Yamidoo Blog

Help Scout alternative: Yamidoo vs Help Scout

hello@yamidoo.ai (Pavel Ciorici) — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Stay with Help Scout if your team lives in a shared inbox and answers on email, chat, WhatsApp and Instagram. It is very good at that, and this page will not talk you out of it. Choose Yamidoo if what you want is the widget on your site answering the questions visitors already ask, with a person able to step in. At 300 AI-answered conversations a month, that is about $164 in resolutions plus seats, against $29.

Help Scout is help desk software: a shared email inbox first, then Docs (a knowledge base), Beacon (a help widget with chat) and AI Answers, an AI agent in Beacon that answers from your Docs and website and is billed per resolution.

Yamidoo is an AI support chat built by WPZOOM: answers from your own pages, with the source linked under every one and a person one click away. AI answers are on every plan, the free one too.

The whole argument is in the unit each of them bills. A resolution is a conversation where the AI replied and the visitor did not escalate, search, ask again or say they still needed help. A conversation is a conversation either way, and that is the difference the numbers below come from.

We were Help Scout customers from 2014 to 2025 and still use it for email. We built Yamidoo to replace the chat, after running AI Answers on our own site for a month; the numbers from that month are further down.

The short version

Price. Help Scout is priced per user, from $30 a month each, and the customer-facing AI is extra at $0.75 per resolution. Yamidoo is priced per site, from $0, and AI answers are what the plan is for.
Shape. Help Scout is a help desk with an AI add-on in its widget. Yamidoo is an AI support chat with live human takeover built in, and nothing else: no email inbox, no ticketing, no WhatsApp.
WordPress. Help Scout has no WordPress plugin; you paste a script with a third-party plugin. Yamidoo's plugin is on wordpress.org, connects in one click, and shows the customer's orders and licenses next to the chat on WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads stores. Freemius connects from the dashboard with a product token.

Yamidoo vs Help Scout

	Help Scout	Yamidoo
Cheapest paid plan	Standard, $30 per user a month; AI Answers extra	Starter, $29 a month per site: 300 AI-answered conversations, human replies free
On annual billing	$25, $45 and $75 per user a month	$290, $590 and $990 a year, so $24, $49 and $83 a month
Free plan	5 users, 1 Inbox, 1 Docs site with 10 articles, 100 contacts a month; AI Answers for the first 3 months only	50 AI-answered conversations every month, 100 pages, 1 seat, no card, no expiry
What you pay for	Users, plus $0.75 per AI resolution	AI-answered conversations only
300 AI conversations a month	About $164 in resolutions at the stated 73% rate, plus seats	$29 (Starter)
1,000 AI conversations a month	About $548, plus seats	$59 (Plus)
Where the AI gets its answers	Your Help Scout Docs site, plus website pages and public documents you add as sources	Your pages, sitemap, pasted text and hand-written Q&A pairs
Does the AI show its source	Not stated on Help Scout's pages	Every answer links the page it came from
When the AI does not know	Offers "I still need help", which opens a conversation in the Inbox	Says so and offers a person
Human takeover	The visitor escalates; your team answers from the Inbox as email or chat	Your team watches live and can take over mid-answer with a reply already drafted; the AI resumes when they leave
Channels	Email, live chat, SMS, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger	Website chat only
WordPress	Script snippet via a third-party plugin	Free plugin: one click to connect, no theme edits; WooCommerce and EDD orders, licenses and subscriptions next to the conversation, and Freemius through a dashboard token
Knowledge base	Docs, hosted by Help Scout, 10 articles on Free	Your own site is the knowledge base; Content Gaps lists what visitors asked that it could not answer
Remove the badge	Beacon branding is configurable on paid plans	Included on Pro, $99 a month
Team seats	5 on Free, then $30 to $90 each a month	1 on Free and Starter, 3 on Plus, 5 on Pro; extra seats $19 a month each, on request
Over the limit	Resolutions bill until the cap you set; then the AI turns off	We email you at 75%, 90% and 100%, then AI answers pause until the next period. No overage billing
Trial	15 days of Standard or Plus, no card; 3 months of unlimited AI Answers	The Free plan is the trial, and it does not end
Getting your data out	Reports export to CSV or XLSX; the customer export leaves out conversation history, so raw conversations come through the Inbox API	Transcripts by email, one conversation at a time. No bulk export yet
Apps	Desktop and mobile	Web dashboard

Yamidoo plans and limits are on the pricing page; the full feature list is on features.

