Manychat vs Chatfuel: Which platform is better in 2024?

By Joren Wouters • Updated on Aug 19, 2024

When you looking to create a chatbot on Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp, Manychat and Chatfuel are two popular chatbot platforms to choose from.

You can use them both for creating chatbots and required zero coding experience, which means anyone can build a chatbot with them.

But which platform should you use? What are the differences? And which platform is better?

Find it out in this in-depth Manychat vs. Chatfuel comparison!

P.S. I’ve personally used both platforms for more than 4 years, so I all know ins and outs of each platform. And this comparison is backed up by two in-depth reviews of Manychat and Chatfuel.

Table of Contents

Chatfuel vs Manychat: Our Verdict

Overall, I think Manychat is better than Chatfuel, because it has better features.

Go to Manychat

Here’s the short version:

Manychat‘s interface is easier to use, has a better live chat, is available on more channels and has better analytics for conversion tracking
Chatfuel has better analytics for unanswered questions and better customer support

To make your decision easier, here’s an overview of the key features per chatbot platform:

	Manychat	Chatfuel
Ease of use	Easy-to-use Flow Builder with drag and drop	Easy-to-use Flow Builder, but can be slow at times
Chatbot features	Great for collecting user input, conditional branching and scalability	Great for collecting user input, conditional branching and scalability
Contacts	Unlimited custom fields & tags, create your own segments	Unlimited custom fields & tags, create your own segments
AI & NLP	Keyword-recognition, AI Intents, AI Steps, AI Flow Builder Assistant & AI Text Improver	Keyword-recognition and advanced integration with ChatGPT
Available channels	Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS and Email	Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp
Growth Tools	Auto Reply to Facebook/Instagram Comments, WhatsApp Message Templates & More	Auto Reply to Facebook/Instagram Comments, WhatsApp Message Templates & More
Live chat	Advanced live chat with team member groups and auto-assignment rules	Basic live chat
Analytics	Flow builder analytics & conversion event tracking	Flow builder analytics and unanswered questions
Pricing	Free plan up to 1000 contacts, Pro plan starting at $15/month	Free plan up to 50 contacts, Pro plan starting at $19.99/month

If you want more in-depth details of each platform, keep reading!

Manychat vs Chatfuel: Side-by-side Comparison

Let’s compare Manychat and Chatfuel side-by-side. For each of the platforms, we will look at:

Using the Interface
Chatbot elements
Contacts
AI Features
Live Chat
Channels
Growth Tools: Drive Traffic to Chat Funnels
Integrations
Pricing
Analytics
Templates
Support

Using the Interface

When you create chat automations in Manychat, Manychat offers a flow builder. Each automation consists of a trigger and blocks, that determine the content of the automation.

Adding blocks is super easy, you can just drag and drop them in the flow builder:

To keep your automations structured, you can also divide these into folders:

Additionally, Manychat has some nice features that make it even easier to use. For example, you can click on Auto-Arrange Steps, which automatically arranges all the steps in your automation. Or you can you use Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V to copy and paste elements.

Just like Manychat, Chatfuel also offers groups and a Flow Builder to create your chat automations. You can just drag and drop elements in the flow builder, which is super easy to use:

Chatfuel also provides similar cool features, such as copy/pasting and automatically organizing blocks.

Moreover, with both chatbot builders you can test out your chat automations before you actually set them live.

So overall, both chatbot platforms are extremely easy to use. When using them I only found two differences:

Manychat’s flow builder is just a bit more easy to use, more smoother experience
When you have more chat automations or larger chat automations, Chatfuel’s flow builder loads slow
With Chatfuel, you cannot duplicate chatbot flows across channels

	ManyChat	Chatfuel
Flow Builder Create chatbot dialogs with a visual flow builder.
Ease of use How easy is it to use the platform? On a scale of 1 to 5.	5	4
Ease of setup How easy is it to set up your chatbot? On a scale of 1 to 5.	5	4
Test chatbot Is it possible to test the chatbot before putting your new flows or changes live?

