Chatbot software uses artificial intelligence (AI) to conduct conversations with people through text input. Some people think “live chat” and “chatbot” are similar terms, but in essence, there are huge differences between the two. Unlike live chat, where a user is conversing with an actual human, a chatbot is a piece of software that automatically applies to customer queries without the need for real human interaction.
This type of software isn’t just good for customer support; you can also use it for sales, marketing, onboarding, and feedback collection. Read the rest of this review to discover the best chatbot software to try for your small business so you can provide better round-the-clock service to your customer base.
Brevo
If you're looking for the best overall chatbot software out there then Brevo is ideal for you!
HubSpot
HubSpot is a perfect choice if you're looking to 'capture' leads and turn them into customers.
ChatBot.com
ChatBot.com is an easy-to-use, no-code conversational chatbot software with a wide range of templates.
Chatra
Chatra is excellent when it comes to effective multi-channel customer support systems.
ManyChat
ManyChat can help you increase customer engagement with its robust integrations and easy scaling.
What is the Best Chatbot Software?
1. Brevo
Best Overall Chatbot Software (Free Plan, Then $25/Month)
Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) allows you to meet your customers where they are across Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and Live Chat. You can centralize all your customer conversations and manage them all in one place. Use the chatbot software to increase opportunities and drive website sales.
For example, you can answer user questions in real-time, increasing your chances to convert each visitor into a paying customer by helping them find what they’re looking for. The chatbot also has features to help you boost productivity.
You can scale your tasks and reduce your workload by using the bot to provide website visitors with the answers they are looking for. This will free up your team’s time to focus on more complex customer support issues.
Brevo also has a mobile app that allows you to respond to your clients at any time, from anywhere. The app is available for both Android and iOS, giving you the peace of mind of knowing that you can deliver an exceptional experience for your customers, even when you are away from your computer.
Key Features:
- Centralized Conversations: Connect and manage all your customer communication channels in one place with just a few clicks.
- Live Chat Integration: In addition to using the chatbot, you can also use the live chat feature to build engagement and boost customer satisfaction in real time.
- Chatbot Automation: Boost productivity by automatically answering the most frequently asked questions on your website before transferring visitors to a customer care rep, if necessary.
Pricing:
Brevo has a free plan that you can use to discover the platform. You get unlimited contacts, 300 emails/day, a drag-and-drop editor, and SMS and WhatsApp campaigns. However, if you want to get advanced features and unlimited contacts, you’ll have to upgrade to one of the premium plans, starting from $25/month for the “Starter” plan.
2. HubSpot
Best Chatbot Software for Capturing Leads and Turning Them Into Customers (Free Plan, Then $45/Month)
HubSpot offers a free chatbot website builder to help you qualify leads, provide customer support, book meetings, and scale your one-to-one conversations on your website.
The platform makes it easy for you to launch a chatbot on your website with no coding required. No integrations are necessary, and deployment is easy. Once you sign up, you can have a fully-functional chatbot on your website in just minutes.
You’ll have unlimited, personalized conversations with your customers. Scale without sacrificing on quality. Lighten the load for your team while still providing 1-to-1 conversations wherever necessary. Your bot can hand off qualified leads to a live agent. This way, your team can focus on the customer conversations that matter most.
You can also configure your bot to create a support ticket, add the user to a list or workflow, and more. The best part about using HubSpot to create your chatbot is that it comes with pre-made templates for different goals so you don’t have to start from scratch.
Key Features:
- Personalized chatbot Interactions: Seamlessly integrate your chatbot with your contact database to provide a friendlier and more personalized experience based on information you already know about the contact.
- Powerful Contact Management: You can easily see all the interactions you’ve had with a contact to help you build relevant campaigns that close more deals.
- Universal Inbox: HubSpot offers a universal Inbox that allows you to view, manage, and reply to conversations from different channels, including live chat, bots, email, social messaging platforms, and more.
Pricing:
HubSpot provides you with free marketing, sales, service, and CMS tools that you can use to start generating and connecting with new leads. If you want to unlock more features for your business, you can upgrade to the “Starter” plan which costs $45/month.
3. ChatBot.com
Best AI Chatbot for Building No-Code Conversational Chatbots (Free 14-Day Trial, Then $52/Month)
If you are looking to power up your marketing with personalized customer experiences, then this is great software for you to consider.
