ManyChat Review

By Joren Wouters Updated on

ManyChat

ManyChat is one of the biggest chatbot software platforms for Facebook Messenger. It is an excellent platform to build your chatbot in just a few minutes and a lot of people throughout the world are using it. In this post, I will review all the aspects of the ManyChat software platform!

For writing this review about ManyChat, I used the criteria of my post “How to choose the best chatbot software“.

User Interface

The dashboard of ManyChat is really clean with on the left side a menu with different options and on the right side the content of each section. It is a really straightforward dashboard and easy to understand:

manychat-dashboard-interface

When creating your chatbot, ManyChat has one of the best interfaces I have ever seen in a chatbot platform. The reason for this is that ManyChat has two kinds of interfaces: The Basic Builder and The Flow Builder.

The Basic Builder

With the Basic Builder, the content of your chatbot is more organized and all the messages of a certain flow are presented in order. As the name says it is really basic, but this interface ensures that you can keep your chatbot organized.

manychat-basic-builder
Basic Builder of Manychat

 

The Flow Builder

If you want a more visual approach for editing your chatbot, you can also choose for the Flow Builder. The Flow builder is a visual drag and drop interface in which you can connect messages and actions with each other. This kind of builder gives you a more structured overview of the content of your chatbot.

Normally, a disadvantage of such a kind of interface is that it can become really messy when you get a lot of content in your chatbot. But with ManyChat, you can change to the Basic Builder at any time, so you can keep things organized.

manychat-flow-builder
Flow Builder of ManyChat

 

  • Visual Flow Builder
    Create chatbot dialogs with a visual flow builder.
  • Test chatbot
    Is it possible to test the chatbot before putting your new flows or changes live?
  • Interface easy to use?
    Is the chatbot platform easy-to-use?
  • Easy to setup a chatbot?
    Is it easy to set up your chatbot with this chatbot platform?

Chatbot elements

ManyChat provides an almost complete variety of chatbot elements to build your chatbot. They only don’t have lists, but this is absolutely no deal-breaker, you can always use a Gallery instead. They are really outperforming a lot of chatbot software here!

  • Delays
    Use delays between messages in your chatbot
  • Images
    Can you send images via your chatbot?
  • Video
    Can you send video via your chatbot?
  • Audio
    Can you send audio via your chatbot?
  • Attachments
    Can you send attachments via your chatbot?
  • Gallery (Horizontal list)
    Show a gallery of cards inside your chatbot. A card consists of an image, title, subtitle and button.
  • Vertical list
    Show a vertical list of items inside your chatbot
  • Emojis
    Can you use emojis inside your chatbot?
  • Persistent Menu
    Can you add a persistent menu to your chatbot?
  • Quick Replies
    Can you add quick replies to your chatbot where users can click on?
  • Buttons
    Can you add buttons to your chatbot where users can click on?
  • Free text input
    Can chatbot users freely type text to your chatbot whenever they want to?
  • Location sharing
    Can users share their location inside the chatbot?
  • Email validation
    When a chatbot user gives their email, can the platform validate it's a correct email address?
  • Phone number validation
    When a chatbot user gives their phone number, can the platform validate it's a correct phone number?
  • Date validation
    When a chatbot user gives a date, can the platform validate it's a correct date?

Users

Within ManyChat is it extremely easy to add custom fields and tags to specific users. You can simply ask questions and save the answer of the user to a custom field or add a specific tag. With those custom fields and tags, you can send broadcasts to specific user segments.

Moreover, users can also share their location with a ManyChat chatbot. This could give you more information about where your audience is located.

In ManyChat you can view all the users of your chatbot in the “Audience” tab. This gives you a good overview of all the people that talked with your chatbot:

manychat-audience
Source: ManyChat

 

In this overview you can click on each individual user and get all the information of that user, which is extremely useful:

manychat-user
Source: ManyChat
  • Custom fields
    Store information from your chatbot users inside fields. For example, you can ask for someone's email and store it inside the "email" custom field.
  • Tags
    Add tags to users in your chatbot flows to organize and categorize contacts.
  • User segments
    Can you create user segments based on custom fields and tags?

