My Honest Manychat Review After Using It For 6+ Years (2026)

I’ve used Manychat for 6+ years to automate thousands of conversations, generate leads, and drive sales for my clients.

Over that time, I’ve used it for everything from simple DM automations to more advanced funnels that turn Instagram and Facebook engagement into leads.

But is it still worth using in 2026?

For this Manychat review, I looked at the features that matter most in real-world use: the flow builder, growth tools, marketing automation, AI features, live chat, integrations, and pricing.

More importantly, I tested how well Manychat turns conversations into leads and sales.

I’ll break down what’s good, what’s bad and whether you should use Manychat for your business.

Here’s what I found:

What is Manychat?

Manychat is a chat automation tool that lets you create chatbots on WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, SMS and Telegram.

It helps businesses and individuals automate conversations. This way, you can get more leads, boost sales and reduce costs

Manychat features include:

• Flow Builder: Easily create chatbots using a drag-and-drop flow builder.
• Custom Fields: Store contact data in custom fields and share it with other applications, like your CRM or email platform.
• Growth Tools: Drive traffic to your chatbots by using Manychat Growth Tools. For example, if someone comments on your Instagram post, you can automatically start a conversation.
• Broadcasts & Sequences: Businesses can send out broadcasts and sequences. So, you can reach your audience with targeted messages
• Live Chat: Hand over any conversation to a human agent
• Integrations: Manychat integrates with many other tools, such as email platforms, CRMs and Zapier
• Analytics: Track the performance of your chatbot with detailed reports, so you can easily optimize your chatbot

How does Manychat work?

In Manychat, you have several tabs where you can manage your chat automations from:

1. Home – General overview of your chatbot and tips on how to get started
2. Contacts – Overview of everyone who talked to your chatbot
3. Automation – This is where your chat flows and chat automation live
4. Live chat – when you hand over a chat from the bot to an agent, here is where you can chat with contacts
5. Broadcasting – if you want to send mass messages to your contacts
6. Settings – here you control the settings of your chatbot and Manychat account

When you get started with creating your Manychat bot, you’ll start in the Automation tab. Here, you can structure your Manychat automations into folders, so you keep a good overview:

Once you start building automations in Manychat, everything happens inside the Flow Builder.

Each automation in Manychat consists of one (or multiple) triggers and blocks.

A trigger in Manychat is an event that starts your automation. For example, when someone leaves a comment on a Facebook Post.

Manychat blocks determine what happens after triggering the automation.

Adding blocks to your chat automation is super easy, you can just click and drag them in the flow builder:

Here are the most important ones:

1. Messages, send content like text, images, buttons, or collect data from users (channel-specific)
2. Conditions, personalize conversations using if/then logic based on user data
3. Actions, update fields, add tags, trigger integrations, or hand over to live chat
4. AI Step, let AI handle parts of the conversation and collect data naturally
5. Start Automation, connect different flows together (great for scaling)
6. Randomizer, split traffic for A/B testing

In practice, these elements let you build anything from simple reply flows to more advanced funnels with personalization and follow-ups.

And in my experience, the most important elements are Conditions and Actions. These allow you to personalize conversations and turn simple automations into real funnels that drive results for your business.

Additionally, the flow builder has nice features that make it even easier to use. For example, you can click on the Auto-Arrange Steps button. This arranges all the blocks in your chat automation:

Or you can use Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V (CMD for Mac) to copy and paste blocks in your automation, even across browser tabs.

Moreover, you can test your chatbot flows on the channel you are building the automation for (WhatsApp, Facebook, etc). Or, you can test them directly in the Manychat interface:

Manychat has one of the easiest-to-use interfaces I’ve ever seen in a chatbot platform. By using the flow builder, you can set up your first chat automation in a matter of minutes!

Manychat Growth Tools: Drive Traffic to your chatbot

If you remember just one thing about Manychat, it’s this: It gives you powerful tools to drive traffic and re-engage your audience.

It’s the main reason I use Manychat for most of my clients, because they have all these marketing tools.

It offers growth tools across all major messaging platforms:

• Facebook: Comment triggers, Ref URLs, Recurring Notifications, Facebook Ads
• Instagram: Story mentions, Comment triggers, Follow-to-DM Trigger, and Ref URLs
• WhatsApp: Message templates

Likewise, it also built-in tools to follow-up:

• Broadcasts: Send mass messages to you audience
• Sequences: Automated drip campaigns
• Rules: Trigger actions based on user actions

Let’s break each of these down:

Broadcasts, Sequences & Rules

In Manychat, you can start conversations by using broadcasts, sequences and rules.

