Alibaba Cloud Intelligent Robot vs. ManyChat vs. MobileMonkey

I found that ManyChat is a strong tool when receiving incoming messages, being able to create a tree of potential responses based on options given to the initiator. There is also a huge potential for complex automation (as long as the environment required by Facebook in order to send outgoing messages is maintained).

Incentivized

MobileMonkey would be great if you have a really strong social media presence and want to capitalize on people visiting your pages. It's great if you have a tech friendly audience who is not afraid to talk to a chatbot. If you have an audience where they might be uncomfortable or more of an "uptight" audience then it might not be fore you. It's also not great for heavy B2B if your focus is on high level targets as they're likely not logged in to Facebook at work. B2C is probably the best function for MobileMonkey, although it could be used to help field support messages.

Incentivized

• Collect email and phone number easily
• provide 24/7 customer support to your customers
• More than one ways for people to opt into your bot
• great way to provide offers and sales to your subscribers via messenger
• Great to build a relationship with your followers on Instagram

Incentivized

• For small businesses on zero budget - provides a free.
• A Facebook group community with peers and experts helping each other.

Incentivized

• Honestly, the only thing I don't like about ManyChat is their support. It seems to be almost non existent. However, that concern is negated by having a fantastic user base that helps each other out on Facebook.

Incentivized

• Terrible marketing ethics!
• 6am phone calls to my cell trying to up-sell me
• Spam galore! I have replied more than 5 times to be unsubscribed, yet they still spam me

ManyChat is a great tool, provides loads of features, integrations and just saves you a whole load of time once all set up. If you aren't tech-savvy or used to how digital marketing tools work, it can appear complicated. That's how I felt initially 2 years ago, and after watching tutorials online I had a better understanding of it. This is why I rated it a 7, as it's not a tool that you can just play around with and guess how it works. There's definitely a learning curve with it so I recommend doing the free training and watching video tutorials.

Incentivized

There is room for improvement but frankly, we haven't had the need to request for support. Everything is pretty easy to setup and there are very useful video explanation guides and walkthroughs on ManyChat's YouTube channel. The only challenge we have had was to integrate it with Zapier, it's a bit tricky because you need to do a setup workaround first, but nothing too complicated.

Incentivized

MobileMonkey support is second to none when you have a paid plan. Always willing to help and make your life a lot easier when you're facing any technical difficulties or frustrations. When I was on the free plan, I found plenty of useful resources that helped me solve my problems, and I could still contact support for help.

Incentivized

I've worked in the past with Chatfuel. However, I decided to switch to ManyChat due to a variety of reasons. Overall, ManyChat offers much more functionality out of the box (e.g., Facebook comments tool), sequence builders are much more intuitive. Also, they provide flexible pay as you go pricing plan, which is perfect for a startup like us.

Incentivized

MobileMonkey is a lot less expensive than both Olark and Drift. We chose MobileMonkey because we were hoping the familiar interface and integration between social and the website would drive more interest which would lead to conversion and revenue. It's more of a chatbot than Intercom in that Intercom is really good for customer support, but MM is a nice way to get people interested by sharing high level data through a conversation that doesn't require a real person. However, Olark, Drift, and Intercom all integrate with the major CRMs and marketing automation platforms which gives them a real edge over MobileMonkey at this time.

Incentivized

• For the intended application, we experienced a negative ROI due to the inconsistency in the ability to maintain the automation without incoming responses. Since it is a free service that was meant to lead to paid services organically, the inconsistencies prevented the desired outcome.
• We did experience a higher conversion rate with basic incoming messages with questions about services or products due to the ability to have pre-created responses and direction immediately supporting the prospect.

Incentivized

• It has become a quick sunk-cost due to the amount of time I had to spend ignoring/blocking their unsolicited marketing/communication attempts.