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Tidio's homepage asks a good question: "What did your last 100 conversations earn you?" Next to it sits a 75% average resolution rate for its Lyro AI agent. For an online store, that is the right number to chase. A shopper asks where an order is, the bot answers, and the shopper buys.
On a B2B website, that number points the wrong way. The conversations worth the most should end with a qualified buyer on a rep's calendar, not with the bot. I call this the resolution trap: a chat tool scored on how many conversations it closes gets better at closing conversations, and on a B2B site, closing the wrong one costs you a deal.
So this list of Tidio alternatives is sorted by the job the tool does, not by feature count. If your B2B chat on Tidio feels busy but pipeline doesn't move, the job is probably the mismatch.
Why does Tidio fit e-commerce better than B2B?
Tidio is built and priced around conversations, and its site says who it pictures. The homepage invites you to "start free on platforms like Shopify, WordPress, and Wix", Lyro "recommends tailored products", and the sales features are product recommendations, cart recovery and lead capture. Paid plans include "Native Shopify actions". Billing counts conversations too: the pricing page says "Pay only for AI conversations". (Tidio pricing and homepage, checked November 12, 2026.)
That works when every conversation is small and similar. A B2B question is neither: pricing for their setup, security review or rollout time, often unanswered by the site.
The Storylane Buyability Index checked 529 B2B websites against 10,580 buyer questions and found they fully answered 69% of the easy, self-serve questions but only 50% of the high-assurance ones a buyer needs settled before committing (the questions are generated per company as what a buyer would plausibly ask, not logged from real buyers). More on that gap in why B2B websites answer easy questions and skip the ones that decide the deal.
A bot trained only on your website cannot resolve a question your website does not answer, and on a B2B site about half the questions that matter most fall in that gap.
What is the resolution trap?
The resolution trap is what happens when a B2B team measures website chat by how many conversations the bot resolves. More content helps, but it does not fix the mechanism underneath.
The questions with the weakest answers are often the ones whose real answer is "it depends on you". A support bot meets that with a help article, an "I don't know", or a handoff to the support queue. Each of those counts as handled. The buyer leaves with a shortlist still open in other tabs.
A B2B site needs a tool that treats a hard question as a buying signal: answer what it can, learn who is asking and whether they fit, and pass a fit buyer to the right rep with the context attached. That is real-time lead qualification and routing, a different job from resolution. The short version of chatbots vs AI agents: a bot ends conversations and an agent moves them forward.
The three jobs website chat can do
Decide which job you are hiring for first; most B2B sites need more than one.
- Resolve. Answer support questions for existing customers and close the ticket. Tidio, Intercom Fin, LiveChat and Crisp are built for this.
- Route. Capture a visitor, ask a few questions and send them to a form, a calendar or a team. HubSpot's free chat and classic lead routing setups do this well.
- Sell. Hold a real buying conversation, qualify the visitor against your ICP, and book the meeting with the right rep. Qualified and Storylane RepX are built for this.
Tidio alternatives compared
RepX is first because it is ours. Prices are from each vendor's pricing page, checked November 12, 2026; chat pricing changes often, so check before you buy.
| Tool | Main job | Best for | Price (as listed, Nov 12, 2026) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Storylane RepX | Sell | B2B sites where the product needs showing, not just describing | Starts at $2,000 a month; price depends on website traffic; 30-day free trial |
| Tidio (for reference) | Resolve | Online stores on Shopify, WordPress or Wix | Free plan; Starter $24.17/mo and Growth from $49.17/mo, both billed annually; Plus $300/mo; Premium on request; Lyro from $32.50/mo for 50 AI conversations |
| Intercom Fin | Resolve | Support teams with a large help centre | Essential $29 ($19 for new customers), Advanced $85, Expert $132, per seat a month billed annually; Fin AI Agent $0.99 per outcome |
| HubSpot chat | Route | Teams already living in HubSpot CRM | Chatbot builder and live chat free; more in paid Hubs |
| LiveChat | Resolve | Teams that want human agents first, with AI help | Essential $25 per user/mo ($19 billed annually); Growth $99 ($79 annually); Enterprise custom |
| Crisp | Resolve | Small teams that want a flat price per workspace | Free; Mini $45/mo; Essentials $95/mo; Plus $295/mo, per workspace |
| Qualified | Sell | Salesforce-centred marketing teams | Quote-based (Premier, Enterprise, Ultimate) |
Storylane RepX
We make Storylane RepX, a website agent built for the "sell" job, so weigh this section with that in mind. It is trained on your website, help docs, decks, call recordings and demos, and it answers with the product itself: each interactive demo gets a plain-language display instruction that tells RepX when to pull it up mid-conversation and walk the buyer through it. Buyers can type, listen to an answer or talk face to face by voice or video.