ChatBot allows you to engage prospects and customers across different communication channels. This means you can optimize your support and supercharge your sales no matter what platform your customers use.
Scale your efforts and boost revenue without increasing employee headcount. For instance, you can generate and qualify leads automatically by setting up a rules-based bot on your website. Furthermore, you’ll be able to keep your customer support going after hours and help improve resolution times.
ChatBot provides a ton of benefits for marketing, sales, and support. It’s the perfect tool for you if you want to stand out with exceptional customer service. Building your AI chatbot is easy with the use of ready-made templates. Simply pick an appropriate design, customize it to fit your business needs, and your chatbot will spring to life in just a few minutes.
Key Features:
- Wide Variety of Templates: From call scheduling templates to help desk tickets, customer satisfaction templates, discount templates, eCommerce templates, and more – ChatBot has it all.
- Cover Entire Sales Funnel: You can engage, nurture, qualify, and convert customers with a single smart chatbot.
- Visual chatbot Builder: ChatBot’s Visual Builder lets you create AI chatbots quickly and easily with zero coding. Use drag-and-drop elements and test them in real time to increase engagement levels.
Pricing:
ChatBot offers goal-oriented pricing that scales with you. Starting from $52/month (or $65 month-to-month), you can get an active chatbot, 1,000 valid chats per month, and an unlimited number of conversations.
4. Chatra
Best Chatbot Software for Effective Multi-Channel Customer Support (Free Plan, Then $17/Agent/Month)
Chatra allows you to answer questions and solve problems quickly and automatically so you can increase your conversions. In addition to the chatbot software, you also have live chat features and Messenger. You can connect your inbox and Facebook Business Page, allowing you to handle all your customer communications without having to switch between multiple browser tabs.
Use Chatra’s chatbot to do all your routine work for you. For instance, you can set up your bot to collect user data, get visitor consent, and offer quick options for your most frequently asked questions. You can also use it to supercharge your marketing efforts by offering product suggestions, discount coupons, and more.
You’ll be able to keep customers happy without adding to your team’s load. Chatra also has a mobile app that allows you to chat anywhere so you never miss a conversation when you’re away from your computer.
Moreover, there are powerful reporting tools that let you see who’s on your website in real-time. Learn your visitors’ browsing history, including where they’re from, so you can welcome them with effective personalized greetings.
Key Features:
- Multichannel Messaging: Chatra offers multichannel messaging tools built for all types of businesses, big and small.
- Robust Support: The platform has a passionate team of customer support professionals, experts, and engineers who understand the importance of great service.
- Helpful Resources: When you sign up, you get access to a comprehensive range of books and guides with research-backed tips and tricks on how to leverage the software to make your customers happy.
Pricing:
You can try Chatra for free and use it for as long as you want. No credit card is required to sign up, and you can get started in under three minutes. The free plan supports one agent and comes with an online and offline chat widget. However, if you want support and automation features, you’ll have to sign up for one of the premium plans starting from $17/month/agent.
5. Manychat
Best Chatbot Software for Increasing Customer Engagement (Free Plan, Then $15/Month)
Used by over 1 million businesses in 190 countries across the world, Manychat is a powerful chat marketing platform that will help your sales and marketing teams meet their objectives. It allows you to automate interactive conversations on Facebook Messenger, Instagram direct messages, and SMS. It’s the perfect tool to grow your brand without increasing your overhead.
In addition to automating conversations, you’ll be able to use your chatbot to drive more sales, get more leads, and engage your prospects. Convert customers with simple personalized experiences. Leverage Messenger’s 80% open rates and 25% CTR (which, incidentally, beats every other channel). Build relationships with customers using interactive and tailored content.
All of this and more is possible with this single solution. Like other chatbot builders listed here, no coding knowledge is required to create your chatbot that’s suited for your specific customer base.
You’ll find easy integrations to help you keep your conversation going with SMS and email. The automation feature allows you to capture phone numbers or emails, and deliver coupons, promotions, and newsletters. You can also book confirmations and much more.
Key Features:
- Build Advanced Campaigns: The premium plan comes with tools to help you build advanced marketing campaigns, including segments, custom fields, and unlimited tags.
