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Compare Chatfuel vs. Manychat side-by-side. Understand their key features, pros, cons, and make an informed choice for your chatbot needs.
Pricing:
$14.39/mo - $300/mo
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Pricing:
Free - $15/mo
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Best For:
Startups to enterprise businesses
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Best For:
Businesses that advertise on Facebook and Instagram
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In this head-to-head Chatfuel vs. Manychat comparison, we aim to help you choose the best option for your business.
Since both are renowned chatbot software designed to streamline customer engagement and improve your marketing strategy, it can be difficult to decide.
We aim to answer all your questions and help you make the best choice.
Let’s dive deeper into their features, pros, and cons.
Chatfuel vs. Manychat: At a Glance
Criteria | Chatfuel | Manychat | Winner |
---|---|---|---|
SMB Guide’s Rating | 8/10 | 8.2/10 | Manychat |
Real-Time Messaging and Canned Responses | ✅ | ✅ | Manychat |
Live Chat AI and NLP | ✅ | ✅ | Chatfuel |
Customizable Chat Widgets | ✅ | ✅ | Manychat |
Visitor Tracking and Analytics | ✅ | ✅ | Chatfuel |
Multichannel Support | ✅ | ✅ | Tie |
Multilingual Support | ✅ | ❌ | Chatfuel |
Offline Messaging and Availability | ✅ | ✅ | Tie |
Handoff and Escalation to Human Agents | ✅ | ✅ | Tie |
Security and Compliance | ✅ | ❌ | Chatfuel |
User Experience and User Interface | Intuitive interface | Easy to user interface | Tie |
Integrations and Compatibility | 10+ integrations | 10 popular integrations | Manychat |
Customer support | Knowledge base and email | Live chat and email | Tie |
Pricing | $14.39/mo – $300/mo | Free – $15/mo | Manychat |
Scalability | ✅ | ✅ | Tie |
Chatfuel: Key Features, Pros, Cons, & Pricing
Chatfuel is a popular chatbot platform known for its user-friendly interface and robust features. It’s especially known for its seamless integration with Facebook Messenger, allowing businesses to automate responses and engage customers effectively.
Key features include AI-powered bots that can understand and respond to user queries, drag-and-drop functionality to make it easier to build birds, ecommerce integrations for simpler online sales, and comprehensive analytics tools for tracking engagement and performance.
Its ability to create complex conversational flows without any coding makes it highly desirable among non-technical users.
Pros & Cons
7-day free trial
24/7 customer support
User-friendly interface
iOS and Android apps
No free plan
Limited functionality
Pricing
- Start: $29/month ($290/year) for up to 1,000 AI messages, unlimited manual messages, all support channels, and standard support.
- Grow: $79/month ($790/year) for up to 5,000 AI messages, unlimited manual messages, all support channels and standard support.
- Pro: $149/month ($1,490/year) for up to 10,000 AI messages, unlimited manual messages, all support channels and priority support.
Manychat: Key Features, Pros, Cons, and Pricing
Manychat is a platform known for allowing businesses to create chatbots for Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and SMS.
It’s considered one of the leading platforms for creating Messenger bots because of its simplicity and extensive feature set.
Features and characteristics it’s known for include ease of use, templates, multi-platform support, marketing automation, and chatbot analytics.
Pros & Cons
Free forever plan
10 popular integrations
User-friendly interface
Powerful automation features
Manual setup required
No multilingual support
Pricing
- Free: $0/month, includes Instagram Direct Messages, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, automated conversations for up to 1,000 contacts, basic growth tools and the ability to segment contacts.
- Pro: $15+/month (scales based on contacts up to $8,835 for 2 million+), everything in the free plan plus SMS text messaging, email, unlimited contact engagement, unlimited growth tools and keywords, advanced campaigns, analytics and insights, integrations, no ManyChat branding, email customer support.
Drive more sales and conversions on Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger using automation.
Real-Time Messaging and Canned Responses
Chatfuel uses ChatGPT to understand user intent to provide more accurate answers, the same way a human would, only faster.
It relies on keywords to help guide the platform but it doesn’t just spit out a canned response based on the keyword it catches.
It understands user intent for better answers even to more obscure questions.
Manychat makes it easy to create as many canned responses as you need, entered with just a quick shortcode that you assign.
Messages are sent to customers quickly.
✅ Winner: Manychat
Live Chat AI & NLP
Chatfuel can access NLP with most languages, but requires a bit of setup. You must integrate it with Dialogflow and set up Janis with a JSON API to manage it.
That is what takes it from scanning for keywords and guessing about user intent, to be able to determine user intent and answer accordingly.
In testing Manychat, I found that it lacked a bunch of features. The templates were in English, but they definitely weren’t written by a native speaker, and would require significant edits.
✅ Winner: Chatfuel
Customizable Chat Widgets
With Chatfuel, you have limited customization options when it comes to the look and feel. All you can do is add your logo and business name.
