ChatBot Review: Features, Pricing, & Alternatives

Our Verdict

Everything you need to know about ChatBot, the answer to your customer service needs. Includes a detailed review, comparisons to competitors, and FAQs.

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ChatBot ChatBot
Software Type: AI chat bot software
Best For: Startups to enterprise businesses who need a cost-effective solution to answer online queries or spark conversions.
Pricing: $65/mo - $499/mo
Pros:
  • 14-day free trial
  • 10+ integrations
  • Intuitive user-based design
  • Customization options
Cons:
  • No mobile apps
  • No free forever plan

ChatBot is a cost-effective AI-powered chatbot that greets visitors to your website and social media channels and engages them in informative chat conversations.

It connects to your knowledge base to find useful answers to common customer service and sales questions and can be configured to market or upsell.

Here’s what you need to know about 24/7 instant response customer service.

SMB Guide’s Verdict for ChatBot

We rate ChatBot 8.5 out of 10. It’s a great tool for organizations of any size who want to provide excellent customer service and boost conversions, but a bit pricey for those on a budget.

ChatBot is an AI-driven chat widget you can add to your website, message service, or social media. It’s easy to use and integrates with other services from the same company, LiveChat and HelpDesk, along with other popular apps.

There’s a lot to learn, and customer support is spotty at best for anyone on a lower-priced plan. Read on for a detailed breakdown of key features.

FactorRating (out of 10)
Pricing & Plans8
Real-Time Messaging & Canned responses9
Live Chat AI & Natural Language Processing (NLP)9.5
Customizable Chat Widgets8.5
Visitor Tracking and Analytics9.5
User Interface and User Experience9
Integrations and Compatibility8
Customer Support7.5
SMB Guide Rating8.5

SMB Guide evaluates products using a broad range of assessment criteria. For additional information, visit the SMB Guide Evaluation Criteria page.

Pricing & Plans

Following a 14-day free trial, you have 4 plans to choose from. Each higher plan offers additional active chats and/or more features.

ChatBot pricing

Here’s the price and breakdown for each tier.

Starter

With a new startup, answering web visitor questions can quickly overwhelm a small staff. ChatBot’s Starter plan is a cost-effective way to answer routine questions that can lead to sales while your staff takes care of more important tasks.

Price

  • $65 per month
  • $52 per month billed annually

Features

  • 1 active chatbot
  • 1,000 valid chats/mo
  • Unlimited number of stories
  • 7-day training history
  • All integrations
  • Basic reporting
  • Data security

Who it’s for: The ChatBot Starter package is best for small businesses with small staffs and small budgets.

Team

The Team plan is a great answer for smaller businesses on the move. 

Price

  • $169 per month
  • $142 per month billed annually

Features

  • 5 active chatbots
  • 5,000 valid chats/mo
  • Unlimited number of stories
  • Unlimited training history
  • All integrations
  • Advanced reporting
  • Data security
  • Team collaboration
  • Button actions
  • Version history

Who it’s for: The Team plan is perfect for a small business that’s growing fast.

Business

If your business is growing and customer service needs it, the Business plan will provide a lot of answers at a far more reasonable price than hiring the number of people it takes to handle thousands of queries.

Price

  • $499 per month
  • $424 per month billed annually

Features

  • Unlimited active chatbots
  • 25,000 valid chats/mo
  • Unlimited number of stories
  • Unlimited training history
  • All integrations
  • Advanced reporting
  • Data security
  • Team collaboration
  • Button actions
  • Version history

Who it’s for: The Business plan is best for growing businesses with a heavy web traffic to service a lot of visitors each month.

Enterprise

Large businesses need a lot more attention, and the Enterprise package provides more hands-on support and training for your team.

Price

  • Custom pricing

Features

  • Unlimited active chatbots
  • Custom chat package
  • Unlimited number of stories
  • Unlimited training history
  • All integrations
  • Advanced reporting
  • Data security
  • Team collaboration
  • Button actions
  • Version history
  • Personal onboarding
  • Premium customer support
  • Security assistance
  • ChatBot building services
  • ChatBot maintenance
  • Custom integrations
  • Dedicated account manager

Who it’s for: The ChatBot Enterprise plan is good for large businesses with a lot of website traffic.

ChatBot

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Real-Time Messaging & Canned Responses

Before AI, rule-based chatbots were limited in possible responses. They could only follow the script you provided. AI bots like the ChatBot AI work differently.