- Robust Integrations: Integrate with thousands of marketing, sales, and customer care tools that you already use, such as Google Sheets, Shopify, MailChimp, HubSpot, and more.
- Easy Scaling: Manychat offers scaled pricing that’s based on your number of contacts so you don’t have to pay for more features than you need.
Pricing:
The free plan lets you access multiple channels, including Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram DMs. You can automate conversations and engage up to 1,000 contacts. If you want to unlock more features and engage unlimited contacts, then you can upgrade to the Pro plan for $15/month.
6. Drift
Best AI Chatbot Software for Human-Like Conversational Marketing (Free Trial, Then $2,500/Month)
Drift understands that every relationship, every solution, and every deal starts with a conversation. The platform provides you with features to make it easier for your marketing, sales, and customer teams to connect with customers through well-timed conversations that build trust and boost revenue.
Build custom chatbots to engage visitors in conversation 24/7. You can also set it up so that your bots not only help answer customer questions but also qualify and convert buyers.
You can test drive Drift by signing up on the website. Simply enter your email, and they’ll do the rest. You’ll be able to preview how the Driftbot works on your website. You’ll also get ideas on how the best conversational marketers leverage this powerful platform to increase conversions and make more sales.
The higher-priced plans offer features like AI-powered chatbots and A/B testing so you can discover which version of the message jumpstarts more conversions. The Advanced Routing feature is perfect if you have multiple teams. You can get them the information they need with conditional routing that is reliable.
Key Features:
- Conversation Cloud: Your marketing, sales, and customer service teams can be in sync to deliver personalized conversations via email, chat, video, or any other methods your customers prefer.
- All-In-One Marketing Platform: Drift use cases cover everything from marketing and sales to customer service for businesses in all industries.
- Stellar Support: You can get help via email, live chat, and phone. Drift also offers a ton of resources to help you get the most from the software.
Pricing:
Drift has 3 plans for businesses of all sizes. The premium plan is perfect for small businesses and provides the right amount of conversational firepower to grow your business. Features include custom chatbots, live chat, meetings, real-time notifications, conversational landing pages, and intel to de-anonymize your website traffic.
7. Intercom
Best Chatbot Software for Faster Customer Service Resolutions (Free Trial, Then $74/Month)
The best time to connect with customers is when they are already using your website, product, or app. Intercom will help you provide a better customer experience across marketing, sales, and support.
Provide personalized assistance at scale with a healthy mix of proactive, human, and self-serve support. This game-changing, next-generation technology has it all. You’ll be able to make the most of each engagement to boost conversions and make more sales.
Resolve all your customer inquiries with the fastest inbox yet, and save time by solving the customers’ problems before they even contact you. Small businesses can get started for just $74/month on the “Starter” plan. This plan includes chat and email support, targeted outbound email, and in-product messages to help you support and engage your customers at each stage of the buyer’s journey.
You also get powerful reporting dashboards, company and behavioral data, and conversation ratings to give you insights on how to improve your customer experience.
Key Features:
- Multiple Messenger Channels: Each plan includes 1:1 direct messages, inbound user messages, in-app messages, website messages, push notifications, and more.
- Non-Messenger Channels: You also get outbound email, SMS notifications, WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram integrations, and more.
- Various Message Types: Intercom allows you to work with various types of messages, including posts, mobile carousels, banner messages, surveys, and tooltips.
Pricing:
You can sign up on the website to test drive the software for free. You’ll find many of the features come included, but a few, such as WhatsApp integration, SMS, and surveys are only available with add-ons. If you require additional features to scale your visitor conversations, you can request a custom quote on the website.
8. Tidio
Best Chatbot Software for Automating Answers and Workflows in Minutes (Free Plan, Then $15.83/Month)
Tidio offers a range of tools to help you turn website visitors into customers. These include live chat, chatbots, and a powerful ticketing system. This top-rated platform is perfect for small and medium-sized businesses that want to grow sales through exceptional customer service.
You can book a demo or sign up for a free trial to see how the chatbot will work on your website. Start conversations, boost satisfaction, and win loyal customers. This is possible when you can solve their problems in real-time.
