Chatmatic is chatbot software for Facebook Messenger. It is a useful platform to build your Facebook Messenger chatbot and launch it in a couple of minutes. But is it actually worth paying for? You will find out in this review!
I reviewed the Chatmatic software based on my post about how you can choose the best chatbot software.
User Interface
When you log in to Chatmatic, you first see an overview of your chatbots and the latest analytics:
Once you selected one of your chatbots, the interface changes. On the left-hand side you have a menu with:
- Subscribers – here you can see all your users that used your chatbot
- Triggers – Growth tools to get more users to your chatbot
- Broadcasts – speaks for itself
- Workflows – these are your chatbot flows
- Training – training courses on Chatmatic
- Settings
When you are going to actually build your chatbot, Chatmatic uses a Visual Flow Builder:
In general, the interface is easy to use and it is easy to set up your chatbot.
The only thing that seems odd to me, is that there is no option to preview the flows before actually publishing them. With this, you cannot double-check a flow if it’s totally working before you are publishing it for the whole world.
- Visual Flow Builder
- Test chatbot
- Interface easy to use?
- Easy to setup a chatbot?
Chatbot elements
Chatmatic got enough elements to make your chatbot. It only lacks on Attachment, Lists, Validation and Location Sharing. The biggest drawback of those four is the validation part, because you cannot check whether a user has filled a properly formatted email or telephone number.
But, you got enough elements to make your own chatbot!
- Delays
- Images
- Video
- Audio
- Attachments
- Gallery (Horizontal list)
- Vertical list
- Emojis
- Persistent Menu
- Quick Replies
- Buttons
- Free text input
- Location sharing
- Email validation
- Phone number validation
- Date validation
Users
In Chatmatic, you can see a complete overview of all your users with their according information:
A drawback of this overview is that you cannot see the custom fields of the user (which are pretty important).
Moreover, you can assign custom fields and tags to users. But, you cannot use these custom fields and tags to create user segments. And when you are going to send a broadcast, you can only use tags to condition on.
- Custom fields
- Tags
- User segments
Messages
With Chatmatic is possible to send broadcasts and sequences to your users. You can send a broadcast to your complete audience or a part of it (using tags to condition your audience). Moreover, using the Smart Delay feature in Chatmatic, you can send sequences:
Next to creating sequences, you can also use Conditions to create more personalized experiences.
Unfortunately, you cannot have a chatbot in multiple languages.
- Broadcasts
- Sequences
- Conditions
- Multiple languages
- Easy to translate
AI & NLP
With Chatmatic, you can recognize keywords of the user and create a certain response with your chatbot:
But this is also where it stops. You cannot understand the intent of the user or use Entities in Chatmatic.
- Keywords
- Intents
- Entities
- Dialogflow integration
Channels
With Chatmatic, it is possible to have a chatbot on Facebook Messenger and SMS.
To be honest, I don’t know if you can send worldwide text messages with their SMS channel. I couldn’t find any documentation on this.
The use of only two channels is a potential drawback for companies who want to give an omnichannel chatbot experience to their customers.
- Website
- Facebook
- Instagram
- Whatsapp
- Telegram
- SMS
- Slack
- Skype
- Email
Integrations
It seems that Chatmatic has a built-in live chat, however, I couldn’t get it to work.
When I typed something in their live chat, it just didn’t send it to the user in Facebook Messenger.
And this is a huge drawback, because live chat is the most important integration of any chatbot software.
Unfortunately, Chatmatic offers no direct integrations with other software. They do provide webhooks though, but this is a lot harder to make than a simple integration.
- Livechat
- Zapier
- Integromat
- Google Sheets
- Webhooks
Marketing
With Chatmatic, it is possible to connect your chatbot to Facebook ads, automatically reply to Facebook Comments, create a button for your website and make custom URLs to your chatbot.
There is only one drawback: Chatmatic is partly compliant with the latest Facebook policies. On the one hand, they are compliant, because you can send broadcasts using one of the Messenger tags:
But on the other hand, you cannot use the One-Time Notification. And this is a huge drawback for a chatbot builder that is so focused on Facebook Messenger.
