POP is chatbot software for building chatbots on Facebook Messenger and your website. It is primarily focused on running campaigns inside Facebook Messenger. But is this chatbot software worth it to buy? Let’s find that out!
For this review about POP, I used the criteria of how you can choose the best chatbot software.
Introduction to POP
Before conducting this review of POP, I had some contact with them.
POP is chatbot software that is mainly focusing on running campaigns inside Facebook Messenger. And with campaigns they practically mean chatbot flows.
This means that they are not really focused on the question-answering side of chatbots. But this doesn’t mean that it is impossible to provide answers to questions of your users 😉
Well, let’s dive in!
User Interface
When you log in to POP, the first thing you see is the Inbox containing all the messages that were sent to the live chat:
On the left side, you have a menu with:
- Send – For setting up your broadcasts
- Campaigns – Here you can create your chatbot flows
- Audience – Your audience and the statistics of your chatbot
- Automations – Containing all the marketing tools, such as automatically reply to comments
- Help – Troubleshooting if you have a problem
When you are actually going to create a chatbot, the interface is like a blank canvas in which you just can start typing:
To be honest, it took me some time to get used to this interface. This is because it’s hard to see the complete overview of your chatbot flow. Here is an example, this is a flow containing a button:
But what happens after you click on the button? The interface doesn’t let you see this, until you are actually clicking on the button yourself:
On the one hand, this doesn’t give you a great overview of your complete flow. But on the other hand, it shows you how your users would flow through your chatbot flow, which is actually pretty nice.
What is a great feature of their interface, is that it is really easy to have a flow within a flow.
If you see the example above, the “Multiple choice question (artists)” is a separate flow that is used within my current flow. When the user has gone through that flow, it automatically returns to my current flow. This is really nice and a feature I have not seen yet in many different other chatbot software.
So it may take you some time to get comfortable with the interface, but once you have it is really easy to use and really flexible. Also, POP provides 40 templates that you can install right away to build your chatbot. And you can test all of your chatbot flows inside Messenger before they actually go live.
- Visual Flow Builder
- Test chatbot
- Interface easy to use?
- Easy to setup a chatbot?
Chatbot elements
POP has all the chatbot elements you need to build your chatbot. They only don’t provide Delays, Vertical Lists and Date Validation, but those are no deal-breakers.
So they perform really well on this one!
- 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 POP it is really easy to analyze your audience, by clicking on the “Audience” tab:
This gives you an overview of all your subscribers with their additional information.
In POP, you can easily add custom fields and add tags to your subscribers. Also, it is possible to make user segments and assign your subscribers to one of your segments.
- Custom fields
- Tags
- User segments
Messages
With POP, you can send broadcasts to all your subscribers or a part of your subscribers (by selecting a segment). Also, it possible to schedule those broadcasts for a specific date and time.
Unfortunately, it is not possible to send sequences with POP. And this is a drawback, especially for a chatbot software that is focused on using campaigns inside Facebook Messenger.
Moreover, it is not possible to use any conditions in your chatbot flows.
On the other side, it is possible to make a chatbot in any language, but it is not easy to translate your chatbot to different languages.
- Broadcasts
- Sequences
- Conditions
- Multiple languages
- Easy to translate
AI & NLP
With POP it is possible to recognize keywords and give a good response to your users:
Because POP is primarily focusing on running campaigns, they provide less attention to the AI part of chatbots. Therefore, it is not possible to use any AI or NLP, such as grabbing the intent of the user or using entities. Moreover, they don’t provide a DialogFlow integration.
- Keywords
- Intents
- Entities
- Dialogflow integration
Channels
POP makes it easy to put your chatbot on Facebook Messenger and on your website (using a Facebook Messenger widget).
But those are only the channels that POP serves. So, if you want to provide an omnichannel chatbot experience to your users, you cannot use POP, which is a potential drawback.
- Website
- Facebook
- SMS
- Slack
- Whatsapp
- Telegram
- Skype
- Email
Integrations
POP has a built-in live chat integration, which is the most important integration any chatbot software needs.
Moreover, they have a Zapier integration, which allows you to connect your chatbot with almost any software on earth.
Unfortunately, they don’t provide integrations with Integromat, Google Sheets or the possibility to create your own webhooks.
- Livechat
- Zapier
- Integromat
- Google Sheets
- Webhooks
Marketing
POP does really great on marketing.
You can:
- Put a Facebook Messenger widget on your website
- Connect your chatbot with Facebook ads
- Send One-Time Notifications
- Automatically reply to Facebook comments
- Create “Send to Messenger” buttons and put them on your website
- Have custom URLs to specific chatbot flows
So, they have all the tools you need to make sure your audience is coming to your chatbot.
- Facebook website widget
- Native website widget
- Landing pages
- Facebook Ads
- Facebook comments auto-reply
- Button creator
- Custom URLs for your chatbot
Pricing
POP comes with a free plan that comes with all the features of the platform up to 100 subscribers.
When you exceed those 100 subscribers, you need to pay. But the pricing of their plans is actually really cheap:
| Up to | Price |
|---|---|
| 5.000 subscribers | $29 |
| 10.000 subscribers | $49 |
| 15.000 subscribers | $69 |
| 20.000 subscribers | $89 |
| 30.000 subscribers | $109 |
And all these plans have all the features of the platform. These prices are even less than ManyChat and Chatfuel, which I consider as one of the cheapest chatbot software for Facebook Messenger.
So a lot of value for a really small price.
- Free trial
- Free plan
- Price per month29
- Monthly pricing available?
- Money back guarantee
Analytics
As I said before, POP is really focusing on running campaigns inside Facebook Messenger. Therefore, their analytics are really focused on campaigns and so on the number of subscribers your chatbot has, which is shown in a dashboard:
Moreover, you have a separate dashboard containing the statistics of your broadcasts:
These show the number of messages you sent, the total views of your messages and the average open rate.
So these statistics are mostly focused on the number of subscribers and a bit minimal, but enough to analyze how good your chatbot is doing.
A drawback is that you cannot analyze the user input that the chatbot did not understand. This could allow you to improve the answers of your chatbot, but as said before, this is not something that POP is focusing on.
- Dashboard
- User input
- User retention
- Sent messages
- Open rate
- Click rate
- Conversion rate
- Fall back rate
- Volunteer users
- Custom dashboards/reports
eCommerce
POP doesn’t provide any integrations with eCommerce software.
- Payments
- Shopify
- WooCommerce
- Buy directly within the chatbot
- Cart abandonment
Templates & Cloning
POP has 40 templates that you can install immediately to create your own chatbot.
Unfortunately, it is not possible to create your own templates and share them with others.
What is possible, is that you can duplicate your own chatbot flows, so you don’t have to duplicate everything manually.
- Templates40
- Make template
- Share template
- Duplicate chatbot flows
- Duplicate chatbot elements
Optimization
With POP, it is not possible to do any optimization, like A/B Testing.
- A/B Testing
Support
POP provides tutorials on how to use their platform, and extensive documentation.
Moreover, they provide support via email and live chat.
- Tutorials
- Documentation
- Customer support
Conclusion
So, should I buy POP to create my chatbots?
Yes, I should.
POP has a great interface, many chatbot elements, you can assign custom fields and tags, make user segments, send broadcasts, have a built-in live chat integration, a Zapier integration and various marketing possibilities for a really small price.
There are only three situations in which I should not use POP:
- If you want to create an omnichannel chatbot experience and not only want to use Facebook Messenger
- If you want to improve the answers of your chatbot by making use of AI & NLP
- And if you want to create sequences, because this is currently not possible with POP
But for the rest, POP is great chatbot software for building your chatbots.