The platform allows you to automate up to 47% of all repetitive answers about your product, order status, shipping, etc. This leaves your agents free to advise customers on complex topics. You can also use your chatbot to offer discounts based on the visitor’s browsing history. Detailed reporting gives you insight into customer behavior so you can make relevant product recommendations.
Key Features:
- Sales Chatbots: You can create selling scenarios to increase conversions and boost revenue by up to 25% on your website.
- No Code Bot Builder: Create any type of chatbot scenario you want (sales, marketing, or customer service) without writing a single line of code.
- Detailed Analytics: Use the smart ticketing system’s analytics to monitor your team’s performance so you can make the necessary improvements to boost customer satisfaction (CSAT).
Pricing:
Tidio offers a free plan that you can use for as long as you want. You can sign up with your email. No credit card is required. This is an excellent choice to get your small website started with chatbot communications. You can conduct up to 50 live chat conversations and chatbot conversations with 100 users. As your business grows, you can upgrade to one of the premium plans starting from $15.83/month/operator. If you pay annually, you get two months free.
9. Freshchat
Best Chatbot Software for Decreased Resolution Time (Free Plan, Then $15/Month/Agent)
Freshchat helps you power your business with intelligent and intuitive conversations. Trusted by over 50,000 businesses worldwide, this platform makes it easy for sales, marketing, and customer service teams to have meaningful conversations with customers.
You get contextual and unified conversational engagement. Leverage the powerful chatbot to offer personalized self-service on your website, in-app, and on various digital messaging channels like SMS, WhatsApp, and more.
You can build any type of bot to simplify the experience of your customers. No coding knowledge is required. Simply use the pre-made templates and easy flow builder to create any type of conversational flow you require. Bring your insights to action with native AI for next-generation messaging.
All in all, this is a powerful platform that provides you with the tools to offer modern, cost-effective support to all your customers. You can enable high rates of zero contact resolution, which makes it easy for you to scale your business without scaling your costs.
Key Features:
- Freshworks Neo Platform: The new platform allows you to efficiently scale your business with the help of customizable analytics and a unified messaging API.
- Powerful AI Algorithm: Freshchat is powered by “Freddy”, an artificial intelligence algorithm that is designed to detect intent to better engage with customers.
- Contextual Agent Experiences: Give your agents broad customer context to boost customer satisfaction with each conversation.
Pricing:
Freshchat offers a free plan for up to 100 agents. It comes with 100 campaign contacts that you can engage with via multiple channels. It also includes integrations with WordPress, Shopify, and supported mailboxes. If you want to add more contacts, you can upgrade to one of the premium plans starting from $15/agent/month for the “Growth” plan.
10. SnapEngage
Best Chatbot Software for Boosting ROI Across the Entire Customer Journey (Free Trial, Then $16/User/Month)
SnapEngage has live chat, chatbots, and integrations to help you with sales and support. You can use it on your website or Facebook Messenger. It integrates with a wide range of popular software so you can get the most out of the tools you already use.
Engage prospects wherever they are, including SMS, Twitter, WeChat, and more. The platform comes with ready-to-use chatbots, including the Answer Bot, Guide Bot, and Info-Capture Bot. You can also design your own custom chatbot using the custom bot API.
This conversation and chatbot technology are perfect for small to medium businesses that are ready to amplify sales. Your sales team will be able to engage, qualify, and convert leads from one place. With automation tools and an omnichannel experience, this is the perfect tool to help make customer service your competitive edge.
Key Features:
- Powerful Automation Features: You can automatically synchronize your CRM or helpdesk with your leads and contacts to provide a more personalized user experience.
- HIPPA-Compliant Chat: If you run a healthcare site staffed with nurses to help patients, you’ll be able to provide secure live chat, SMS messaging, and chatbots that are HIPPA-compliant.
- Multi-Channel Conversations: With SnapEngage, you can manage conversations on multiple channels, including mobile SDK, Messenger, SMS-to-Chat, and more.
Pricing:
SnapEngage has three different plans, the Essentials, Professional, and Enterprise plans. The Essentials plan costs $16/month/agent. It includes a bot, integrations with third-party apps, and multi-channel management of conversations. If you’re not sure which plan will benefit you the most, the platform can help you make the right choice. Simply enter your name and email, and one of the experts will get back to you to help you make your choice.
