One of the biggest challenges for digital businesses that are scaling fast, is maintaining effective communication channels with customers.
It's inevitable that customers will run into questions, and problems that they will need your help with. But it's often difficult to service these questions when you have so much else to focus on.
That's why thousands of businesses are turning to chatbot builders to automate their customer support and win back time.
And they're in good company.
The chatbot platform ecosystem is growing fast, with chatbot platform revenues expected to surpass $450m per annum by 2027 - as digital businesses turn to chatbot builders to automate customer communication and help drive revenue.
The best chatbot platforms like Tidio, and Manychat make it easy to build customized chatbots and use artificial intelligence and automated workflows to automate your customer communication.
Not only do they help by answering commonly asked questions, they can also capture customer data, update customers on their purchases, increase conversion rate and average order value (by delivering coupons and promoting upsells), and automate social media communication.
Before you select the best chatbot builder for your business. Ensure you get under the hood and understand how each chatbot platform works, and whether it integrates into your wider tech stack.
Best Chatbot Builders & Platforms
We've tested the best chatbot builders and platforms on the market so that you can make a quick decision on which chatbot is right for your business.
Each of the chatbots we've reviewed requires no technical knowledge to implement. There are other ai chatbot builders out there that offer more advanced features, but we're sticking to those that do not require technical integration and can help our businesses today.
- Tidio
- Manychat
- Chatfuel
- MobileMonkey
Focused Look At The Best Chatbot Platforms
Tidio
If you are looking for an all-in-one chatbot builder that is reasonably priced, and to set up then Tidio is a great option.
Tidio is used by over 3 million businesses and has over 2k 5-star reviews from customers around the world.
As well as offering live chat, Tidio has an ai chatbot that integrates seamlessly into your social media ecosystem and ecommerce store to automate customer support, and help convert customers in real-time.
There are over 35+ pre-built chatbot ready-to-use templates that you can access, and installation takes less than 5 minutes. And if you'd prefer to build your own chatbot, then Tidio has an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface that takes care of the process.
The chatbot plan starts at $30 per month, which is a drop in the ocean when you consider how quickly you can make that money back by increasing your conversion rate and average order value with chatbot automation.
The features we like:
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Codeless chatbot builder - one of the best features that Tidio offers is the ability to build your own chatbot. The drag-and-drop builder makes it easy to set conditions and triggers so that the chatbot communicates with your customers effectively. For example, you can set up a rule-based system that tells the chatbot to send customers specific messaging, ask for their email addresses, or create a carousel of options for the customer to choose from. Depending on whether it's their first time on to site, or if they are browsing specific products, send custom messaging, coupons, or upsells to help increase conversion rate. The Tidio chatbot builder requires no coding skills and integrates into social media
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Discount engine - Tidio's bots can deliver personalized messages offering new and returning customers discounts at key times. The drag and drop builder also makes it easy to set up cross-sells and to contact those who have abandoned cart
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Lead generation - one of the main ways we use Tidio at Visualize Value is to collect customer data. Tidio integrates into our email platform via Zapier (ConvertKit) so that we can capture data in real-time, and add those customers into our automated workflows. It's easy to incentivize data capture by offering promotions or by offering unique content. If you're using other email software like Mailchimp, Tidio also has you covered
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AI chatbots - another great feature Tidio offers is AI response bots. These AI chatbots require you to upgrade to the Tidio+ plan but upgrade your bots from rule-based chatbots to AI bots that learn over time what customers are asking. This means that they can start to build conversational scenarios with customers and decide what to say based on what the customer is asking. It might be that you're happy using rule-based chatbots to get started, but it's great that Tidio offers AI chatbots if you need to upgrade in the future
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Instagram/Facebook Messenger chatbot - like other leading chatbot builders, Tidio makes it easy to automate your social media customer support. Tidio can answer your DMs, help to generate more social media sales, and importantly centralize all of your communication in one place - making things much easier to manage
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Live chat - if you'd prefer to offer live chat before automating customer support with the best chatbots, then Tidio has a cheaper live chat solution. It's easy to see what customers are typing in real-time, what they've viewed on site, and where they're visiting from. Not only will live chat help you convert more customers, but Tidio makes it easy to communicate with customers in real-time across their mobile app, desktop, and browser applications
- Integrations - Tidio integrates into all major shopping cart platforms, including Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, and others. On top of this, Tidio integrates with Zapier, social media platforms, and other applications like Mailchimp and Zendesk. We have hooked Tidio up to our Shopify front end, and any data we capture via Tidio is automatically fed through to Converkit, our email marketing software
Tidio Pricing
All of the Tidio pricing plans are affordable and offer great value for money. We are currently using the Chabot plan, which starts at $40 per month, providing unlimited access to live chat and 40,000 chatbot interactions per month.
