ManyChat Expert Reviews, Pricing, Alternatives - SSR 2023

ManyChat is a conversational AI chatbot platform designed to help businesses automate conversations across Facebook Messenger, Instagram, SMS, WhatsApp, and email. With features like A/B testing, analytics, and automated drip sequences, businesses can use ManyChat to optimize lead acquisition, promote marketing campaigns, provide customer support, and more.

Founded in 2015, ManyChat positions itself as one of the leading chatbot programs for companies that need an AI tool for lead generation and marketing campaigns. 

ManyChat's user dashboard is fairly simple and intuitive, with a menu of the different tools and flows. ManyChat has two different interfaces: The Basic Builder and The Flow Builder. The Basic Builder displays all the generated message flows and some fundamental editing options in a linear, organized way, whereas the Flow Builder is a visual drag and drop interface that provides a structured overview of your chatbot and message flows. They also provide a range of ready-to-use templates that you can use for a variety of use cases. 

Apart from the chatbot builders, ManyChat offers basic to advanced growth tools that you can use for lead generation. Using these tools, you can drive leads to your chatbot from multiple sources such as Facebook comments, website widgets, QR codes, Facebook Ads, and landing pages. 

ManyChat has a basic analytics tool that helps log metrics like active contacts, inactive contacts, and net contacts in the form of graphs. They also provide analytics like the number of successful deliveries, open rate, and click rate for each block in your chatbot. You can also add their ManyChat Pixel, a piece of tracking code to your website to track any conversions coming from your chatbot. However, ManyChat's analytics are distributed across different sections like broadcasts, sequences, etc. There is no one in-depth analytics dashboard that outlines the performance of your chatbots. This makes it challenging to assess the overall effectiveness of your chatbot flows. 

Apart from the above features, ManyChat also offers A/B testing for businesses on the Pro plan, automated drip sequences, live chat, and broadcast messaging.

Since ManyChat's Pro plan is billed according to the number of contacts who engage with your business per month, it can get very expensive for organizations that cater to a large audience. For instance, if 50,000 people contact you monthly, you'll be paying $235/month or over $2800 per year. In such a scenario, choosing a chatbot solution with a fixed price per month is a better option.

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• A/B testing: Alter your message sequence with split testing, allowing you to send different messages to leads and see which they respond best to.
• Branding: Customize the look of your chatbot widget to match your website.
• Analytics: See who's chatting with you, your conversion rates, and how much time people spend with your bot.
• Automated drip sequences: Subscribe people to one or more drip campaigns and start sending automated messages on your chosen schedule.
• Chatbot flows: Create multi-step chatbot flows to walk people through complex tasks.

With ManyChat, you can also use these other features:

• Access to industry templates
• Click-to-Messenger ads
• Comment automation
• Capture user information
• eCommerce dashboard
  

ManyChat easily integrates with various platforms such as Google Sheets, Shopify, ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, ConvertKit, MailChimp, PayPal, Stripe, and Klaviyo. Apart from this, 1500+further integrations are also possible through Integromat and Zapier.

ManyChat has two primary pricing plans depending on the number of contacts the business expects to engage:

• The Free Plan provides basic features, such as channel integrations to Instagram Direct Messages, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp. You can also automate conversations of up to 1,000 contacts, access basic growth tools, create 3 custom keyword triggers, run 2 automated drip sequences, and create 10 customer tags to segment your audience.
• The Pro Plan ( starting at $15 a month) includes all the basic features of the Free Plan and additional channel access to SMS and email. Billed based on the number of contacts per month, it offers unlimited growth tools, advanced analytics and insights tools, unlimited tags, keywords, and drip sequences, one-tap contact data collection, and A/B testing. 

ManyChat offers a free 7-day trial of the Pro plan during sign-up and a no-questions-asked refund within 30 days of purchase if you're unhappy with their services.

ManyChat is ideal for small and mid-sized businesses, specifically in the Ecommerce space, that engage with <1000 customers per month. This is because as the number of contacts increases, the price/month becomes higher, which can be significantly expensive in the long term.

To get started, you must first sign up and link the channel you want to build your chatbot on to your ManyChat account. For instance, if you're going to make a chatbot for Facebook messenger, start by linking your Facebook account to Manychat. Then, connect the Facebook page you want to build a chatbot for. The next step is to create your chatbot flow by either using one of the pre-existing templates or designing your own from scratch.

ManyChat provides email support for both Free and Pro plans. 

They also have a private Facebook Community with over 103K members and an extensive library of guides, tutorials, best practices, and troubleshooting tips for self-service.

In 2015, Mikael Yan established ManyChat to help businesses build meaningful relationships with their customers. After completing his Bachelors in Psychology from State University — Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Mikeal pursued Entrepreneurial Studies at Open University Skolkovo. Soon thereafter, he built ManyChat - a chatbot solution to help companies do marketing, sales, and support through multiple online channels. Today, ManyChat powers 1B+ conversations every year across 190+ countries.