What Help Scout costs in 2026

Help Scout pricing has two moving parts, both on <a href="https://www.helpscout.com/pricing/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">its pricing page</a>: users, meaning members of your team with a login, and AI Answers resolutions. Everything else is gated by plan.

Help Scout's plans

Help Scout plan	Monthly billing	Annual billing	What it includes
Free	$0	$0	5 users, 1 Inbox, 1 Docs site with 10 articles, 1 Beacon, 100 contacts a month, 30 days of reporting
Standard	$30 per user	$25 per user	Up to 25 users, 2 Inboxes, 2 Docs sites, 5 Beacons, live chat and SMS, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, 150 basic workflows, AI Inbox assistant
Plus	$54 per user	$45 per user	Up to 50 users, 5 Inboxes, 3 Docs sites, unlimited Beacons, unlimited AI Drafts, 500 advanced workflows, Salesforce, Jira and HubSpot
Pro	$90 per user	$75 per user	Minimum 10 users, 10 Inboxes, 5 Docs sites, unlimited workflows, SSO, HIPAA, a dedicated onboarding specialist

Extra Inboxes are $10 a month each on annual billing and $12 on monthly; extra Docs sites are $20 and $24. A contact is "someone who received a reply from your team or had their question resolved by the AI assistant"; the Free plan caps them at 100 a month, paid plans do not count them.

The word survives from a pricing experiment. In late 2024 Help Scout moved to contact-based billing, where AI resolutions counted as contacts and the bill tracked volume rather than headcount. Per-user pricing came back during 2025 and the contact-based plan is now legacy, closed to new accounts. On today's plans the count only bites on Free.

AI Answers

The AI that talks to your visitors is a separate line:

AI Answers	Price
First three months on any new account	Unlimited resolutions, free
After that	$0.75 per resolution, on paid plans
Spending cap	Optional monthly cap; the AI switches off for the rest of the month when it is reached
Pre-paid discounts	Available, not published

Four Help Scout features carry similar names and only one of them reaches your customers. AI Answers is the chatbot in Beacon, and the only one billed per resolution. AI Assist (rewrite, shorten or translate a reply), AI Drafts (draft a reply from past conversations) and AI Summarize help your team rather than your visitors, and they are included: AI Assist from Standard up, AI Drafts and AI Summarize from Plus up.

A resolution, in Help Scout's words, "is counted only if the customer receives an AI response and doesn't use escalation, search the knowledge base, ask more questions, or indicate that they need more help." One resolution is charged per conversation, however many questions the AI answers in it. Help Scout puts the average resolution rate at 73%.

That rate is the number to plan around. A site whose widget gets 300 AI conversations a month can expect about 219 resolutions, or $164 a month for AI Answers, plus the seats. Two people on Standard bring it to $224 a month. The same 300 conversations on Yamidoo are the Starter plan at $29, or Plus at $59 if three people share the inbox.

<figcaption>Help Scout's AI Answers at $0.75 a resolution and its stated 73% average resolution rate, next to the Yamidoo plan covering the same volume. The Help Scout bars are resolutions only; a paid seat (Standard, $30 per user a month) is also needed once the 3-month trial ends. Yamidoo counts AI-answered conversations; human replies are free, and AI answers pause at the limit instead of billing overage.</figcaption>

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The case for Help Scout, and the case against

What Help Scout does well

The inbox. Shared email with assignments, collision detection, saved replies, workflows and reporting, refined over fifteen years. It is why we stayed a customer for eleven of them, and why we still use it for email.
Docs. A hosted knowledge base with its own search, branding and article editor, wired into Beacon so the widget can suggest articles by page URL.
Every channel in one place. Email, live chat, SMS, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger land in the same Inbox on Standard and up, with mobile apps for the team.
Escalation is one click. Help Scout's own line is "your team is always a click away". A visitor who presses "I still need help" becomes a normal conversation in the Inbox, and that conversation is not billed as a resolution.
A spending cap on the AI. You can set a monthly ceiling and the AI turns itself off when it is reached. That is the right design for per-resolution pricing.

