In this article, we will provide a brief and useful review of the chatbot software that we consider to be the best. If you are not familiar with conversational assistants, you can check our article on How to create a chatbot for WhatsApp Business? Ah! We address and solve basic doubts for those who are just beginning to learn about the topic.
On the other hand, if you have already decided that you will implement a chatbot, but you are researching and want to compare options, keep reading. Here we will expose the main characteristics of each service, its pros, and its cons. Also, we present an alternative that can be equally beneficial to you. We hope this compilation will be useful and easy to understand.
Before we begin, it’s worth mentioning that to use or implement a chatbot service for WhatsApp, it is necessary to be a user of the WhatsApp API. If you don’t know how to do it, you can take a look at our article How to integrate the WhatsApp API into your company?
1. Message Bird
Message Bird offers as its main product an omnichannel tool that helps you unify communication from different media into a single channel. In this way, you can build a customer profile from the various channels through which they have contacted you (WhatsApp, SMS, Messenger, LINE, Telegram). They are recognized as an official provider of the WhatsApp Business solution. Their product in terms of conversational assistance is FAQ Bots. That is, they have geared the chatbot towards answering frequently asked questions that may arise among your customers. The chatbot operates within omnichannel communication. The process consists of four steps: the creation of the bot (where you add the information that the bot should know), the channels through which it will operate, customization of responses, and testing before launching it. To find out how much it would cost to acquire this solution, you should contact their sales team. On the other hand, to use the bot, you must be a user of MessageBird’s services, that is, have one of their licenses. In addition to the unification of communication, other value points of their services are language detection and automatic translation, assignment of conversations to specific agents, and up-to-date activity information.
Due to the diversity of features, they have a variety of rates according to the functionalities you require and the size of the team. Let’s explain the situation.
Let’s take as an example the plan they indicate as recommended: Pro-Plus Plan for 10-100 people on your team, for $150 per month. Now, remember that to use a chatbot with WhatsApp, it is necessary to integrate the API. So, their WhatsApp messaging prices are $0.005/message for one-session-message (messages sent during the first 24 hours that a customer initiated a conversation) and $0.005/message for template-messages (these are pre-approved messages that can be sent, even if the customer has not started the conversation).
In summary, suppose you resort to their $150 monthly plan, with your team of 10 people. Each advisor is responsible for maintaining 10 conversations and, on average, they send 5 messages per conversation a day:
- 10 advisors x 10 clients x 5 messages x $0.005 = $2.5/day
- Now let’s calculate the monthly expense: $2.5/day x 30 days = $75. Here we are leaving aside the template-messages.
- The monthly fee would be $150 + $75 = $225 just to have a plan with WhatsApp integration. Remember that you must consult the price of the FAQ bot. Additionally, the MessageBird team specifies that team plans require a minimum one-year commitment with them.
2. Hiwabot
Advertises itself as a multichannel chat software, integrating messaging from WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and WebChat. The functionalities within their offer include multi-agent capability, a control dashboard, and parameterization to evaluate the performance of the work team, conversation assignment, and activity reports. The bots are designed to automate responses, usually on the first contact with a lead or client. When creating it, you must choose on which channels it will be available and modify the information of the messages it can send (welcome, contact name, data confirmation, and advisor assignment). It is not a conversational chatbot, but rather a bot that recognizes keywords, so one would have to work within its limitations. However, they also offer the development of customized chatbots; to do this, it is necessary to contact them through their website.
In their plans listed on their page, they do not stipulate a message limit, which is attractive. Their Chatbot Plan is at 390 USD per month, includes only one agent (using the Hiwabot platform) and five channels for your accounts on the platforms we mentioned at the beginning of this provider. The channels establish the limit of conversations you can handle using Hiwabot. The activation fee is 300 USD. This is a fee that is only paid at the start of a plan. Let’s put up another example. Suppose you are interested in the multi-agent functionality and your team is small. You would choose the Business Plan which includes 3 agents for 270 USD/month, but not the chatbot. The cost of integrating the latter is 300 USD/month. It adapts to the flow of conversation and redirects to a sales agent or concludes the conversation, but only associates with one channel.