Chatbot Elements

Both Manychat and Chatfuel provide many chatbot elements to build your chatbot.

You can collect User Input, create conditional branches (great for creating personalized chatbots) and start other automations (best for scalability).

	ManyChat	Chatfuel
Image Can you send images via your chatbot?
Video Can you send video via your chatbot?
Audio Can you send audio via your chatbot?
Attachment Can you send attachments via your chatbot?
Gallery (Horizontal List) Show a gallery of cards inside your chatbot. A card consists of an image, title, subtitle and button.
Quick reply Can you add quick replies to your chatbot where users can click on?
Button Can you add buttons to your chatbot where users can click on?
Collect User Input Can you collect input from users and store it in fields?
Condition Make checks in your chatbot flow based on if-then logic. For example, if the user has not given their email, ask for their email.
Delay Use delays between messages in your chatbot
Start automation Can you refer from one automation to another and thereby reuse your automations?
Split traffic Can you split your trafic inside a chatbot flow? Often used for A/B testing.

Contacts

In Manychat, you can see all the contacts that talked to your chatbot in one overview:

When you click on one contact, you can see their custom fields and tags. Clicking on “Start chat” shows their entire chat history on all channels:

You can add unlimited custom fields and tags to your contacts. Custom fields are used to store specific information about someone, such as their interests, email address or name. Tags can be used to segment your contacts into different buckets, such as “Qualified” or “Customer”.

Additionally, you can also create segments based on a combination of fields and tags.

Chatfuel offers the same functionalities. So you can see all the contacts of your chatbot in the People tab:

When you click on one of the users, you can see all the user information for that specific person:

Additionally, you can also create custom segments in the People tab by clicking on the Add Segment button. This automatically saves the current filters to a new segment. Then, you can use this segment in your Chatfuel automations, such as when sending a broadcast:

	ManyChat	Chatfuel
Contacts overview Can you see all the contacts that talked to your chatbot in one overview?
Custom field Store information from your chatbot users inside fields. For example, you can ask for someone’s email and store it inside the “email” custom field.
Tags Add tags to users in your chatbot flows to organize and categorize contacts.
User Segments Can you create user segments based on custom fields and tags?

AI Features

Both Manychat and Chatfuel provide keyword-recognition.

This means that you can automatically reply if someone asks a question with a certain keyword in it.

In Manychat, this is called the Keyword trigger:

And in Chatfuel, you can create Keyword groups:

Besides that Manychat offers an AI Add-On.

This add-on includes four extra features:

AI Intents
AI Step
AI Flow Builder Assistant
AI Text Improver

With AI Intents, you can not only reply to certain keywords, but understand the intent of the user. So if someone types in a question and it matches with the intent, you can automatically reply to it:

This can save you a lot of time, because you don’t have to manually enter all the keywords you want to match. You can just enter the intent and Manychat AI can automatically reply to it.

But I think the most promising feature is the AI Step. With the AI step, you can create your own AI Lead generation assistants with natural language.

With the AI step, you can let the AI handle the conversation for you in a number of steps. And then you can tell the AI:

What it needs to do at every step
Whether it needs to collect information
And if it needs to collect information, to what Manychat fields these need to be saved

And the AI step can also take into account the context of your business. So you can give extra business information and use that information during the conversation.

Furthermore, Manychat provides the AI Flow Builder Assistant. With this assistant, you can answer a couple of questions and the Assistant automatically creates a complete automation for you:

And lastly, Manychat also has the AI Text Improver. With the Text Improver, you can simply give the AI a text and Manychat can rewrite the text for a different goal, change tone of voice or translate it to another language:

Chatfuel also has two extra AI features: direct integration with ChatGPT and AI Agents.

With the ChatGPPT integration, you can determine to what intents Chatfuel will reply and how the AI needs to answer:

With this integration, you can also determine how many messages ChatGPT should remember.

And Chatfuel provides pre-configured AI Agents.