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Why people look for a Help Scout alternative

The facts below are on Help Scout's pricing page and help center; the reading of them is ours.

You pay for seats before you pay for answers. The customer-facing AI is only available on paid plans once the trial ends, so the entry price for AI in the widget is a Standard seat at $30 a month plus $0.75 a resolution. On Yamidoo the entry price is $0.
Per-resolution pricing rewards the wrong thing. The more questions the AI settles, the bigger the bill. A site that gets the same twenty questions a day is exactly the site that should automate them, and at 73% resolution that is about $330 a month in AI Answers alone.
Silence counts as success. By Help Scout's definition, a visitor who reads the AI's reply and closes the tab is a resolution. Ask more questions and it is not; leave without a word and it is. It still charges you for the visitor who gave up.
It is a help desk, and you pay for all of it. Workflows, SLAs, Salesforce, SSO and HIPAA are worth paying for when you use them. If the goal is a widget that answers questions from your docs, most of the plan table is weight.
WordPress is a script snippet. Help Scout's guide for adding Beacon to WordPress points you to a third-party custom-JavaScript plugin and says Help Scout is "not affiliated with that plugin or the developer of it".

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What we saw when we ran AI Answers

If you are looking for Help Scout reviews of the AI specifically, here is one month of our own traffic rather than a feature tour. We turned on AI Answers in Beacon on wpzoom.com in May 2025 and pulled the numbers after a month. Help Scout had marked 197 sessions as "Customer helped". Reading them one by one, 95 were nothing of the kind: the visitor asked one question, the AI posted an answer or a link, and the visitor left. Forty-eight percent. The single biggest source was Beacon's own suggested prompt, "I have a pre-sales question!", which the AI answered with a link to a page and which then counted as helped every time someone clicked it, because nobody replies to a link.

Under the billing in force that year, each of those counted as a contact we paid for. When we sent Help Scout the analysis, their support team agreed that these customers "weren't helped as our human brains would understand it", credited us $25, and pointed out that the AI was designed for direct questions, not statements. Both fair. The definition in force today excludes visitors who ask a second question. It still counts the ones who leave.

That month is the reason Yamidoo shows the source under every answer, lets you watch a conversation live, and counts conversations rather than resolutions: a conversation is a conversation whether the visitor was helped or gave up, so there is nothing to argue about.

How Yamidoo works

Yamidoo replaced Beacon on wpzoom.com in July 2026. By 11 September it had handled 439 conversations, 85% of them with nobody on our team stepping in, at an average reply of 7 seconds. To see what it would answer on your own site, run the free Support Readiness Scan: it reads your public pages and lists the questions it can already answer.

Where the answers come from

Answers from your own content. Yamidoo indexes your crawled pages, a sitemap, pasted text and Q&A pairs you write yourself, and answers visitors from that content only.

A source under every answer. Every reply links to the page it came from, so the visitor can check it and so can you. When it does not know, it says so and offers a person instead of inventing an answer.

Content gaps. The Content Gaps report lists the questions it could not answer well, grouped by topic, so you know which page to write next.

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Watch every conversation, step in when you want

A live monitor. It shows who is on the site and every conversation as it happens. You can watch an answer stream in real time.

Takeover in one click. Take over even mid-answer, with a reply already drafted for you to edit or send. Your name and photo replace the assistant in the widget header. Step away and the AI takes the thread back.

A handoff the visitor can ask for. At any point a visitor can ask for a person, and the conversation is flagged for your team. It costs nothing extra when they do. A conversation counts as one conversation whether the AI finished it or you did.