In summary: 270 USD/month Business Plan + 300 USD/month Chatbot = 570 USD/month. Don’t forget the 300 USD activation fee. If you wanted to add another agent, the cost would be 90 USD/month.
3. Landbot
Landbot is a platform for creating chatbots whose main attraction is that you don’t need to know how to code to build the chatbot you need. They present features for people with basic, intermediate, and advanced knowledge in programming or experience with bots. Its interface is easy to understand, as is the logical path that the bot would follow. Their software allows for the integration of multimedia messages to enliven the conversation since it’s not a person. Likewise, you can use one of their preset models to save time when building your own bot. In creating the conversational assistant, you can customize the questions with the contact’s name, choose the variables for questions and answers, insert conditions to determine the course of the conversation based on the customer’s response, use keyword-jump to recognize keywords and determine variables for storing customer responses. Finally, the bot can redirect the conversation to an advisor (person).
Their services are available for WhatsApp, Messenger, or any other messaging app that allows you access to its API. They also allow you to integrate with other tools such as Mailchimp, Slack, Zapier, among others. Through their platform, they give you access to a metrics space to analyze the bot’s activity based on the number of chats and messages sent and received per period. Of course, the availability of features depends on the plan you choose to hire.
Currently, they have four plans: Sandbox (trial plan), Starter for 30 EUR/month, Professional for 100 EUR/month, and Business, the price of which varies depending on the features you discuss with their sales team. All plans include only one user. However, none of the rates cover integration with WhatsApp; this has an additional cost of 50 EUR per month (such as WhatsApp Pro for the Professional plan) and a customized cost (such as WhatsApp Business for the Business plan).
Let’s put the costs in order with an example to clarify the accounts. On their page, they display the Professional plan as the most requested, so let’s consider 100 EUR per month. Adding a user will cost you 20 euros a month. Let’s assume you would work in a small team of 5 people. Then the bill per month would go like this:
100 EUR Professional Plan + (4 additional advisors x 20 EUR) + 50 EUR WhatsApp integration = 230 EUR.
A couple of details to note are, first, the limit of conversations, as with the conditions of the example, it is capped at 500 conversations per month, charging 10 EUR for every extra 100 chats. Second, prices are given in euros. Generally, the euro is about 20% higher than the US dollar in terms of Mexican pesos.
The chatbots we have presented so far work with keyword recognition and follow some conditionals in their design logic. In contrast, Botscrew’s proposal is based on the customized design of a chatbot based on the needs you have and the information you can provide to train the software. The result is a bot capable of engaging in a conversation that feels fluid and more natural. They take care of dealing with the chatbot’s integration into the WhatsApp API and deliver a pre-trained bot that you can test before officially launching it. Their software is available in a large number of languages, including English, Arabic, Spanish, French, German, and Turkish. While it is very convenient to have a conversational tool that trains with use and is capable of recognizing the use of natural language in chat, Botscrew’s costs are quite high.
They have three plans: Professional for 600 USD/month, Enterprise for 1,500 USD/month, and Agency for 1,700 USD/month. For any package, you can request a free trial. Likewise, the packages include a chatbot integrated with WhatsApp, Facebook, and the widget for your website; as well as the capacity to attend to 30,000 users per month. In addition, the bot also performs the multi-channel function, channeling conversations from different sources to a single inbox. The cost of the Professional plan covers three people to access the platform, an additional person costs 50 USD per month.
Botscrew could be an option for medium and large companies, due to the large capacity of the bot and the high costs of the service.
5. Agentbot by Aivo
This is a conversational assistant that operates with artificial intelligence, which promises to make the conversation feel less stiff. The facilities that Aivo offers include assistance with the management of the WhatsApp API request; allowing you to design your bot without necessarily having technical knowledge in programming; and automating responses through the bot. Since this tool operates with artificial intelligence, the bot could overcome the difficulties of language variations such as regionalisms, abbreviations, or spelling errors. Moreover, according to the information on their page, Aivo’s chatbot can even attend to customers who send voice notes. On the other hand, if the situation is too complex for the chatbot, you can integrate their Live Chat tool, allowing the chatbot to pass the conversation on to a sales agent.