11. Chatfuel
Best Chatbot Software for Fully Automated Customer Support Conversations (Free Trial, Then $11/Month)
Chatfuel offers two distinct plans so you can choose whether you want to handle bot-building on your own or if you want the expert team to offer and implement the perfect solutions for your website, Facebook, or Instagram.
The platform comes with a range of pre-built templates for customer support, sales, and marketing. Simply choose one, customize it to meet your needs, and launch. Program your AI chatbot with pre-made answers for your most commonly asked questions. You can look through analytics for common inquiries so you can automate even more conversations.
Thanks to the powerful automation features, you’ll be able to do so much on autopilot, including recommending products, collecting emails, gathering user feedback, giving out promo codes, and more. Whether you want to attract, engage, or re-engage customers, you’ll experience much higher conversion rates with the chatbot marketing and sales features on this platform.
Chatfuel also brings triggered messages to your socials. You get access to audience segmentation tools with an internal CRM system. You’ll be able to easily design and tweak scheduled re-engagement sequences. The list goes on!
Key Features:
- High Online Customer Reviews: This chatbot software has an average of 4.6 out of 5 stars on the top software review websites like Trustpilot and G2.
- Full Automation Features: This platform allows you to have every type of conversation on autopilot so you can do what inspires and automate everything else.
- Wide Range of Templates: From Real Estate and eCommerce to Restaurants, Healthcare, Travel, and Insurance, you’ll find ready-made templates for every industry.
Pricing:
For $11.99/month, you can get access to the tools to build your own chatbots. The platform provides you with in-depth guides and a simple drag-and-drop builder, which means no coding knowledge is required to create your own conversation chatbots. If you want custom solutions, you can sign up for the “Enterprise” plan starting at $199/month. Here, the Chatfuel team discusses your needs and goals and then offers and implements the appropriate solutions.
12. Ada
Best for AI-Powered Customer Service Automation (Pricing Available on Request)
Ada comes with powerful features that allow you to automatically resolve your support interactions with less effort. You can do this in any language and on any channel. Talk to your customers where they are and manage all messages from a single platform.
The software is perfect for customer-focused enterprises thanks to its focus on increasing CSAT. Automate many of your repetitive interactions to free up your team’s time so they can focus on more complicated issues.
You can also empower your customers to self-serve. This will allow you to scale support without adding to the headcount. Now, you have the ability to treat each and every one of your customers like a VIP by delivering 24/7 personalized support in their language, and on their channel of choice. Ultimately, this will help you increase customer satisfaction and retention – which, in turn, will lead to more sales.
Key Features:
- AI-Powered Automation: The platform boasts a dedicated team of automation experts to help drive your automation transformation.
- Integrate and Expand: The software fits right in with your existing tech stack thanks to custom and out-of-the-box integrations.
- Robust Security: Ada takes its security seriously and comes with enterprise-level data security and compliance.
Pricing:
Ada doesn’t disclose pricing on the website. There are three plans to choose from: the Core, Advanced, and Pro plans. Each comes with its own set of features. For example, the Core plan comes with one chatbot, chat and email handoff, and a no-code builder. The Advanced plan offers segmentation, multilingual chat, and a predictive suggestion feature. On the Pro plan, you get lead creation, A/B testing, and proactive SMS campaigns. You can request a quote for your chosen plan on the website.
13. Zendesk Chat
Best Chatbot Software With a Unified Agent Workspace (Free Trial, Then $49/Month)
Zendesk’s chatbot is a natural complement to its live chat software. It’s designed to easily handle simple, repetitive requests, and you can program it to seamlessly pass off more complex requests to a live agent. This will allow you to scale and serve more customers more efficiently.
You can use this chatbot for service or sales. Zendesk for Sales pricing ranges between $19 and $99/month/user. Zendesk for Service will cost you between $49 and $99/agent/month.
As soon as you sign up, you get full access to all the platform’s features. You can instantly add messaging and live chat to your site or mobile app. Start leveraging customer presence on various social media channels. You’ll be able to provide support wherever your customers are across the web, as well as increase team productivity through the use of a unified agent workspace.
Key Features:
- Built-In Automation: Offer 24/7 support with automation tools build for faster service and quicker resolutions.