Instead of writing scripts, you can connect them to your knowledge base, which the same company offers as a separate service, or you can integrate with a third-party app like Zendesk

ChatBot AI does not merely scan for keywords and give canned answers; it considers the whole question to deliver more contextual answers, even if the customer’s question is unusually phrased. AI means fast answers to more complex questions.

To streamline responses, you can set up predefined story templates to answer FAQs and save replies for quick future reference.

Live Chat AI & NLP

ChatBot supports Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Norwegian (Bokmal), Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Ukrainian languages.

So it can communicate with most prospects and customers in their own language. You can choose whether to have your chatbot initiate the conversation or wait for the customer to start the chat.

With each chat, ChatBot AI builds its knowledge base, making future conversations more natural and with faster access.

Customizable Chat Widgets

ChatBot’s chat widgets allow plenty of customization. You can choose a template and then customize it with colors, graphics, and buttons to meet your needs.

For example, with the restaurant chatbot template, you can create buttons on the welcome screen to answer FAQs:

ChatBot restaurant template

Other options might include:

  • Showcase your menu (you can add mouth-watering images or your most popular dishes)
  • Display your service hours
  • Take orders for pickup or delivery
  • Allow users to make reservations
  • Provide contact details
  • Show your location – and link to a map

You can customize the chat story to match your brand voice and add your logo or a familiar face in place of the cartoon graphic at the top of the window.

It’s all pretty simple, and you don’t need coding skills. Implement the chatbot on your website with a copy-and-paste code, or integrate with Facebook Messenger, Shopify, Slack, or Zapier to create other channels of communication.

Visitor Tracking and Analytics

ChatBot offers a range of useful reports you can use for informed business decisions. Use the data to understand your customers better – learn what they want, what might be barriers to sales, and when your potential customers are most active.

ChatBot analytics

ChatBot automatically saves a profile for each chat user, so you can get to know who is asking about your company or products and what they are most interested in.

Pattern tracking can help you decide what to do next. For example, if you’re a seafood restaurant and 30% of potential customers want to know if you serve crab cakes, that seems like a good addition to the menu.

User Interface and User Experience

ChatBot’s interface is simple to navigate and use once you get the hang of it. The most difficult part of the process is building the various inputs, your knowledge base, brand voice, and stories to address FAQs.

ChatBot interface

You can start with a blank bot or explore pre-written templates with common scenarios. The purpose of your bot may be to answer questions, highlight products, encourage signups, take reservations, troubleshoot, provide organization or product information, ask for feedback, invite users to fill out a quiz, or some other purpose you envision.

Training the bot is simple. You connect with your website, knowledge base, or app, and ChatBot AI Assist generates responses automatically based on your resources. You choose from 6 types of responses:

  • Text – plain text responses without graphics or emojis
  • Random Text – a randomized set of, for example, greetings, in place of one standard hello for each visitor
  • Image – your answers and or greetings can be accompanied by an image
  • Gallery (Carousel) – or even a group of images
  • Button – set buttons to answer common questions, like operating hours, location/directions, or reservations
  • Quick Reply – convenient for meeting scheduling, surveying, or presenting a special offer. The user can select a quick reply or type another query or answer.

If no templates fit your ChatBot vision, you can start with a blank slate and work from there.

ChatBot customization

It looks pretty straightforward, but you’ll need some idea of where you want it to go and what you want it to look and sound like.

ChatBot creation

However, my first attempt fell flat. I expected my brand new bot to say “Hello, welcome to my website!” followed by “How can I help you?” It did not.

ChatBot creation example

Obviously, it’s a bit more complicated than it appears – which is exactly what a lot of users say. Be prepared to spend some time in the knowledge base when you’re getting started.

Integrations and Compatibility

ChatBot offers AP support and integrates with many popular apps plus its own in-house softwares, LiveChat and HelpDesk (for additional service fees).

Third-party integrations include:

  • Shopify
  • WordPress
  • Facebook Messenger
  • Freshdesk
  • Slack
  • Zapier
  • Zendesk

You can connect other social media channels and your CRM using Zapier to accomplish tasks like adding subscribers to your Mailchimp mailing list or contacts to your CRM.

Customer Support

Lack of customer support with lower-priced plans is the most common user complaint. While there is a knowledge base and a chatbot to answer the most common questions, users say it’s difficult to get a response from a representative.

Large companies using the higher-priced packages report exceptional service.

ChatBot — Unique Features

ChatBot’s AI learning is the standout feature that sets it above canned-response chatbots. Instead of writing responses to questions and leaving users without answers for unanticipated questions, AI delves into multiple sources to find accurate, detailed information.

What the Experts Say About ChatBot

  • TrustRadius: 8.1/10 (14 votes)
  • Capterra rating: 4.7/5 (55 ratings)
  • G2 rating: 4.5/5 (20  ratings)

This is a great software! My company loved it because we gave our attendees a personal experience as we logged in as ourselves. We were able to “say hi” to attendees while they were looking around the platform. This gave the attendees an “in-person” feel as if we saw them at an in-person conference. The analytics were great and we gained a lot of knowledge about our attendees and how we can improve our event for next time.

Lauren B., Programs Manager – Verified Capterra review

It was a very enjoyable experience for me. I tried many similar tools and the chatbot stood out due to its professional look and feel (and also the advanced feature set). Although it has many advanced features, it is designed with beginners in mind as well, so you can get started quickly and make it more advanced as you progress and learn more about the platform. This is a powerful tool that boosted my engagement on the site and lead generation.

Abdo L., Lawyer – Verified Capterra review

ChatBot Alternatives

Still not sure if ChatBot is the right solution for your organization? Here are some alternatives to consider.

 
 
 
4.0
4.3
3.9
Free - $79/user/mo
Free - $499/mo
$39/user/mo - $139/user/mo
4.0
Free - $79/user/mo
4.3
Free - $499/mo
3.9
$39/user/mo - $139/user/mo

Freshchat

freshchat homepage

Compared to ChatBot, Freshchat offers a similar service but has lower ratings on Capterra and G2.  The most significant difference is in pricing. Freshbot offers a limited free version for up to 10 agents.

Pricing tiers start at $19/month/per agent following a 21-day free trial as opposed to ChatBot’s flat rate pricing. Freshchat’s Pro and Enterprise plans include unique features such as IntelliAssign – automatic load balanced assignments based on team member skills and team performance reports.

It’s also where the API feature kicks in – unlike ChatBot, which has API at all levels.

Start your free trial of Freshchat today!

Tidio

tidio homepage

Tidio is a business-focused live chat platform that combines email, Messenger, and live chat. Its major purpose is to automate the many stages of client engagement that take place on the website.

Tidio offers free capabilities, making it an excellent choice if you’re looking for advanced chatbots and automation. The free plan allows for a maximum of three agents, and Tidio’s subscription plan begins at $29 per month.

Get started with Tidio for free!

Intercom

Intercom homepage

With a 4.5/5 rating and over a thousand reviews on Capterra, Intercom sounds like a good bet. Its operation is slightly different from ChatBot.

Where ChatBot focuses solely on bot interaction, Intercom has a human component – allowing human operators to handle 7 live chats at a time by answering the basic questions with a live person overseeing each chat in case more help is needed.

In addition, their AI chatbot is bundled with their integrated suite of products, including a helpdesk, and is not a standalone product.

Intercom plans that include their chatbot range are Advanced at $99/user/month plus $0.99 per verified chat and Expert at $139/user/month.

It’s a good solution for big organizations with deep pockets who are looking for an all-in-one solution.

Getting Started with ChatBot

ChatBot is a money-saving solution for organizations of any size looking to provide great customer service all the time. While it has a few drawbacks, it’s still the best solution I found, and the company is well-known and reliable.

I think it’s one of the best chat solutions on the market.

Start your 14-day free trial of ChatBot today!

FAQs

What is a valid (paid) chat?

Spam chats exist, but they don’t count toward your total number of chats. Chats are not considered valid unless they contain a successful interaction between a user and the chatbot.

What is a story?

It’s the responses that you create between the chatbot and your users. Your chatbot stories reflect your brand voice and tone.

You may choose a formal tone, for example, like “Hello. How may I help you today?” or a fun, casual tone, like “Hi there! How can I help?”

Then write subsequent answers in the same tone to simulate more human, brand-centric interactions. The same stories can be assigned to many different chatbots and social media channels.

Is a contract required?

There are no contracts or hidden fees. You may cancel at any time.

ChatBot

Automate your customer service with ChatBot in less than 10 minutes. Sign up now for free!

Sign up free
ChatBot

ChatBot is a robust platform to build your own chatbot with no programming skills.

Product Brand: ChatBot

Editor's Rating:
4.3

Lucinda has spent the last 15 years working from home as a freelance writer and WordPress designer, and throughout her career, she has worked directly with several digital marketing agencies with clients in the SaaS space, ranging from e-commerce platforms to procurement software.