To know the prices of their services, it is necessary to request a quote through their website. They will ask you to fill out a form with information such as your name, company email, company, phone number, country, and the number of people attending monthly (through messaging, of course).
6. Cliengo
Bases its offer on the construction of a chatbot available for WhatsApp, allowing you to automate some stages of the sales process and integrate the information with its CRM software. As we have previously mentioned, it is necessary that you have requested access to the WhatsApp API, but if you haven’t, the Cliengo team will assign you a WhatsApp Business line. Their chatbot operates with machine learning, so it will learn to converse as it interacts with people. It is available 24/7, and its main functions focus on welcoming prospects and clients, capturing contact information, and establishing a conversation, primarily of frequently asked questions. In building the bot, you can customize the questions you want it to ask and automate responses based on the message it receives. This tool is available in Spanish, English, and Portuguese.
If you are interested in getting to know their services more closely, you can subscribe to the Free plan or request a two-week trial. They also offer Starter plans (from $24 USD/month), Premium (from $90 USD/month), and Corporate (from $300 USD/month). The given fees are set for 50, 200, and 1000 contacts respectively. If the number of monthly contacts increases, the price to be paid will also increase, even if the rest of the features do not change. For example, the Premium plan increases its fee by $40 USD/month for every additional 200 contacts. It’s important to know that the chatbot for WhatsApp is only included in the Corporate plan. The same applies to customization features and machine learning for chatbot design. In the Premium plan, you can request the chatbot for WhatsApp for an additional cost.
7. Chatbot Chocolate
Chatbot Chocolate has developed an offering of conversational assistants that takes place in four points: acquisition, sales, customer service, and retention. For the first stage, they have a conversational engine that will mainly be responsible for registering contact data; this information can be transferred to the CRM you use. For the sales stage, their chatbot is responsible for making recommendations and guiding customers. For customer service, they have designed a chatbot with automated dialogues, or you can opt for technology that allows for natural language recognition. Finally, for customer retention, the Chatbot Chocolate team talks about the automation of processes that can be resolved with a conversation. We believe these could be notifications about offers or promotions.
Their solution also works with artificial intelligence, so the bot is programmed according to the conversational information available. It needs to be trained to maintain a conversational flow and adopt a tone or its own voice.
It’s necessary to contact the sales team to request a quote for their services. You can do this through their website. They will ask you to fill out a form with your contact information, company, country, what type of chatbot you are looking for, conversation flow, budget, etc.
Before you go, let’s revisit the most relevant points about chatbots. To use a chatbot on WhatsApp, it is necessary to integrate the API. The WhatsApp API, at the moment, is designed for medium to large enterprises.
If WhatsApp gives you the green light, then you can integrate a chatbot. As you may have observed, chatbots are tools that help automate, generally, the first contact, as this is where simple responses are required. The promise of this tool is to help sales advisors with the workload. However, this will not be possible if there is no clear strategy on how to implement bots in the sales process. The work that you and your team can do depends, to a large extent, on the organization as a team and the communication you have among yourselves.
Additionally, several of the platforms that offer a more conversational bot are also expensive, so you should be careful when evaluating the investment. Take into account that in any case, the companies that offer chatbots have the option to transfer the conversation to a human assistant.
Now, in order to combine these key points (organization + effective communication with leads and customers) and succeed in your sales, turning to a CRM service becomes crucial. Leadsales is a CRM integrated with WhatsApp and easy to handle, as the interface is similar to that of WhatsApp Web. Our services allow you to keep your WhatsApp number and we are available, even if your business is small. Additionally, you can share the same mobile phone line simultaneously among several users.
How can Leadsales help you?
Our CRM will help you keep a clear track of the conversations held via WhatsApp. This way, you can see how many actually convert from leads to sales. Our sales funnel will be very useful for this. Furthermore, you will have access to an activity analysis panel on the platform, from which you can extract valuable information about the performance of your team.
The functionalities of Leadsales can be compared to a control panel, as they allow sales advisors to set reminders, receive notifications, and have a more transparent interaction with the people who contact them. This results in better attention, with the necessary details in mind, and reduces waiting time.
Check out our plans or contact us to schedule a demonstration and discuss the best alternative for you. We will be happy to work with you.