- Wide Range of Integrations: Never miss a customer message again with Zendesk integration for Twitter, Facebook, and other apps.
- Industry-Leading Ticketing System: In addition to the chatbot software, you also get an integrated ticketing system to engage customers via email.
Pricing:
Zendesk plans start from $49/month for the Suite Team plan. This comes with a ticketing system and messaging across mobile, social, and web. It also includes email, voice, and SMS support, in addition to live chat and chatbots, of course. You can sign up for a free trial to try out the chatbot software to see if its the right fit for your business.
14. LivePerson
Best for Creating Personalized Connections in Real Time (Pricing Available on Request)
LivePerson’s main goal is to help you discover how the right customer engagement strategy can help you lift sales and reduce operating expenses. The platform offers an AI-powered chatbot to help you save costs, boost sales, and increase customer satisfaction with automated messages.
With this innovative conversational AI platform, you will experience a higher uptick in employee efficiency. You’ll get increased conversions and skyrocket your automation containment rates.
This is the perfect platform to help businesses create closer connections with customers. You can scale intent-driven conversational experiences through the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning. You’ll also be able to unite all your customer experience platforms, including social, email, voice, sentiments, and analytics.
Key Features:
- Purpose-Built NLP Feature: The natural language processing technology is built to better understand the unique needs of each unique customer.
- Conversational Cloud: This feature helps you to manage and automate all your customer conversations in one place.
- Boost Business Outcomes: Choose from dozens of chatbot templates to help you raise your bottom line by turning routine customer conversations into revenue-generating experiences.
Pricing:
LivePerson doesn’t include prices on its website. Instead, you’ll have to contact support to get a custom quote for your business. Simply fill out the form with your full name, business email address, and phone number, and the support team will get back to you.
15. Pandorabots
Best for Building Intelligent and Intuitive Conversational Chatbots (Free Plan, Then $19/Month)
Whether you want to build a chatbot for marketing, sales, customer service, voice interfaces, B2B messaging, eCommerce, or entertainment – Pandorabots can help you do it effectively.
The platform prides itself on its ability to build chatbots with character. Used by great companies like Coca-Cola, Barclays, Walmart, and Bridgestone, this platform helps you easily bring your chatbots to life with integrations for real-time animation, like Rapport.
You can expand your chatbots using APIs or open-source connectors. You’ll also find turnkey integrations for a lot of popular messaging platforms like Twitter, Messenger, WeChat, and more.
One of this platform’s biggest selling features is that it has a free “Small Talk” library filled with over 10,000 chit-chat inputs so you don’t have to start from scratch.
If you’re just getting started in the conversational AI chatbot space, you’ll love the free Udemy course offered by Pandorabots. It comes with all the basics you need to craft complex conversational chatbots using the open standard for artificial intelligence markup language (AIML).
Key Features:
- Wide Range of Features: This software has an impressive range of features, including a development sandbox, chat widget, and landing page, third-party channels, and Rapport avatar compatibility.
- Free Plan Available: You can start creating your own chatbot for free by signing up on the website.
- Stellar Support: The platform provides you with all the support required to develop your conversational AI chatbot.
Pricing:
If you’re ready to dedicate development resources to create your own conversational chatbot, you can sign up for free on the platform. Premium plans start from $19/month and include API access, a chat widget, a landing page, and third-party channel integrations.
What is Chatbot Software?
Chatbot software is a tool that simulates human-like conversations with your audience via chat. The software proactively starts chats, answers user questions, creates tickets, and automates any other tasks that don’t require human intervention.
Chatbots can be implemented on websites, messaging apps, social messaging platforms, and other places to answer questions and provide service to customers with instant messages.
They are the perfect tool to engage, nurture, qualify, and convert your audience into customers.
Here’s how:
- Engage Your Audience: You can use chatbots to reach out to your visitors proactively with personalized chatbot greetings. This helps you turn website visits into lucrative sales opportunities.
- Nurture Your Customers: Use your chatbot to nudge customers toward a sale through discount coupons, product recommendations, and tailored offerings.
- Qualify Your Leads: Generate leads and qualify them automatically. Your bot can transfer high-intent leads to sales agents in real-time to make the sales cycle shorter.
- Convert Your Prospects: Let customers order, purchase, or schedule meetings easily with a smart chatbot.
