ChatFuel or ManyChat. Which one is better for your business?

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