AI Agents are similar to the ChatGPT integration, but are predetermined by Chatfuel and can do entire tasks on their own. For example, with the 1st-line customer support agent you can automatically answer questions from customers.

What is great about the ChatGPT and AI agent block is that you can also tell ChatGPT when it should handover the conversation back to a Chatfuel flow. For example, if a user is angry, you can directly send them to live chat:

So both platforms have AI features you can use to create better chatbots!

	ManyChat	Chatfuel
Keyword recognition Trigger chatbot flow based on certain words or phrases a user says to the chatbot.
Intents Trigger a chatbot flow by understanding the intent of the user.
Entities Capture specific information from sentences. For example, if a user says “veggie pizza”, the chatbot can understand it’s not a regular pizza, but a veggie pizza.
AI Knowledge Base Can you train your chatbot on a knowledge base (like your website or articles) and then your chatbot automatically answer questions about it?
NLP integrations Does it have a direct integration with NLP platforms, such as Dialogflow?
LLM integrations Does it have a direct integration with LLM platforms, such as ChatGPT and Claude?

Live Chat

Manychat has a built-in live chat that is called Inbox. By using the Inbox, you can hand over the conversation from your chatbot to one of your customer support agents:

Additionally, Manychat also has an iOS and Android app, allowing you to answer to questions on your phone.

In addition, Manychat also has a more advanced version of their Inbox: Inbox Pro. This comes with extra features, such as:

Creating groups of team members
Auto-assinging conversations based on rules
And agent chat analytics

If we look at the live chat of Chatfuel, this one is more limited.

Just like with Manychat, Chatfuel also has a built-in Live Chat feature:

And this also comes with an iOS and Android App, which is great.

So they both offer great live chat, but Manychat also offers the ability to set up automated rules for assigning conversations, which Chatfuel doesn’t.

	ManyChat	Chatfuel
Built-in live chat Does it have a built-in live chat, so you can hand over a conversation to a support agent?
Live chat integration Does it have a direct integration with a third-party livechat application?
Auto-Assignment Rules Can you set up rules so that conversations get automatically assigned to agents in livechat?

Channels

With Manychat you can publish your chatbot on your website, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS and Email.

With SMS, you need to connect your ManyChat account to a Twilio account. Then, ManyChat will handle the chatbot and chat logic. Twilio will receive and send the text messages (Twilio has extra costs).

Moreover, you can also merge contacts across channels (based on their email or phone number). For example, if someone contacts you via Facebook Messenger and later via Instagram. Manychat can see that it is the same person and merge the contacts.

Chatfuel provides less channels: Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp.

And with Chatfuel it is not possible to merge contacts across channels.

So this is a clear win for Manychat.

	ManyChat	Chatfuel
Website Can you publish your chatbot on your website?
Facebook Can you publish your chatbot on Facebook?
Instagram Can you publish your chatbot on Instagram?
Whatsapp Can you publish your chatbot on WhatsApp?
Telegram Can you publish your chatbot on Telegram?
SMS Can you publish your chatbot on SMS?
Slack Can you publish your chatbot on Slack?
Email Can you publish your chatbot on email?
Merge contacts across channels Can you merge contacts across channels, when the same person contacts you over multiple channels?

Growth Tools: Drive Traffic to Chat Funnels

In addition to creating user-triggered automations, you can also start conversations with your contacts.

With Manychat, you can do this by sending broadcasts & sequences.

With broadcasts, you can send mass messages to your contacts in Manychat:

Likewise, you can send a series of messages with a certain time interval by using a Sequence:

And lastly, you can also create your own Rules. With a Rule, you can automatically do an action when an event happens.

For example, when someone books an appointment, we can send them a reminder 1 day before it:

With Chatfuel, you can also send broadcasts and sequences:

Unfortunately, they don’t have the Rules feature as Manychat provides it.

So I would say that Manychat does it slightly better on this subject than Chatfuel, because they have Rules.

When it comes down to driving traffic from your social channels to your chat funnels, Manychat and Chatfuel are among the best platforms on the market.

