UChat Review

UChat is a new chatbot platform with very promising features, such as creating chatbots on 13 channels, a visual flow builder, translating your chatbot to other languages and even a complete whitelabel platform.

But can UChat live up to its promise? And should you use UChat to create your chatbots?

Let’s find out!

User Interface

When you log in at UChat, you will see a dashboard with the latest stats of your chatbots:

On the left-hand side, you have a menu with all the different options, such as your Bots (per channel), Analytics, Templates, eCommerce and much more.

With UChat, it is possible to

1. Create a chatbot per channel
2. Or create one omnichannel chatbot for all channels

Hereby, it is also possible to combine the two. For example, you can have an omnichannel chatbot for Facebook and Instagram and one separate chatbot for Telegram.

When creating your chatbot, you can use the visual flow builder of UChat. With the flow builder, you can just drag and drop elements and create your chatbot flow:

If you click on one of the blocks, a sidebar will open up on the right where you can edit the contents of that block:

Furthermore, you can customize the theme of your flow builder and switch between different themes (which is a really unique feature):

Also, you can test out your chatbot flows by clicking on the Preview button before you actually put them live.

In general, the interface of UChat is really easy to use and it is also pretty easy to set up your chatbot.

Although it is really easy to use, the platform can feel quite overwhelming when first starting with it, because of the many features UChat has.

• 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

UChat provides all the chatbot elements to create your chatbot.

And I mean this literally: they check every chatbot element in the list below!

This is unique because I haven’t seen this before with any other chatbot platform.

Moreover, they also provide more technical elements such as getting data and showing that in a dynamic gallery. I won’t deep dive in these elements in this review, but just know that you can get a bit technical with UChat 😉

• 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 UChat, you can see all the users that talked to your chatbot on every channel in one overview:

If you click on one of your users you can see the detailed information of that user, such as their name, custom fields and tags that have been added:

With UChat, you can add custom fields and tags to users. Then you can use that user information to condition in your chatbot flows, broadcasts and sequences.

Likewise, you can create your own segments based on custom fields and tags, and use these segments inside your chatbot.

• 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

With UChat, you can send broadcasts to your complete audience or filter down on specific users:

Moreover, you can also send sequences to your users whereby you send messages to them with a certain delay in between:

Furthermore, and this is one of the best features of UChat, you can create a chatbot in any language. And the best part of this it that is really easy to do so.

What you do, is that you just create your chatbot flows in your main language (for example, English). Then, you can add another language inside your chatbot settings and easily translate all the texts:

Once you have done that, your chatbot is fully translated! And inside your chatbot flows you can just ask the language of the user and set the right language for that user in UChat. Really great feature!

• 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 UChat is pretty simple. You can group keywords together and create a reply for it. This can be a chatbot flow or just a simple text response:

What is also pretty cool is that UChat can recognize images, stickers, locations and more using their keyword recognition:

Unfortunately, UChat does not provide Intents and Entities within their platform. But it is possible to connect UChat with Dialogflow and use Google’s AI to understand the intent of the user.

• 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 UChat, you can create chatbots on 13 different channels:

1. Your website
2. Facebook Messenger
3. Instagram
4. WhatsApp
5. Telegram
6. SMS
7. Slack
8. Google Business
9. Voice
10. WeChat
11. Line
12. Viber
13. VK (Russian version of Facebook)

This allows you to create an omnichannel chatbot experience for your customers.

If this is not enough, you can also add your channel using the Custom API Channel integration.

Currently, it is not possible to merge contacts across channels and identify the same contact on multiple channels.

• 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

UChat has its own live chat, which is the most important integration of any chatbot builder. This live chat also comes with an iOS and Android app, so you can answer customer questions while you are on the go.

Besides their own live chat, they also have live chat integrations with Intercom, JivoChat, Drift, Freshchat and Front.

Moreover, they provide over 30 integrations with other software applications, such as:

• Zapier
• Integromat/Make
• Calendly
• Google Sheets
• Gmail
• Mailchimp
• Slack

And much more!

If this is not enough, you can also use webhooks inside your chatbot and integrate with other systems using this way.

Furthermore, UChat also has its own Mini-App Store that allows third-party developers to create their own apps inside UChat and share them with others (free or paid). Currently, the Mini-App Store has 32 apps that you can use inside your UChat chatbot:

And you can also create these kinds of mini-apps yourself using the flow builder of UChat:

• 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 an API inside your chatbot flow to send or get data from other applications?

Marketing

Regarding the marketing possibilities, UChat performs really well.

On Facebook, you can automatically reply to comments, connect your chatbot to Facebook Ads, use the One-Time Notification, send Sponsored Messages and use Recurring Notifications.

On Instagram, you can also automatically reply to comments, reply when somebody mentions your account in their Instagram story and check if somebody replied to your own Instagram story.

