If you wish to quickly deploy multilingual chatbots without having to worry about infrastructure and model training, go for Amazon Lex. It is one of the best general-purpose conversational AI solutions in the market. The cherry on the cake is that it also seamlessly integrates with other AWS services, so you would be good there. Performance monitoring is very easy with AWS. It has support for both text and integration. If you are not a pro-NLP expert, Amazon Lex will make your job really easy.
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).
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.
Easy to deploy and very easy to integrate with other AWS services. Automating simple tasks is also very easy with Amazon Lex. We never had NLP experts in our team, but we were still able to deploy chatbots for our support functions with minimal issues. Native integration with other AWS services like S3 and Lambda has been of paramount importance.
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.
Community support for Amazon Lex is good. Also, since it is an AWS service, the support has a similar standard as other AWS services. We have had a couple of instances of our bots weren't able to interact with our web apps. We reached out to the support team, and they were able to resolve our issue in no time. The documentation from the Amazon Lex team also makes creating chatbots a breeze.
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.
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.
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.
