Botpress Review

Botpress is an omnichannel chatbot platform that allows you to create chatbots for your website, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram,  SMS, Slack, Viber, Line and Microsoft Teams.

The question is: Should you use Botpress to build your chatbots?

Let’s find out!

User Interface

When you log in Botpress, you first see an overview of all the chatbots you have:

Once you are going to build your chatbot, Botpress uses a Visual Flow Builder:

On the left-side, you have an overview of all your flows (that you can divide into folders) and you can edit your flows in the middle of the interface.

When you are creating your flows, you can connect nodes to each other, where each node can consists of one or multiple cards (a card is a chatbot element, such as a text message or asking a question).

Moreover, if you want to test your chat flows, you can immediately start talking to your chatbot in the down-right corner:

When you are testing your chat flows, the cards in the visual flow builder light up, so you can easily see where you are in the process of testing.

And what is also great, is that you can use the Event Debugger to analyze what decisions the chatbot took in your chat flows. By having these features, Botpress makes it extremely easy to test your chat flows and improve them.

So overall, the interface of Botpress is really easy to use. That being said, I do think you need some time to get used to how the interface precisely works (with setting variables and starting flows). Once you get the hang of that, it works like a charm!

• Visual Flow Builder

  Create chatbot dialogs with a visual flow builder.
• Test chatbot

  Is it possible to test the chatbot before putting your new flows or changes live?
• Interface easy to use?

  Is the chatbot platform easy-to-use?
• Easy to setup a chatbot?

  Is it easy to set up your chatbot with this chatbot platform?

Chatbot elements

Botpress provides a lot of elements to create your own chatbot (almost all elements I have on my criteria list).

The most imporant elements: User Input (for asking user information), Conditions (to personalize the conversations) and starting another flow (for scalability) are all present in the platform.

Also, they have a built-in table feature that you can use to create your own tables and add data to them (such as lead data):

What I also like about Botpress is that they have the “Execute code” card. By using this, you can create your own custom functions using Javascript. So by using that, you can code your own things, such as adding a delay to your flow or creating an API call to another system.

• Delays

  Use delays between messages in your chatbot
• Images

  Can you send images via your chatbot?
• Video

  Can you send video via your chatbot?
• Audio

  Can you send audio via your chatbot?
• Attachments

  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.
• Vertical list

  Show a vertical list of items inside your chatbot
• Emojis

  Can you use emojis inside your chatbot?
• Persistent Menu

  Can you add a persistent menu to your chatbot?
• Quick Replies

  Can you add quick replies to your chatbot where users can click on?
• Buttons

  Can you add buttons to your chatbot where users can click on?
• Free text input

  Can chatbot users freely type text to your chatbot whenever they want to?
• Location sharing

  Can users share their location inside the chatbot?
• Email validation

  When a chatbot user gives their email, can the platform validate it's a correct email address?
• Phone number validation

  When a chatbot user gives their phone number, can the platform validate it's a correct phone number?
• Date validation

  When a chatbot user gives a date, can the platform validate it's a correct date?

Users

With Botpress, you can ask questions to your chatbot users and store the answers in a custom field (called Attributes in Botpress). Then, you can use the answer to that question in the rest of your chat flows.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to see an overview of everyone that talked to your chatbot. It is possible to create this yourself by adding a Botpress table and adding each chatbot contact to that table.

• Custom fields

  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?

Messages

With Botpress, you cannot send broadcasts or sequences to your users.

It is possible to create a sequence of messages, but you should code this yourself using the Execute Code block.

Furthermore, you can create chatbots in multiple languages, which is really easy to do with Botpress. Botpress has a built-in Translator Agent that can automatically detect the language of the user and translate the chatbot messages into the user’s language:

By using this feature, you don’t have to translate anything yourself, while you have a multi-language chatbot!

• 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
• Conditions

  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.
• Multiple languages

  Is it possible to create a chatbot in multiple languages?
• Easy to translate

  Can you translate text to other languages without using a third-party platform and without creating duplicate flows?

AI & NLP

Botpress has extremely advanced AI capabilities.

In Botpress, you can create Intents to understand the intent of the user based on training phrases you provide:

Additionally, Botpress has lots of built-in entities and you can create your own entities to capture specific information from a sentence:

But I think the best part of the AI capabilities of Botpress are the Agents. In Botpress, you have multiple agents that you can enable:

• Knowledge Agent
• Personality Agent
• Summary Agent
• Translator Agent (I already described this one above, you can use it to automatically translate each message sent to a user)

With a Knowledge Agent, you can upload knowledge base sources (such as website URLs, documents and Web Search) and Botpress will use these sources to automatically answer questions from your chatbot users:

You can just upload the URL of your website FAQ and Botpress can immediately answer all the questions that are on that page, which is absolutely incredible!

Using the Personality Agent, you can give Botpress instructions on what the personality of the bot should be. Then, Botpress will automatically rewrite every message that is sent to a user so that it matches with the described personality:

And lastly, you can use the Summary Agent to automatically summarize the complete conversation someone had with the chatbot. Especially useful if one of your chat users want a summary or when creating a ticket in another support system.

Again, really incredible AI features built-in Botpress, I haven’t seen such advanced capabilities with any other chat platform yet!

• Keywords

  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.
• Dialogflow integration

  Does the chatbot platform provide a direct integration with Google's AI Platform?

Channels

With Botpress you can create a chatbot and publish it on multiple channels:

• Your website
• Facebook Messenger
• Instagram
• WhatsApp
• Telegram
• SMS (using Twilio)
• Slack
• Viber
• Line
• Microsoft Teams

• 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?
• Skype

  Can you publish your chatbot on Skype?
• Email

  Can you publish your chatbot on email?

Integrations

Unfortunately, Botpress doesn’t have a built-in live chat or any live chat integration, so you cannot hand over the conversation from the chatbot to a human agent.

That being said, I spoke to Botpress and they told me that they are very close to releasing a Zendesk integration, so I hope this will be very soon.

Furthermore, Botpress has direct connections with:

• Zapier
• Linear
• Intercom
• Gmail
• Sunshine Conversations

And as said before, you can use the Execute Code block to send or get data from other applications by creating your own API calls.

• Livechat

  Direct integration with live chat, either via a built-in live chat functionality or a third-party live chat platform.
• Zapier

  Direct integration with Zapier, one of the largest integration platforms in the world.
• Make (formerly Integromat)

  Direct integration with Make (formerly Integromat), one of the largest integration platforms in the world.
• Google Sheets

  Direct integration with Google Sheets, to store or retrieve data from sheets.
• Webhooks

  Can you call an API inside your chatbot flow to send or get data from other applications?

Marketing

With Botpress, you can add a native widget to your website:

You can fully customize the look of this widget by using CSS (styling programming language for websites) and can even pro-actively send messages using Javascript. A little downside of this is that you need to know how to code in these languages.

Moreover, you can also send WhatsApp Message Templates using Botpress, but you have to code these as well.

• Facebook website widget

  Embed your chatbot as a Facebook Widget on your website.
• Native website widget

  Embed your chatbot as a native widget (your own branding & colors) on your website.
• Landing pages

  Can you create a simple landing page to drive users to your chatbot?
• Facebook Ads

  Start a conversation with your chatbot when someone clicks on a Facebook Ad
• One-Time Notification

  Send one-time notifications via Facebook Messenger for a topic that a chatbot user has opted-in for
• Facebook comments auto-reply

  Automatically reply with your chatbot to users who comment on your Facebook Posts
• Button creator

  Add a button to your website to drive users to your chatbot
• Custom URLs for your chatbot

  Generate a simple URL that can be shared anywhere to send users to your chatbot

Pricing

You can use Botpress and all of its features for free up to 1,000 incoming messages per month.

After that, you need to pay $0.005 per incoming message, which is still a very low price:

• 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 for creating a chatbot on this platform?
  5
• 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

The analytics of Botpress are pretty basic. Botpress provides a simple dashboard with the number of users (new and returning), the number of sessions and the number of messages:

These analytics give some insights on how much traffic is coming through your chatbot, but I think it is not enough to improve your chatbot flows or the answers of your chatbot.

• Dashboard

  Dashboard that provides general analytics of your chatbot.
• 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.
• Custom dashboards/reports

  Can you create your own dashboard or reports?

eCommerce

Unfortunately, Botpress doesn’t provide any direct eCommerce integrations.

• Payments

  Collect payments inside your chatbot
• Shopify

  Direct integration with Shopify to get products, order information and cart data.
• WooCommerce

  Direct integration with WooCommerce to get products, order information and cart data.
• Buy directly within the chatbot

  Ability for chatbot users to buy products or services directly from a chatbot
• Cart abandonment

  Trigger messages in the chatbot when a user abandons their cart on a website or inside the chatbot

Templates & Cloning

Botpress does not provide any templates that you can use to get started with building your chatbot.

But luckily, you can easily export and import chatbot templates and share these with others.

Also, you can just duplicate your chatbot flows and chatbot elements, so you can easily reuse them.

• Templates

  How many pre-built templates does the chatbot platform provide?
  0
• Make template

  Can you make templates yourself?
• Share template

  Can you share self-created templates with others?
• Duplicate chatbot flows

  Is it possible to duplicate chatbot flows, so you can easily reuse them?
• Duplicate chatbot elements

  Is it possible to duplicate chatbot elements, so you can easily reuse them?

Optimization

Botpress doesn’t provide any optimization in their platform, such as A/B testing.

• A/B Testing

  Can you optimize your chatbot flows by performing A/B tests?

Support

Botpress provides extensive documentation on how you can use their platform.

Also, they have a lot of Youtube videos that can help you to get started with their platform.

For support, they rely partly on their active Discord community and customer support via Email.

• 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?

Conclusion

So, would I recommend to use Botpress to build your chatbots?

Yes, I would. Especially if you are looking for a support chatbot for your website.

Botpress has an easy-to-use flow builder, pretty advanced testing capabilities, lots of chatbot elements, you can ask questions to users and store the answers in attributes, automatically translate messages, extremely advanced AI capabilities, publish your chatbot on 10 channels and easily integrate with other applications using Zapier.

Go to Botpress

There are only a few drawbacks of Botpress:

• Botpress doesn’t have a live chat integration, so you cannot handover the chat to a support agent
• Analytics are pretty basic
• Limited marketing possibilities (aside of the website and WhatsApp possibilities)