After Tidio, what matters is qualification and routing. You write your ICP in plain English, and RepX screens for it through the conversation, not a form. Playbooks set the starter questions, intro message, CTA buttons and qualification questions per page, along with when to ask for an email (work emails only, after a set number of messages, or once the visitor qualifies) and the goal: book a meeting or start a trial. So a pricing page can book an AE while a docs page books support. Guardrails hold rules on pricing, competitors and compliance, and you can test the agent before anything goes live. Qualified leads and conversation summaries flow to HubSpot, Salesforce and Slack; in HubSpot, each conversation is logged on the contact with the full transcript and summary.
Why this job matters: Storylane's Modern Buying Trends 2026 report found that 51.4% of buyer conversations with website agents start outside the buyer's working hours (8,211 conversations across 19 companies), and nine in ten of the buying committee never join a sales call. A support bot in those hours closes the question; a sales agent qualifies the buyer. In RepX's first month, Hospitable booked 36 meetings and sourced 7 deals.
Pick RepX if your buyers need to see the product before they talk to sales, and you want the website itself to qualify and book them.
Intercom Fin
Fin is Intercom's AI agent, priced per outcome rather than per seat ($0.99 per outcome, with "no seats required"). It sits on a full help desk with seat plans from Essential to Expert. If support volume outgrew Tidio, Fin is the natural step up, though it is still a resolution tool. I compared it with sales-first options in Intercom Fin alternatives for B2B sales teams.
Pick Intercom Fin if most of your chat traffic is existing customers and you want one inbox for support.
HubSpot chat
HubSpot's chatbot builder is free with no credit card, and it can qualify leads, trigger email campaigns and personalise replies using CRM data. For a HubSpot team, it removes a tool and puts every chat on the contact record (routing rules are in routing an AI SDR on a HubSpot website). It routes well; a deep product conversation is a different job, covered in HubSpot chatbot vs an AI sales agent.
Pick HubSpot chat if you run on HubSpot and your main goal is getting visitors to the right form or calendar.
LiveChat
LiveChat is human-first chat with AI added: Essential includes one AI agent, Growth includes ten, and extra AI resolutions come in packs of 50 for $49.50. If your reps run that chat, our live chat for sales playbook has the scripts and KPIs.
Pick LiveChat if you have a staffed chat team and want per-agent pricing you can predict.
Crisp
Crisp prices per workspace, not per conversation or seat: Mini is $45 a month with four seats, Plus is $295 with 20 or more, and each plan includes AI credits. That is easier to budget than Tidio's conversation billing.
Pick Crisp if you want a low, flat monthly cost for support chat across a small team.
Qualified
Qualified describes its Piper agent as an AI SDR that generates "inbound pipeline at scale", and it lists a Salesforce Alliance and a top ranking on Salesforce AppExchange. Pricing is quote-based (we compared it with Warmly in Qualified vs Warmly vs Storylane RepX). The wider category is reviewed in the B2B sales chatbot buyer's guide.
Pick Qualified if you are a Salesforce-centred marketing team buying an inbound AI SDR.
How to tell which job your chat is doing
Tidio's headline question is the best test. Export your last 100 chat conversations and tag each one:
- Support: an existing customer with a problem.
- Simple pre-sale: a question your site already answers well.
- Buying conversation: pricing for their setup, security, implementation, a comparison, or a request to talk to someone.
Then check what happened to the buying conversations. If they were marked resolved with a help link, or ended in "I don't know", you are in the resolution trap. If buying conversations are a small share, keep a resolution tool (Tidio may still be right for you). If they are a large share and few reached a rep, you need a tool that sells. Our guide to replacing a chatbot with an AI sales agent covers what changes when you switch.
The one idea to keep: on a B2B website, judge chat by how many qualified buyers it hands to sales, not by how many conversations it closes.
If your tagging shows the buying conversations are slipping away, book a RepX demo and we will show you how it handles them on your own pages.