Which One Should I Use? Chatfuel or Manychat or Something Else

As I have been testing the whole chatbot thing, I know I still have a lot of work to do. Right now, I'm still evaluating platforms.

Last year when the craze started, I played with chattypeople (site is no longer available). But it was too early for me, and the tools were not as easy to use as they are now. Then about a month ago, I started anew by a friend's recommendation using Manychat, then the same friend changed the recommendation to Chatfuel.

I recreated the bot I had in Manychat on Chatfuel and added some new content. The entire transition was manual, so it was a pain in the you-know-what, but I did it.

Now it seems that Chatfuel is going through their own growing pains and having some tough decisions to make in regards to levels of service and pricing. They have a long thread going on in their FB support group.

All of the sudden, the very impressive platform has lost some of my confidence.

But if you're on a similar boat as I am, or you're starting to research chatbots for yourself, you may find this article really really helpful. It goes through some of the most popular chatbot builders out there. The article is good, highlighting the pros and cons and the most notable features on each platform.

Before you go on to that article, here's a thougth I have about the whole chatbots world right now. It's the wild wild west, even today just about a year after Facebook opened up their api to messenger. That's a great start.

But you know the pain I had, moving the chatbot from Manychat to Chatfuel? When the chatbot industry grows a little and gets a new wave of entrepreneurs, by the natural progression of the market there will be someone that comes up with an importer and exporter tool. That will be interesting.

That is a good idea.

As of right now, I don't know that I love Chatfuel, and in some ways, I miss Manychat.

I wonder if these companies are already working on their own importers. That's a feature that many people would pay extra for, I think. If you have a great chatbot builder and I found you after I started with a competing product, make it as easy as possible for me to get into your platform.

Exactly what an importer would do. I bet you there's a smart developer out there that can create a "listening chatbot" to walk the entire tree of responses of your chatbot and copy and save them elsewhere.

This whole importing feature is an interesting idea to explore don't you think? That feature will put that builder at an advantage.