Chatfuel Review 2024: Features, Pros and Cons, Pricing

When looking to create a chatbot on Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp, Chatfuel is one of the popular options you can choose from. But should you use Chatfuel to create your chat automations?

In this in-depth review, I will cover Chatfuel’s features, pros and cons, and their pricing options. And of course, I will also give you my recommendation when you should use Chatfuel.

Let’s dive in!

What is Chatfuel?

Chatfuel is a chatbot platform for automating business communications on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

Some of the key features of Chatfuel are:

• Easy-to-use flow builder to build your chat automations
• Store data of contacts in unlimited custom fields
• Easily drive traffic from your social channels to your chat automations
• Built-in live chat
• Advanced integration with ChatGPT, Zapier, Make & Shopify

Using Chatfuel: Dashboard, Flow Builder & More

In Chatfuel, you have a menu on the left-side showing all the various functions you can use in Chatfuel:

1. Home, giving you a general overview of your Chatfuel account
2. Automation, this is where you create your chatbot flows
3. Live Chat, here live chat agents can talk with chatbot contacts
4. People, this shows an overview of everyone that talked with your chatbot
5. Reengage, from here you can create reengagement campaigns (to get people back to your chatbot)
6. Configure, here you install the settings of your Chatfuel chatbots
7. Analyze, the analytics section of Chatfuel
8. Billing, where you handle your billings plan

When you start building your chat automations in Chatfuel, you can either use the Flow Builder or the Block Builder.

In the Flow Builder, you can create folders with flows on the left-side to manage all your chat flows. Then, in the middle you can create the content of your chat automation.

Each chat automation in Chatfuel consists of a trigger and the content of the automation. To create the automation, you can just drag and drop in the flow builder, which is super easy to use.

 

The flow builder also has cool features which allow you to work faster. For example, you can just use Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V (or Cmd+C/CMV+v on a Mac) to copy and paste chatbot elements.

Or you can click on the Organize Blocks button to automatically organize the blocks in the flow builder:

Next to the Flow Builder, you can also use Chatfuel’s Block builder. In the Block Builder, each automation consists of one or multiple blocks, where a blocks represent a chatbot element.

To keep these Blocks structured, you can also structure these blocks into groups, just like in the Flow Builder:

What’s also good to know is that you can use these builders interchangeably. You can refer from blocks to flows and vice versa.

Also, you can test out your chatbot flows in Chatfuel before you put them live, which is really useful:

So the interface of Chatfuel is easy to use and you can set it up a chatbot in a matter of minutes.

The only drawback I could find is that each chatbot flow is for one specific channel, and you cannot duplicate chatbot flows across channels. So if you want to create the same flow on Facebook and on Instagram, you actually need to do double the work.

Chatbot elements

Chatfuel provides all the elements to create your own chatbot. In fact, they only lack two points on my criteria list: Attachments & Location sharing.

Among these, I think there are three important elements to point out:

Collect User Data: With this element you can wait for input from the user and store the information inside attributes. This allows you to collect information from the user talking to your chatbot.

Condition: By adding conditions to your chatbot flows, you can create personalized conversations by using “if-then” logic.

Redirect to Flow or Block: By using this element, you can redirect the user to other chatbot flows or blocks. This is great for the scalability of your chatbot, because then you can reuse existing flows instead of duplicating the same content across your chatbot.

Contacts

In Chatfuel, you can see an overview of all the contacts of your chatbot in the People tab:

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

In this overview, you see all the tags and attributes assigned to this user.

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:

Chatfuel AI & NLP

Chatfuel has built-in keyword recognition, a direct integration with ChatGPT and AI Agents powered by ChatGPT.

Keyword Recognition

You can recognize keywords in your chatbot with Chatfuel. Based on a keyword (or a group of keywords) you can determine a certain response (either a message or a block/flow).

This is how that looks in Chatfuel:

Unfortunately, it is not possible to understand the intent of the user or understand entities in a sentence.

Also, Chatfuel doesn’t have a direct integration with DialogFlow. But I created a tutorial on how you can connect Chatfuel to Dialogflow yourself.

Chatfuel’s ChatGPT Integration

Next to keyword recognition, Chatfuel also has a built-in integration with ChatGPT.

By using the ChatGPT block, you can send any message to ChatGPT and get it answered in your chatbot flows:

With this block, you can also determine how many messages ChatGPT remembers within the conversation.

AI Agents

Chatfuel also provides multiple 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:

Live Chat

Chatfuel has a built-in live chat so you can hand over the conversation from your chatbot to a human agent:

And they also provide an iOS and Android app, so you can respond to questions on your phone.

