So, you're building an AI chatbot, eh?
Luckily for us (and a big shout out to LLMs), AI chatbots have become more sophisticated, more autonomous, and — most importantly for us — easier to build.
It's really not as hard as you might think to build a custom AI chatbot — you just need to fit the right chatbot platform.
Your choice of platform will depend on several factors (unfortunately, there's no one best chatbot platform for any and all needs). It will depend on:
- Your level of coding expertise
- What kind of integrations you'll need for your use case
- Your channel, i.e. whether you want to deploy a WhatsApp chatbot, telegram chatbot, a website chatbot, etc.
- The complexity of your use case
Based on your needs and preferences, you might need to use an open-source chatbot platform, a white-label chatbot platform, a conversational AI platform, or a low-code platform.
So, honestly? The first step is figuring out what type of chatbot you want to build, and what kind of building resources you have.
Once you have a sense of what kind of projects you want to build, you can pick a platform that supports you.
The best chatbot will always be the one that works exactly how you want it to — so let's go figure out which platform will best suit your needs.
Most chatbot platforms here include a free plan and 1-2 paid plans. Some specialize in specific verticals, like customer support, while others provide any capabilities you might need to scale across business processes.
Ready? Let's get cracking!
1. Botpress
Botpress is a versatile AI chatbot platform, known for its advanced customizability and extensibility. It’s always up-to-date with the latest LLM engines, ensuring its chatbots and AI agents are always powered by the most recent technology.
It's great for developers and newcomers alike: it offers a visual drag-and-drop canvas in the Botpress Studio, automatic translations for over 100 languages, and endless customizability.
The platform includes pre-built integrations to the most popular software and channels, but allows developers to connect their bot to any knowledge base or internal platform. This endless extensibility makes Botpress an excellent platform for professional, enterprise-grade AI agents.
The company has over 750,000 active bots in production, processing over 1 billion messages. As a fully vertical solution, these AI chatbots span customer service, HR, IT, governments, tech, and more.
As a bonus, Botpress comes with a thriving community (honestly, less of a bonus and more of a necessity). There's an active Discord community of 25,000+ builders, daily AMAs with employees, and an extensive partner network of expert builders.
Learning the ins and outs of the platform is made simple with their YouTube video tutorials and by their expert-curated courses at Botpress Academy.
Key features
- Advanced analytics
- Endlessly extensible – connect a bot to any platform or channel
- Pre-built integrations
- Enterprise-grade security
- Automatic translation to over 100+ languages
Pricing
Botpress offers a Pay-As-You-Go tier (which includes a free plan), a Team Plan, and an Enterprise Plan.
The free plan comes with 5 bots, 2000 incoming messages a month, 100MB vector database storage, and $5 AI credit. The Pay-As-You-Go model allows users to purchase small add-ons as they expand their usage – you can purchase an extra 100,000 table rows for $25 CAD, an extra 5000 incoming messages for $10 CAD, or an extra bot for $1 CAD.
The Team Plan includes $1000 worth of add-ons, but is sold for $495/month.
The Enterprise Plan is entirely customized to an individual company – each will have different chatbot needs. It comes with high-level dedicated support and volume discounts across the board.
2. IBM watsonx Assistant
You might know them from their decades of software and hardware work — that's IBM, which has (of course) set their stake in the AI chatbot game.
Their conversational AI platform is called IBM watsonx Assistant (yes, the lowercase W is intentional, thank you). It's designed to build virtual assistants and voice assistants, specifically for customer service applications.
This platform leverages AI and LLMs to learn from customer interactions, aiming to improve issue resolution efficiency and reduce customer wait times.
Unlike traditional chatbots, watsonx Assistant can query knowledge bases, seek clarifications, or escalate to a human agent as needed. So no frusterating back-and-forths with no resolution, like the customer support chatbots from 10 years ago.
What's more, this platform is adaptable for use in various environments, including cloud and on-premises setups (and that combo is hard to find these days!).
IBM also offers voice capabilities, allowing integration into telephonic customer support systems.
So what's it best for? You guessed it: customer service.
IBM promotes watsonx Assistant as a tool for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of customer service interactions. That's their main schtick.
Key features
- Agent assistance
- Artificial intelligence integration for better customer understanding
- A range of integrations with existing tools
- Enhanced security measures
- A visual builder for easy chatbot creation without extensive coding
Pricing
IBM watson Assistant offers a Lite free plan, as well as Enterprise pricing. The latter is fully customizable for companies – so that means price will vary based on specific needs (like the number of conversations your bot will be having).
Their Plus plan includes a base cost of $140 USD per month, with additional costs for more integrations, additional MAUs, and additional RUs.