Both platforms provide all the possible ways to drive traffic to your chat automations.

On Facebook, you can:

Create Ref URLs that go to specific chat automations
Automatically reply to Facebook Comments and start a Messenger conversation
Send one-time notifications
Send Recurring Notifications
Connect a Facebook ad to your Messenger chatbot
Send Sponsored Messages via Facebook Messenger

On Instagram, you can:

Automatically reply to Instagram comments and start conversations in Instagram DM
Send automatic replies to people who mention your account in their Instagram story
Connect an Instagram Ad to your Instagram chatbot

And lastly, on WhatsApp you can send Message templates to start conversations with people.

The only difference I have noticed between the two platforms is that Manychat also provides banners and pop-ups that you can add to your website to drive website traffic to your Facebook Messenger automations:

But other than that, they do equally well on this subject!

	ManyChat	Chatfuel
Broadcasts Send a message to all or a part of your chatbot users at a specific date and time
Sequences Send messages on a pre-defined schedule with a certain time interval between those messages
Rules Trigger events based on if-then logic. For example, if email is given by the user, send it to your CRM.
Website widget Embed your chatbot as a widget on your website (with your own branding & colors).
Send proactive messages on website Can you send pro-active messages on your website with your chatbot?
Facebook Ref URL Can you create a URL that goes to a specific flow inside your Facebook chatbot?
Auto-Reply to Facebook Comments Automatically reply with your chatbot to users who comment on your Facebook Posts
One-Time Notification Send one-time notifications via Facebook Messenger for a topic that a chatbot user has opted-in for
Recurring Notifications Send recurring notifications via Facebook Messenger for a topic that a chatbot user has opted-in for
Facebook Ads Start a conversation with your chatbot when someone clicks on a Facebook Ad
Sponsored messages Send paid messages via Facebook Messenger outside the 24-hour window
Auto-Reply to Instagram Comments Automatically reply with your chatbot to users who comment on your Instagram Posts
Instagram Story Mention Reply Send auto replies to Instagram users who mention your Instagram handle in their Instagram Stories
WhatsApp Message Templates Can you initiate conversations with Message Templates on WhatsApp?

Integrations

Regding integrations, Manychat and Chatfuel are equally well.

Both platforms provide direct integrations with other applications. For example, Manychat provides direct integrations with ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, Hubspot, Google Sheets and more.

Chatfuel provides similar integrations with Hubspot, Shopify and Google Sheets.

If that’s not enough, they both also provide direct integrations with Zapier and Make, allowing you to connect to almost any application on earth.

And lastly, you can use both of them to make API Calls in the flow builder.

The only thing that Manychat has and Chatfuel doesn’t is its own App Store. This allows third-party developers to create their own integrations with Manychat and has over 61 apps to extend functionalities of Manychat:

	ManyChat	Chatfuel
Direct integrations How many direct integrations does it have with other applications?	1-10	1-10
Zapier Direct integration with Zapier, one of the largest integration platforms in the world.
Make Direct integration with Make (formerly Integromat), one of the largest integration platforms in the world.
Make API Calls Can you call an API inside your chatbot flow to send or get data from other applications?
Webhooks Can the platform send automatic notifications of all the messages and events going on in your chatbot?

Pricing

When it comes to pricing, both platforms provide plans at a pretty cheap price.

Manychat’s free plan comes with basic features of the flow builder, some Growth Tools, access to 3 channels (Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp) and you can reach up to 1,000 contacts.

If you need want all the features, you need to go with the Pro plan, which starts at $15/month and comes with 500 contacts. This plan increases with the number of contacts you have. For example, 5,000 contacts costs $45/month:

Manychat also has two Add-Ons:

AI Add-on, which costs $29/month
Inbox Pro, which starts at $99/month

Manychat’s Pro plan also comes with a 7-day Free Trial and a 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee.

Chatfuel on the other hand doesn’t provide a free plan, but only a free trial, which allows you to test out the platform.