With broadcasts, you can send mass messages to your contacts in Manychat. You can compare it with sending an email newsletter, but on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram or SMS.

When creating your broadcast, you can determine the automation you want to send and the target audience based on filters:

Likewise, you can send sequences in Manychat. With a sequence, you can send a series of messages with a certain time in between.

What I like about the sequences in ManyChat is that they are really organized. You can see the complete sequence in one overview and you also see what message is sent at what time:

Another great feature of Manychat is the Rules. With a Rule, you can automatically do an action when an event happens.

For example, when someone books an appointment, we can send them a reminder 1 day before it:

Growth Tools on Facebook

On Facebook, you can:

• Create Ref URLs that go to specific chat automations
• Automatically reply to Facebook Comments and start a Messenger conversation
• Send one-time notifications
• Send Recurring Notifications
• Connect a Facebook ad to your Messenger chatbot

Growth Tools on Instagram

On Instagram, you can:

• Create Ref URLs that go to specific chat automations
• Automatically reply to Instagram comments and start conversations in Instagram DM
• Auto DM Anyone who follows your Instagram account
• Send automatic replies to people who mention your account in their Instagram story
• Connect an Instagram Ad to your Instagram chatbot

Growth Tools on WhatsApp

And lastly, Manychat offers Message Templates and Ice breakers on WhatsApp.

By using Message Templates, you can send WhatsApp broadcasts and start conversations with users.

And Ice breakers let you show bubbles at the start of a WhatsApp conversation:

Basically, ManyChat provides almost all the marketing possibilities you need for your chatbot.

The only drawback is that Manychat doesn’t have a chat widget for your website.

Manychat AI Features

Manychat has many AI features you can use in your chatbot:

• AI Replies: Automatically reply to DMs based on website links and business info
• AI Comments: Auto-reply to comments based on your past reply style
• AI Goals: Follow-up after AI replies and comments to hit specific goals (like growing followers or getting leads)
• AI Step: Let an AI Assistant take over the chat and collect data
• AI Flow Builder Assistant: Auto-generate entire flows from answering a few questions
• AI Intents: Trigger flows based on user’s intent, not just keywords
• Keywords: Auto-reply to messages based on specific words

Let’s cover them one-by-one.

AI Replies

AI replies are the core of Manychat’s new AI engine.

With AI replies, you can train Manychat on website URLs or business info:

You can simply do this by adding a link or sharing knowledge about your business:

And once it’s trained, Manychat can automatically reply to DMs on Instagram:

So instead of building flows, you just give AI the right info and it does the work for you.

Note: Manychat AI Replies, AI Comments and AI Goals are currently only available on Instagram. More channels will follow soon.

AI Comments

AI Comments let you automatically reply to Instagram comments using AI.

Here’s what it does:

• Analyzes your past comment replies to learn your style
• Presents a few AI comment replies and asks you to review
• Automatically replies to comments based on your past replies and preferences

This is super helpful to increase engagement and save time, especially if you get dozens (or hundreds) of comments per post.

Right now, you can only reply to positive comments. But Manychat said they will add more intents in the future.

AI Goals

Once your AI starts replying to DMs or comments, what’s next?

That’s where AI Goals come in.

So after Manychat has answered a DM or replied to a comment, it can lead the user to a certain goal.

At this point, you can optimize for three goals:

• Get people to visit your website
• Increase followers
• Collect leads

AI Step

The AI step lets you hand over a conversation to Manychat’s AI to collect data. This is great for handling questions or getting data in a more natural way.

You just have to set:

• The goal of the conversation
• What data to collect
• Where to store the data (e.g. custom fields)

This is especially useful for when users go “off script” or ask questions during the conversation. The AI can then answer those questions (based on your business info) and route them back to the script.

AI Flow Builder Assistant

Furthermore, Manychat provides the AI Flow Builder Assistant. With this assistant, you can answer a few questions. Then, it creates a full automation for you:

AI Intents

Instead of replying to specific words, AI intents let you respond based on the user’s intent.