Unfortunately, you cannot set rules to automatically assign new conversations (useful with large teams).

Channels

With Chatfuel, it is possible to create a chatbot on Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp.

Unfortunately, you cannot merge contacts across channels.

Marketing

When it comes to Marketing for chatbots, Chatfuel provides many possibilities.

First of all, you can send broadcasts and sequences with Chatfuel. This allows you to start conversations with your contacts or send a sequence of messages. It’s really easy to set this up. You can see the complete sequence of all the messages you want to send in one overview:

Likewise, Chatfuel offers many marketing possibilities per channel.

On Facebook, you can:

• Create Ref URLs that go to a specific chatbot flow
• Automatically reply to Facebook Comments
• Send one-time notifications
• Send Recurring Notifications
• Connect a Facebook ad to your Messenger chatbot
• Send Sponsored Messages via Facebook Messenger

With Instagram, you can:

• Automatically reply to Instagram comments
• Send replies to Instagram users who mentioned your Instagram handle in their Instagram story

And with WhatsApp, you can send WhatsApp message templates.

The only drawback is that Chatfuel doesn’t provide a chat widget for your website.

Chatfuel Integrations

Chatfuel has direct integrations with:

• Zapier
• Make (formerly known as Integromat)
• Google Sheets
• Calendly
• ChatGPT

If that’s not enough, you can also create your own API calls inside their flow builder and get or send data to other applications.

Chatfuel Pricing

Chatfuel has a free trial and a paid plan already starting at $20/month.

Pricing for Instagram and Facebook

If you want to create a chatbot on Instagram or Facebook, the Business plan starts at $20/month.

This plan comes with 1000 conversations per month and all the features of the platform:

 

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

Chatfuel’s WhatsApp Pricing

If you want to get started with Chatfuel for WhatsApp, the Business plan starts at $49.49/month.

This plan has 1,000 conversations/month and all the features of the platform:

 

Just like with the other plan, this plan also increases with the number of conversations. 2,500 conversations/month costs $87.34.

Enterprise plan

Chatfuel also provides an Enterprise plan that starts at $300/month and is perfectly tailored to your needs.

This plan comes with everything in other plans, plus a personal account manager, 10 free hours of bot building service and bulk pricing.

Analytics

Chatfuel has three types of analytics:

• Analytics dashboard
• Unrecognized messages
• Flow analytics

Let’s cover them one by one.

Analytics dashboard

Chatfuel provides a general analytics dashboard showing general stats, like 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.

 

Unrecognized messages

In additition to the dashboard, Chatfuel also has an overview of frequent unrecognized messages:

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

 

Flow analytics

Chatfuel also provides 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:

There are only three things it does not have: Conversion rate (but still possible to track certain actions), Fall Back Rate (could be a good improvement) and custom dashboards/reports (not always necessary).

Chatfuel Templates

Chatfuel provides 22 free templates that you can install to quickly create your chatbot.

You can also create these templates yourself and easily share them with others using the Share Flow feature in Chatfuel.

Support

Chatfuel provides tutorials on how to make chatbots on their website, have proper documentation and good customer support.

What I really love about Chatfuel, is that they have a large Facebook community (75.000 members) in which all people are willing to help you when you get stuck.

Conclusion

So, should you use Chatfuel to create your chatbots?

Yes, you should.

Chatfuel is one of the best chatbot platforms for creating chatbots on Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp. Especially if you are just starting with creating chatbots.

Chatfuel has a flow builder, lots of chatbot elements, you can collect contact information, a lot of marketing possibilities, many integrations and great analytics. And all this for only $15 a month.

Go to Chatfuel

When thinking of drawbacks, I can only imagine three:

• Duplicating chatbot flows across channels is not possible
• You can only add a Facebook-like widget to your website
• It’s hard to translate your chatbot to multiple languages

Learn more about Chatfuel

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the costs of Chatfuel?

The costs of Chatfuel depends on the channel. On Facebook and Instagram you can already start from $20/month. On WhatsApp, the paid plan starts at $49.49/month. Both of these plan come with 1000 conversations/month. The price of the plan goes up with the number of conversations you have.

Is Chatfuel free?

Chatfuel isn’t free. It does provide a free trial so you can test out its features before making a payment. The first paid plan starts at $20/month.

Does Chatfuel use AI?

Chatfuel has a direct integration with ChatGPT, so you can use ChatGPT in your Chatfuel bot.

Is Chatfuel safe?

Yes, Chatfuel is safe. Chatfuel is used by many small and medium business across the world to create chat automations on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.