The MNCs
and even the local companies are adopting chatbots to increase user
interaction. Especially Facebook Messenger Chatbots are spreading rapidly. Facebook
Messenger bots are not only increasing customer engagement but also elevating
the business opportunities.
To know more about chatbots and their frameworks look at my previous articles.
If you are
willing to develop your own facebook chatbot, but you don’t know any coding
skills, then you are on the right place.
There are
several frameworks through which we can develop exceptional chatbots for our
facebook page like IBM Watson, DialogFlow, SAP Conversational.ai etc. But there
are two premiere chatbot building tools especially for Facebook Messenger,
ChatFuel and ManyChat, which allow anyone to develop powerful chatbots without
coding skills. Let’s dive deep into this.
ChatFuel
ChatFuel is
one of the leading platform for building bots on Facebook Messenger.
Bots automate
communication with humans through messaging applications. Since messengers have
become the most heavily used mobile apps, bots have emerged as effective
instruments that are changing the world of digital marketing. Messenger
Marketing today is what email marketing and landing pages were a decade ago.
It’s fundamentally changing the way businesses interact with their prospects
and customers. We can use bots to increase sales, improve conversions, qualify
leads, and automate support on Facebook.
ChatFuel |
ChatFuel is the most popular and easy to use bot building platform.
ChatFuel
provides a user-friendly platform to develop these chatbots, just by drag and
drop approach. We can add image, videos, buttons etc. using chatfuel.
ChatFuel
was founded in the summer of 2015 with the goal of making bot-building easy for
anyone.
They
originally started with Telegram bots but are now focused entirely on Facebook
Messenger Bots.
ManyChat
There’s no denying the fact that we’re moving away from
emails, SMS and phone calls. More and more we’re using mobile-friendly
messenger apps like Facebook Messenger, iMessage, and WhatsApp to keep in touch
with friends, family, and even businesses.
It’s the quickest, easiest, and most convenient way to reach someone.
And chatbots are the best way to handle your business.
ManyChat empowers businesses to create Facebook
Messenger bots for marketing, sales, and support, helping to grow ROI and
revenue. They power more than 400,000 businesses all over the world to have 1B+
monthly business-to-customer conversations.
ManyChat |
ManyChat is also a leading chatbot developing platform
that was also founded back in 2015. It is also used for building chatbots for
facebook messenger using somewhat drag and drop approach.
Now, the question is which one is better?
The main purpose of this article is to compare the two platforms
with each and every feature they provide and help you to find the best platform
for your business.
Let’s find out which one is better and cheaper…
Login:
ChatFuel:
We can login to the ChatFuel account using our Facebook id
only. We should also have a page previously registered in the Facebook account. Only after linking the ChatFuel account with the Facebook page we can start
developing the bot.
ChatFuel Login Page |
ManyChat:
ManyChat also has the same approach like ChatFuel. Here
also we can login only through our Facebook id. You can have one ManyChat
account for a single facebook page, and we have to link that page to the
ManyChat account and start developing.
ManyChat Login Page |
Hence login is same for both of the platforms.
User Interface:
ChatFuel:
ChatFuel has a user-friendly and easy to understand UI.
It provides one view for their automation.
ChatFuel uses the concept of card, groups, and blocks for
their automation and flow-builder. The card actually contains the customized
responses such as texts, images, videos, links etc. They also provide buttons
for easy user interactions. A block is
actually the collection of these cards and the collections of these blocks are
termed as groups in ChatFuel.
For the newbie it is pretty easy to understand and build
the bots by their own. Once you understand how the thing actually works, you
can easily develop your chatbot with no worries.
ManyChat:
ManyChat has a more intuitive UI than ChatFuel. They
actually provides with two options to develop the flow builder.
By using the blocks, groups and cards like the chatfuel. Also here the card contains the custom responses like texts, images or videos. We
also can create buttons for easy user interactions.
Here is a picture of the basic building block of
ManyChat.
They also have a bot flow page where we can connect each
and every intent manually using threads. It’s a visual environment, very
user-friendly but a bit harder to understand. This is a drag and drop editor,
which gives an option to visualize the bot flow in the editor. It can get messy
with more number of intents.
Here is a picture of the flow builder in ManyChat.
But this is really hard to understand for a newbie. I had to refer to their help
documentation several times before making a successful sequence.
Hence in
I prefer ChatFuel in terms of UI.
Templates:
Regardless of
how easy the interface is, even creating a "simple" bot from scratch
can involve hours of setup time. That's why pre-made templates—and the ability
to clone and edit a bot—are so important.
ChatFuel:
ChatFuel provides almost 75 templates available free or
paid, starting from basic email bots to e-commerce bots. We can easily use these
templates in our facebook messenger bots by just editing it according to our convenience.
Most of the chatbots are free, except some comes with pro subscription.
ChatFuel also provides comments and documents for the easy
understanding of the templates.
