November 30, 2019



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.

What are chatbots?
How to develop chatbots?

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:
  1. Google Site Search
  2. Bing Search
  3. Swiftype Search
  4. RSS
  5. Subscriber
  6. Digest
  7. Zapier
  8. Google Sheets
  9. 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.

If you want to contact a chatbot developer and develop your chatbot in the best price, click here


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November 25, 2019

This blog will take you through a scrumptious journey of how to develop a chatbot .

For knowing about chatbot please refer here .

Chatbots are conversational bots that can be accessed either by voice or texts or both. We can ask any type of queries, maybe anything about weather, time; you can schedule appointments, set alarms or even ask some general knowledge questions or mathematical questions.

But the question comes how to develop this chatbots? Can a person with no coding skills, develop a chatbot? 
In this blog I am going to answer all of these questions with the best possible explanation.
Let’s start with the first question.

Can we develop our own chatbot?


Yes, we can. Now the question that arises is why we would like to develop the chatbot?

Well, let me help you then. If you are a businessman and want to handle your customers through your website or social media sites, you can have a chatbot to answer all of their queries regarding your company. Or you are a content writer and have a website; you can have a chatbot on your website to interact with your readers. And developing that chatbot is termed as Chatbot Skill Development.

Benefits Of Having a Chatbot.

Benefits Of Chatbots

Before building a chatbot we should identify the benefits of having a chatbot. 

  1. There is no doubt that chatbot is going to be the most big thing in the future. According to an online survey in 2018, it was found that almost 50% Americans prefer chatbots when it comes to customer interactions. Hence having a chatbot can enhance your business.
  2. Not only in America, but also in European countries almost 30% people prefer chatbots over humans.
  3. In India maximum companies are adopting chatbot services. Almost 12% of all Indian websites contains chatbots for user interactions.
  4. The greatest benefit of having a chatbot is it is available 24x7. That is, at any place, any time we can access these chatbots. If we consider a customer-care center, we can get in touch with them with our basic queries and get them solved, even after the service center is closed. This is possible only due to chatbots.
  5. Around 85% of people in the entire world say that 24 hours service is the best. And it can be only provided using websites and chatbots.
  6. It is trustworthy (depends on your inputs) and it increases efficiency.
  7. It reduces time consumptions as it generally replies very fast, almost within 10 seconds (depending on your internet speed) hence it is reliable.

Ok, now we know what chatbots are. And what are the benefits of having it.

Chatbots mainly work on NLP (Natural Language Processing)

What is NLP?

The name itself suggests that it is a method that processes natural languages. Natural Language doesn’t mean only voice, but text too. It is actually the input of the user. The chatbots understands the motif and the question of the user through NLU (Natural Language Understanding) layer. This layer generally identifies the respective answer of the question and outputs it.

The below diagram briefly describes the working of a NLP layer.

NLP Layer



Now let me answer the second question, 

Can a person with no coding skills develop a chatbot?

My answer to this question will be partially yes .
There are many platforms that does not require coding for the development of the chatbots. But Amazon Lex or Amazon Alexa Skill development requires a bit of coding knowledge. You should either know JavaScript or Python for developing Amazon chatbots. Here we require a lot of coding when we develop the backend in AWS Lambda. Having some web development skill is handy as well. Many of these codes are available in GitHub, hence basic knowledge of coding is enough just for editing the code. So, if you don’t know coding you probably cannot develop Amazon Alexa Skills.

Developing a Chatbot


Before we learn how to develop it, I would introduce some predevelopment steps that are needed to be performed.

  •  Determine the goal of the chatbot.

Your chatbot should have a goal. Whether you will develop your chatbot for business or personal page, first set that. Then select the social site for which you want to develop, either facebook, whatsapp, instagram, twilio or your website.

  • Heap up all you questions with respective answers

This is the most important task you need to do while you develop a chatbot. You should assemble all your questions in a single place with their respective answers. I would also recommend you to group the similar type of questions in a single intent.
Intents are the most important component because they try to determine what the user wants. What are they asking for? In other words, they capture the intent or goal of the user.

  • Find the most suitable platform for your chatbot.


In the internet there are several platforms available for building chatbots for free, but uploading the chatbots requires money. If you know the methods you can easily develop it.

I am listing some of the topmost platforms.

  •   DialogFlow (By Google)

DialogFlow  (formerly known as api.ai) is a Google-owned chatbot developing engine. It provides tool to develop different chatbots for your websites, apps, especially for Google Assistant. Voice and conversational interfaces created with Dialogflow works with a wide range of devices including phones, wearables, cars, speakers and other smart devices.

This platform supports 14 different languages as of now, including Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian.
You can develop skills for your Google Home too through this.
You just have to create a developer account in DialogFlow, and start developing the chatbot. Click in this link to register in dialogflow.

Dialogflow


  • IBM Watson (By IBM)


   IBM Watson is a general question-answering computer system posed in natural language processing. It was developed by IBM’s project research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. It was named after IBM’s founder Thomas J. Watson.

But later they made it a framework, and made it available for chatbot development. We can integrate the chatbot with our facebook messenger, or our website. If you want you can integrate it with other social media sites as well. We can even use the IBM Cloud for storing our data. Here no coding is required for basic bots.

IBM Watson


  • Amazon Lex (By Amazon)


Amazon Lex is a service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text. Amazon Lex provides the advanced deep learning functionalities of automatic speech recognition (ASR) for converting speech to text, and natural language understanding (NLU) to recognize the intent of the text, to enable you to build applications with highly engaging user experiences and lifelike conversational interactions. With Amazon Lex, the same deep learning technologies enable you to quickly and easily build sophisticated, natural language, conversational bots (“chatbots”).

Amazon Lex backend is mostly controlled by AWS Lambda. For this you need an AWS (Amazon Web Service) account.

Amazon Lex


  • Amazon Alexa (By Amazon)


Amazon Alexa is one of the most famous Virtual Assistant. It is actually a cloud-based voice service especially developed for Amazon Echo and Echo Show. Through this you can develop skills for your Amazon Alexa. Then can publish them in Alexa Skills Store. This store is like Google Play Store, people can download your skill and use it whenever they want. Even you can use other developed skills from the Skill Store.
This also requires AWS Lambda for its backend.
Amazon Echo


Click here to see what type of skills are developed in Amazon Alexa.

Note: This is only used for the development of chatbot for  Amazon Alexa not for any website or  social media sites.
Amazon Alexa

  •  snips.ai

Snips is a AI Voice platform for connected devices that animates product interactions with customizable voice experience.

Snips is similar to Dialogflow, but it runs on the edge without sending any data to the cloud. This maintains our privacy. It is mainly beneficial for students, as snips.ai is the best for their projects like smart mirror, smart refrigerator etc..

snips.ai

  •  SAP Conversational.ai

It is one of the most trusted AI Voice Platform. It generally provides the best interface for our chatbots. We can develop chatbots for any social media sites in many languages. It can help you improve employee productivity, customer retention, and revenue . This is specially build for business purpose.
SAP conversational.ai





The development procedures are different for each of the platforms. We can find the tutorials in their official websites. 

Basically we create intents, which actually contains the queries of the users. If the inputted  question matches with the keywords in the intent, the platform calls the intent. Then the dialog related with the called intent is outputted either by voice or text. This is common for every platform, but the approach is different.

Thank you for reading this. Hope you have enjoyed.

See you in next blog.😊😊

If you want to contact a chatbot developer and develop your chatbot in the best price, click here

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