And with WhatsApp, you can send WhatsApp Message Templates.

Moreover, with UChat you can add a Facebook Messenger and a native widget to your website.

With their native website widget, you can create a website widget and change it to the branding of your own website by changing the avatar, colors and even the font of the widget:

This widget can be displayed as a small bubble, full page, chat window inside your page or even a pop-up. And you can also send pro-active messages to the user depending on the page to the user.

Additionally, you can also send a QR-Code inside your web chat and continue the same conversation on a different channel. For example, if a user starts a conversation and needs to go at a certain time, you can continue the conversation on another channel (such as WhatsApp). This is an amazing and unique feature, which I haven’t seen in any other chatbot platform yet.

• 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

UChat provides a free plan that includes 1 chatbot on 1 channel, 200 users and all basic features of the platform.

This plan also comes with a 14-day free trial for all Pro features. This is great when you want to determine whether UChat is the right fit for you.

If you want to create more chatbots or more users, you need to upgrade to the Business plan, which costs $10 per month. This plan comes with 1 chatbot (which can be an omnichannel chatbot), 1000 bot users, 5 members and all Pro features:

If you want more chatbots, members or users you can simply add those at some extra costs:

UChat also provides a Money-Back Guarantee for 7 days. So you can safely buy their Pro plan, test out their features within 7 days and if it isn’t the right fit for you, you can just ask your money back.

Lastly, UChat also provides a Partner plan, which I tell more about in the Whitelabel section of this review below.

• 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?
  10
• 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

UChat provides a basic analytics dashboard that shows how many users talked to your chatbot, how many messages were received and how many messages were sent:

Besides that, it also provides information on Gender, Language and the different timezones of your users:

Moreover, inside the flow builder, you can see to how many people a certain message was sent:

I think these analytics are pretty basic and don’t really allow you to optimize the chatbot experience. For example, it is not possible to see the open rate or click rate of a message, so you don’t know how successful a certain message or button was.

The same is true for unrecognized input. There is no overview of input that your chatbot did not understand, so it’s hard to improve the answers of your chatbot.

• 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

This is also a great feature of UChat. Within UChat, you can create your own products and directly sell these products inside your chatbot:

With this feature, you don’t even need to use a third-party eCommerce platform.

However, if you do, UChat also provides a direct integration with Shopify and with WooCommerce, which allows you to get customer information, search for products, get abandoned carts and much more.

Furthermore, UChat also provides direct integrations with Paypal, Stripe, Razopar, Billplz, Bizappay and Hitpay so that you can let customers pay directly inside the chatbot.

Moreover, UChat also provides the WhatsApp Product Catalogue Message, which allows you to create a smooth checkout experience directly on WhatsApp. This is also pretty unique, because I haven’t seen this yet with any other chatbot platform.

• 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

UChat provides 27 templates that you can use to get started with creating your chatbot.

With UChat it is also possible to create your own templates and share them with others.

Moreover, you can duplicate your chatbot flows and chatbot elements inside the visual flow builder, so that you can easily reuse them.

• Templates

  How many pre-built templates does the chatbot platform provide?
  27
• 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

Within UChat, you can use the Split element to perform A/B testing on certain messages:

• A/B Testing

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

Support

UChat has extensive documentation and Youtube tutorials on how you can use their platform.

Besides that, they also provide customer support via email and via their Facebook Community.

• 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?

Whitelabel platform

One last feature I want to mention is the Whitelabel platform. This is usually not a section I include in my reviews, but I think it’s worth pointing out.

In the Partner plan of UChat, it is possible to have your own whitelabel platform. This means that you have UChat, but then with your own logo, your own branding and your own custom domain:

This is also one of the most extensive whitelabel chatbot platforms I have ever seen. For example, you can create your own pricing plans and individually enable or disable certain features:

Or you can disable certain apps in the Mini-App store:

And even the iOS and Android apps for the live chat come in whitelabel versions.

This looks like a really promising feature for agencies that are looking for a chatbot whitelabel platform!

 

Conclusion

So should you use UChat to create your chatbots?

Yes, you definitely should.

UChat has a visual flow builder, all the chatbot elements you need, you can store user info, condition on that info to create a personalized experience, built-in live chat, automatically reply to keywords and intents (using their Dialogflow integration), publish your chatbot on 13 different channels, translate your chatbot into other languages and sell products inside your chatbot.

Besides that, if you are a marketing agency looking for a whitelabel chatbot platform, I definitely recommend checking out UChat, because it has one of the most extensive whitelabel platforms I’ve ver seen.

Go to UChat

When thinking of disadvantages, I can only imagine two:

1. In the beginning, it can feel a bit overwhelming because the platform has so many features
2. It could be hard to optimize your chatbot, because UChat only provides basic analytics