10 Best Tools to Build a Chatbot for your Business

By 2020, 85% of the consumer interactions will be supported without human interaction, predicts Gartner.

Today, chatbots are smartly handling the biggest problem of every industry, i.e. providing 100% customer assistance. Healthcare, finance, insurance, e-Commerce, logistics, sports, entertainment, leisure, travel, and almost every other industry is leveraging the pros of chatbot. While a lot of companies are already reaping the benefits of automated convo system, many are still contemplating over its adoption.

Building a chatbot is easy. Considering the plethora of tools available to develop a chatbot with or without coding skills, having a smart bot to interact with consumers isn’t a rocket science.

In the following segment, we will acquaint you with some of the popular chatbot building tools. The list is a blend of some free and paid tools. While some of them will require you to have coding skills to get started, many of them are built especially for the non-coders. Herein, we discuss about 10 tools to build chatbots.

1. ChatFuel

ChatFuel started its bot-building services in the year 2015 and today, this tool enables developing bot for almost every industry. The tool lets its users build a chatbot without coding skills. It enable the users to link to external sources for information via plugins.

Bots build with ChatFuel: ABC News, Adidas, Jpark Island Resort, Persona, TechCrunch, MTV, British Airways

Supported Platforms: Facebook, Telegram

Pricing: Building bot with ChatFuel is absolutely free. However, you can upgrade to the Pro plan ($30/month) to remove ‘Powered by ChatFuel’ attribution from the persistent menu.

2. Microsoft Bot Framework

The bot framework by Microsoft includes a bot builder, which has got tools to build bots. The bot builder is an open-source SDK that offers support to .NET, Node.js, and REST. The tool will let you get started with bot building in minutes and with documentation available for every step, Microsoft ensures that you get the expected output.

Bots build with Microsoft Bot Framework: Skyscanner, Azure bot, Solitaire, Stubhub

Supported Platforms: Facebook, Kik, Slack, Cortana, Bing, Skype, and more

Pricing: Free

3. API.ai

API.ai lets you build text and voice based conversational apps in 14+ languages, including French, Japanese, and Japanese. Once initial inputs are provided to the bot when building it, it uses Machine Learning (ML) to improve the conversation quality automatically. The tool also comes with a performance tracker that identifies latency issues, low/high performing intents, usage patterns, and more for improvement.

Bots build with API.ai: Hubspot, Comcast, The Wall Street Journal, Giorgio Armani

Supported Platforms: Google Assistant, Slack, Facebook, Alexa, Cortana

Pricing: Free

4. Facebook’s Bot for Messenger

Facebook Messenger has got 1.2 billion, active monthly users, making it the second most used instant messaging platform. For creating bots, Facebook offers the best of development tools to the businesses. You can access Facebook’s guide, case studies, developer forum, and more to create a professional chatbot.

Bots build with FB’s Bot for Messenger: Skol, Sephora, Snaptravel, Globe

Supported Platforms: Facebook

Pricing: Free

5. Botsify

With Botsify, you can create conversational forms, have WP-integration, and create Chatbot for website. It’s easy to customize the form fields, get input from the users, and keep a track of your leads through social media. With the WordPress Integration feature, you can add your users into Botsify and send them daily digest to keep your users informed and connected.

Bots build with Botsify: Shazam, Apple, Unicef-NZ, Grin, RemoteInterview

Supported Platforms: Facebook, Website

Pricing: The Free plan enables building one chatbot. You can switch to Basic, Golden, or Pro plan for building more number bots, for more number of unique users, and other amazing features.

6. Chatscript

Chatscript is an open-source project, available publicly on Github, and is written in C and C++. If you wish to give your users a natural conversation flow, opting for chatscript is definitely a good idea. It’s a rule based engine, wherein the rules are defined by humans in the form of program scripts through a process called dialog flow scripting.

Pricing: Free

7. ChattyPeople

ChattyPeople enables creating text and voice based bots for enterprises. It facilitates creating, testing, deploying, measuring, and managing the bot. With this AI powered tool to build chatbots, a personalized experience for interaction between businesses and consumers/customers is created.

When developing your bot with ChattyPeople, you can use Machine Learning (ML) technologies and build data driven applications. Moreover, once the bot is deployed, you can analyze its working, check out user conversations with the bot and customize the experience accordingly.

Supported Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Skype, Amazon Echo, HTML5

Pricing: Free

8. Beep Boop

If building a bot for Slack is the aim, then Beep Boop could should be the tool you should opt for. The tool relies up on Github for code creation and Docker for Deployment. Therefore, developers can choose any programming language to add up the needed functionality.

Supported Platforms: Slack

Pricing: Building a bot for up to 3 Slack teams is absolutely free under the Tall Plan. You can upgrade to Grande Plan or Venti Plan according to your requirements and set of features available.

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9. Wit.ai

Wit.ai is used by over 120,000 developers. You can use intentes, entities, actions, contexts, and also incorporate natural language processing (NLP) to offer seamless conversational experience to the users. It has got support for over 50 languages and is available for the developers to be used with Raspberry, C, Python, Android, Windows, iOS etc.

Supported Platforms: Facebook, Slack, Telegram, and others

Pricing: Free

10. Meokay

Meokay enable non-developers to build a bot and works out for businesses to converse with customers and accept product orders from them. You can integrate Stripe, PayPal, bKash, and many other payment options within the bot. Meokay smartly push offers or deals to the users on demand (in between the conversations).

Supported Platforms: Facebook, Skype, Slack, Viber, Hangout

Pricing: Free

More Options to Build Chatbot

Tools like API.ai, ChatFuel, Microsoft Bot Framework, Chatscript have been into existence from a long time. However, with extreme popularity of chatbots and their contribution in maintaining a seamless business cycle, a number of potential tools are being introduced. Twyla, Rasa NLU, Reply.ai, ManyChat, KITT.ai are to name a few.

With tools like Chatfuel, getting started with chatbot development is possible with bare minimum coding skills. For building domain specific bots, if you are choosing a tool that requires professional coding skills, then opt for AI application development services.