Build a Smart Chatbot
Hire chatbot experts to enhance user engagement
We looked at tools that offer either no-code builders for beginners or advanced features for developers. We tested each platform and evaluated them on key features like ease of use, AI capabilities, customization options, pricing, overall user experience, and where the chatbot can be deployed.
In several cases, comparing chatbot platforms wasn’t a simple “apples to apples” comparison. Some platforms place more emphasis on a specific use case or channel than others, making them better suited to businesses with those specific needs.
Because of this, the list below isn’t a ranked list—the first item on the list is not necessarily better than the second one.
In no particular order, here are the 10 best AI tools for building chatbot apps:
1. Chatfuel
Chatfuel is a no-code development platform specifically designed for creating AI-powered chatbots for Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and your website. You can use its visual interface to design conversational flows, integrate with third-party services, and deploy chatbots without any programming knowledge.
Chatfuel offers powerful WhatsApp automations that let you configure customizable workflows directly inside WhatsApp or as a chatbox on your website. The live chat can trigger workflows that connect to backend services to enrich responses. It also integrates with ChatGPT, Zapier, Stripe, and Google Sheets.
Facebook and Instagram social media automations allow you to auto-reply to comments or stories, and they also integrate with ChatGPT.
Chatfuel pricing
Chatfuel for Facebook and Instagram costs $23.99 per month for 1,000 conversations. Each conversation thereafter costs $0.02.
The WhatsApp module costs $34.49 for 1,000 conversations and $0.02 for each conversation after that. The WhatsApp module includes a website chat widget.
2. OpenAI’s ChatGPT API
The OpenAI ChatGPT API (Application Programming Interface) gives developers direct access to underlying ChatGPT LLMs (large language models) so you can create custom generative AI chatbots. Unlike no-code chatbot solutions, an API offers full flexibility to create advanced AI assistants.
The ChatGPT API integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform. Microsoft provides several SDKs (software development kits) that make it easy for AI developers to connect their apps to these backend services. OpenAI pricing
OpenAI’s pricing for the API is complex, to say the least. It depends on the LLM you want to use—such as GPT-4o, 4o-mini, o1, and so on—and how many input and output tokens you’ll need.
Pricing varies from $1.10 for 1 million input tokens for 3o-mini to $75 per 1 million input tokens for GPT-4.5.
3. Botsonic
Botsonic is an AI chatbot platform developed by Writesonic. It lets you create and deploy AI-powered chatbots without any coding knowledge.
These chatbots can be trained on custom data sources, such as websites, documents, and knowledge bases, to provide context-aware interactions.
Botsonic is powered by OpenAI's GPT-4 technology, and it lets you create AI agents by defining agentic actions.
Botsonic pricing
Botsonic charges $16 per month, billed annually, for its starter package, which includes only one chatbot, one team member, and 1,000 messages per month. If you pay monthly, the starter package costs $19. The starter package lets you create three agentic actions.
The professional plan includes 3,000 messages and two chatbots for $41 per month if billed annually, and $49 if you pay monthly. The professional plan lets you create five agentic actions.
The advanced package costs $299 monthly or $249 if you pay annually. The advanced plan lets you create “AI agents that reason and execute tasks automatically,” according to its website. Find an Expert Chatbot Developer for Hire
4. Botpress
Botpress is an advanced open-source conversational AI platform that enables the creation of sophisticated omnichannel chatbots and virtual assistants for your specific needs. It combines a visual flow builder with advanced natural language understanding (NLU) capabilities, allowing users to design complex conversational flows and integrate them with various messaging channels and backend systems.
It supports a huge number of channels, integrations, and LLM providers.
Some of the channels supported include:
Facebook Messenger
Instagram
Intercom
Telegram
WhatsApp
Slack
It supports the following LLM providers:
Anthropic
Cerebras
Fireworks AI
Groq (not to be confused with Grok)
Hugging Face
OpenAI
Creating an AI chatbot is intuitive and easy. The platform asks you to define a name for your bot and then helps you provide custom instructions to get the bot started. You then upload a PDF of your knowledge base and install the bot on your website, where it can start handling customer interactions in real-time.
Botpress pricing
Unlike most other providers, Botpress offers a free tier. The free tier lets you use $5 in AI credits every month. You also get access to its visual building studio, agent analytics, the platform’s API, and community support.
Their next tier is $89 per month, which removes the Botpress branding, increases usage limits, provides custom analytics, and lets you configure the bot to hand conversations off to human agents.
They also offer a team package at $495 per month with more advanced AI features.
5. Watsonx Assistant
IBM watsonx Assistant is a robust conversational AI solution that lets you create virtual agents capable of processing natural language, engaging in dialogue, and performing tasks. It combines advanced natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning capabilities to deliver context-aware interactions.
Although Watsonx brands itself as an enterprise AI chat solution, it offers a generous free tier that many small businesses will find adequate to improve customer engagement. Watsonx offers a drag-and-drop editor with prebuilt templates.
