Dialogflow Review 2025: Features, Pros and Cons, Pricing

Dialogflow is the natural language understanding platform of Google that you can use 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 the natural language understanding platform of Google that allows you to understand language with your chatbot.

What Dialogflow tries to, is understand the intent of the user based on training sentences that you give.

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

Additionally, Dialogflow can also extract specific information in a sentence, which are called Entities. For example, if you say “Can I order a veggie pizza”, Dialogflow can understand that “veggie” is the flavour of the pizza.

How to Create a Dialogflow Chatbot: the Interface

Dialogflow has two types of editions: Dialogflow Essentials (ES) and 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 this video for intents and this video for entities.

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

 

Dialogflow Customer Experience (CX)

Dialogflow CX is a relatively new version of Dialogflow and is not yet used by many people.

In general, Dialogflow CX is not recommended for many use cases, unless you have a very sophisticated chatbot.

The benefit of Dialogflow CX is that you have a visual flow builder that provides a better overview of the conversation:

But at the same time, I wouldn’t recommend using Dialogflow CX if you are a beginner with chatbots. The interface is much harder to use than the simple interface of Dialogflow ES.

In general, I think the interface of Dialogflow ES is easy to use and it is easy to set up your chatbot. Dialogflow CX provides a better overview, but also has a steeper learning curve (and you probably don’t need to use it).

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 doesn’t have a built-in live chat or live chat integration, so it’s not possible to hand over 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.

While Dialogflow provides many channels, often you need to code to connect your chatbot to a channel (and Dialogflow already gives you the code you need to use). 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. In essence, Dialogflow is user-triggered, which means that it responds when the user asks something, but the chatbot cannot initiate conversations (or you need to code this yourself).

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.

Dialogflow Pricing

Dialogflow has a Free Plan and paid plans that scales 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:

Moreover, Dialogflow has a “Training” feature that shows the messages your chatbot did (not) understand, so you can easily improve the answers of your chatbot:

If you want more advanced analytics, you can use Dialogflow CX, which also provides analytics on Engagement and the different conversation paths users follow:

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.

Conclusion

So, should you use Dialogflow to create your chatbots?

Yes, you should.

I wouldn’t recommend using Dialogflow as a standalone chatbot platform, because you cannot create chatbot flows easily, store user information and personalize conversations (you need to code for that).

But Dialogflow is really good at one thing: understand the intent of the user based on training phrases you provide.

Therefore, I recommend creating a chatbot with another bot builder and integrating it with Dialogflow. Then, you can use the AI-engine of Dialogflow (where it’s good at), and don’t have the disadvantages of it.

In the past, I have created chatbots with other chatbot platforms (such as ManyChat) and integrated it with Dialogflow, so you can understand the intent of the user with Google’s AI. That way, you have the best of both worlds. Manychat for creating the chatbot flows and storing user information, and Dialogflow for AI.  By the way, here is a post on how you can integrate ManyChat with Dialogflow.

Go to Dialogflow

 

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Frequently Asked Questions

Is Dialogflow free?

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.