Messages

Manychat provides broadcasts, sequences and also subscribing/unsubscribing from sequences.

What I really 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 which message is sent at which time, a really good feature.

manychat-sequence
An example sequence in ManyChat

Also, with ManyChat you can use a feature called “Conditions”, in which you can use logic to send users through a certain flow.

With ManyChat it is possible to make a chatbot in any language, but it is not possible to easily translate this chatbot to different languages (because you need to do this manually and copy all your complete chatbot).

  • Broadcasts
    Send a message to all or a part of your chatbot users at a specific date and time
  • Sequences
    Send messages on a pre-defined schedule with a certain time interval between those messages
  • Conditions
    Make checks in your chatbot flow based on if-then logic. For example, if the user has not given their email, ask for their email.
  • Multiple languages
    Is it possible to create a chatbot in multiple languages?
  • Easy to translate
    Can you translate text to other languages without using a third-party platform and without creating duplicate flows?

AI & NLP

The AI&NLP of ManyChat is really straightforward. Within ManyChat you can group certain keywords together and make a certain response for them. However, intents and automatic synonyms are not supported.

How it looks in ManyChat:

What they do provide in their keywords feature, is the possibility of how the keyword is matched. This is a feature not all chatbot software have. You could say that:

  • 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 also doesn’t have a direct integration with DialogFlow. But I created a tutorial on how you can connect ManyChat to Dialogflow.

  • Keywords
    Trigger chatbot flow based on certain words or phrases a user says to the chatbot.
  • Intents
    Trigger a chatbot flow by understanding the intent of the user.
  • Entities
    Capture specific information from sentences. For example, if a user says "veggie pizza", the chatbot can understand it's not a regular pizza, but a veggie pizza.
  • Dialogflow integration
    Does the chatbot platform provide a direct integration with Google's AI Platform?

Channels

With ManyChat it is possible to make a chatbot on your website, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS and Email.

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 part and all the chat logic, and Twilio will take care of receiving and sending the text messages (additional costs for Twilio apply).

  • Website
    Can you publish your chatbot on your website?
  • Facebook
    Can you publish your chatbot on Facebook?
  • Instagram
    Can you publish your chatbot on Instagram?
  • Whatsapp
    Can you publish your chatbot on WhatsApp?
  • Telegram
    Can you publish your chatbot on Telegram?
  • SMS
    Can you publish your chatbot on SMS?
  • Slack
    Can you publish your chatbot on Slack?
  • Skype
    Can you publish your chatbot on Skype?
  • Email
    Can you publish your chatbot on email?

Integrations

ManyChat has a built-in live chat integration. Really good, because this is the most important integration a chatbot software needs. They also provide integrations for:

By the way, what I really like about the live chat integration of ManyChat is that they also have an iOS app and Android app, so you can respond to user inquiries on the go.

Moreover, ManyChat has its own App store which allows third-party developers to create their own integrations with ManyChat. Currently, the App Store has 38 apps, but I think this will grow over the years:

manychat-app-store

  • Livechat
    Direct integration with live chat, either via a built-in live chat functionality or a third-party live chat platform.
  • Zapier
    Direct integration with Zapier, one of the largest integration platforms in the world.
  • Make (formerly Integromat)
    Direct integration with Make (formerly Integromat), one of the largest integration platforms in the world.
  • Google Sheets
    Direct integration with Google Sheets, to store or retrieve data from sheets.
  • Webhooks
    Can you call a webhook inside your chatbot flow to send data to other applications?

Marketing

It is possible to put a Facebook Messenger widget on your website, create a landing page, connect to Facebook ads, use the One-Time Notification and Recurring Notifications, automatically reply to Facebook comments, create buttons and create custom URLs to your chatbot.

Moreover, ManyChat has a really advanced auto-reply to Facebook comments.