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On stores, Yamidoo sees what Help Scout's widget cannot. Connect WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads through the WordPress plugin, or Freemius from the dashboard with a product token, and the customer's orders, licenses and subscriptions sit next to the conversation for your team, and, if you switch it on, the AI can answer "when does my license expire?" for customers who are logged in to your site.

Three smaller things that come up when people compare the two widgets: the widget's own text (buttons, placeholder, notices) comes in 14 languages on paid plans while the AI answers in the visitor's language on every plan, visitors can attach PDFs, PNGs and JPGs up to 10 MB on any paid plan and the AI reads them, and answer ratings with CSAT reporting are on every plan, the free one included.

What happens to your Help Scout Docs

This is the first practical question when you leave. You have a Docs site with articles in it. Where do they go?

The honest answer about migration first: there is no Help Scout Docs importer in Yamidoo, and pretending otherwise would cost you an afternoon. What there is instead: your Docs site is a website, so you point Yamidoo at its URL or its sitemap and it crawls it like any other source, next to your own pages, text you paste in, and Q&A pairs you write by hand. Hand-written pairs are treated as authoritative and outrank anything crawled, which is the fix for the one answer it keeps getting wrong. The Free plan indexes 100 pages from one source of each type. Paid plans take unlimited sources and 500 to 5,000 pages, re-synced monthly, weekly or daily.

What you give up is real, so here it is plainly: a hosted, branded, searchable help center with its own article editor. Yamidoo does not host articles. If that help center is the part you actually pay Help Scout for, keep paying for Docs, or look at a knowledge base specialist instead of at us.

What replaces the part of Docs most teams use most, the report telling you which article to write next, is Content Gaps: the questions visitors asked that the AI could not answer well, grouped by topic.

Other Help Scout alternatives, and where they fit

Yamidoo replaces one part of Help Scout, the widget. If you are replacing the whole help desk, these are the Help Scout competitors worth knowing about, and what each one is actually for.

Zendesk, if you are scaling into enterprise support and need SLAs, routing and a marketplace of integrations. Nobody picks it to save money.
Freshdesk, for multi-channel ticketing across email, chat, phone and social. One correction, because it matters if you are shopping on price: Freshdesk is still widely listed as the free option, and its own pricing page starts at $19 per agent a month on annual billing, with a 14-day trial and no free plan.
Zoho Desk, the budget omnichannel option, and the real free tier in this group: a Free Edition with three user licenses. It makes most sense if you already run other Zoho software.
Front, if what you love about Help Scout is the shared inbox and you want heavier collaboration on top of it.
Hiver, if you want the shared help desk to live inside Gmail.
HubSpot Service Hub, if support belongs next to the CRM your sales team already uses.
Intercom, if you want messaging first and an AI agent, and the budget is there.

If you would rather host it yourself, the open source answers are FreeScout, which is the closest thing to Help Scout's inbox and has no AI in the widget, and Chatwoot, a shared inbox with website chat that you can self-host or buy as cloud.

And on the chat side of the line, Tidio is a suite with every social channel and a chat flow builder; its AI is metered per conversation. We compared it here.

Which one is for you

When to stay with Help Scout

Your team answers customers by email, and you want that inbox, its workflows and its reporting.
Your customers write on WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger or SMS and you want one place for all of it.
You already maintain a Docs site and want the widget to suggest articles by page.
You are past the free trial of AI Answers, the spending cap suits you, and $0.75 a resolution is cheaper than a seat.

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When Yamidoo fits better

Most of your support is the same questions your site already answers.
You want AI answers on the free plan, every month, with no card and no seat.
You want to see conversations live and step in yourself, then hand back.
Your site runs WordPress, and your store runs WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads or Freemius.
You want one bill you can predict: conversations, not seats plus resolutions.
You can keep Help Scout for email. That is how we run it.

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Tidio alternative: Yamidoo vs Tidio

hello@yamidoo.ai (Pavel Ciorici) — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Stay with Tidio if you answer customers on several channels, or you run a Shopify store and want proactive chat campaigns. Choose Yamidoo if your site mostly needs one thing: answering the questions visitors already ask, from the pages you already wrote, with a person able to step in. At 300 AI-answered conversations a month, that is $210 against $29.