After signing up, the IBM platform walks you through creating your first assistant using its setup wizard. The wizard asks you questions about where you want to deploy the chatbot, such as web, SMS, Facebook, WhatsApp, and so on.
Unfortunately, the setup is less intuitive than we had hoped. We created the bot in a few steps, but the wizard didn’t provide an intuitive way to connect the bot with a knowledge base, so watsonx has a steeper learning curve than other tools.
However, watsonx offers the ability to encrypt communications with your own encryption key, which makes it a strong contender for privacy-aware companies or companies that must follow strict privacy regulations, such as those in the EU.
Watsonx pricing
Watsonx’s Lite tier is free. It offers conversational AI for up to 1,000 monthly users, SMS and MMS, web chat, and industry-leading NLP capabilities.
The next tier starts at $140 per month, allows more conversations per month, and includes voice features, more versions per AI assistant, longer analytics data retention, and a 99.5% SLA.
Anyone in the healthcare industry would need to use the enterprise version because it lets you use the Data Isolation Add-On, which is necessary for HIPAA compliance.
HIPAA stands for the “Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act,” an act that sets standards for the privacy and security of protected health information (PHI), ensuring it’s only used or disclosed by covered entities like healthcare providers, insurers, and their business associates for specific purposes like treatment or payment.
6. Perplexity API
The Perplexity API offers powerful AI search capabilities that can be used to build a chatbot with real-time, web-grounded answers. This makes it ideal for chatbots that need up-to-date or knowledge-rich responses.
The Perplexity API uses its own Sonar AI model, which the company says is faster and more accurate than ChatGPT and Claude. The Sonar model did feel incredibly fast when we used it for web-grounded searches. Perplexity can add powerful additional functionality to an existing AI chatbot solution. You can use it to improve the customer experience by providing search engine responses directly inside the chatbot interface.
Calling the API is incredibly simple. In the example below, we sent a query to the API, specifying that Perplexity should provide suggested follow-up questions to keep the conversation going. Perplexity responded rapidly, along with the links from where it derived its data.
If you’re building a research chatbot, the Perplexity API is a must.
You might also need AI consulting to determine if including Perplexity in an existing solution is feasible. Perplexity pricing
Pricing depends on usage. We ran two queries and paid $0.01.
Pricing per 1 million tokens ranges between $1 and $15.
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7. Dialogflow
Dialogflow is Google’s conversational agent solution designed to facilitate the development of conversational user interfaces powered by Google’s Gemini AI model. The platform lets developers create virtual agents capable of engaging in natural conversations with users.
Dialogflow supports both text and voice-based interactions and can be integrated into mobile apps, web applications, devices, bots, and interactive voice response systems.
The product is part of Google’s larger Customer Engagement Suite, which includes several services that leverage AI technology to improve the customer experience. Dialogflow isn’t especially user-friendly for beginners and is intended for people who are already familiar with Google Cloud offerings.
Dialogflow pricing
8. ManyChat
ManyChat is a longstanding player in the chatbot field, and it has now added AI technology to its offering. The platform lets you create and manage omnichannel chatbots across various messaging platforms.
ManyChat’s purpose has always been to automate and manage conversations across various messaging apps, including Facebook Messenger, Instagram Direct Messages, WhatsApp, SMS, and email. It offers a visual drag-and-drop builder to create chatbot flows, enabling users to design automated conversations without coding. ManyChat is widely used for marketing, sales, and customer support purposes.
The AI offering is designed to automatically generate workflows for your chats based on your goals, as well as to improve copy. It can handle and respond to multilingual queries.
Unfortunately, finding the web chat option is complex. It’s apparently integrated into ManyChat’s “Growth Tools” section, which we couldn’t find. So, this is an awesome tool for messenger apps and social media comment automation, but we recommend choosing a second tool for web chat functionality.
ManyChat pricing
ManyChat offers a free plan with a 1,000 contact limit, which should be enough for the business needs of any new ecommerce store.
Its Pro plan starts at $15 per month and scales as your number of contacts grows.
9. UChat
UChat is a no-code, omnichannel chatbot platform designed to help businesses automate customer interactions, streamline operations, and enhance engagement. With its visual flow builder, users can design complex conversation flows without any programming knowledge. UChat supports deployment across various platforms, including messaging apps, websites, and voice channels.
UChat is a traditional chatbot provider that recently added an AI component to its larger offering. The platform offers many of the traditional rules-based workflow options that are common in automation solutions.
If you’re simply looking for an AI chatbot that you can train and unleash on your site, UChat might feel like overkill. Also, integrating AI isn’t especially intuitive. You create a workflow and must then connect that workflow to an external tool such as OpenAI or Google’s DialogFlow.
This possibility is powerful because it allows you to control the workflow fully instead of handing over control to a “black box.” If you’re interested in comprehensive workflow and chatbot solutions that you can add AI to, UChat is an excellent choice.