- Facebook website widget
- Native website widget
- Landing pages
- Facebook Ads
- Facebook comments auto-reply
- Button creator
- Custom URLs for your chatbot
Pricing
Maybe the most important part: Pricing!
And to be really honest to you: when I first started Chatmatic I felt a little bummed. Because when you click on “Free trial” on their website, this is the next window:
Immediately a commitment of 149$ per month. And yes, they provide a free trial, because the first month is free, but you immediately need to give your billing information (which I don’t like).
On this screenshot, it says that the monthly pricing is 149 dollars. But in the dashboard, it says that it is 97$. I really don’t know which one of those two is true, so I hope for the 97$.
But this is still a lot of money. And to my opinion, it is not actually worth it. For this kind of money, you would expect a better user overview, a working live chat, integrations with other software, better AI capabilities, analytics dashboard and compliance with the latest Facebook policies.
Moreover, there is additional pricing if you want to use SMS:
- Free trial
- Free plan
- Price per month97
- Monthly pricing available?
- Money back guarantee
Analytics
With Chatmatic, you can see the analytics per message in your chatbot flow. For every message, you can see how many times it is sent, delivered, opened and clicked.
Moreover, you can also see the averages for the whole flow:
In general, these analytics are fine to optimize your chatbot flows, but it would be nice if they added a dashboard where you can see all the analytics for your complete chatbot.
There is one drawback of their analytics: you cannot analyze the user input that the chatbot didn’t understand. Therefore, it is hard to improve the automated answers of your chatbot.
- Dashboard
- User input
- User retention
- Sent messages
- Open rate
- Click rate
- Conversion rate
- Fall back rate
- Volunteer users
- Custom dashboards/reports
eCommerce
Chatmatic does not have any eCommerce integrations whatsoever.
- Payments
- Shopify
- WooCommerce
- Buy directly within the chatbot
- Cart abandonment
Templates & Cloning
Chatmatic provides 4 free templates that you can use to build your chatbot.
Moreover, you can also create templates and share these with others.
Unfortunately, it is not possible to copy your chatbot flows or chatbot elements.
- Templates4
- Make template
- Share template
- Duplicate chatbot flows
- Duplicate chatbot elements
Optimization
With Chatmatic, you can optimize your chatbot by using A/B testing.
- A/B Testing
Support
It seems that Chatmatic offers some training on how you can use their platform, but that training isn’t free.
Moreover, I couldn’t find any tutorials or documentation on how to use the Chatmatic, which is a huge drawback. This can keep you of really understanding how to use the software.
Also, they do provide customer support via their own support desk, which you can access via the Chatmatic dashboard. I cannot decide over the quality of their support, but it does not seem really good. On Facebook there is a page Chatmatic Support, which is rated as 2.3/5 stars and shows the following:
- Tutorials
- Documentation
- Customer support
Conclusion
So, should you buy this software?
My opinion: No, you shouldn’t.
As I already mentioned in the Pricing section, it is way too much money for the features that you get. For 97 dollars per month, you expect a better user overview, a working live chat, integrations with other software, better AI capabilities, compliance with the latest Facebook policies and an analytics dashboard.
And if you are getting stuck and you need some help, I honestly do not know if you can rely on their customer service…
I asked for a refund as the software did not function, they said wait for the updates so I did then it still did not work correctly. DO NOT BUY THIS SOFTWARE. Worst support plus they did not deliver what they said they would in the way of training. I will never ever buy from TRAVIS STEVENSON again as he is a total rip off merchant! Be warned!
Thanks for your sharing your experience, Karen!
Thank you for this review. What do you suggest in its place?
Hey Allen, good alternatives for Chatmatic are ManyChat, SilFer Bots, Chatfuel and MobileMonkey.
Hey Joren, so what do you recommend or prefer personally given these choices? All 4 of them have good reviews and I can’t decide. Many thanks!
It really depends on your needs. But if you only want to create a chatbot for Facebook Messenger, I would recommend to use ManyChat or SilFer Bots.
Thanks for the advice! For SilFer Bots though, they’re not listed as a Facebook partner but Chatfuel, MobileMonkey, and ManyChat are. Should we be worried? Here’s the link: https://www.facebook.com/business/partner-directory/search?solution_type=messaging&ref=fbb_messenger_ads.