If you want to head forward with Chatfuel, you can choose any of their paid plans. And they have seperate plans per channel.

For Instagram and Facebook, the Business plan starts at $20/month and comes with 1000 conversations:

The price of the plan increases with the number of conversations you have. For example, 2,500 conversations/month costs $45.

For WhatsApp, the Business plan starts at $49.49/month and comes with 1,000 conversations.

Just like the other plan, this price scales with the number of conversations.

And with each Chatfuel plan also comes a 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee.

So in terms of pricing, Manychat and Chatfuel do pretty well.

I would say Manychat does slightly better, because they also has a free plan and Chatfuel only has a free trial.

	ManyChat	Chatfuel
Free trial Does the chatbot platform provide a free trial?
Free plan Does the chatbot platform provide a free plan?
Price per month What is the lowest price per month to create a chatbot with this platform? In US Dollars.	$15	$20
Monthly pricing available? Is it possible to pay monthly?
Money back guarantee Is there a money-back guarantee in case you are not satisfied with the platform?

Analytics

Manychat has four types of analytics:

Manychat Insights
Automation Analytics
Conversion Analytics
Agent Analytics

Manychat has an Insights dashboard that gives general insights into your Manychat account. In this dashboard, you can see how many contacts you have per channel:

And how these contacts have evolved over time:

Moreover, Manychat also has automation analytics (“Flow analytics”). For each block in your automation, you can see how many contacts it was sent to. You can also see the delivery, open, and click rates (if a message has a button):

By using these flow analytics, you can easily improve your Manychat flows for better conversion.

Also, you can add your own conversion events inside your chat automations. Then, you can see how many people reached those events in a specific period:

These conversion events are not limited to your chatbot funnels. You can also install the Manychat Pixel (similar to a Facebook Pixel) on your website and track conversions on your website of people coming from your chatbot. For example, when someone clicks on a button in Messenger and then converts on your website, this pixel will track that conversion back to your Manychat account.

And if you sign up for Manychat Inbox Pro, you also get agent analytics. With these analytics, you can see how many conversations where resolved by your agents:

And you can also see how many conversations each agent resolved:

Looking at Chatfuel, they provide similar analytics as Manychat. Chatfuel also has an analytics dashboard with the number of total users:

The user activity per day:

And the most important sources of traffic for your chatbot:

Besides this, it also provides analytics on the most popular blocks and buttons in your chatbot.

And just like Manychat, it also has flow analytics.

For each message in your chatbot flows, you can see the delivery rate, seen rate and click rate:

Likewise, you can see the same data for all the sequences and broadcasts in your Chatfuel account (also possible with Manychat):

But they don’t provide conversion event tracking or a Manychat pixel. Instead, they offer an overview of all the questions your chatbot couldn’t answer:

This allows you to quickly improve the answers of your chatbot and create additional flow, which is great.

So all in all, what analytics you like more depends where you want to focus on.

They both provide a dashboard and flow analytics, which is great. But the difference is in marketing and customer support. Manychat focuses more on marketing and conversion events. Chatfuel’s analytics are more focused on improving the answers of your chatbot.

	ManyChat	Chatfuel
Dashboard Dashboard that provides general analytics of your chatbot.
Flow analytics Can you analyze how users are going through your chatbot flows?
User input Get the input from users that your chatbot didn’t understand.
Sent messages The number of messages that were sent by your chatbot.
Open rate The percentage of chatbot users that opened a message inside your chatbot.
Click rate The percentage of chatbot users that click on a button inside your chatbot.
Conversion rate The percentage of users that converted through your chatbot. For example, the percentage of users that gave their email address
Fall back rate The percentage of interactions where the chatbot did not know an answer to a question.
Agent analytics Can you analyze the performance of live chat agents?
Custom event tracking Can you create custom events and analyze how many times these happened?
Custom dashboards/reports Can you create your own dashboard or reports?

Templates

Both platforms provide many templates that you can use to get started with creating your chatbots.