Tidio is a live chat and customer service suite: chat, tickets, email, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp in one inbox, rule-based chatbot Flows for sales, and Lyro, Tidio's AI agent, sold by the conversation.

Yamidoo is an AI support chat built by WPZOOM: customer support answers from your own pages, with the source linked under every one and a person one click away. AI answers are on every plan, the free one too.

The short version

Price. On Tidio, the AI is a separate meter. Every account gets 50 Lyro conversations once, for life. After that, 50 a month cost $39 and 300 cost $210. On Yamidoo, the Free plan includes 50 AI conversations every month, and $29 buys 300.
Shape. Tidio is a help desk with an AI add-on. Yamidoo is an AI support chat with live human takeover built in, and nothing else: no ticketing, no WhatsApp, no email inbox.
Sources. Every Yamidoo answer links the page it came from. Tidio's pages do not say whether Lyro shows its sources.
WordPress. Both install on WordPress with a plugin. Tidio's has 70,000 active installs and years of reviews. Ours is new, from a company whose WordPress themes and plugins run on 250,000+ sites.

Yamidoo vs Tidio

	Tidio	Yamidoo
Cheapest paid plan	Starter, $29 a month: 100 human-replied conversations, AI extra	Starter, $29 a month: 300 AI-answered conversations, human replies free
Free plan	50 human-replied conversations a month, 50 AI conversations once, 10 seats	50 AI-answered conversations every month, 100 pages, 1 seat, no card, no expiry
What you pay for	Human-replied conversations, plus AI conversations, plus Flows visitors	AI-answered conversations only
300 AI conversations a month	$210 (Lyro add-on)	$29 (Starter)
1,000 AI conversations a month	$700	$59 (Plus)
Where the AI gets its answers	Your support content: website scraper, FAQ upload, Zendesk article import	Your pages, sitemap, pasted text and hand-written Q&A pairs
Does the AI show its source	Not stated on Tidio's pages	Every answer links the page it came from
When the AI does not know	Forwards to a human agent	Says so and offers a person
Human takeover	Handoff rules; the agent replies in the inbox	Your team watches live and can take over mid-answer with a reply already drafted; the AI resumes when they leave
Channels	Website chat, email, tickets, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp	Website chat only
WordPress	Plugin with 70,000 active installs	Free plugin: one click to connect, no theme edits; WooCommerce and EDD orders, licenses and subscriptions next to the conversation
Remove the badge	$20 a month add-on	Included on Pro, $99 a month
Team seats	Up to 10 on self-serve plans	1 on Free and Starter, 3 on Plus, 5 on Pro; extra seats $19 a month each, on request
Over the limit	Quotas refresh every 30 days; more volume means a bigger quota	We email you at 75%, 90% and 100%, then AI answers pause until the next period. No overage billing
Getting your data out	Contacts export to CSV in bulk; chat transcripts one conversation at a time	Transcripts by email, one conversation at a time. No bulk export yet
Trial	7 days, no card, then Free	The Free plan is the trial, and it does not end
Apps	Desktop and mobile	Web dashboard

Yamidoo plans and limits are on the pricing page; the full feature list is on features.

What Tidio costs in 2026

Tidio bills three things separately, all on <a href="https://www.tidio.com/pricing/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">its pricing page</a>. A billable conversation is any chat, ticket, email or social thread that a human on your team replies to, counted once however many messages it holds. Replies from Lyro or from Flows do not count as billable. A Lyro conversation is any thread with at least one AI reply, also counted once. Flows are metered by visitors reached per month.