3. Kore.ai
Next up? Kore.ai.
Kore.ai provides a multifaceted AI chatbot platform - that means it's designed for enterprises and small businesses. And its goal? 'Enhancing customer, employee, and agent experiences.'
This platform stands out for its ease of integration with the all-knowing Microsoft suite. Think powerPoint, Teams, Word, Excel, etc. So if you're looking to use Microsoft integrations, this might be the choice for you.
The Kore.ai platform also allows for a no-code approach, so their users can create virtual assistants without extensive coding skills. But if you're feeling advanced? It also doubles as a low code platform.
Kore.ai also focuses on security and compliance, crucial for sensitive sectors. No one wants a banking chatbot or healthcare bot that's gonna spill insider information.
And like any good platform, these guys are equipped with analytics and reporting tools. A side note: if you're deploying your chatbot to a high volume of users, you will absolutely be relying on your analytics. Don't forget.
This platform is less use-case-specific and more adaptable. You can use it across different industries, from IT to customer support. So if you need both, this might be the solution for you.
Key features
- Support for over 120 languages and channels
- Pre-built bots for various industries
- Advanced dialog management
Pricing
Kore.ai offers two pricing plans: Standard and Enterprise. They don’t include a set price for either plan (mysterious...), offering instead a customized service for their users.
Their Enterprise plan includes all their Standard offerings, as well as unlimited notifications, unlimited dialogues in their builder, unlimited FAQs, and an increase from 200 to 1200 requests rate limit per minute.
So if you're interested, you'll have to take a meeting to figure out the price.
4. Dialogflow
You know them, I know them. You probably got here by using their search engine.
Dialogflow is an AI chatbot platform developed by Google, offering two editions: Dialogflow CX (advanced) and Dialogflow ES (standard).
The Dialogflow chatbots offer 24/7 customer self-service through virtual agents and interactive voice response (IVR) systems.
They're capable of handling routine tasks and queries, while also providing seamless transition to human agents for complex issues. And let's be real, sometimes your users just have to speak to a human.
Dialogflow's versatility enables many conversational forms across various platforms, ensuring instant, accurate responses to common queries.
As for its choice of LLMs, Dialogflow is always built on Google AI. So if you want a platform that can accept different LLMs, you might want to look elsewhere.
Dialogflow also emphasizes ease of management and scalability, supporting a wide range of use cases like voicebots for customer engagement and chatbots for B2C interactions.
Key features
- Omnichannel implementation
- Multilingual support and 30+ language supported
- Visual flow builder
- State-based data models for managing conversation flows
Pricing
Dialogflow is priced monthly (just like other chatbot builders), based on the edition you choose and the number of requests that are made to your chatbot each month.
Dialogflow ES (Essentials) and Dialogflow CX offer different features – the latter supports up to 20 independent conversations flows and models that can detect conversation detours. It also allows builders to reduce development time by 30% with a visual builder.
5. Amazon Lex
Another major player entering the AI chatbot field: Amazon Lex is a comprehensive service designed to build conversational interfaces.
Like many of the options on this list, Lex can be used to build both voice and text bots.
And just like Google, the whole 'ownership by a major corporation thing' means that this platform is powered by the their technology. in this case, it means the platform uses the same tech as Amazon’s Alexa. As another Amazon bonus, it specializes in easily integrating with AWS Lambda and other Amazon services (of course).
Amazon Lex chatbots will work with intents, utterances, and slots to provide request fulfillment for their users. As a fully managed service, it also eliminates the need for users to manage infrastructure.
With Amazon Lex V2, the service enhances its capabilities, offering even more intuitive and flexible conversational interfaces, integrating easily with AWS services and simplifying bot creation – without the need for deep learning expertise.
So if you want a lower-touch option and you're an avaid Amazon integration user, this might be the platform for you.
Key features
- Integration with other Amazon services
- Advanced voice features
- Drag-and-drop conversation builder
- Increased speech recognition accuracy
Pricing
Amazon Lex changes clients based on the number of speech or text API requests processed by the bot. For example, 1000 speech requests in a month would cost $4.
6. UChat
If you are not a coder, we have another option up your lane.
UChat is a comprehensive no-code chatbot platform. And what's more, they have a niche: small businesses and digital marketers.
This is another platform that uses specific LLMs (instead of BYOLLM, like some of the other options). Their chatbots are powered by OpenAI and Dialogflow.
It provides pre-built integrations across over 12 social channels, including Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and SMS. So if they have what you're lookin' for, then fantastic. Aside from the social channels, they have dozens of other integrations too.
Like other platforms, it features a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface, allowing for easy creation of advanced chatbots.
The platform stands out with its voice flow feature, enabling real-time voice virtual assistants and Interactive Voice Response systems.