Manychat provides 35 templates, whereas Chatfuel has 22 templates to get you started with.

With both platforms, you can also create these templates and share these with others.

	ManyChat	Chatfuel
Number of templates How many pre-built templates does the chatbot platform provide?	35	22
Make template Can you make templates yourself?
Share template Can you share self-created templates with others?

Support

Manychat and Chatfuel have a lot of tutorials and documentation on their website to help you with using their platform.

Manychat offers customer support via a ticketing system, while Chatfuel does so via Live Chat.

Overall, the customer support of Chatfuel is also better. Because with Chatfuel you often get a response back within a day (often way quicker!). With Manychat, it’s not unusual to get a response after weeks, and this has also been addressed many times in their community and other review platforms.

Manychat on the other hand does have a bigger active community (120K+ on Facebook), with a lof of enthusiasts willing to help you out.

	ManyChat	Chatfuel
Tutorials Does the chatbot platform provide tutorials on how to use its platform?
Documentation Does the chatbot platform provide documentation on how to use its platform?
Customer support Does the chatbot platform provide customer support?

Manychat vs. Chatfuel: Which should you choose?

Overall, I think Manychat is better than Chatfuel, because the interface is easier to use, has a better live chat, available on more channels and better analytics for conversion tracking.

Go to ManyChat

But that doesn’t mean Chatfuel is bad. Chatfuel has other aspects that are better than Manychat, such as better analytics for unanswered questions and better customer support.

Comments (14)

rasheedo February 13, 2021 Reply

Thanks
1. Joren Wouters February 15, 2021 Reply
  
  Glad that I could help!
Jorge March 30, 2021 Reply

Good, Inwill use manychat
1. Joren Wouters April 1, 2021 Reply
  
  Great!
Pedro Benevides September 19, 2021 Reply

What a great study, thank for sharing.
1. Joren Wouters September 20, 2021 Reply
  
  Thank you, Pedro!
pedro November 10, 2021 Reply

I don’t understand, why Manychat is better? It doesn’t even got AI ????
1. Joren Wouters November 15, 2021 Reply
  
  Hey Pedro! Because ManyChat has slightly better features than Chatfuel. It is true that they do not have AI, but Chatfuel also does not provide AI.
Ces February 28, 2022 Reply

In Chatfuel, it is mentioned that free trial can only have 50 users, does that mean only 50 subscribers can subscribe to the bot? thank
1. Joren Wouters March 2, 2022 Reply
  
  Yes, with the free plan of Chatfuel, only 50 users can subscribe to the bot.
Vassiliy September 15, 2023 Reply

Awesome, thanks for the work!!
Is their customer support good? Meaning, can you easily reach people?
1. Joren Wouters September 24, 2023 Reply
  
  Thank you! Do you mean Manychat’s or Chatfuel’s support?
idr September 22, 2024 Reply

Best review!
Please compare ManyChat Inbox Pro with Wapi Team Inbox, and also its UI for ios phones.
1. Joren Wouters October 1, 2024 Reply
  
  Thank you! And thanks for the suggestion, will add it to my list.

Manychat vs Chatfuel: Which platform is better in 2024?

Chatfuel vs Manychat: Our Verdict

Manychat vs Chatfuel: Side-by-side Comparison

Using the Interface

Chatbot Elements

Contacts

AI Features

Live Chat

Channels

Growth Tools: Drive Traffic to Chat Funnels

Integrations

Pricing

Analytics

Templates

Support

Manychat vs. Chatfuel: Which should you choose?

Comments (14)

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Free ebook "5 Biggest Mistakes When Making Your First Chatbot"

Use your email

Discover The Secrets of Choosing The Perfect Chatbot Platform - Without Breaking The Bank.

How I Automated 2,144 Questions Within 30 Days

Get started with WhatsApp Automation and Stand Out on the "2 Billion People Platform"

Don't forget your FREE ebook!

"5 WhatsApp Automations You Can Copy And Paste Today"