If you're just starting out, check out the free plan which allows you to live chat with 50 customers, and run your chatbots with 100 customers per month.
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Free - live chat with 50 customers, chatbot with 100 customers
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Communicator - $15 per month, unlimited live chat, 5 operators
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Chatbots - $30 per month, unlimited live chat, chatbot with 40,000 customers in real-time
- Tidio+ - $240 per month, unlimited live chat, custom chatbot messages, AI response bots
Manychat
Manychat is the most used marketing chat platform on the internet and facilitates over 1 billion conversations for over 1 million businesses every year.
The best chatbot builders seamlessly integrate with your social media platforms, and ecommerce store, and Manychat is no different.
Manychat has solutions for Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram, and SMS. On top of this, Manychat works with Shopify and other leading ecommerce platforms to help you automate your customer communication and support.
Also offering an easy-to-use drag-and-drop chatbot builder, Manychat makes it easy to automate social media conversations, automate data capture, take bookings, communicate customer content and run customer quizzes.
The Manychat interface also has a reporting dashboard so that you can track earnings, stay on top of sales, and track uplifts in average order value.
Like Tidio, you can also access a number of pre-built platforms to set up rule-based chatbots.
The features we like:
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Flow builder - the Manychat flow builder makes it easy to drag and drop custom flows that are initiated by certain triggers, conditions, and keywords. For example, if someone asks a question about an online course, you can set up a chatbot to run them through a sequential series of steps to guide the customer towards your intended goal (either capturing a lead or generating a sale). The flow builder makes it easy to add media, text, or to allow the customer to initiate a live chat
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SMS integration + drip campaigns - it's easy to connect Manychat directly with your Instagram, Shopify, and Facebook Messenger channels to acquire customer data, and cell numbers. Once you capture your customer's data you can set up automated chatbots to automatically send SMS messages to your customers (helping to keep them up to date on their purchases or to recover abandoned carts). From there, you can run SMS drip campaigns from your Manychat dashboard
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Whatsapp integration - just like Manychat's SMS integration you can keep customers up to date via Whatsapp. This is a growing communication channel for digital businesses, and Manychat makes it easy to communicate via Whatsapp and SMS from one central dashboard
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Comment automation - you can set up social media chatbots to automate comment responses across your social profiles. Every time a customer responds, or tags a friend, set up a chatbot to reply to your comments or direct customers into live chat or automated workflows where you can drive them towards making a purchase
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Lead generation - like Tidio, Manychat has a number of features to help you capture customer data. From there, you can store customer data directly in the Manychat CRM system or pull the data through to your email marketing software or purpose-built CRM (we use ConverKit at Visualize Value)
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CTX Ads - integrate your ad traffic with Manychat and send clicks directly to your automated chatbot to help convert more customers. Work out exactly what new customers that click your ads are looking for, and show them the products they are looking to purchase, if they're interested in something else, qualify that interest or swap out items to help customers make a better decision. Manychat will also automatically add products to the basket and send customers straight to the checkout to purchase
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Abandon cart messaging - set up automated flows to recover lost sales and abandoned carts. Check in with your customers automatically to make sure that they definitely don't want to buy your product before they leave you for good. Manychat offers this functionality across SMS, Whatsapp, and email
- Integrations - like Tidio, Manychat also integrates into the majority of major ecommerce technologies, including Shopify, Mailchimp, HubSpot, Google Sheets, Zapier (and others)
Manychat Pricing
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Free - 1,000 contacts free of charge
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Pro - $15 per month, get access to all premium features, pricing scales based on contacts
- Premium - custom plans available for enterprise customers and custom use cases
Chatfuel
Like Manychat, Chatfuel has been building chatbots for some time.
Their chatbot platform has been used by over 7 million customers, including big brands like Netflix, Lego, British Airways, and Adidas.
It’s free to get started with Chatfuel, and once you’re up and running there are two pricing plans depending on whether you need a small business solution (starting at $11.99 per month), or an enterprise solution (starting at $199 per month) to meet your needs.
