Dialogflow Review 2026: Features, Pros and Cons, Pricing

Dialogflow is the natural language understanding platform of Google. You can use it to create omnichannel chatbots.

But should you use Dialogflow to create your chatbots?

Find it out in this in-depth Dialogflow review!

What is Dialogflow?

Dialogflow is Google’s platform for creating chatbots.

With Dialogflow, you can understand the user’s intent by training a bot on sentences.

Based on those training sentences, Dialogflow knows how to automatically respond to questions of your users.

Dialogflow can also extract specific information from a sentence. These are known as Entities. For example, if you say “Can I order a veggie pizza”, Dialogflow can understand that “veggie” is the flavour of the pizza.

There are two versions of Dialogflow:

1. Dialogflow ES
2. Dialogflow CX

How to Create a Dialogflow Chatbot

Dialogflow has two types of editions:

1. Dialogflow Essentials (ES)
2. Dialogflow Customer Experience (CX)

Both types of editions come with different interfaces and can be used for different purposes.

Dialogflow Essentials (ES)

Dialogflow Essentials is the standard edition of Dialogflow and most people are familiar with this one.

Within Dialogflow ES, you can understand the intent of the user by providing training sentences to your agent. The agent is then trained to understand these sentences:

And create a reply for it:

Also, you can use Entities with Dialogflow. With Entities, your chatbot can understand the difference between a “veggie pizza” and a “pizza”. In this example, the entity part is “veggie” that relate to a topping of a pizza:

If you want more information on how you can use intents and entities in Dialogflow, check out this Dialogflow tutorial.

Moreover, you can test your chatbot in the Dialogflow interface:

In general, Dialogflow ES is easy to use and it is easy to set up your chatbot. But it’s using an “old” way of AI, where you need to set the answer for every intent. This is not very common anymore, since generative AI Platforms like ChatGPT were launched.

Dialogflow CX (Conversational Agents)

Dialogflow CX is a more advanced version of Dialogflow and consists of three core components:

1. Playbooks: determine how your bot behaves in certain situations
2. Flows: how your bot flows in general
3. Tools: how to get data from other apps

Let’s cover them one by one.

Playbooks determine how your bot responds in certain situations. For example, if someone wants to manage their cards, you can give it clear specific instructions to this playbook.

Also, if someone asks to get the status of the order, a playbook can determine how it should behave.

Plus, Playbooks can call tools to send and receive data from other apps.

Flows determine how the chatbot replies in general. For example, if someone asks about order status, a flow determines that you’re going to launch a playbook about order status.

These can also call playbooks.

Tools allow you to send and receive data from other applications. But they’re really technical to use.

Overall, Dialogflow CX isn’t that easy to use. It has a pretty high learning curve for beginners and takes some time before you fully understand how the features work together. It’s a technical platform and if you want to connect it to other tools, that’s technical as well.

Chatbot elements

Dialogflow provides basic elements to create your chatbot. Depending on the channel, you can reply with Text, Images, Cards and Quick Replies. I think this is enough if you want to create a simple question/answering chatbot.

But I think Dialogflow lacks some important elements, such as:

• Collecting User Input and storing it in fields
• Using conditions to personalize conversations
• Starting other automations in Dialogflow (good for the scalability of your chatbot)

Users

In Dialogflow, you cannot see a complete user overview of all the people who talked with your chatbot.

In fact, if you want to store user information, you need to create a custom integration with Google Datastore or any other type of database.

Dialogflow AI & NLP

One of the reasons so many people use Dialogflow is because of their AI & NLP, which is really good.

As described above, you can train your Dialogflow agent to understand the intent of the user by providing training phrases.

Also, you can use Entities so your chatbot can understand useful information that your users say.

Live Chat

Unfortunately, Dialogflow lacks built-in live chat or a live chat integration. So, you can’t transfer the conversation to a human agent.

Gladly, some companies provide a combination of live chat and Dialogflow, such as Botcopy.

Channels

With Dialogflow, you can put your chatbot on 14 channels:

• Your website
• Facebook Messenger
• WhatsApp (using Twilio)
• Telegram
• Twitter
• SMS (using Twilio)
• Slack
• Skype
• Viber
• Workplace from Facebook
• Hangouts
• Line
• Kik
• Spark

And you can even use Dialogflow to handle one-click telephony:

Next to the AI of Dialogflow, this is one of the greatest benefits. You can create a chatbot on almost any channel.

