Respond.io Review 2026: Platform Built for Sales Teams

Most chatbot platforms are built for marketing automation or for customer support. Respond.io is built for sales.

It puts every chat from WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, your website and even phone calls in one inbox. It shows you which stage each lead is in, and it adds AI Agents on top. But is it actually worth it?

I let its AI Copilot build a sales agent that qualifies leads, trained that agent on my website, and tested it in real conversations. I used my website and Telegram.

Below I’ll show you what impressed me, where it falls short for a sales team, and what it really costs.

Respond.io

4.3

Best for Medium business, Enterprise

Average setup time 2 hours

Starting price $99 per month Free trial

Visit Respond.io →

Our Verdict

Respond.io is one of the best platforms for sales teams that talk to leads on a lot of channels.

Every chat from WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, your website and phone calls lands in one inbox, where you see which stage each lead is in.

On top of that, you get AI Agents that qualify your leads, workflows and broadcasts. And it’s simple to set up and use, because an AI Copilot can set the platform up for you.

There’s no free plan, but you can try it free for 7 days. Paid plans start at $99/month for a shared inbox with 5 users, and AI Agents start at $199/month.

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Pros

• Omnichannel inbox with lifecycle stages, built for sales
• Connects to more than a dozen channels, including WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok and calls
• AI Agents that qualify leads and move them to the next stage
• Set up the platform by chatting with AI
• Workflow builder that works with or without AI
• Broadcasts on WhatsApp, SMS, email and Telegram
• Integrations with Zapier, Make & n8n

Cons

• The $99/month plan is only a shared inbox; AI Agents and workflows start at $199/month
• The AI Agent can only connect to other tools through APIs, and only from $349/month
• Calendar integrations can't book meetings automatically

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Respond.io at a Glance

Here are the most interesting features that I found in Respond.io while testing it:

• You see every conversation a lead had with you, on every channel, in one inbox. And your team can take over from the AI agent with one click:

  

• Your dashboard shows how many leads sit in each stage of your sales process, from new lead to paying customer:

  

• You don’t have to set it all up yourself. Ask the AI Copilot to build an AI agent for you, and it does:

  

• Your AI agent learns from your website and files, and it can do things for you, like updating a lead’s contact details or closing a conversation:

  

• If you’d rather not use AI, you can automate replies with workflows, like an away message outside your business hours:

  

• You can send one message to a whole group of contacts on WhatsApp, SMS, email or Telegram:

  

• Reports show you how many leads convert, and where in your sales process the others drop off:

  

What is Respond.io?

Respond.io is a customer conversation platform for sales teams. It connects more than a dozen channels to one shared inbox, like:

• WhatsApp
• Instagram
• Facebook Messenger
• TikTok
• Telegram
• Website chat
• Email
• SMS
• Phone calls

But instead of treating every chat as a support ticket, it treats every contact as a lead on the way to a sale. So when you log in, the first screen you see is your leads, counted per stage:

How does Respond.io work?

Respond.io is simple to set up, because you don’t have to do it yourself. You can ask its AI Copilot to set up the platform for you, by chatting with it.

For example, I asked Copilot to create an agent that qualifies leads, and it built the whole agent for me. And when I asked it to change the qualifying questions, it updated only those and left the rest of the agent alone:

That saves you a lot of clicking around, especially in the first week, when you don’t know where every setting lives yet.

And if you’d rather set things up by hand, an onboarding checklist and product tours explain each feature the first time you open it:

Two ways to automate: AI Agents and workflows

Respond.io gives you two ways to automate your conversations. You can use an AI agent, you can build workflows, or you can use both together, since an AI agent can start a workflow.

A workflow is a set of steps you build yourself, like this one, which checks whether a conversation starts within your business hours.

If it does, the contact gets a welcome message. If not, they get an away message saying you’ll reply as soon as possible:

That’s good to know if you don’t want AI talking to your customers yet. Workflows work fine without it, and you can add AI later.

Before anything goes live, you can test it. Workflows have their own Test button, and every AI agent has a test chat right next to its settings, so you can talk to it before a customer does. In the next section, I’ll go through the AI features in detail.

Ease of use How easy it is to build and change things once you’re set up? On a scale of 1 to 5.	4.5
Setup difficulty How much technical work it takes to get going.	Easy
Average setup time How long until your first bot or AI agent is live.	2 hours
Set up with AI Describe what you want in a chat, and an AI builds the bot or agent for you.
Test before going live You can try the bot or agent yourself before customers see it.

Respond.io AI Agents

Besides the AI Copilot, Respond.io has three AI features. AI Agents talk to your customers, AI Assist writes replies for your team, and AI Prompts change how those replies are written. In this section, I’ll go through:

1. How you set up an AI agent
2. What the AI agent can do with skills
3. The drawback: connecting the AI agent to other tools
4. AI Assist and AI Prompts

How you set up an AI agent

You give an AI agent three things: instructions, knowledge sources and skills.