You cannot change the colors to match your branding. But, you can freely customize the text in the automatic messages and canned responses.
With ManyChat, you can embed a box or button on your website. You can set the colors to match your website’s style.
That said, it’s not an option on the free plan, because it’s considered part of the Growth Tools, which are only available on paid plans.
✅ Winner: Manychat
Visitor Tracking and Analytics
In the Chatfuel dashboard, you can get at-a-glance reports about chat statistics. For a deeper look, you can connect it to Google Analytics via Zapier.
Visitor tracking and analytics is not available on the Manychat free plan, so it wasn’t something I could test.
Paid users can install the Manychat Pixel on their website, and then a Metrics tab will become available in the dashboard.
Using it, you can track website actions, so you can see earned revenue, sales, buyers, and average payment count, and average payment amount.
✅ Winner: Chatfuel
Multichannel Support
Chatfuel offers multichannel support for Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, SMS, and email.
Manychat offers multichannel support for: Facebook Messenger, SMS, email, and WhatsApp.
✅ Winner: Tie
Multilingual Support
Manychat doesn’t offer multilingual support. Chatfuel makes it easy to create a multilingual chatbot.
✅ Winner: Chatfuel
Offline Messaging and Availability
Manychat’s interface is considered more intuitive and suitable for larger teams staffed with humans. It also is available across a wider range of channels, making it a versatile choice for businesses with broad customer outreach.
It offers an omnichannel approach, which allows businesses to use chatbots across multiple platforms.
✅ Winner: Tie
Handoff and Escalation to Human Agents
Chatfuel allows businesses to take over the conversation from the chatbot at any point. It’s particularly useful for handling complex customer queries that bots cannot address.
Chatfuel also offers the option to automatically switch to live chat when the customer uses certain keywords.
Manychat, on the other hand, provides a seamless handoff to human agents with the FlowBuilder feature.
Businesses can design complex workflows with automated responses and manual intervention when necessary.
✅ Winner: Tie
Security and Compliance
During our Manychat review, we were unable to determine if it offered HIPAA compliance.
There is a blog post on the website about WhatsApp compliance, but nothing we could find would definitively tell us if the Manychat platform offered the necessary security and compliance.
Chatfuel, on the other hand, is both HIPAA and GDPR compliant, as evidenced by a blog post that demonstrates how to build a medical chatbot.
✅ Winner: Chatfuel
User Interface and User Experience
Both platforms offer a strong user experience and user interface. Manychat offers a visual bot builder with various messaging platforms that are highly regarded.
On the other hand, Chatfuel is more focused on customer-centric chatbots. Some users say Chatfuel might be a better choice for those who want a more straightforward, less complicated setup.
✅ Winner: Tie
Integrations and Compatibility
Both platforms integrate with various messaging platforms and offer a multichannel approach.
ManyChat offers an iOS and Android application for mobile use. Chatfuel doesn’t offer mobile apps.
ChatFuel integrations include:
- Shopify
- Facebook Messenger
- Telegraph
- Line
- Your website
- Calendly
- ChatGPT
- Stripe
- Zapier
Manychat integrations include:
- Messenger
- SMS
- Google Sheets
- ChatGPT
- Stripe
✅ Winner: Manychat
Customer Support
With Manychat, unless you’re paying for the Pro plan, you only have email customer support. Paid plans give you access to 24/7 ticket support.
Live chat tech support is an option from 3a to 7p EST Mon-Fri. There’s also a lack of customer support on lower-tier plans with Chatful.
There’s a basic knowledge base with a chatbot to answer FAQs. The Pro plan offers “priority” service.
✅ Winner: Tie
Pricing
Chatfuel pricing ranges from $29 to $149 a month ($290 to $1,490 a year for two months free). ManyChat pricing ranges from free to $8,835 a month based on contact volume.
$15/month is for up to 500 contacts – and the highest end is for more than 2 million contacts. There’s also a custom pricing plan for those who want premium live chat support and 1:1 onboarding.
✅ Winner: Manychat
Scalability
Both platforms are completely capable of supporting businesses as they scale. No matter where you start or how big you grow, you can trust that either platform will work with you.
✅ Winner: Tie
Standout Features of Chatfuel
Chatfuel allows businesses to create conversion funnels. Chatfuel users report that it is better at creating custom fields than Manychat.
Standout Features of Manychat
Manychat offers mobile apps, whereas Chatfuel doesn’t. They also offer 13 tools to help you grow your subscriber base.
Chatfuel vs. Manychat: SMB Guide’s Verdict
While both tools are fairly impressive when it comes to chatbots, our winner is Manychat by a hair. At 8.2 compared to Chatfuel’s 8, it’s clear the tools are quite useful.
Manychat falls short because it lacks multi-language support, and the free version forces you to use its branding. And, for some, the manual setup can be a bit of a pain.
That said, if you don’t have a budget for a tool and you need one, then you can definitely make Manychat work for you.
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