As expected of any comprehensive tool, it has a steep learning curve.
UChat pricing
UChat offers a free tier with support for Facebook, Instagram, and Telegram bots only. You also can’t use any integrations unless you’re on a paid plan, which costs $15 per month.
10. Appy Pie Chatbot
Appy Pie is a powerful AI chatbot builder that offers integrations for ecommerce sites, messaging platforms, email, and even apps such as Google Sheets and Microsoft Teams. It offers many of the traditional rules-based options for creating a chatbot, but also has an AI feature where you can create a bot through prompts.
In the test above, we asked it to create a bot that provides product recommendations and customer service. Appy Pie did all the initial grunt work to create the framework for the bot.
Appy Pie pricing
Appy Pie does not offer a free tier, but they do provide a seven-day trial.
They only offer an annual plan, which costs $132 per year.
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As you’ve likely noticed, none of the solutions above offer everything in a single package. It’s likely that you might want to use more than one solution.
Here are the most common aspects to consider when choosing an AI chatbot platform:
Natural Language Understanding (NLU)
AI doesn’t understand language in the truest sense. However, its ability to accurately process input and determine the most appropriate output feels like “understanding.” Breakthroughs in AI technology have enhanced AI’s ability to determine context in this manner.
The better an AI chatbot determines the context of your customers’ input, the more effectively it can assist your customers and reduce your workload. Chatbots without NLU capabilities are less useful and require immensely complex pre-designed workflows behind them to make them work.
Integration
The more services your chatbot platform integrates with, the more value you can extract from it. For example, integrating with a CRM would enrich your CRM data with valuable customer conversations that your sales team could use later. Integrating with your email marketing platform means you could send targeted emails based on messenger app interactions.
Scalability
As your business grows, the chatbot platform must scale accordingly to handle increased user interactions without compromising performance.
Customization
Customization lets you tailor chatbot functionalities to your business’s specific needs. Customization applies to how the chatbot responds, its look and feel, and to whatever workflows it triggers in the backend. For example, a chatbot conversation might trigger a marketing email with a product recommendation.
Security & Compliance
In some industries, such as healthcare, strict data protection policies must be followed.
Some jurisdictions, such as the EU, also enforce rigorous data privacy laws that your chatbot platform should comply with if you have users in the EU.
User-Friendliness
User-friendliness applies to both your experience in creating the chatbot and the experience your customers have when using it.
Conversational AI has significantly improved the user experience for people interacting with a chatbot.
AI Model Quality
The more human-sounding the underlying model is, the better your customer’s experience will be.
The underlying AI model should also be suited for the chatbot’s task. For example, connecting Perplexity’s search-grounded model to an ecommerce store customer service bot would make little sense. However, using it in an internal business chatbot to provide quick answers to search queries does make sense.
The model you use should match your needs and your budget.
Cost & Pricing
Be wary of pricing models that increase with the number of contacts or interactions. Although a certain platform might seem cheaper than another, it might end up being far more expensive as your business scales.
Also, consider the quality of responses you need. For example, OpenAI’s most expensive model costs $75 per 1 million input tokens, but the model is overkill—and thus overpriced—for customer service chatbots.
Hire a freelance AI developer today
Although AI companies want us to believe that we’re all one click away from instant software and solutions, the reality is quite different. AI has empowered people to do many things they couldn’t do before, but much of what’s created still feels like a car with three wheels. It needs a final touch by an expert to give it the fourth wheel.
AI is a powerful tool, and you likely need expert help to make full use of that tool. Whether you need help setting up the workflows behind each of your chatbots or need someone to program a custom AI chatbot solution, Fiverr has professional freelancers ready to help you. Fiverr’s AI tech consulting services can also help you figure out what the right AI solution is for your business. Fiverr’s merit-based ranking system, combined with its vetted professionals, lets you find trusted freelancers capable of delivering what your business needs.
Many different platforms exist that let you create AI chatbots. Each platform has its strengths and weaknesses. Some of the most capable platforms are Chatfuel, Botpress, OpenAI’s API, and watsonx by IBM.
Which is the best AI chatbot?
Consumers are lucky to have so many choices when it comes to AI chatbots. For AI chatbot assistants, the three giants are ChatGPT, Grok, and Claude.
What AI is better than ChatGPT?
Many benchmarks exist to determine which AI is better than another. Our tests show that these benchmarks serve little purpose when it comes to day-to-day intelligent usage.
All the major AI chatbots on the market offer powerful features, although some excel better in certain areas than others. For example, Grok has excellent research capabilities but often falters in complex coding tasks compared to Claude and ChatGPT.
What is the best AI chatbot for free?
All the major AI chatbot platforms offer a limited free tier. Most businesses will almost always need to upgrade to one of the paid tiers to obtain real value from the service.
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June 16, 2025
11 minute reading