In the instructions, you describe its role, how it should talk and what it should do, step by step:

Its knowledge sources are what it answers from. You can upload files or add a website, and you choose how often Respond.io syncs your website again, like every day:

There’s also a small setting I really liked: the wait time. A lot of people send three short messages instead of one long one. With a wait time, the agent waits a few seconds and answers all of them at once, instead of replying to the first line only:

What the AI agent can do with skills

Skills are what make the AI agent useful for sales, because they let it do things instead of only answering questions. You can let your agent:

• Update contact fields, like a lead’s name, email address and phone number
• Close a conversation
• Assign the conversation to a team
• Move the contact to another lifecycle stage
• Add a comment for your team
• Start a workflow
• Send an HTTP request to another tool

For each skill, you write when and how the agent should use it. These are the first two skills on my sales agent:

So a lead that answers your qualifying questions can move from New Lead to Hot Lead on its own. Your sales team only steps in once a lead is worth their time.

The AI agent works on every channel you connect, and it can even answer phone calls.

The drawback: connecting the AI agent to other tools

This is where Respond.io falls short. Respond.io has integrations, but your AI agent can’t use them. The only way to connect it to another tool is an HTTP request, which means calling that tool’s API yourself.

That’s doable for someone like me, because I work with APIs all the time. But if you’re a beginner who just wants to get started, it’s a real hurdle.

AI Assist and AI Prompts

AI Assist is for your team rather than your customers. It writes a reply in the inbox based on your knowledge sources, so your team only has to check it and send it. You also decide whether it may answer from general knowledge, like ChatGPT, or only from your own sources:

With AI Prompts, you change how a reply is written. You can change its tone, translate it, fix the spelling and grammar, or make the language simpler. And you can add your own prompts too:

Build an AI agent You can build an AI agent that replies on its own.
Train the AI on your content The AI learns from your website, documents or files.
AI rules Tell the AI what it may and may not do, and which steps to follow. Also called guidance, guardrails or procedures.
Let the AI perform actions The AI can do things in other tools, like book a meeting or update your CRM.
Connect the AI to MCP servers The AI agent can use any tool that has an MCP server, without a custom setup per tool.

Respond.io Marketing Features

Respond.io has two marketing tools: broadcasts and growth widgets. On top of that, it tells Meta and TikTok which of your ad chats turned into sales.

Broadcasts

With a broadcast, you send one message to a segment of your contacts on one channel. That’s most useful on WhatsApp, SMS and email. There, you can reach people who haven’t messaged you in a while, for example with a promotion or an appointment reminder.

You pick the segment and the channel, and then write your message. A message can combine text, multiple-choice buttons and files:

Growth widgets

Growth widgets turn website visitors into contacts. You add a widget to your website, and visitors pick the channel they want to talk to you on, like WhatsApp, Messenger or Instagram:

But a widget only waits for the visitor. You can’t send a message to a website visitor first.

Meta and TikTok ads

If you run ads on Meta or TikTok that open a chat on WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram or TikTok, Respond.io sends your conversions back to the ad platform. So Meta and TikTok learn which chats turned into customers, and you see which ads actually bring in sales.

You connect your Meta Business account on the integrations page, and it sends your conversions back to Meta:

Broadcasts Send one message to many contacts at once.
Sequences Send a series of messages over time.
Proactive website messages Send a visitor a message based on what they do, like 90 seconds on the pricing page.
Comment to DM on Facebook Send a DM to someone who comments on your Facebook post.
Click-to-message Facebook ads Run Facebook ads that open a chat with your bot.
Facebook Ref URL A link that opens Messenger and starts a specific flow.
Comment to DM on Instagram Send a DM to someone who comments on your Instagram post or reel.
Follow to DM on Instagram Send a DM to someone who follows you on Instagram.
Story mention reply on Instagram Reply in DM when someone mentions you in their story.
WhatsApp message templates Send approved WhatsApp templates, for broadcasts or for follow-ups outside the 24-hour window.

Respond.io Inbox & Contacts

Your team can take over any conversation from the AI agent in Respond.io’s own inbox. One click on Takeover, and the AI agent stops replying:

That inbox is the best part of Respond.io, because it’s truly omnichannel. When a lead talks to you on your website today and on Telegram tomorrow, you see both conversations with that one contact. And it doesn’t matter whether they talked to your AI agent or to your team.

You can also create team inboxes, so your sales team and your support team each see their own conversations.

Lifecycle stages

What makes the inbox different is its lifecycle stages. Each stage is a step toward a sale, so you see at a glance who is still deciding and who is ready to pay.

You set up your own stages, like New Lead, Hot Lead, Payment and Customer. And you add lost stages for the leads that drop out, like Cold Lead:

Every contact then sits in one of those stages, and you filter your inbox by them. So your team always knows which leads are new, which are hot and which already paid.

Hand over to a human Your team can take over a conversation from the bot or AI, in an inbox inside the platform.
AI copilot AI helps your team inside the inbox after a handover: it summarises the chat, tells you the customer’s mood, and suggests replies.
Auto-assignment rules Conversations go to the right teammate automatically.
SLAs Set response-time targets and get alerted when a conversation is about to miss them.
Connects to an external help desk Hands conversations over to helpdesk platforms like Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom and similar.
Contact profiles One profile per person with their details and chat history.
Custom fields Add your own fields to a profile, like order number or budget.
Merge contacts across channels The same person on WhatsApp and Instagram becomes one profile.

Respond.io Pricing Plans

Respond.io doesn’t have a free plan, but you can try it free for 7 days, without a credit card. Paid plans start at $99/month: