Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot platforms are revolutionizing the way businesses interact with their customers.
As large language model (LLM) technology rapidly evolves, AI-powered chatbots have become more sophisticated, capable of handling complex tasks. Beyond complex conversations, they can:
- Book a meeting
- Generate leads
- Respond to customer inquiries
- Send an email or WhatsApp message
- Seamlessly transfer a user to a human agent
- Integrate with all your existing systems, platforms, and channels
These days, there are a lot of ways to create bots. You can build a chatbot from scratch, but most companies and developers use a chatbot platform.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll share 9 of the best chatbot platforms on the market today. Custom chatbots are a fruitful starting ground for scaling your operations, enhancing customer support, and saving your employees from routine tasks.
The best chatbot will always be the one that works exactly how you want it – we’ll help you find the platform that best suits your needs.
What is an AI chatbot?
An AI chatbot is a software application designed to mimic human conversation. Chatbot conversations are powered by artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP).
These days, the best chatbot you can build will have agentic capabilities – similar to an AI agent. What’s an AI agent? It’s a software that can perform tasks on behalf of a user, like when a smart thermometer perceives a temperature change. They can also make autonomous, proactive decisions.
When you pick a chatbot builder that allows your bot to integrate with your existing systems and knowledge sources, you can build a bot with agentic capabilities. They can take actions into your systems, just as a sales or HR representative could.
Building an AI chatbot
Most chatbots are built on chatbot building platforms. You can build a bot from scratch, but a platform offers developers years’ worth of shortcuts in building an effective, secure chatbot.
Chatbot-building platforms offer builders the tools to craft conversational user interfaces, enabling engaging dialogues between humans and machines. The most important part of your chatbot is integrating it with your current systems and customizing it to your users – a chatbot builder platform allows you to start connecting your bot on Day 1, instead of starting from scratch.
The shape your chatbot will take depends on your target audience (e.g. customers vs. employees), desired conversation design, integration needs – in essence, the conversational experience that you want your chatbot to provide.
A chatbot platform allows you to host your chatbot as a website widget directly on your site, or on other platforms through an integration.
Using an AI Chatbot
An AI chatbot can be used across business processes, from internal communications to every step of the customer journey.
Chatbot conversations can be held with your website visitors, or conducted on a third-party platform or messaging channel (like Slack, WhatsApp, or Facebook Messenger). The conversational forms you use will depend on your use case – what’s the most useful and convenient for your users?
The introduction of chatbots in the past ten years were largely in customer support – it’s easy to automate repetitive conversations with customers. But use cases have vastly expanded: a chatbot can conduct a marketing campaign, it can both collect and provide data for your users, and it can act as an AI agent, taking actions and updating internal sources.
Benefits of an AI Chatbot
A chatbot is beneficial for employees, customers, and users alike. They can collect and provide data for customers, easily allow for human intervention, and save time for workers.
24/7 availability
Unlike a human, a chatbot can work around the clock. While 24/7 service is exceptionally costly with live agents, it’s a built-in feature of a chatbot.
If you have an international user base, or provide key services (like IT support), 24/7 service is a necessity for your success. A chatbot is a natural extension of your business offerings.
Scalability
If your organization is looking to scale, an AI chatbot is necessary for your communication channels. They’re cheaper, always available, multilingual, and integrated with all your systems.
A chatbot provides improved customer experience and enables revenue growth for your company.
Fast and consistent service
Chatbots are available 24/7 – and they can handle many customer queries simultaneously.
And the best part? Chatbots never have a bad day. Their service is exactly what you want, whenever your customer wants it.
When powered by LLMs, their natural language understanding means that even complex customer questions – beyond the level of a simple FAQ – can be handled in large numbers by a chatbot.
Multilingual support
Every chatbot can interact in multiple languages.
An AI chatbot can interact with your users in their native language, at no additional cost. While a human team that speaks 100 languages is prohibitively expensive, it’s a built-in feature of a chatbot.
Integration capabilities
The proper AI chatbot platform will allow you to connect your bot to other platforms – your AI agent can take data from any source and use it to source outgoing information.
Knowledge databases like Google sheets, your website, any documents, your Calendly availability – all of these and more can be synced up with your bot.
A chatbot builder like Botpress provides pre-built integrations to platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, Google Analytics, Intercom, Facebook Messenger, Mixpanel, Linear, Notion, Zapier, Trello, Asana, Zendesk, and many more.
The best platforms will be endlessly extensible – you’re able to build in integrations to any platform or software in existence. When you pick a chatbot platform for pros, you can build it to accomplish anything you want.
The 9 Best AI Chatbot Platforms
There are plenty of AI-driven chatbot platforms on the market. No matter your business needs, there are options available for organizations of all sizes and budgets, from open-source solutions to enterprise-level suites.
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.
