Manychat vs. Chatfuel: Which chatbot builder should you use? [2025]

You're probably here because jumping back and forth between Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and TikTok and answering the same questions all day isn't your idea of time well spent. Manychat and Chatfuel will help automate the answers to repetitive questions, nudge customers toward conversion on your behalf, and alert you when you need to be there for more unique interactions. And both apps now incorporate AI to make the chatbot experience more personalized for customers—and easier for businesses.

I've been using and testing both platforms to see how they handle everything from basic customer service to advanced automations. Here, I'll share my experiences using Manychat and Chatfuel, so you can decide which makes the most sense for your business.

Table of contents:

• Chatfuel vs. Manychat at a glance

• Do chatbot builders rely on AI?

• Manychat is easier to use

• Chatfuel has more templates, but Manychat lets you build flows with AI

• Chatfuel offers more control over chats

• Manychat is better for customer service teams

• Both apps offer AI agents

• Both apps offer Stripe integration; Manychat also offers PayPal

• Manychat's plans are more affordable, but its add-ons are pricey

• Manychat vs. Chatfuel: Which should you choose?

Chatfuel vs. Manychat at a glance

Here's the short version:

• Manychat is best for teams who want easy messaging across many platforms. Its clean, easy-to-use design lets you manage all your chats (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Telegram, WhatsApp, and SMS) in one place, and its basic plans won't cost you too much. 

• Chatfuel is best for teams who want website chat and affordable AI. It comes with website chat built in, costs less to use AI features, and offers lots of ready-to-use templates to help you automate conversations on both your website and social media.

Keep reading for more details on my experiences with each app.

Do chatbot builders rely on AI?

When compared with platforms like ChatGPT or some of the other AI chatbot builders we've reviewed, there's not quite as much AI going on here. Manychat and Chatfuel are both "legacy" chatbot builders launched in the pre-AI era, and while each has recently added AI features, they aren't as essential to the process as with newer apps like Zapier Chatbots or Chatbase. 

Most use cases for Manychat and Chatfuel are driven less by LLM-style interactions and more by classic branching logic and canned responses (e.g., "If customers request a quote, then gather their email address and project requirements.") Still, each app's AI features have come a long way: for example, you can now use AI to recommend products, gauge user intent, and respond to chats in any language. I'll explore more benefits of Manychat AI and Chatfuel's Fuely AI in a bit.

Manychat is easier to use

Manychat is nice to look at: it has a clean interface and a pleasing color scheme to help you distinguish each section. It keeps clutter to a minimum on most screens, especially when you're building a chatbot flow. It's easy to navigate the web of message blocks and actions as you set them up for your visitors.

There are two views to build these flows:

• The basic view lays all the steps out in a list, useful when you're writing the message blocks in bulk.

• The flow builder places the blocks on a canvas, giving you a visual scheme where you can drag and drop to connect each message and add delays, conditionals, and other special rules.

When you're in the flow builder, most of the settings are hidden, which helps you see what you're building with greater clarity. When you want to edit a block, you can click on it to reveal the left-side menu, letting you pull the knobs and tune the behavior.

Manychat divides flows into two categories: Automations, which handle the recurring questions your customers have, and Broadcasts, which act like email marketing campaigns by sending a set of messages to all the contacts in your list.

At some point, you'll want to personalize each conversation even more by using customer data and behavior. Manychat makes this easy by helping you add tags to each of your contacts (great for labeling people based on the products they're interested in, for example). Once those tags are in place, you can create flows that will only be available for people with that specific tag.

Tags aren't the only way you can separate people based on interests: it's also possible to set a range of filters—for example, contacts that engaged with your bot in the last five hours—and then save these as segments. Follow that up with a flow to talk to these recently-engaged contacts, offer a discount code, and watch the sales come in.

Chatfuel's user interface is less polished than Manychat's, and in my experience, less intuitive. For example, to select certain templates, you need to leave the app and go to Chatfuel's website; only then can you import the template back into the app.

Putting aside my reservations about the interface, Chatfuel's onboarding experience is solid. It shows the basics of a welcome sequence, a reply-to-comments automation, and how to leverage Facebook ads in a series of step-by-step tutorials. By going through this process, you'll quickly become familiar with the gist of building a chatbot, which is great if you don't have any previous experience.

It's also worth noting that only Chatfuel currently allows you to embed its chatbot onto your website. (Just go to New bot and then Website beta access.) Until recently, Manychat had encouraged its users to embed Facebook Messenger's widget on their websites and launch automations from there, but Meta recently decided to block this functionality, leaving Manychat without a website chat solution.