You just define the intent (Like “order status”) and Manychat will try to match user messages to it:

This can save you a lot of time, because you don’t have to manually enter all the keywords you want to match. You can just enter the intent and Manychat AI can automatically reply to it.

Manychat Keywords

This is the most basic form of automation in Manychat. You can trigger flows based on specific keywords in the user’s message:

Then, you can determine how you match the keyword. For example:

• A message is equal to the keyword
• A message contains the keyword
• A message contains the whole keyword
• A message begins with the keyword
• A message is thumbs up (a standard feature in Facebook Messenger)

Manychat Live Chat & Contact Management (Inbox)

Manychat also gives you a built-in Inbox where you can manage and reply to chats manually.

Here, you see all conversations in one place, whether they come from Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp or SMS. This makes it easy to jump into conversations whenever needed.

One of the most useful features is the ability to take over conversations from your chatbot.

For example, if someone asks a question your automation can’t handle, you can jump in and reply manually. Or you can trigger this automatically in your flows, like when someone asks for support:

Manychat also offers a mobile app for iOS and Android, so you can reply to conversations directly from your phone. This is especially useful for creators or small teams who manage conversations on the go.

If you’re working with a team, you can use auto-assignment rules to automatically distribute conversations across agents.

Besides that, Manychat gives you a full overview of everyone who has interacted with your chatbot:

When you click on one of them, you can see their entire chat history, along with custom fields, tags, and other data you’ve collected:

This is especially useful when working with leads or customers, because you always have context before replying. Instead of starting from scratch, you can see who someone is, what they’ve done, and where they are in your funnel.

You can also use this data to segment your audience and personalize conversations. For example, you can send targeted broadcasts, trigger automations based on behavior, or customize messages based on tags and fields.

In my experience, this combination works really well. You can automate most conversations, but still jump in when needed.

Manychat Pricing Plans

Manychat has a Free plan with basic features, and a Pro plan that starts a $15 a month.

Free plan

With the Manychat Free plan, you can get started with the basic features to reach up to 1,000 contacts.

This plan includes Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp as channels. It gives access to the basic features of the Flow Builder and to the basic Growth Tools of Manychat.

This plan is perfect if you want to test whether Manychat is the right fit for your business.

Pro Plan ($15/month)

Manychat’s Pro plan gives you access to almost all the features of the platform.

This plan starts at $15 per month and increases with the number of contacts you have. For example, 1,000 contacts costs $25 per month and 5,000 contacts is $45 per month.

This plan also comes with a 7-day free trial that you can use to test out the Pro features of ManyChat. Besides that, there is also a 30-day money-back guarantee, no questions asked.

Also, if you want to use the Manychat’s AI features, you need to pay an extra $29/month.

Manychat Free vs Pro comparison

So, should go with the Free or Paid plan of Manychat?

The free plan gives you access to the basic features of Manychat and allows you to test its platform.

The Pro plan is you want to use all the features of Manychat and actually want to use it for your business.

Here’s a full comparison of the pricing plans:

	Free	Pro
Flow Builder	Basic blocks	All blocks
Available Channels	Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp	Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, SMS, Email, Telegram
Contacts	Free up to 1,000 contacts	Unlimited contacts (price goes up with the number of contacts)
Collect User Input
Growth Tools	Basic Growth Tools	Advanced Growth Tools
Integrations

Manychat WhatsApp Pricing

In addition to the Manychat Pro pricing, you also need to pay for conversations on WhatsApp.

The first 1,000 user-started conversations are free. But if you have more, you need to pay for these conversations to WhatsApp.

Likewise, you need to pay for business-started conversations as well.

The prices for user-started and business-started conversations differ per country. For example, in the United States you pay $0.0172 per user-started conversation and $0.0287 per business-started conversation.

If you want to calculate the WhatsApp costs, you can use Manychat’s WhatsApp pricing calculator.

Add-on: Pricing of Manychat Inbox Pro

Moreover, Manychat provides Manychat Inbox Pro. Manychat Inbox Pro is an advanced feature of the Manychat Inbox. It gives you access to:

• Agent chat analytics
• Forming groups of team members
• Auto-assigning conversations

This plan starts at $99 per month and comes with 3 live chat seats:

If that’s not enough, you can add one extra live chat seat for $39 per month.