Choosing the right one can be challenging. The best chatbot platform is the one that matches your business goals. Take care to consider the capabilities, features, and pricing models that best meet your needs.
1. Botpress
Botpress is a versatile AI chatbot platform, endlessly customizable and extensible. 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.
Botpress offers a visual drag-and-drop canvas for developers, 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 as of June 2024, processing over 1 billion messages. Their AI chatbots span customer service, HR, IT, governments, tech, and more.
Botpress comes with a thriving community. If you’re looking for a developer to build your chatbot, Botpress offers an extensive partner network of expert builders. And their active Discord community of 25,000 bot-builders provides 24/7 access to other developers.
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 your bot to any platform or channel
- Pre-built integrations
- Military-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
IBM watsonx Assistant is a conversational AI platform designed to build virtual and voice assistants for customer service applications.
It leverages artificial intelligence and large language models 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. It’s adaptable for use in various environments, including cloud and on-premises setups.
The platform also offers voice capabilities, allowing integration into telephonic customer support systems. IBM promotes watsonx Assistant as a tool for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of customer service interactions.
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 – price will vary based on their needs.
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
Kore.ai provides a multifaceted AI chatbot platform designed for enterprises and small businesses, aimed at enhancing customer, employee, and agent experiences.
The platform stands out with its no-code approach, enabling users to create intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) without coding skills. It also offers low-code options for deeper customization.
Kore.ai also focuses on security and compliance, crucial for sensitive sectors like banking and healthcare. Analytics and reporting tools provide insights for optimizing customer service strategies.
The platform's adaptability across different industries, from banking to healthcare, helps businesses streamline processes and enhance customer interactions. Kore.ai’s free trial option allows companies to evaluate the platform's fit with their specific needs.
Overall, Kore.ai positions itself as a comprehensive solution for creating and managing AI-driven customer interactions, aiming to improve efficiency and customer satisfaction across various sectors.
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, 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.
4. Dialogflow
Dialogflow is an AI chatbot platform developed by Google, offering two editions: Dialogflow CX (advanced) and Dialogflow ES (standard).
It facilitates 24/7 customer self-service through virtual agents and interactive voice response (IVR) systems capable of handling routine tasks and queries, while also providing seamless transition to human agents for complex issues.
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.
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, 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
Amazon Lex is a comprehensive service designed to build conversational interfaces for customers in applications using both voice and text.
The platform is powered by the same technology as Amazon’s Alexa and can easily integrate with AWS Lambda and other Amazon services.
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.
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
UChat is a comprehensive no-code chatbot platform that caters to small businesses and digital marketers. Their chatbots are powered by OpenAI and Dialogflow.
It provides integrations across over 12 social channels, including Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and SMS. 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. UChat supports AI integration, eCommerce functionalities, and over 50 platform integrations.
The company’s bread-and-butter is omnichannel customer communication. Businesses can build a support bot to automate customer interactions, streamline sales processes, and provide conversational marketing solutions for customers of all kinds.
Its platform is able to white-label and personalize for different brands, making it especially appealing for chatbot builders at 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. 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.
8. Yellow.ai
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, BFSI, and healthcare.
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.
The platform can support conversations in over 100 languages, and they offer services like campaign management and autonomous customer interaction.
The platform features DynamicNLP™, used to facilitate high intent accuracy and multilingual fluency – this 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.
9. Gupshup
Gupshup is a chatbot platform centered on business-customer interactions. It specializes in customer support, acquisition, and engagement through the use of chatbots.
Gupshup supports a wide range of channels including WhatsApp, Instagram, SMS, Facebook Messenger and voice, providing businesses with the flexibility to reach their audience wherever they’re most active.
Gupshup distinguishes itself with a proprietary AI engine, seamless enterprise system integration, and the ability to handle complex customer interactions across various stages of the customer journey.
The platform's no-code approach allows businesses to create custom conversational flows and deploy AI chatbots easily across multiple channels without extensive technical expertise.
Gupshup business positioning allows them to offer conversational marketing: meeting prospects wherever they are, channel-wise.
Key features
- No-code solution
- B2C specialized
- Integrations with popular messaging apps
- Agent-based support processes
Pricing
Gupshup charges a standard 0.0001 USD fee per message. But beyond this price, prospects need to reach out to their sales team for pricing details.
However, the company does offer a free trial, so you can test out their platform at no cost.
Deploy your chatbot next month
Building best-in-class chatbots and AI agents is what we do best.
The future of industry is AI, and a well-integrated, customized chatbot is an AI solution that’s easy to scale across your business processes.
Conversations powered by AI are increasingly popular. It’s for good reason. The best chatbot is one that saves you time and money while enhancing your end-user experience.
Whether you want to improve customer engagement or improve your employee experience, we’re here to help you build the best chatbot possible. The possibilities are endless with Botpress.
Start building today. It’s free.
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