Usually, with auto-reply to Facebook Comments, you make a Facebook post, people comment on it and then you send them an automatic message in Facebook Messenger.

But ManyChat goes further. Next to sending a message in Facebook Messenger, you can automatically like the comment and reply with your own comment:

manychat-automatic-comment-reply

  • Facebook website widget
    Embed your chatbot as a Facebook Widget on your website.
  • Native website widget
    Embed your chatbot as a native widget (your own branding & colors) on your website.
  • Landing pages
    Can you create a simple landing page to drive users to your chatbot?
  • Facebook Ads
    Start a conversation with your chatbot when someone clicks on a Facebook Ad
  • One-Time Notification
    Send one-time notifications via Facebook Messenger for a topic that a chatbot user has opted-in for
  • Facebook comments auto-reply
    Automatically reply with your chatbot to users who comment on your Facebook Posts
  • Button creator
    Add a button to your website to drive users to your chatbot
  • Custom URLs for your chatbot
    Generate a simple URL that can be shared anywhere to send users to your chatbot

Pricing

Maybe the most important part: Pricing. ManyChat provides a free plan that stays free forever. This plan comes with 1000 contacts and does not have all the features that ManyChat provides (but still enough to make a good chatbot).

If you want more features, you can upgrade to the Pro plan, which costs 15$ per month, which is a really low price:

manychat-pricing

The price of the Pro plan goes up with the number of subscribers your chatbot has. 1K subscribers result in $25 per month and 5K subscribers 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.

  • Free trial
    Does the chatbot platform provide a free trial?
  • Free plan
    Does the chatbot platform provide a free plan?
  • Price per month
    What is the lowest price per month for creating a chatbot on this platform?
    15
  • Monthly pricing available?
    Is it possible to pay monthly?
  • Money back guarantee
    Is there a money-back guarantee in case you are not satisfied with the platform?

Analytics

ManyChat provides basic analytics in their dashboard. When you enter the dashboard, the first thing you see is a complete overview of all your subscribers:

manychat-dashboard
Source: ManyChat

 

Furthermore, they also provide analytics for each block in your chatbot. For each block, they provide the number of people the message is delivered to, the open rate and the click rate.

manychat-analytics-block

This also holds for sequences. For each sequence, the number of subscribers, the open rate and the click rate are presented:

manychat-analytics-sequence

There are only two drawbacks about the analytics in ManyChat:

  1. The analytics are all over the place. There is no one clear, in-depth dashboard with all relevant analytics, but this is distributed over multiple sections (Broadcasts, Sequences, etc.)
  2. There is no overview of unmatched keywords. If a user filled in a word that did not get a response, you cannot get this information in your ManyChat dashboard. This is a big disadvantage because it does not allow you to improve your chatbot.

This is a possible drawback of ManyChat. Analytics are an important part of your chatbot because with analytics you can easily improve your chatbot. The analytics of ManyChat are mostly focused on flows and not on giving answers on questions, so it is hard to improve the answers of your chatbot.

Update 2020: ManyChat introduced the ManyChat Pixel. This is a piece of code that you can put on your website to track conversions coming from your chatbot. When someone clicks on a link button in Messenger and then converts on your website, this pixel will track that conversion back to the specific flow. Now you can find out which flows are the most converting!

  • Dashboard
    Dashboard that provides general analytics of your chatbot.
  • User input
    Get the input from users that your chatbot didn't understand.
  • Sent messages
    The number of messages that were sent by your chatbot.
  • Open rate
    The percentage of chatbot users that opened a message inside your chatbot.
  • Click rate
    The percentage of chatbot users that click on a button inside your chatbot.
  • Conversion rate
    The percentage of users that converted through your chatbot. For example, the percentage of users that gave their email address
  • Fall back rate
    The percentage of interactions where the chatbot did not know an answer to a question.
  • Custom dashboards/reports
    Can you create your own dashboard or reports?

eCommerce

ManyChat provides a direct integration with Shopify so you can:

  • Recover abandoned carts
  • Notify customers about orders and shipment updates
  • Collect reviews and feedback after purchase
  • Generate repeated purchases

It is, however, not possible to buy a product from your Shopify store within the chatbot.