Types of Chatbot Platforms
There are two types of chatbots: rule-based bots, and AI-driven bots.
Rule-Based Bots
Also known as decision-tree or flow-based chatbots, these types of bots hold conversations based on pre-defined flows. This means they can only hold basic conversations compared to their AI-driven counterparts.
They are extremely easy to set up and manage, and you can design any conversational flow you want using a simple drag-and-drop builder and if/then logic.
AI-Driven Bots
These types of chatbots are conversational in nature. They use technologies such as natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to simulate human conversations.
These types of bots can understand the context of the message to provide users with appropriate answers.
Hybrid Bots
A hybrid chatbot is one that also integrates the human element through live chat. A hybrid chatbot offers a mix of AI/flow-based chatbot and live chat features.
It’s a simple yet effective solution that enables humans and bots to work together by offering a seamless human-chatbot handoff if the user’s query goes beyond what the chatbot can handle. All the chatbots listed in this guide are hybrid bots.
What Features to Look For in Chatbot Software
With so many chatbot software platforms to choose from, making the right choice will likely prove to be a challenging task.
However, it can be made easier by looking for some of the most important features every top chatbot software should have. I’ve made a list to make it easier for you to know what to consider during your search.
1. AI, Rule-Based, or Hybrid Bot: Before you decide on the features you want in a chatbot platform, you must first determine the type of chatbot software you want. For example, if you want to run conversations that are human-like without any actual human interaction (other than the initial setup), then an AI-powered chatbot is right for you. Alternatively, if you simply want a basic bot to handle some of the most common customer queries, then a rule-based bot will work perfectly for you.
2. Ease of Use: This should always be your first consideration, particularly if you are not versed in coding. The entire process should be intuitive and quick, including mapping out conversations and designing common chat scenarios. You shouldn’t need a developer at any stage from the installation going forward.
3. Full Customization: You want a chatbot platform that is not only easy to deploy but also comes with a simple bot builder and pre-made templates or workflows so you don’t have to create your own from scratch. You should be able to quickly customize your chat widget to match your website and brand.
4. Multi-Channel Solution: Choose a multichannel solution that comes with a built-in CRM system as well as a toolkit for running multichannel campaigns. Many of the chatbot software options in this guide offer this feature. They allow you to set up interactions via email, social media, SMS, WhatsApp, etc. after your visitors have interacted with your chatbot, and vice versa.
5. Live Chat Handover: As noted above, this is the best type of chatbot software to use. I recommend getting a hybrid bot with live chat handover so you don’t have to entrust all your customer communications to a bot. After all, even the most sophisticated bots won’t be able to handle complex customer issues. So, use your bot as a way to take the burden off your customer service team while they handle more important issues.
6. In-Depth Analytics: The best chatbot software tools offer chat statistics to help you work toward continuous improvement of your business.
7. Third-Party Integrations: A stand-alone chatbot isn’t of much use. You need to be able to easily sync it with your CRM or help desk so you can record customer or lead data for future campaigns. It’s best to choose a chatbot platform that offers built-in integrations with third-party sales, marketing, or customer service apps.
8. Affordable Pricing: Finally, you want to choose chatbot software that offers the features you need at an affordable price. The chatbot platform you decide on should also allow you to scale without breaking the bank. Ideally, the platform should offer a free trial or a free plan that lets you test-drive the software before you commit to a paid plan.
Best Chatbot Software Summary & Top Picks
You’ve made it all the way to the end of this guide on the best chatbot software. You now have all the information you need to help you choose the right conversational chatbot to power your customer communications.
The chatbots listed here will help you optimize your chat reply time, support customers outside working hours, free up your team’s time, and save labor costs. Not to mention the boost you’ll experience in customer satisfaction thanks to personalized customer experience!
Brevo
If you're looking for the best overall chatbot software out there then Brevo is ideal for you!
HubSpot
HubSpot is a perfect choice if you're looking to 'capture' leads and turn them into customers.
ChatBot.com
ChatBot.com is an easy-to-use, no-code conversational chatbot software with a wide range of templates.
Chatra
Chatra is excellent when it comes to effective multi-channel customer support systems.
ManyChat
ManyChat can help you increase customer engagement with its robust integrations and easy scaling.