Dialogflow offers many channels, but you often need to code to connect your chatbot to them. Luckily, Dialogflow provides the necessary code. This is good to know when considering Dialogflow as your chatbot platform.

Marketing

The marketing possibilities of Dialogflow are pretty limited.

With Dialogflow, you cannot send broadcasts and sequences. Dialogflow is user-triggered. This means it only responds when a user asks a question. The chatbot cannot start conversations on its own, unless you code that feature.

Likewise, you can only use Dialogflow Messenger to create a native widget and put it on your website.

With this native widget, you can change the appearance (such as the title and colors) by editing some CSS (mark up language for websites). Also, you can trigger different intents.

Moreover, you can send pro-active messages to website visitors when the page of your website loads.

Integrations

Dialogflow doesn’t have any direct integrations with other applications.

So if you want to connect Dialogflow to other systems, you need to use Fulfillment. With Fulfillment, you can make API calls and code your own webhooks so you can integrate Dialogflow with other systems.

Google Dialogflow Pricing

Dialogflow chatbot pricing includes a Free Plan and paid plans that scale as you go, already starting at $1/month.

Dialogflow ES Pricing

Dialogflow ES is free if you stay under 180 text requests per minute. This means that you can send 7,5 million text messages per month and don’t have to pay a dime.

If you go above the 180 requests per minute, you need to pay $0.002 per request. Also, if you want audio input or output, you need to pay extra:

Dialogflow CX Pricing

When you use Dialogflow CX, new customers get a $600 charge for a no charge trial, that can be cancelled at any time.

After that, it costs $0.007 per Text Request. So this costs $7 if you want to send a 1,000 messages, which is pretty cheap. Also, if you wanto to use audio input or output, you pay $.001 per second:

In my opinion, Dialogflow is really cheap. For most chatbots, you don’t have to pay anything, you can just use Dialogflow ES for free. Only when your chatbot is really advanced or when you handle a large amount of messages, you need to pay. And these prices are still very low.

Analytics

In Dialogflow ES, you have a dashboard that shows the number of sessions and the number of interactions:

Dialogflow also has a “Training” feature. It shows which messages your chatbot understood and which it did not. This makes it easy to improve your chatbot’s responses:

For better analytics, try Dialogflow CX. It offers insights on Engagement and the various conversation paths users take:

In general, Dialogflow provides enough analytics to improve the answers of your chatbot.

Templates

Dialogflow provides 45 pre-built agents that you can use to get started with your chatbot.

Also, you can export each agent and share the ZIP with others (which is basically the same as using templates).

Support

Dialogflow has extensive documentation on how you can use their platform.

NOTE: I also have some Dialogflow tutorial videos on my Youtube channel, which I definitely recommend you to check out!

Moreover, Dialogflow provides support via email.

Is Dialogflow worth it?

So, should you use Dialogflow to create your chatbots?

After this Dialogflow review, I don’t think so.

Dialogflow used to be great in NLP. But nowadays ChatGPT is the standard for AI and Dialogflow doesn’t have that. Plus, it has a pretty high learning curve and you can only use it if you’re technical.

I would only recommend it if you’re already using Google Cloud platform and have developer experience.

If you want to know what platforms I would recommend, check out this post:

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Frequently Asked Questions

Is Dialogflow free or paid?

Both Dialogflow ES and CX have a free plan. With Dialogflow ES, you can send up to 7,5 million messages per month without paying a dime.

With Dialogflow CX, new customers get a $600 charge for a no charge trial, that can be cancelled at any time.

Is Google Dialogflow open source?

No, Dialogflow is not open source. It’s a proprietary AI-powered chatbot development platform owned by Google.

Is Dialogflow easy to use?

Dialogflow ES is relatively easy to use for beginners, but Dialogflow CX has a steeper learning curve due to its advanced flow builder.

What are the limitations of Dialogflow?

Dialogflow lacks built-in chatbot flow creation, user data storage, and personalization options. It also requires coding for many advanced Dialogflow features and integrations.

Should I use Dialogflow ES or CX?

Use Dialogflow ES if you need a simple, free, and easy-to-set-up chatbot. Use Dialogflow CX if you need advanced conversation flows and have technical expertise.

What is Dialogflow used for?

Dialogflow is used to create AI chatbots. These chatbots understand what users want and answer questions on various platforms. These includes websites, messaging apps, and voice assistants.

What is the free tier of Google Dialogflow?

Dialogflow ES is free as long as you stay under 180 text requests per minute. Dialogflow CX includes a $600 free credit for new users before pay-as-you-go billing starts.