Integrations

Manychat has direct integrations with:

• Zapier
• Make (formerly Integromat)
• Google Sheets
• ActiveCampaign
• MailChimp
• ConvertKit
• HubSpot

Furthermore, ManyChat has its own App store. It allows third-party developers to make their own integrations with ManyChat. Currently, the App Store has 61 apps to extend the functionalities of Manychat:

Channels

With Manychat you can publish your chatbot on:

• Instagram
• WhatsApp
• Facebook Messenger
• Tiktok (now in Beta)
• Telegram
• SMS

Likewise, you can also send emails and email campaigns with Manychat.

This allows you to make an omnichannel chatbot experience for your users. So for example, when someone gives a certain response on Facebook Messenger, you could send an email based on that response.

With SMS, you need to connect your ManyChat account to a Twilio account. Then, ManyChat will handle the chatbot and chat logic. Twilio will receive and send the text messages (Twilio has extra costs).

Moreover, you can also merge contacts across channels (based on their email or phone number). For example, if someone contacts you via Facebook Messenger and later via Instagram. Manychat can see that it is the same person and merge the contacts.

Manychat Analytics

Manychat has four types of analytics:

• Manychat Insights
• Automation Analytics
• Conversion Analytics
• Agent Analytics

Below, I will briefly cover them one by one.

Manychat Insights

Manychat has an Insights dashboard that gives general insights into your Manychat account. In this dashboard, you can see how many contacts you have per channel:

And how these contacts have evolved over time:

 

Automation Analytics (“Flow Analytics”)

Moreover, Manychat also has automation analytics (“Flow analytics”). For each block in your automation, you can see how many contacts it was sent to. You can also see the delivery, open, and click rates (if a message has a button):

By using these flow analytics, you can easily improve your Manychat flows for better conversion.

Conversion Analytics

Also, you can add your own conversion events inside your chat automations. Then, you can see how many people reached those events in a specific period:

And these conversion events are not limited to your chatbot funnels. You can install the Manychat Pixel (like a Facebook Pixel) on your website. It will track conversions from people coming from your chatbot.

For example, when someone clicks on a button in Messenger and then converts on your website, this pixel will track that conversion back to your Manychat account.

Agent Analytics

If you sign up for Manychat Inbox Pro, you also get agent analytics. With these analytics, you can see how many conversations where resolved by your agents:

And you can also see how many conversations each agent resolved:

So this is great as well!

There are only two drawbacks to the analytics in Manychat:

1. There is no overview of unmatched user input. If a user asked question and did not get a response, you cannot get this information in your ManyChat dashboard. This is a disadvantage because it does not allow you to improve the automatic answers of your chatbot.
2. It’s not possible to see the flow analytics for a specific period

In general, you can use Manychat’s analytics to see how well your chatbot is performing. This helps you improve your chatbot funnels!

Templates

ManyChat provides 35 templates that you can directly install to make your chatbot. These include free templates and templates only available for Pro users.

With ManyChat it is possible to make a chatbot template and share it with others. This is really useful when you are making multiple chatbots who do the same thing (for example, Lead generation).

Support

ManyChat provides extensive tutorials on how to make a chatbot and all the features of their platform. They also have proper documentation and good customer support.

Likewise, Manychat has a community (20K members) where you can ask all kinds of questions and learn more about the platform.

Is Manychat worth it?

So, should you use Manychat to create your chat automations?

Yes, you should.

In fact, I use it all the time to create chatbots for my own clients.

Manychat is one of the best chatbot platforms in the world for creating chatbots on Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, SMS and Telegram. It’s super beginner-friendly, since you can create automations in minutes without needing code. But it’s also powerful enough to create more advanced automations as well.

What makes it stand out is how easy it is to turn Instagram and Facebook comments into DMs, leads, and sales. The flow builder, live chat and marketing automation tools make it a great fit creators, agencies and businesses.

And likewise, you can easily connect Manychat to other tools like your email or webinar platform.

If you want to generate leads from Instagram or Facebook, Manychat is one of the best tools you can use. And you can already get it for as low as $15/month.

