Manychat vs Chatfuel - All You Need to Know

- Setup

- Templates

- Managing contacts

- Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Bot

When you visit a site, remember that little chat icon that appears at the corner of your screen with a message. It’s a powerful tool of engagement and may help a user from simply providing a demo of their product to resolving their query and concerns. That, my friends, is the power of chatbot!

With 1.2 billion active users, the platform offered by Facebook is hard to ignore for businesses around the world. To reach out to this population efficiently, chatbots have become a must-have. They not only give information to users in real-time and increase engagement but also help you in segregating the audience the way you like. Another added advantage is that to create a facebook messenger bot, you don’t necessarily have to be a coder! Yes, you could not be a coder and still create a bot for your page!

The question that is bound to arise when a person looks forward to installing the chatbot is : Which is the best Facebook bot?br>
Undoubtedly, ManyChat, Chatfuel & Freshchat are some of the top contenders.

Now, another question which arises is: Which one is better out of these?

To help you answer these questions, we’ll look at specifications and features of each one along with added advantages so that you know which bot suits your business type and needs better.

So, Let’s get Started!

Setup

The best thing about using the above mentioned is that they offer a user-friendly interface. Even if you are not a tech-savvy person, these platforms are easy-to-use for creating chatbots.

As you can see in the picture down below, ManyChat offers a flow which goes vertically downwards. You can create steps which further have texts, buttons, list, etc. You can link each of these buttons to the next step given for creating a chat flow.

ManyChat comes with two types of views for building a flow:
Basic Builder ( Pic 1) Flow Builder ( Pic 2)

1. Basic Builder ( Pic 1)

2. Flow Builder ( Pic 2)

If you are making a complex chatbot which has a number of messages and linkages, Flow Builder view provided by ManyChat would come handy to you. This is because it provides a whole overview to you wherein you can see various messages connected to different blocks and makes it so much easier for you to understand as well as edit the flow.

This is what a flow builder screen usually looks like. To edit a block, simply click on it from the flow. On the left, the block will pop up for editing. Herein you can add text, images, audio, video, etc as per your need.

On the other hand, Chatfuel has groups which have blocks which further have the messages you’ve put in. To understand better, you can take a look at the picture given below. There are various blocks you can make, comprising your flows. You can further group these blocks together as per your convenience.

Source:Chatfuel

Templates

You know what’s even better than building chatbots without coding? Pre-built templates for bot! Probably chatfuel knew that way too well because of which it provides over 75 templates as compared to 6 provided by Manychat. From restaurant to gym to hotel owner, you name it they got it!

Managing Contacts:

The best part of a chatbot is their ability to not only solve a user’s problems but also to collect useful information that users tell. Specific groups can later be made as per this information and can later be utilised in future. As per the fields created, both manychat and chatfuel can store a user’s information automatically. This information is later collated to one place and can also be shared with a CRM. Moreover if you need to edit any particular field, you can do the same manually.

Both platforms give you the feature of filtering your audience as per the fields or tags placed in a conversation.

Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Bot

A bot with artificial intelligence which can handle any open-ended questions thrown at them would be a dream come true! Manychat as such doesn’t really provide natural language processing (NLP) to understand the intent of the user and we’ll have to enter all the keywords along with their responses which will be triggered when the keyword is used in the conversation. This may be inefficient in resolving a user’s concern and can lead to bad user experience.

On the other hand, chatfuel does offer NLP, however, only for namesake. You’ll end up adding keywords on which you’d like to trigger a response. This is quite rudimentary and not what you’d expect for AI responses.

Pricing:

Both the platforms provide free plans with limitations.

Chatfuel offers a free plan which is limited to 1,000 users in which access is provided to all features mentioned above and more. However, your chatbot will display the Chatfuel branding. To remove it, you’ll have to upgrade to the paid Pro Plan.
On the other hand, manychat’s free plan, though unlimited in terms of users and messages, is more limited than Chatfuel’s when it comes to features. It too comes with the branding in bot. The Free Plan only offers a maximum of 4 growth tools, and you can’t add any further.

Pricing is further as per the number of subscribers.

Conclusion:

Both manychat and chatfuel have their own advantages and disadvantages over the others. Chances are that you might find the user interface and design of manychat better. With separate groups and blocks, chatfuel may look a little complex in the beginning. However, the number of templates that chatfuel provides can be helpful in reducing your efforts. Therefore, in the end, it’s all about your business needs and preference to see which bot will suit you better.