A Tidio alternative for teams who live in email, not chat.

Tidio and Solves both help small teams answer customers, but they start from opposite places. Tidio starts at the website chat bubble and chatbot. Solves starts at the support inbox. Choosing well is about which channel your support actually arrives on, not about which tool has more features.

Tidio is chat-first. Its core surface is a live chat widget on your site, automated chatbots that deflect and route, and its Lyro AI assistant. That is genuinely useful for an online shop that wants to catch visitors in the moment. Tidio also has a free plan, tightly capped at roughly 50 live-chat conversations a month and around 100 chatbot triggers a month, with a one-time block of Lyro AI conversations, and paid plans from about 29 US dollars a month for Starter.

Solves is email-first. It turns shared inboxes such as support@, info@ and accounts@ into owned tickets with assignment, states, priority, tags, saved replies, private notes, saved queue views, first-response and resolution SLA timers with a breaching view, reports and multi-brand support. It does not run a chat widget, chatbots, social inboxes or phone, on purpose. If your real support load is email, that focus is the point. If it is website chat, Tidio is the right shape and you should use it.

The quickest way to choose is to look at where your last 50 customer questions actually arrived. If most of them came through a shared mailbox, with order numbers, attachments and back-and-forth that needs a paper trail, you are an email-first team and a chat tool will always feel like a bolt-on. If most arrived as quick "is this in stock?" chats on a product page, you are a chat-first team and an inbox tool will feel heavy. Neither answer is wrong; they are just different businesses.

The reason these tools feel so different in daily use is that chat and email are different kinds of work, and the software grows around the channel it was built for.

A live chat is built to be fast and disposable. A visitor asks, an agent or a bot answers, the window closes, and the conversation is mostly done. Tidio is excellent at making that loop quick and at catching people before they leave a page. The trade-off is that chat is not a great place to run accountable, traceable work over days, because the moment is the point and the moment passes.

Email support is the other shape. A question lands, it might need a colleague, it might take two days, it might come back a month later, and you need to know who owns it, what was promised and whether you replied in time. That is what Solves is for. Tickets have a single owner, a state and a priority. Replies and private notes are kept hard-separated so an internal aside never reaches the customer. First-response and resolution SLA timers, with a breaching view that surfaces overdue tickets, mean "we will get back to you by end of day" actually means something.

There is also a quiet safety layer that matters when more than one person is in a shared inbox. Solves stops a teammate replying as the wrong brand, warns before a stale reply goes out over a newer one, and keeps light collaborators to notes only so a helper cannot accidentally email a customer. Those guards do not exist in a chat widget because a chat widget never needed them. They are exactly what a busy email team needs.

We are not going to pretend Solves does everything Tidio does. There are real situations where Tidio is the right answer, and we would rather you choose well than choose us.

Website live chat for small shops

If you want a chat bubble on your storefront so visitors can ask a question while they are browsing, Tidio is built for exactly that. Solves has no chat widget, so on this point there is no contest. For a small online shop that converts on real-time conversations, Tidio earns its place.

Chatbots and automated deflection

Tidio's chatbots and Lyro AI can answer common questions automatically and route the rest, which is valuable when a small team cannot watch chat all day. Solves does not ship an automations engine or AI drafts today; both are on our roadmap and described as coming, never as live. If automated bots are central to your plan, Tidio is ahead here now.

Omnichannel and social in one widget

If you want chat, social messaging and a bot stitched into one on-site experience, that is chat-first territory and Tidio leans into it. Solves is deliberately email-first: no chat, no social, no voice. We would rather do support email properly than spread thin across channels we do not run.

No single tool is right for everyone, so here is a plain summary of who tends to be happier with each. Use it as a starting point, not a rule.

Online shop wanting on-site chat	Tidio. A chat bubble and chatbots that catch browsing visitors are its core strength, and Solves has no widget to offer here.
Team drowning in a shared inbox	Solves. Owned tickets, assignment, SLAs and saved replies turn a crowded support@ mailbox into accountable work.
Several brands, one small team	Solves. Run each brand with its own mailbox and identity from one unified queue, with a guard against replying as the wrong brand.
Want bots to deflect FAQs at scale	Tidio. Its chatbots and Lyro AI are built for automated deflection; Solves automations and AI drafts are on the roadmap, not live.
Need a paper trail and response times	Solves. First-response and resolution SLA timers with a breaching view, audit history and hard-separated notes give you the record that chat does not keep.
Mix of website chat and support email	Both can coexist. Many teams keep Tidio on the storefront and move their email support into Solves; they solve different problems.

Plenty of teams run Tidio chat on the website and still answer the bulk of their real questions from a shared Gmail or Outlook inbox. That second part is where Solves helps. Our guided mailbox setup connects your support address using forwarding-first onboarding, with plain-English DNS checks, and live sending stays blocked until those checks pass. That is a shipped, working path off a shared inbox.

A general import tool for pulling historical helpdesk tickets across is in pilot, and we offer it as guided, hands-on help rather than a self-serve one-click transfer. We will be clear about what can and cannot move before you switch anything, so there are no surprises on day one.

In practice the cut-over is gentler than people expect. You connect your support address, set up the brands you run, add your common saved replies, and let new email start flowing in as tickets while your old chat widget keeps doing its job. Because Solves is email-first, switching the inbox side does not force you to rebuild any chat flows you have invested in. You are adding ownership and accountability to email, not tearing down what already works on the website.

On price, the honest position is that the two tools are not directly comparable. Tidio prices around chat volume and bots, with Starter from about 29 US dollars a month. Solves prices in GBP team bands, ex VAT: Starter 29, Team 79, Growth 149 and Agency/MSP 299, with annual billing priced as twelve months for ten, plus a Starter at GBP 29 for small teams. Early adopters in our pilot can take the Team band at GBP 49 a month for six months. Decide on fit first and let the numbers follow, because paying for the wrong channel is the expensive mistake, not a few pounds either way.