If you’re convinced, just click on the button below to get my discount code to get 1 Month of the Pro plan for free:

 

When thinking of drawbacks, I can only imagine three:

1. You need to create seperate messages per channel. So if you want to create a chatbot on many channels, it’s more work.
2. It’s hard to translate your chatbot to multiple languages, because you need to do it manually
3. The AI Add-on can be a bit limited. For example, you cannot connect AI Replies to automations, you cannot guide AI comments with a prompt and the AI Step only works if users follow a specific script

And if you want a quick tutorial on how to use Manychat, I got you covered:

Want to go deeper?

I also run a free Manychat Masterclass where I teach you how to make money with Manychat.

Join the free training here – or check out the full paid community if you’re ready to get the best funnel to turn your audience into sales.

Compare Manychat with others

 

Frequently Asked Questions

What is ManyChat used for?

Manychat is used for creating fully automated chatbots on platforms like:

• Instagram
• WhatsApp
• Facebook
• Telegram
• SMS

Manychat is mostly used by small and medium businesses, but also by larger brands, like Nike. You can easily create a chatbot by using the Manychat flow builder and connect it to one of your channels.

Is ManyChat free?

Yes, Manychat has a free plan. This plan gives you access to the basic features of the platform, up to 1,000 contacts.

If you also want one month of the Pro plan for free, click on the button below and get my discount code:

Is Manychat safe?

Yes, it is safe to use Manychat. Manychat complies with global security standards, such as the Cloud Security Alliance, ISO/IEC 27001 and SOC 2 Type II.

Moreover, they are also an official Meta Business Partner and compliant with the GDPR and California Privacy Act. If you want to learn more about privacy and security at Manychat, click here.

What are the limitations of ManyChat?

Manychat has three limitations:

1. You need to create separate messages per channel. So if you want to create a chatbot on many channels, it’s more work.
2. It’s hard to translate your chatbot to multiple languages, because you need to do it manually
3. The AI Add-on can be a bit limited. Especially the AI Step, because people need to follow an exact script for the AI to work.

What is the disadvantage of ManyChat?

Manychat has three disadvantages:

1. You need to create seperate messages per channel. So if you want to create a chatbot on many channels, it’s more work.
2. It’s hard to translate your chatbot to multiple languages, because you need to do it manually
3. The AI Add-on can be a bit limited. Especially the AI Step, because people need to follow an exact script for the AI to work.

Is ManyChat approved by Instagram?

Yes! Manychat is an official Meta business partner. This means they are 100% approved by Facebook and Instagram.

What are ManyChat growth tools?

Manychat Growth Tools are ways to drive traffic to your Manychat automations. Examples include the Comment Growth Tool, Messenger Ref URL, Customer Chat Widget on your website, Website Modals and JSON Ads.

How do I get Manychat cheap?

You can use the free plan of Manychat that gives you access to the basic features of the platform, up to 1,000 contacts.

If you also want one month of the Pro plan for free, just click on the button below and get my discount code:

Is Manychat legit?

Yes, Manychat is legit. Manychat is an official Meta Business partner and one of the largest chatbot platforms in the world. The platform is used by over 100,000 Instagram accounts.

How much do broadcasts costs on Manychat?

This depends per channel. On Facebook and Telegram, broadcasts are free.

On WhatsApp, you need to pay per started conversation. How much this costs, depends on the country of the receiver and the message type. For example, if you send a marketing message to someone in the US, it costs $0.025.

You can find the pricing rate cards here.

What are ManyChat free plan’s limitations?

ManyChat’s free plan is pretty good. It lets you test the platform, but it has several restrictions:

• You can only have up to 1,000 contacts.
• Access is limited to basic Flow Builder features and essential Growth Tools.
• Only Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp channels are available.
• Advanced tools such as AI features, detailed analytics, and multi-channel automation are locked behind the Pro plan.
• You also can’t use premium templates or advanced integrations like HubSpot or custom apps.

What is Manychat’s price?

Manychat has a free plan and a paid Pro plan.

• Free plan: $0/month — includes basic features for up to 1,000 contacts on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Perfect for testing the platform.
• Pro plan: Starts at $15/month — it includes all features of the platform. The price increases based on your number of contacts. For example:
  • 1,000 contacts: $25/month
  • 5,000 contacts: $45/month
• AI Add-on: Costs an extra $29/month if you want to use Manychat’s AI features like the AI Step or AI Flow Builder Assistant.
• Inbox Pro: Starts at $99/month and includes 3 live chat seats with advanced agent features.

Want to test Manychat pro for free? Just click on the button below and get my 100% discount code: