host yourself, and you can run the whole platform on your own servers.
Does Ethora replace Tidio’s help desk?
Not fully. Ethora lets a person join a conversation and shows admins every widget conversation, but it is not a multi-channel help desk with email and social inboxes. Some teams keep their help desk for those channels and use Ethora for the website AI agent.
Can I add Ethora to a Shopify or WooCommerce store?
Yes, as a website widget. On WordPress and WooCommerce, install the Ethora Chat Assistant plugin. On Shopify or another builder, paste the one-line script tag into the theme’s custom code or footer area, for example theme.liquid. The agent learns from your store’s pages; it does not connect to your order system out of the box.
Can the AI agent use my own model?
Yes. Each agent can use a cloud model API such as OpenAI, or a model you host through an OpenAI-compatible endpoint such as Ollama or vLLM, so prompts and answers can stay on your own infrastructure.
Is Ethora suitable for healthcare or other regulated businesses?
Ethora is HIPAA and SOC 2 compatible, and a BAA is available on Enterprise and dedicated deployments. Whether a specific project is compliant depends on its configuration and hosting. Chats are encrypted in transit and at rest by default; end-to-end encrypted rooms are an optional per-app setting that is off by default.
An AI chat agent you own, live on your site today
Crawl your site, set the instructions, paste one line. Free to start, on our cloud or your own servers, with the model you choose.