Tidio's plans

Tidio plan	Monthly billing	Annual billing	What it includes
Free	$0	$0	50 billable conversations a month, 50 Lyro conversations one time, 100 Flows visitors a month, up to 10 seats, live chat and ticketing
Starter	$29 a month	$24.17 a month	100 billable conversations, the same one-time 50 Lyro conversations, live visitor list, operating hours, basic analytics
Growth	from $59 a month	from $49.17 a month	250 billable conversations, rising to $349 for 2,000; advanced analytics, permissions, automatic assignment, macros
Plus	$300 a month plus usage	$300 a month plus usage	Custom quotas, premium support, departments, custom branding, discounted usage rates
Premium	Contact sales		From 3,000 Lyro conversations, a guaranteed 50% Lyro resolution rate, pay per resolution

Two more lines matter for a small site. Removing the "Powered by Tidio" badge is an add-on at $20 a month ($16.67 on annual billing). And there is a 7-day trial of every feature with no card, after which the account drops to Free.

Lyro AI conversations

The AI is bought on top of any of those plans, including Free:

Lyro AI conversations a month	Price on monthly billing	Per conversation
50, one time only	$0
50	$39	$0.78
100	$75	$0.75
150	$110	$0.73
200	$140	$0.70
300	$210	$0.70
500	$350	$0.70
750	$525	$0.70
1,000	$700	$0.70

Tidio's Lyro page advertises "just $0.5 per conversation". On the self-serve pricing page the rate runs from $0.78 down to $0.70; the Plus tier at $300 a month is where "discounted usage rates" start.

Tidio's pricing page also says Lyro "solves up to 67% of customer questions automatically". That is Tidio's figure and we have no way to check it. We do not publish a resolution rate of our own, because we do not measure one. What we do measure, on wpzoom.com, is how often somebody on our team had to step in: in 85% of conversations, nobody did. That is not the same measurement, and it is our own site.

<figcaption>Tidio's Lyro add-on on monthly billing, next to the Yamidoo plan that covers the same volume. Tidio also gives every account 50 Lyro conversations once, for life, and its help desk plans meter human-replied conversations separately (Free 50 a month, Starter $29 for 100). Yamidoo counts only AI-answered conversations; human replies are free, and AI answers pause at the limit instead of billing overage.</figcaption>

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The case for Tidio, and the case against

What Tidio does well

Every channel in one inbox. Website chat, tickets, email, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp land in the same place, with desktop and mobile apps for the team. If your customers write on five channels, that is the product to buy.
A mature WordPress plugin. 70,000 active installs, a 4.7 rating from 396 reviews, updated in September 2026. It has been through years of WordPress and PHP versions.
Ten seats on every self-serve plan, including Free. A small team can share the inbox without paying per person.
Flows. Rule-based chat paths that trigger on visitor actions, with a visual builder and templates for lead capture, quote requests and missed conversations. Yamidoo has starter questions and floating messages, not a flow builder.
Guardrails on the AI. Tidio says Lyro "works only with the content and guidance you provide" and forwards the question to a human when the answer is not in your content. That is the right design, and it is the same principle we built on.

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Why people look for a Tidio alternative

The facts below are on Tidio's pricing page; the reading of them is ours.

The AI is metered separately, and the free allowance never refills. Fifty Lyro conversations for the lifetime of the account is a demo, not a plan. Real usage starts at $39 a month.
Three meters plus add-ons make the bill hard to predict. Human-replied conversations, AI conversations and Flows visitors each have a ladder, and the badge is a fourth line.
You pay for a suite when you wanted a widget. Ticketing, video calls, Instagram and WhatsApp are worth paying for if you use them. If the goal is answering questions from your docs on your website, most of the feature table is weight.
Per-conversation AI pricing punishes the sites that need it most. A site that gets the same 20 questions a day is exactly the site that should automate them. That is about 600 conversations a month, which on Tidio's ladder falls between the 500-conversation rung at $350 and the 750 rung at $525.

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How Yamidoo works

On wpzoom.com, where it has run since July 2026, it had handled 439 conversations by mid-September, 85% of them with nobody on our team stepping in, at an average reply of 7 seconds. To see what it would answer on your own site, run the free Support Readiness Scan: it reads your public pages and lists the questions it can already answer.

Where the answers come from

Answers from your own content. Yamidoo indexes your crawled pages, a sitemap, pasted text and Q&A pairs you write yourself, and answers visitors from that content only.

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Watch every conversation, step in when you want

A live monitor. It shows who is on the site and every conversation as it happens. You can watch an answer stream in real time.

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Where your data lives

No model trains on your content, ours or our AI provider's. Workspaces are isolated at the database level. Data is stored in the United States on AWS under EU Standard Contractual Clauses, and Yamidoo is operated by WPZOOM BV in Amsterdam, so GDPR applies. IP addresses are kept for 90 days, you can delete a workspace or an account, and an erasure request overrides retention. The sub-processors are listed in the privacy policy.

Yamidoo on WordPress, WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads

Both tools install on WordPress with a plugin. Theirs is the established one, ours is new, and if a long track record on WordPress is what you are buying, buy theirs. What the Yamidoo plugin does:

One field, or one click. Install the plugin, paste your Site ID or click Connect in Settings, and the chat is live. No theme edits. Deactivate it and the widget is gone.
Store data next to the conversation. On WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads, Yamidoo can show a logged-in customer's orders, licenses and subscriptions beside the chat, so account questions get answered instead of forwarded. It is off until you switch it on.
Caching plugins do not strip it. The plugin ships excluded from the usual caching and optimization tools, so the widget still loads where those are set aggressively.
Free, with no Pro tier. The plugin itself costs nothing. Your limits live with your Yamidoo plan.

WPZOOM has built WordPress themes and plugins since 2008, they run on 250,000+ sites, and our free plugins have 100,000+ active installs on wordpress.org. Setup is on the WordPress integration page.

Moving from Tidio

Switching chat tools is mostly a question of what you lose on the way out.

Your contacts come out in bulk. Tidio's contact list exports to CSV on every plan, the free one included. Select the contacts, click Export, download the file.

Your chat history comes out one conversation at a time. Tidio exports a transcript per conversation, from the three dots menu in the Inbox. Its help center is direct about the limit: "At the moment, you can download only one transcript at a time. We don't have the option to batch-download multiple transcripts." If those transcripts matter to you, export the ones you want before you close the account.

Yamidoo imports none of it. There is no migration tool and no Tidio connector. Yamidoo answers from your pages, your sitemap, text you paste and Q&A pairs you write, so it does not need your old conversations to start working. Your knowledge base is the site you already have.

Open conversations stay where they are. Nothing moves between the two tools. Finish the threads that are open in Tidio, then change the widget over.

Take as long as you want. The Yamidoo Free plan needs no card and does not expire, so you can index your site and read the answers it gives before you take Tidio off the page. Switching is one field on WordPress or one script tag. Leaving is deactivating the plugin.

Other Tidio alternatives and competitors

For some sites neither Tidio nor Yamidoo is the answer. What the other Tidio competitors charge:

Crisp, if you want a shared inbox and website chat at one flat price per workspace rather than per seat. Free for 2 seats with no AI credits, then $45 a month (Mini), $95 (Essentials) and $295 (Plus), each with a small AI credit allowance included.
tawk.to, if free matters more than anything else. Its live chat is free and its automation page advertises AI agents as free forever. It publishes no price list, so check what the paid add-ons cost before you commit.
Chatbase, if you want an AI-only bot and have nobody to take over. It bills message credits, not conversations: free for 50 a month, $40 (Hobby) for 700, $150 (Standard) for 4,000. A person can only pick up a conversation from Standard, where the help desk arrives.
Intercom, if you are a support team with a budget for a full platform. Seats start at $19 a month on Essential, $85 on Advanced and $132 on Expert, and Fin, its AI agent, is charged on top from $0.99 per outcome. Fin can also be bought on its own, without seats, for a help desk you already run.

Which one is for you

When to stay with Tidio

Your customers write on WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger or email and you want one inbox for all of it.
You need ticketing, live video calls or a mobile app for your agents.
You run a Shopify store and use Flows for proactive sales messages.
Your team is bigger than five and the ten free seats matter more than the AI price.

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When Yamidoo fits better

Most of your support is the same questions your site already answers.
You want AI answers on the free plan, every month, with no card.
You want to see conversations live and step in yourself, then hand back.
Your site runs WordPress, WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads.
You want one bill you can predict: conversations, not seats, meters and add-ons.

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Yamidoo is live: why we built it and how it went

hello@yamidoo.ai (Pavel Ciorici) — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Yamidoo is live. It is an AI support chat for your website: it answers visitors from your own pages and docs, shows the page each answer came from, and keeps a person one click away. It has been running on wpzoom.com since July and on recipecard.io since August, and now anyone can add it to their site. There is a free plan with no credit card, a free WordPress plugin, and one script tag for everything else.

We built it for ourselves before we made it a product. Here is why, and what happened when we put it on our own site.

What happened on wpzoom.com

In July we put Yamidoo in the corner of every page on wpzoom.com, pointed it at our documentation and our site, and left it there.

As of September 11, it has handled 439 conversations. In 85% of them the visitor never asked for a human. The average reply took 7 seconds. Before Yamidoo, the first reply to a support email from us took about 6 hours.

The other 15% did ask for a person, and that is the number I care about most. Those are the conversations where a page on our site was never going to be enough. Someone from the team took over, in the same chat, with the whole conversation already on screen. That is the product working, not failing.

The conversations also told us what our site was missing. Every answer can be rated with a thumbs up or down, and we read the thumbs-down ones. So far they have led to more than 100 new support articles on wpzoom.com.

The same questions since 2009

WPZOOM has built WordPress themes and plugins since 2009. They run on more than 250,000 sites, and we answer the support for all of them ourselves.

Most of the questions we get are already answered somewhere on wpzoom.com: in the documentation, in the FAQ, on the pricing page. They still land in the inbox, day and night, and someone on the team sends back the link or a saved reply. The customer waited for an answer that was on the site the whole time.

That is the itch behind Yamidoo. Not "AI is everywhere now", but: the answer already exists, so why does a person have to retype it?

What we wanted from a support chat

We did not set out to build a product. We set out to fix our own inbox, and we looked at what was already out there first. The help desks and chat tools we tried are good at what they are built for: shared inboxes, tickets, seats for a support team, reports for a manager. We did not need most of that for a website that gets the same questions every day.

What we needed was short:

Answers from our real pages and docs, kept fresh without re-uploading anything.
A person who can watch a conversation and take it over in the middle, not a bot that ends in an email ticket.
WordPress treated as a first-class install, not a generic embed that fights the theme and the caching plugin.

So we built it, and we ran it on our own site first.

AI first, human always, in plain words

That line is on our site, so here is what it means in practice.

AI first: every question gets an instant answer, written from your own pages, with the page it came from linked under it. If the answer is not on your site, Yamidoo says it does not know and offers a person instead of guessing.

Human always: the visitor can ask for a person at any time, with one tap or in their own words. Every conversation is visible live in the dashboard, and anyone on the team can take over mid-thread, with a reply already drafted from the conversation so far. When they step away, the AI picks the conversation back up. Human replies never count against your plan.

On wpzoom.com, most conversations start and end without anyone from the team. When a visitor asks for a person, the conversation shows up in the dashboard with everything said so far, and whoever picks it up replies in the same window the visitor is already using, under their own name and photo. When nobody is online, the visitor is asked for an email address and we follow up. How handoff works is in the docs.

What it is not: a help desk. There is no ticketing and no shared email inbox, and it only knows what is on your site.

Why the name Yamidoo

If you have been a WPZOOM customer for a long time, the name may ring a bell. Yamidoo Magazine was our first theme, released in February 2009. It is retired now, and you can still find it on our retired themes page.

Try it

If you want to try it, the free plan is 50 conversations a month, no credit card, no expiry. Paid plans start at $29 a month, and when a plan reaches its limit the AI pauses instead of billing you more. On WordPress, the plugin installs it with one field; anywhere else, it is one script tag.

If you want to see what it would answer on your own site before signing up, the Support Readiness Scan reads a few of your pages and shows you in about ten seconds.

The chat in the corner of this page is Yamidoo, running on its own site. Ask it anything about Yamidoo. If it does not know, it will say so and offer a person. If you would rather write, hello@yamidoo.ai reaches me directly.