Manychat has a couple of clunky workarounds to this issue, but no real solution as of yet. If a website widget is important to you, this might be a deal breaker: according to Manychat's community team, they're focused on channel messaging (e.g., Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.) and aren't prioritizing development of website chat.

Chatfuel has more templates, but Manychat lets you build flows with AI

Writing just one conversation thread is already hard work. Now imagine multiplying that by two or three more branches to cover all the information your customers could want from your chatbot. That'll take at least four cups of coffee.

Thankfully, both platforms offer a set of templates to cut the setup time. Chatfuel is more generous, offering more than 60 templates across use cases, from email signup sequences to eCommerce solutions. Installing each template is straightforward, and you can edit every step until it's working as you want it to.

If you don't find anything you like and still don't want to start from zero, you can pay someone from the Chatfuel team to build a flow for you—including GPT-powered chatbots. This will open an Intercom live chat window, where you'll connect with the support staff. They're very friendly and reply quickly, so you can count on them to show you around and help you build the best bot you can to service your audience.

Manychat only has around half the number of templates Chatfuel has (I counted around 30 total). But you can now use AI to generate simple automations, which might have led to less prioritization of templates. If so, that's a shame because they're a great learning tool: Manychat's templates have explanations under each step, making each one like a hands-on tutorial to learn different aspects of bot-building.

Manychat's AI flow-building tool is good for simple automations, like creating a bot that triggers an appointment-booking workflow when users DM your account with a certain keyword. Ask it anything complex, though, and it sends you back to those same simple options. (Unlike some of the other "build with AI" tools I've tried, this one doesn't seem to actually understand natural language; it just looks for keywords in your text and then presents you with relevant options.)

Chatfuel offers more control over chats

There are two ways your audience can chat with your chatbot. The first is by selecting one of several pre-determined buttons, a bit like classic text-based role-playing games. The other is through open responses: people type what they want into the chat window, and the bot figures out what's going on and responds appropriately using keyword recognition or AI.

Chatfuel is highly accurate because it lets you create keyword groups, which help you bundle words with similar meanings together. For instance, you can gather all the questions people would ask to book an appointment; then, choose what the bot should do when those words are detected: Start a flow? Reply with your email address? Pass the ball to a human and start a live chat?

Manychat also offers keyword-based triggers to start flows, but you have to be much more exhaustive on the keyword lists you enter into the platform to increase accuracy. Chatfuel seems to be doing something extra in the background in this aspect, as it's more flexible and can still reply appropriately even if you didn't type exactly what your customers ended up typing.

While both Manychat and Chatfuel are getting better at using AI to infer your customers' intent without these keyword lists, for now, keywords are still an important way to boost the accuracy of your chats. This is especially true if you're dealing with a niche industry or topic, if customers are referencing product names from your catalog, or if your audience tends to use a lot of jargon or slang.

Manychat is better for customer service teams

If you're picking a chatbot to use as a customer support tool, Manychat is a better option. It's slicker to work with and has useful "CRM-light" features, like the ability to add notes to chats for your colleagues to see. 

You can access the chats from within the app—both on web and mobile—and reply to all questions there. When you're talking to a customer, Manychat pauses any automated campaigns you have for that contact so the conversation isn't interrupted by a discount code. You can create a set of canned responses that you can trigger with a shortcut, so you can send out details about your return policy without having to type it out every single time.

This is all great if you're solo, but when you need to service dozens of interested prospects at the same time, Manychat can automatically distribute conversations among all your available customer support agents. (Just keep in mind that this feature requires Manychat's $99/month Inbox add-on.) If some of your reps are better at answering certain types of questions—say, because they have access to billing and inventory—you can create groups and set rules to route conversations to different agents based on topic. This gets rid of the "let me just transfer you to Joan, she's the one with the invoice data."

For example, you could set up an auto-distribution that sends any appointment-booking conversation to the sales team.

Chatfuel didn't always have the live chat interface available on the platform in the past, but it's available now, and it works well. In addition to keeping all the chats together, you can trigger flows to end a conversation. This is a great touch to, for example, ask for feedback after a live chat session. But if you're coordinating with a support team, all you can do is assign conversations to your teammates manually by selecting them from a dropdown menu in the inbox. It doesn't distribute chats automatically, and you can't mark the best agents in your team to deal with shipping issues or to help with assembly instructions.

Both apps offer AI agents

Earlier versions of Manychat and Chatfuel could handle customer questions using AI, but this feature required a cumbersome API link with ChatGPT. Now, both apps have their own AI-powered features baked into the product. 