The company’s bread-and-butter is omnichannel customer communication. What does that mean?
Glad you asked: Businesses can build a support bot to automate customer interactions, streamline sales processes, and provide conversational marketing solutions for customers of all kinds. You know, the typical chatbot stuff.
Its platform is able to white-label and personalize for different brands, making it especially appealing for chatbot builders at AI agencies.
Key features
- Built-in channel integrations
- A visual flow builder
- Option of white labeling
- Partner program
Pricing
UChat offers a free plan, a Business Plan at $15 USD/month, and a Partner Plan at $199 USD/month.
The Business plan offers 1 chatbot, while the Partner plan offers a customized number of bots. You can also purchase additional add-ons – an extra bot or an extra member is $5 for the Partner Plan and $10 for the Business Plan.
7. Appy Pie Chatbot
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Appy Pie (no, not applie pie)is a chatbot builder designed to help businesses create custom chatbots for customer service, sales, and more.
It's another one for the low-coders — it’s built to make chatbot creation easy and accessible, even for those with no coding experience. A win for the social science majors of yesteryear.
The platform allows businesses to simplify customer interactions, improve response times, and provide 24/7 support. Whether you need a chatbot for your website, app, or social media channels, Appy Pie’s tool helps you get started quickly.
And it's not industry-specific: Appy Pie is versatile and can be used across different industries, from retail to finance, making it an adaptable solution for various business needs.
Key features
- User-friendly interface
- Customization options
- No technical skills required
- Multi-platform integration
- Real-time analytics
Pricing
Appy Pie offers a variety of pricing plans to suit different business needs, including a free tier to get you started.
Paid plans are available with additional features like advanced analytics and extended support.
Pricing is competitive and customizable based on your specific requirements.
8. LivePerson
LivePerson was founded in 1995 and has expanded globally since. They provide voice and messaging capabilities in their chatbots, and allow users to integrate their bots with other communication channels.
Their chatbot app features human like conversations with advanced conversational AI, generative AI, and voice AI abilities, all hosted on their Conversational Cloud. Their product is adept at digitizing voice conversations for your website visitors.
LivePerson has third-party partnerships that support an omnichannel conversational suite, giving your bot the ability to connect to your data with Avaya, Amazon Connect, and Genesys.
Their generative AI allows for generative insights about customers, and their internal dataset powers their proprietary models.
Key features
- SSO sign-in
- Multi-language support
- Multi-channel deployment
- Built-in safety tools
Pricing
LivePerson offers two pricing plans, and unlike other platforms, it prices by resolutions, not individual add-ons like seats or minutes.
Their price also differs based on whether you want to use their conversational cloud alone, or in conjunction with their generative AI capabilities.
For specific prices, users need to reach out to the LivePerson sales team.
9. Yellow.ai
I have a compliment to share: I think it was very tasteful to name a company 'Yellow' but not make a yellow homepage. It would just be too much, don't you think?
Yellow.ai is an enterprise-grade AI chatbot platform designed to enhance both customer and employee conversational experiences.
It specializes in customer service functions, including retail chatbots, BFSI bots, and healthcare bots.
And they match you wherever you're at (or more accurately, wherever your customers are at). Yellow.ai allows for personalized interactions integrated across multiple channels, including websites, apps, and various messaging channels.
Yellow.ai hosts a no-code/low-code bot builder, enabling quick deployment of AI chatbots and agents without extensive coding knowledge. The deployment time is further improved with Yellow.ai’s prebuilt templates and integrations, so that builders aren't starting from nothing.
The platform can support conversations in over 100 languages, and they offer services like campaign management and autonomous customer interaction.
The platform features DynamicNLP™, (wow, fancy) which is used to facilitate high intent accuracy and multilingual fluency. This trademarked feature can significantly reduce deployment time and enhance scalability for chatbot builders.
Key features
- Pre-built integrations
- Chatbot templates
- Offers a unified customer service platform
- Chatbot insights for key metrics
Pricing
Yellow.ai offers a free plan and an Enterprise plan. The free plan allows only 1 bot, 2 channels, 1 custom API, and 1 active campaign.
However, their pro version allows for unlimited or custom usage of their features. The exact price of the Enterprise plan is determined by your specific needs – for a quote, you can contact their sales team.
Deploy a chatbot next month
Helping bot builders create best-in-class chatbots is what we do best.
Botpress offers a drag-and-drop visual flow builder, enterprise-grade security, an extensive educational library, and an active Discord community of 20,000+ bot builders.
Our extensible platform means you can build any custom chatbot with any custom integration — and our Integration Hub is full of pre-built connectors to the biggest channels.
Start building today. It’s free.
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