Here are the famous and most used templates of ChatFuel,
ManyChat:
ManyChat only have 7 templates. But these seven templates
are quite equivalent to those 75 templates. Instead of providing pre-designed
templates ManyChat focuses on creating your own template.
But the templates don’t contain introductory
documentation. So it’s little hard to understand and get used to it.
The ManyChat templates are shown in the following
picture.
Hence, in respect of templates I would prefer ChatFuel.
Growth Tools:
It doesn’t matter how better chatbot you have, but you
need traffic for your bots as well as you business to work well. Both the
platforms provide great growth tools and marketing.
ChatFuel:
ChatFuel has 3 powerful methods to acquire customers. You
can push user manually through other channels, such as link in email or in
websites. ChatFuel gives us access to use messenger ads to reach more number of
people. You can even have a landing page if you don’t have a website. This
landing page comes with a button. You can use your link on several websites, or
emails that is provided by the chatfuel.
ManyChat:
ManyChat also has the same Growth Tools for marketing. ManyChat goes above and beyond, but with
features for more involved users. For example, they have a complex JSON
integration with Facebook ads that automatically gathers data from users who
engage with your ad and then sends custom responses.
They even have scannable
Facebook Messenger barcodes that can be printed on the posters.
Hence in terms
of Growth Tools ManyChat is a better platform.
e-commerce
Tools:
ChatFuel:
This is the
field where chatfuel has made a drastic development. We can create e-commerce
bots, and can order items instead of going back to the website. The chatfuel
supports order payment and buying options inside the bot only. Hence people can
order food, items etc through their messenger app.
ManyChat:
ManyChat doesn’t
provide any online buying facilities. They cannot accept payment; we can only
use online buying by redirecting to the websites. That’s a drawback of
ManyChat.
Plug-ins:
ChatFuel:
ChatFuel
provides a huge amount of plug-ins. These are very beneficial for a chatbot
developer and can create a smarter chatbot. They even provide the plug-ins with
subscriptions.
The Plug-ins of ChatFuel are listed below:
- Google Site Search
- Bing Search
- Swiftype Search
- RSS
- Subscriber
- Digest
- Zapier
- Google Sheets
- Wordpress
ManyChat:
ManyChat doesn’t
comes with so many number of plug-ins.
Hence Chatbot is
superior in this respect.
Customer Support:
The most
important thing for a developer or businessman is the customer support. It’s
the most important thing that should be taken into consideration. If an error
occurs, it’s important to fix it first for which we need customer support.
ChatFuels
documentation is clearer than ManyChat. ManyChat and ChatFuel both offer video
training courses, which help the user to understand the platform more deeply.
The customer
service is quite active for both the platforms. They also do have a chatbot in
their website for solving basic queries of the users.
Pricing:
ManyChat provides a better pricing plan, than other platforms. Both of the platforms
provides a free plan.
The comparison of
the free plan is given below:
Free Plan:
ChatFuel
|
ManyChat
|
Upto 1000 subscribers
|
Unlimited Subscribers
|
Basic Features
|
Basic Quick Start Templates
|
Chatfuel
Branding
|
ManyChat Branding
|
No integrations
|
No integrations
|
Two Growth Tools
|
Four Growth Tools
|
No Visual Flow Builder
|
Visual Flow Builder
|
Collects User Data
|
Doesn’t Collects User
Data
|
Buy Buttons
|
No Buy Buttons
|
They also
contains pro plan, which adds more feature access.
Pro Plan:
This pro plan
contains price rates based on the number of Active Users:
Subscribers
|
ChatFuel
|
ManyChat
|
500
|
$ 15
|
$ 10
|
1000
|
$ 20
|
$ 15
|
2000
|
$ 30
|
$ 25
|
5000
|
$ 55
|
$ 45
|
10000
|
$ 85
|
$ 65
|
15000
|
$ 120
|
$ 100
|
20000
|
$ 150
|
$ 135
|
25000
|
$ 180
|
$ 145
|
If you have more
subscribers than this you can use the premium plan of chatbot which adds
$199/month as a fixed add-on to pro plan.
The Features in
pro plan includes
ChatFuel
|
ManyChat
|
Unlimited
Subscribers
|
Unlimited
Subscribers
|
Full Featured
Bot
|
Full Featured
Bot
|
All templates
|
Advanced Quick
Start templates
|
Remove
Branding
|
Remove
Branding
|
Precise targeting
with Facebook Ads
|
Connect
ManyChat to Facebook Ads
|
Priority Support
|
Priority Support
|
Hence you can select any of the platforms according to
your budget.
Conclusion:
So, we went through a vast comparison of Chatfuel and ManyChat,
and came to a conclusion that ChatFuel is better in development side, but
ManyChat is superior in pricing and advertising.
Hence I will leave it up to you to choose the right
platform.
Thank you, for reading this blog.
See you in next blog.