Chatfuel works in a similar way to Tidio and Manychat, giving you the ability to set up pre-built automated answers to customer questions, and comments using pre-built chatbots.
This includes answering common frequently asked questions (FAQs), dealing with customer support questions, and automating marketing campaigns. Chatfuel can also help your business automatically take bookings, gather customer feedback, qualify and capture leads, and recover abandoned carts.
The features we like:
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Pre-built chatbot templates - Chatfuel has pre-built chatbot ready-to-use templates across Ecommerce, Real Estate, Beauty, Restaurants, Sales, and Healthcare all ready to go. When it comes to Ecommerce it’s easy to set up chatbots to make product recommendations, deliver promo codes, show people their nearby stores, and deal with customer support questions in an automated way
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Social media communication – like Manychat, Chatfuel is integrated with Messenger, and Instagram so that you can automate conversations across your social media accounts. This includes automated responses and sequences for comments, stories, mentions, direct messages, and ads
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Instagram flow builder – Chatfuel has an easy-to-use drag and drop interface for building chatbots that can automate customer service, serve promo codes to help convert customers, and capture leads
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Collect leads - access tones of pre-built templates to help convert leads - once you capture a new lead, Chatfuel saves the data in their CRM and makes it easy to segment customers so they can be retargeted in the right way
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Automate bookings - Customers can make bookings and appointments directly within Chatfuel chatbot platforms. Once the booking is made, you can create an automated chatbot sequence to keep customers up to date with reminders and changes to their booking
- Collect feedback - once your customers have made a purchase, Chatfuel makes it easy to automatically check in to see what the experience was like, and collect feedback at scale so you can improve your service offering over time. Forget customer surveys, just collect feedback on the fly
Chatfuel Pricing
There are two main Chatfuel plans that you can access. The first is the Business Plan which is self-serve and suitable for smaller businesses with more limited use cases.
The Enterprise plan includes bespoke support, and the Chatfuel team will work with you to create custom chatbots that will help you fully automate customer service, and drive revenue.
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Business - $11.99 per month, user-friendly tools to build your own chatbots
- Enterprise - $199 per month, custom-built chatbots for your business, Chatfuel team implements the right solution for you
MobileMonkey
Unlike Tidio, Manychat, and Chatfuel which are chatbot platforms designed primarily for ecommerce businesses, MobileMonkey also has solutions for sales teams.
InstaChamp is their flagship ecommerce product that starts at just $9.95 per month – one of the most affordable solutions out there if you’re looking to automate communication via social media using chatbots.
However, MobileMonkey also offers FunnelPro for lead capture and meeting bookings and RoboBDR for sales outreach and engaging influencers. These are powerful solutions for service-based businesses that drive customers via social media.
Unlike InstaChamp, both FunnelPro and RoboBDR start at $119 per month.
The features we like:
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InstChamp features – MobileMonkey’s Instagram offering helps entrepreneurs set up autoresponders to direct messages, trigger chat funnels with keywords, auto respond to story mentions, and automate social media communication. It works similarly to the other top chatbots we’ve reviewed and is priced affordably at $9.95 per month
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RoboBDR features – one of the stand-out MobileMonkey features is RoboBDR. This tool is built to support sales teams with lead qualification templates, and the ability to segment high-quality leads based on the inbound data collected by the chatbot. Good leads are marked as Unicorn leads, whereas those that are less attractive are bucketed as Donkey leads. Sales teams can easily filter between the two to ensure that they reach out to the best prospects first. RoboBDR includes a multi-channel inbox to respond to customers across website, Instagram, Facebook, and SMS, providing a slick operation for new inbound leads
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FunnelPro for sales teams – building on top of RoboBDR, FunnelPro makes it easy for businesses to automatically capture and qualify leads directly within chatbots, and to add them to high converting sales cadences to keep warm. Once a lead is captured, FunnelPro notify sales reps so that they can complete a meeting or get a meeting booked in. This process ensures that high-intending prospects are converted quickly
- Unicorn X-Ray - MobileMonkey has its own data network of millions of opted-in contacts. Their X-Ray feature scans web traffic to pick up name, email, pages visited, and IP addresses. From there, you can trigger automated follow-up sequences to segmented audiences via email or SMS to drive more engagement and meetings
MobileMonkey Pricing
If you’re an ecommerce business looking to automate your social media communication at an affordable price plan, pick MobileMonkey’s InstaChamp product – starting at $9.95 it’s a cheap solution that works straight out the box.