But, you can receive payments within your chatbot and let users directly pay within the chatbot by using the Stripe or Paypal integration.

There is only one drawback: ManyChat doesn’t have a WooCommerce integration. But it is still possible to connect with WooCommerce, but you will need a Zapier or Integromat integration for this.

  • Payments
    Collect payments inside your chatbot
  • Shopify
    Direct integration with Shopify to get products, order information and cart data.
  • WooCommerce
    Direct integration with WooCommerce to get products, order information and cart data.
  • Buy directly within the chatbot
    Ability for chatbot users to buy products or services directly from a chatbot
  • Cart abandonment
    Trigger messages in the chatbot when a user abandons their cart on a website or inside the chatbot

 

Templates & Cloning

ManyChat provides 19 templates which 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).

Furthermore, it is possible to duplicate your chatbot flows and chatbot elements to make your chatbot faster.

  • Templates
    How many pre-built templates does the chatbot platform provide?
    19
  • Make template
    Can you make templates yourself?
  • Share template
    Can you share self-created templates with others?
  • Duplicate chatbot flows
    Is it possible to duplicate chatbot flows, so you can easily reuse them?
  • Duplicate chatbot elements
    Is it possible to duplicate chatbot elements, so you can easily reuse them?

Optimization

It is possible to do A/B testing in ManyChat, but it is not available in the free plan. So you need to upgrade to a “Pro” plan if you want to unlock this feature.

  • A/B Testing
    Can you optimize your chatbot flows by performing A/B tests?

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.

What I also love about ManyChat is that they have a large Facebook community (80.000 people) in which you can ask all kinds of questions and learn more about the platform.

  • Tutorials
    Does the chatbot platform provide tutorials on how to use its platform?
  • Documentation
    Does the chatbot platform provide documentation on how to use its platform?
  • Customer support
    Does the chatbot platform provide customer support?

Conclusion

In my opinion, ManyChat is one of the best chatbot software for building your chatbot on Facebook Messenger. It has a structured and flexible interface, a lot of chatbot elements, many integrations and lots of possibilities to grow your chatbot. It really outperforms a lot of other chatbot software for Facebook Messenger.

When thinking of drawbacks, I can only imagine two:

  1. It does not provide integrations for Whatsapp, Twitter, Slack, Telegram and Skype
    If you want to provide an omnichannel experience, this could be a possible drawback. But I know that for a lot of users, this does not matter. Besides, they do provide e-mail and SMS integrations.
  2. It is hard to optimize your chatbot because they only provide basic analytics.

ManyChat is extremely good software to build your chatbot with and given recent events, I think they will extend their platform even further.

 

Comments (6)

  1. Tristan

    You convinced me. Couldn’t find a proper comparison with so many chatbots on the market. Thank you so much, great work.

    1. Joren Wouters

      Glad that I could help, Tristan!

  2. David

    Can a single ManyChat account handle multiple websites or do you get new accounts for each website?

    If handling multiple websites, does the paid membership charge by the cumulative number of members from all websites?

    1. Joren Wouters

      Hey David! Yes, a single ManyChat can handle multiple websites. Also, the pricing of ManyChat is determined by the number of subscribers you have. So if users are logging in with Facebook Messenger on your website widget, this increases the number of subscribers (and so the price). If users are logging in as guest on your website widget, I think it does not influence the price.

  3. Tiago Souza Nascimento

    Hi I’m from Brazil.
    Is it possible in manychat to continue with the same whatsaap number for automation?

    And if my client no longer wants to continue with the automation, can he recover the number later on a whatsaap account without losing the contacts and conversations he had on Manychat?

    1. Joren Wouters

      Hey Tiago, good question! Currently, this is not possible and ManyChat discourages it to use the same phone number you used before for WhatsApp.

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