ChatBots

#9. Best Chatbot Builders: SnatchBot

Snatchbot is a chatbot builder intending to remove the complexity of adding AI/machine learning to your messaging applications. They have smart bots for multi-channel messaging.

• Chatbot builder, no-coding required
• Bot templates based on events
• Advanced security features
• Robust administrative controls
• Messaging channels: web chat, Skype, Viber, FB Messenger, Slack, email, Twilio, Line, and others.
• Webhooks, API, plugins
• Broadcasting
• Sentiment analysis

• Import to enterprise clients, Snatchbot has robust administrative features and enterprise-grade security to comply with regulatory mandates.
• Bot building tool is suited for your marketing and sales teams, as well as developers to create more custom solutions.

• It can be complicated to get used to, and you may freak out the first time you use the platform. There are a lot of tools to use and some can be confusing without a previous tour on how to use them.

SnatchBot Pricing: Snatchbot has a free and pro plan. The Free plan provides access to all the basic platform features, including live chat, broadcast, all messaging channels, and more. The Pro plan gives you access to all features, and is based on how many messages are sent/received. This is tiered, starting at $30/mo for 10K messages, and goes all the way up to $999/mo for 1Million messages.

#11. Best Chatbot Builders: Pandorabots

Pandorabots is an open-source website allowing people to build and publish chatbots on the web.

• AIML is the main differentiator
• Voice enabled for speech-to-text and text-to-speech
• Mobile support
• Web hosting and publishing
• Free documentation and training
• Multilingual
• Context-aware
• Web-based development tools
• Conversational logs
• Integrate with external knowledge sources
• RESTful APIs

• Open source platform, so you can own and download your code
• Deploy to messaging or voice channels
• If you’re willing to build your own bot, lots of flexibility and can easily build high performance bots

• The use of pure AIML requires that you define your own input/output pairs
• Not advisable to build your bot using Pandorabots and then host it somewhere else

Pandorabots Pricing: Pandorabots does have a free 14 day trial. Pricing after that starts at $19/mo, the next plan is $199/mo, and then above that is Enterprise pricing.

#13. Best Chatbot Builders: Verloop

Verloop is a powerful platform built for sales and marketing. With Verloop, you can create unique and personalized conversations that over time are very good at generating leads and making sales.

• Bots for Messenger, website, in-app
• Ecommerce bots for Shopify, Wordpress, and Magento
• Chatbot-to-human handoff for support
• Code free, drag and drop interface
• APIs, webhooks
• Analytics, sentiment analysis
• Answer visitors FAQs

• Easy to implement and has many integrations.
• Verloop is very much all about automating processes. It can be customized for many different platforms and pull it all together into a single backend interface.

• Ability to create chatbot conversational flows is limited.
• No ability to broadcast, which limits your capabilities with the platform.

Verloop Pricing: Verloop’s pricing is either free or negotiated once you need to upgrade. There’s a free forever Starter plan for up to 500 monthly conversations, which includes features like FAQ automation, bot builder, live chat, CRM integration and Facebook Messenger bots. Then there’s a Enterprise plan which includes all features, for which you’ll need to contact Verloop to negotiate pricing.

#15. Best Chatbot Builders: Flow XO

Flow XO is another more complete solution for building chatbots, hosting them and deploying them across different channels/platforms. Although it fits into the enterprise chat software category, Flow XO has very reasonable pricing and solutions for small and medium-sized businesses as well.

• Virtual welcome mat for visitors
• Lead capture tools
• Live chat
• Ability to answer simple questions
• Accept payments through your bot
• Messenger, Slack, Telegram, Twilio, web chat

• No coding skills required and easy to use user interface (UI).
• Not only limited to Facebook Messenger. You can also build chatbot widgets for your website or integrate them with suitable third-party platforms.

• Although the user interface is elegant, the ability to actually create a bot in a reasonable amount of time is a problem.
• No easy human to bot handoff, making your bot largely responsible for all customer and site visitor interactions. Lots could go wrong here.

Flow XO Pricing: Flow XO has a free account to get started. Paid versions start at $19/month, which gets you 5,000 interactions and you can add 25,000 by paying an extra $25/month and add five more bots for an extra $10/month.

#17. Best Chatbot Builders: Drift

Drift is a platform that utilizes live chat and automated chatbot software.

• Mobile application
• Manage complex customer cases through tickets
• Option for automated messaging
• Automate activities with a chatbot
• Store data about visitors
• Marketing and sales automation
• Integrates with other business systems

• Strong lead generation features
• Ease of use
• Lots of automation tools to choose from

• Pricing is extremely high compared to the competition which offer similar or better feature sets, especially if you have multiple teams and want to route chats between them
• Mobile application and web chat has many bugs, for example it has an issue where the web chat thinks you are a returning visitor (eg: Hi, welcome back Sarah) even though you are not that person.
• Many competitors outscore Drift in key feature areas (like bot builder) and sell for a lower price
• The bot builder is less powerful than other products (MobileMonkey, ManyChat, Chatfuel, etc.) yet is only available in the enterprise edition
• No support for messaging (SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, etc.)

Drift Pricing: Drift has a free plan that doesn’t include any notable features. After that, pricing begins at $50/mo and then jumps to $400/mo, $1500/mo and custom pricing with an additional charge for each user.

#19. Best Chatbot Builders: ManyChat

ManyChat is a Facebook Messenger bot-building platform with integrated live chat and chatbot communication.

• Build chatbots with visual flow builder and editor
• Chatbot templates
• Store user data
• Enable bot to send email notifications
• Multilingual chatbots
• Integrate with other business systems

• Built-in marketing tools

• Lack of flexibility for custom coding.
• Limited community resources.
• Does not work with any retail applications.
• Pricing is based on the number of contacts you have

ManyChat Pricing: ManyChat has a free account that you can use to test out the platform. However, if you want to use it for business, pricing starts at $10/mo for 500 subscribers. There are 7 more pricing tiers, which goes up to $145/mo for more than 20K subscribers per month. If you go above 25K subscribers in a month, which most medium or large-sized companies do, you need to talk to ManyChat about a pricing plan.

We hope you’ve found the best chatbot building platform for your business.

Please let us know what you think and if you feel other more qualified platforms should have made the list. Thank you!