Chatfuel's AI agent, called Fuely AI, is based on OpenAI's models but also has deeper training in chat-specific contexts like sales, customer support, and eCommerce. After giving Fuely basic information about your business, you're ready to go. You can also specify Connectors, which you can use to trigger an automation if certain topics are mentioned, or to pass the chat off to a human agent if the customer seems to be getting frustrated.

My Fuely-powered agent was nice to talk to, but it seemed overly cautious—it kept wanting to pass me off to a human agent. Most likely, it didn't feel like it had enough source material to answer accurately. As you give Fuely more information about your business and services, along with common customer questions, this should happen less. 

I found Manychat AI a lot easier to work with. For one, the AI feature has its own pop-up dialogue rather than being buried in the flow builder, as Chatfuel's is. And the setup process is more user-friendly too: you can easily set your overall goal (e.g., generate leads), assign tasks for AI to focus on, and provide information for it to refer to when handling questions. Then, you can instantly test your AI agent by asking it questions.

Another useful Manychat AI feature is called AI step. Rather than letting AI engage with customers from the start of the chat, you can limit AI interaction to the portions of your workflow that benefit from it most (reducing the risk of your AI agent hallucinating or getting too far off track). For example, you might use a standard workflow to gather your customer's name, email, and product interests, before deploying an AI step to give more engaging and customized advice based on the information you've collected.

The only drawback to Manychat AI is price. Unlike Chatfuel, which includes ChatGPT access, Manychat AI is a pricey $29/month add-on. 

Both apps offer Stripe integration for online payments; Manychat also offers PayPal

Chatfuel and Manychat will give you frictionless shopping via Facebook Messenger: both integrate with Stripe, bringing online payment processing into the world of automated chats.

With both apps, you can add your products from your Facebook product inventory, offer them during the conversation, and your audience can click the buy button to get them. Once they do, they can complete the transaction right there and then.

One difference here lies in the presentation of each product. Manychat goes on a one-by-one basis, letting you add an image, customize the copy, and add the buy button at the end. Chatfuel lets you bundle up to 10 products on each block, which is better if you have a deep catalog.

In addition to Stripe, Manychat also offers PayPal integration. It's not as easy to connect—you have to set up some webhooks yourself—but the help article is clear enough to help you tie all the wires together.

Fortunately, both Manychat and Chatfuel integrate with Zapier, so you can connect either of them to nearly any app you can think of, getting contacts where you need them and streamlining notifications. Learn more about how to automate Manychat, or use one of these pre-made workflows for both apps to get started.

Manychat's plans are more affordable, but its add-ons are pricey

Chatfuel's pricing page gave me a headache after about 60 seconds of looking at it. Want to sign up? First, you need to decide whether you need to use the app for WhatsApp or for Facebook and Instagram. Want both? That's two separate subscriptions; each subscription has its own pricing plan that varies based on the number of monthly conversations you have (with varying surcharges when you go over your monthly allotment).

Chatfuel doesn't offer a free plan, but you can sign up for a trial that gives you 50 free conversations before requiring an upgrade to a paid plan. Its Facebook and Instagram plan starts at $23.99 for 1,000 conversations/month, while its WhatsApp plan costs $34.49 for 1,000 conversations/month. (Enterprise plans start at $300/month.)

Manychat's more straightforward plans make it easier to get started, and it's also more affordable—as long as you don't need advanced features. If you have under 1,000 contacts, you can use Manychat's free plan, which manages chats on Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and TikTok. The Pro plan, starting at $15/month for 500 contacts and $25 for 1,000 contacts, adds WhatsApp, SMS, and email. (WhatsApp levies a separate per-conversation fee—typically around $0.01-$0.02—so you'll need to top up your Manychat account with credits to handle that.)

However, Manychat gets pricier if you want Manychat AI, which costs an extra $29/month, or Inbox (for customer service), which costs $99/month for three seats.

Manychat vs. Chatfuel: Which should you choose?

Go with Manychat if you want an easy way to automate lots of messaging channels. The interface is clean and simple, and you can manage all your chats (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, TikTok, Telegram, and SMS) in one spot. It's great if you're just starting out since it's free for your first 1,000 contacts, and it's easy to bring in a support team later when needed.

Go with Chatfuel if you want website chat and cheaper AI features. While you'll need to pay for separate plans if you use both WhatsApp and Facebook/Instagram, Chatfuel's AI is powerful and comes included in your plan. You also get a chat widget for your website, and lots of ready-made templates to help you get started quickly.

Related reading:

• 4 chatbot tips from business owners

• How to create a chatbot that works for you and your customers

• The best chatbot builders

This article was originally published in 2018. The most recent update was in February 2025.