Thanks. I’m watching the webinar now…
Hey Alex! Which webinar are you watching?
I have had Chatmatic for 2 weeks. I hired someone full time to learn the system and handle all of the chatbot services for my agency. Chatmatic has been a complete waste of time. Support takes days to respond. The chat system is buggy, after spending hours on a workflow a bug was encountered twice and then the wait begins for support. Their support is comprised of tons and tons of videos, some are hosted on the training platform, and some redirect you to multiple facebook pages. The training organization is complete garbage. For instance trying to use live chat on a website, Travis directed me to a PDF. The one step that I needed was vague with no example of how the step should be done, instead it literally said “whatever you want here”. When support was contacted again Trent gave a vague answer still leaving me with the function unusable. We have been waiting on support for over 24 hours now as the workflows have stopped triggering no matter what configuration has been used. Want to use Zapier with Chatmatic? Good luck, you’ll need to go through their 14 page PDF document. I hired someone who offers zapier integration and after 2 days he still can not get the system to work cleanly. Chatmatic is underdeveloped, lacks support and the training is a mess. I wish I wouldn’t have even bothered with this waste of time system. I am surprised people even use this after putting so much time into it. Keep in mind I have been successfully doing SEO since 2009, figuring things out is my strong suit.
Thank you for sharing your extensive experience, Mario! Did you also address these issues to Chatmatic?
Yes, and Trent (seemingly the only person they seem to have running support) has continued in Chatmatic style dropping breadcrumbs of information whenever he gets back around to my ticket instead of just showing me what needs to be done. A fact I pointed out to him in my initial support ticket that took days for him to respond to. I have workflows created that I spent hours on creating that will not trigger no matter how they are set up. It would be nice if support was readily available instead of needing to way day to address issues like that, that are urgent. Within 20 minutes of using Many Chat everything was working with ease. I asked for a refund and Trent said sorry there is a no refund policy which shows a company that lacks integrity and doesn’t stand being their essentially paid beta test of a product. I paid $500 for the unlimited plan and spent over a month trying to figure it out. You would think they would have the decency to honor a refund considering they offer plans up to 250 subscribers for free and I only had a handful connect as I was only testing. It’s really unfortunate that Travis runs a business this way as he shows off his 2 comma ClickFunnels awards but will rip someone off that doesn’t like his mediocre product.
Hi Mario
A bit late in my response and I’m guessing things have moved on for you since November.
I’m quite new to FB Messenger and bots and got onto Chatmatic through signing for the Lifetime deal in GroovePages. Time will tell on the wisdom of those ‘investments’.
Just thought that I’d share my dumb-newbie experience of my first Chatmatic workflow.
I carefully followed Travis’s extensive video training but for the life of me could NOT get my automation to fire using an m.me link … until … wait for it … I realised I had to click the “Get Started” messenger button the first time! DOH!
They all worked rather well after that!
It bothers me hearing about the lack of renewal opt-out given Travis’s verbiage around transparency etc. etc. My daughter bought the US$499pa lifetime subscription so I hope we can at least make it earn the US$499 pa to pay for itself!
As a correction on my first post, it has been over a month now that I have had Chatmatic, not 2 weeks. As I stated I hired someone to work on this and didn’t realize that much time had passed when I personally started working with it. I bought the plan when he launched the 3 day training event with the $500 yearly unlimited deal just for clarification.
Thanks for the clarification and sharing your experience, Mario!
Thanks for the Chatmatic review – quite enlightening.
I’d be interested to know if your assessment has changed much since the update of the platform?
I find the current UI to be pretty reasonable even for a newbie to FB AI, and the video training is pretty comprehensive now and covers much of what is needed to get going.
The main training weakness for me was the assumption that the audience is already fully-literate on FB as opposed to just ‘ someone with a FB page’.
I do suspect the support is still an issue, judging from comments in the members areas, but I somehow suspect when you compare functionality of the likes of ManyChat and Chatmatic, what’s weak on one is strong on the other and vice-versa to some degree, though I have no experience of ManyChat so I base that on reading others comments and reviews.
Hey Col! No, my assessment of the platform did not change since the most recent update. If you are looking for a comparison between ManyChat and Chatmatic, you can find that here: https://chatimize.com/chatmatic-vs-manychat/