Botsify Review

Botsify is chatbot software you can use for your website, Facebook Messenger, Slack and SMS. Next to “standard” chatbot features, they also provide AI & NLP. So let’s dive in and find out whether this software is worth it!

I reviewed the Botsify software based on my criteria on how to choose the best chatbot software.

User Interface

At first hand, the Botsify interface gives a quite good overview. On the left hand, you have all the menu items, like “Chatbot AI”, “Analytics” and “Users” and on the right-hand side, you have the content of each section:

Also, when you first start with Botsify, they give you a hands-on checklist with the activities you need to do when first building a chatbot:

Making a message in your chatbot seems also really straightforward:

These are really useful features, but I must say that when I first started with Botsify it took me some time to fully understand the interface. It is not the interface itself, but more the terms and structure in the interface.

Most chatbot software use terms like Flows, Keywords and Custom Fields. Botsify instead uses Story (for Keywords), Media Blocks (for Flows) and Datastore (for Custom Fields).

Also, the structure of the interface is not really clear to me. It would rather seem reasonable to me to put all the “chatbot building” features in a list, instead of splitting them into “Chatbot AI” and “Design”.

All in all, I think that Botsify has a higher learning curve than most other chatbot software. But is it still easy to set up a chatbot? Yes, it is. If you want you can get started with one of their 24 templates and have a chatbot ready in minutes.

Also, you can test the chatbot within the interface, which makes it really easy to see the impact of your new chatbot messages.

• 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

Botsify does really great on this one. They have all the chatbot elements, except for Delays, Vertical Lists and location sharing, which are not deal-breakers.

Botsify also has a really awesome feature called Conversational Forms. With this, you can make a simple form but ask it to the user in a conversational manner. Here is an example that I made:

The answers to these questions can be stored in custom fields and can also be automatically put into a Google Sheet. Really useful!

• 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 Botsify it is possible to assign custom fields to users. But how to use this is not really straightforward. For example, you cannot just ask the user for their e-mail and store their response into the custom field “email”. How to do it then? Well, you could use Conversational Forms.

But this is not always really useful. Do you want to make a whole form for just asking someone’s e-mail? I wouldn’t. Also, you cannot use custom fields in the Conversational Forms, but each Conversational Form makes their own custom fields, which also seems a little odd to me. So in general, the use of custom fields within Botsify is really confusing to me and I would not know how to use this properly.

When you have the custom fields of the user it is possible to make user segments based on those fields, which is really useful.

However, it is not possible to assign tags to users, which could be a drawback. On the other hand, you can use custom fields as a tag by setting the value to “Yes” or “No”. So this is not a huge deal.

• 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 Botsify it is possible to make broadcasts, scheduled broadcasts and sequences (what they call “Auto Sequences”).

Moreover, you can use conditions to send tailored messages to users, based on certain criteria, which is really useful.

The only drawback is the multi-language support. Yes, it is possible to make a chatbot in any language, but you cannot easily translate your chatbot to any language.

• 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

With Botsify it is possible to use keywords and entities. So they do pretty well on this one.

But I must say their own entity feature is not that good. For example, I wanted to make a simple flow with the entity “Location”:

1. If a user asks “Do you sell in the USA” answer with “We sell in the USA!”
2. If a user asks “Do you sell in the Netherlands” answer with “Unfortunately not…”

But I did not get this to work, unfortunately.

For these kinds of cases, they have a solution for you: a DialogFlow integration. So, problem solved 😉

• 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 Botsify you can put a chatbot on your website, Facebook Messenger, Slack and SMS (they have a Twilio integration in beta), which allows you to provide an omnichannel experience to your users.

• 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

Botsify has really great integrations. They have their own live chat integration (which is the most important integration you need), with Zapier, with Integromat and even with Google Sheets. They perform really well on this topic.

• 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

Botsify performs really well on this one. With Botsify you can easily make widgets for your website, landing pages, auto-reply to Facebook comments, create buttons and use specific URLs for your chatbot.

What I really like about their website integration is that you can choose whether you want a Facebook Messenger kind of website widget on your website or to choose for a native integration (where you can determine the branding):

You can even set specific rules for URLs to show certain messages after some delay or after the user scrolled some percentage of the page:

There are only two drawbacks of Botsify here. First, they don’t have a native integration with Facebook Ads, but I know it is still possible to connect Botsify with Facebook Ads, so this is not a huge deal-breaker. Secondly, you cannot use the One-Time Notification with Botsify, which means that they are not compliant with the latest Facebook Messenger policies.

• 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

When I first started with Botsify, I wasn’t really happy. Because when you start a “free” trial, you immediately get the following window:

Immediately you need to give your billing credentials or you cannot go further. I know it is still a free trial of 14 days, but I don’t like providing my billing details beforehand.

Moreover, the first plan is 50$ per month, which seems a lot for most people, but I think it is really worth it. For this plan, you get 30K users (which is way more than most other chatbot software), unlimited messages, unlimited stories (aka Keywords), unlimited Forms and unlimited Media Blocks (aka Flows). Seems pretty reasonable to me.

The only possible drawback for most users is that often when you begin with building chatbots, you do not need 30K users, you only often have around 2K maximum. So I can imagine that people prefer to start with a smaller plan, but that is not possible.

• 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?
  50
• 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

Botsify does provide the most important analytics in a dashboard. Analytics such as the user input, sent messages and the click rate. They also provide analytics about buttons, human vs bot chats, the location of the user and the channel of the user.

What I really like about their software is that they have a “Chatbot training” feature, where all the keywords are listed where the chatbot did not know how to answer:

With this feature, it is really easy to improve 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?

E-Commerce

Unfortunately, Botsify does not have any e-commerce 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

Botsify has 24 templates, so it is really easy to get started with your chatbot.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to create templates yourself and share them with others.

But, it is possible to duplicate your chatbot flows, so that you can easily reuse them.

• Templates

  How many pre-built templates does the chatbot platform provide?
  24
• 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

In Botsify it is not possible to do any kind of optimization, like A/B testing.

• A/B Testing

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

Support

Botsify provides video tutorials on Youtube, have documentation and really decent customer support.

I emailed the customer support and they responded within an hour, so really good!

• 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, the conclusion: Should you buy Botsify?

Yes, I think it is totally worth it. They have a native website integration, good analytics to improve your chatbot, many marketing opportunities, multiple channels, lots of integrations, great NLP & AI (and a DialogFlow integration), various chatbot elements and great support.

The only possible drawback I can imagine is that their first plan starts at 50$, which is maybe too much for some people.

All in all, it is totally great chatbot software.