Chatfuel headquartered in San Francisco provides their AI chatbot building tool for Facebook Messenger.
$15
per month
Cresta
Score 4.2 out of 10
N/A
An enterprise-grade AI chatbot used to pinpoint the true drivers of performance, cut costs with targeted automation, and empower employees to work smarter and faster with AI-native co-pilots, QA, and coaching, trained on data.
N/A
ManyChat
Score 7.2 out of 10
N/A
ManyChat headquartered in San Francisco provides their chatbot building platform to deploy Facebook messenger chatbots for support and service.
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 …
Chatfuel is great for a small team looking to easily implement and set up Facebook chatbots for their clients for ease of community management, etc. Chatfuel is not necessarily meant for large scale operations that require complex workflows and chatbot requirements, it is limited to Facebook Messenger and is not 100% intuitive in this regard.
Cresta would best be utilized if your customer service team is large, services a high volume of customers, and the conversations with those customers are very detailed and long. Cresta is less appropriate for small teams, low amounts of customers chatting in, and the conversations are very transactional and simple
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.
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.
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.
Both offer bot service to reply to messages from Facebook. The difference is that Chatfuel gives you the option of being able to create conversion funnels or fixed conversation changes.
Connecting to our API is free from Chatfuel and integration with other providers has an additional cost.
AIVO has no option to create conversation flows if not through keywords.
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.