For sales teams, there are pricing plans for FunnelPro and RoboBDR starting at $119 per month
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InstaChamp - offer a free plan, as well as a Platinum plan starting at $9.95 per month
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FunnelPro - starts at $119 per month
- RoboBDR - starts at $119 per month
Why invest in a chatbot builder for your business?
If you are still on the fence about investing in a chatbot builder for your business, it's worth reviewing why other leading ecommerce businesses have invested in the best chatbot builders and platforms for their businesses.
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Avoid dropout - recent Forrester research suggested that over 53% of customers do not make a purchase if their questions are not answered instantly. This fact alone is a great reason to invest in a chatbot builder for your business
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Drive more revenue - ai chatbots help to increase return on investment and drive more sales. On average ecommerce stores that integrate chatbot builders increase revenue by 7-25% straight off the bat, as customers get the answers they're looking for quicker, and it's easy to serve coupons to encourage conversion there and then. Ultimately, your potential customers are time-poor, help them make the right decision today
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Automate and centralize customer service - chatbot builders are a very cost-effective way to automate your customer service and increase customer satisfaction. Unlike traditional ecommerce stores that do not use ai chatbots, those who have integrated chatbot builders give their customers a 2-way communication channel to answer common questions. In addition, the best chatbot builders combine all of your customer service channels into central dashboards so that you can manage customer service across social, website, email, and CRM from one place
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Collect leads - it's never been more important to collect customer data and grow your own audience. With the rise of social media platforms, it's possible to grow extensive followings (we have nearly 1 million followers across Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter). But ensuring you have an adequate share of voice across those platforms is never in your control. Introducing ai chatbots onto your website is a great way to collect more customer data so that you can retarget a wider audience via email and SMS
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More channels - communicate across a wider number of channels, from Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Whatsapp, Email, SMS, Telegram, Twitter, and more. If you are currently running your customer support via email, it's worth meeting customers where they are by integrating chatbot builders to engage with customers across a wider network
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Collect customer feedback - the best chatbot builders allow you to run quizzes, ask customers for feedback, drive post-sale reviews and evaluate your service. Set up automated questions for your paying customers to find out how and where you need to improve
- Powerful ai chatbots - if you want to take your chatbot strategy to the next level, upgrade to AI chatbots. AI chatbots use artificial intelligence and natural language processing to learn when your customers are asking over time. AI chatbots can then cater conversational responses based on artificial intelligence, rather than pre-built automated responses
How to select the best chatbot platforms as you scale?
Once you've made the decision to invest in a chatbot builder, here are a couple of key features to look out for before deciding which ai chatbot is best for your business.
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Feature set - picking the right chatbot for your business is determined by where the majority of your customer service takes place (and where you drive sales). If you convert all of your ecommerce business from social media channels then it's important to pick a chatbot builder that has a range of features to manage communication channels across Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Whatsapp, and other social media platforms. Likewise, if you are driving the majority of sales from your ecommerce platform (for example Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce) then ensure that your chatbot builder is integrated with this system and that the user experience is seamless
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Integrations - ensure that you pick chatbot builders with a wide spectrum of integrations into the wider tech stack. All of the chatbots we have reviewed integrate with a wide range of ecommerce platforms, email marketing services, and online course platforms. But it's worth checking that you're covered and that you can communicate with customers on the platforms that you care about
- Price - each chatbot builder has a different pricing model, and not all chatbot platforms offer free trials. Take the time to trial each chatbot platform before diving into the paid plans, or review case study material to ensure that the chatbot can deliver on your needs. All of the chatbot builders we have reviewed have very affordable price plans and should drive a big enough increase in conversion rate and average order value to pay for themselves quickly
Sign up for the best chatbot builder platform to get started
It's time to automate your customer service and drive more sales.
Sign up to the best chatbot builder for your business today. And if you are still not sure which chatbot to integrate into your business, pick an all-in-one chatbot platform like Tidio.
Tidio offers a free plan to get you off the ground, and once you're ready to supercharge your chatbot strategy there is an affordable price plan to upgrade to ($30 per month).
If you're super focused on social media, then Manychat and Chatfuel are other great platforms that are already supporting millions of businesses every day.
