The Ultimate Guide to the Best Chatbot Development Platforms

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While chatbots are popular for brands and consumers alike, some might be reticent to build their own because it seems overly complicated and technical to do right. But building a helpful, convenient and informative chatbot doesn’t need to be tough. In fact, with the right chatbot development platforms, it can take just minutes to design a bot without the need for code.

If you’re confident in your programming prowess, many bot frameworks are available for hosting, integrating or designing a bot built from scratch. With so many platforms out there, the most difficult part of building a bot might be finding the right platform for your needs and experience level. For this reason, we’ve put together a chatbot platform comparison and best chatbot development platforms

CHATBOT DEVELOPMENT PLATFORMS COMPARISON: NO CODING REQUIRED

Chatfuel

Chatfuel is among the most popular and best chatbot building platforms for developing Messenger and Telegram bots because it’s fast and simple. With an easy-to-use WYSIWYG editor, you can get a bot up and running in just a few minutes. But despite this simplicity, Chatfuel isn’t without sophistication; it offers integrations into plenty of apps and services like YouTube, RSS, social platforms and more to make your bot functional. Unless you expect more than 500,000 monthly users, Chatfuel is totally free.

Botsify

This chatbot building platform is visually focused, making it an excellent choice for first timers or those without programming experience. With Botsify, you can set up a bot for Facebook Messenger, your website or your WordPress site. Less experienced users will enjoy using the drag-and-drop template editor to customize their bot quickly. Advanced users, meanwhile, can train and tweak their bots using machine learning. With other features like easy plugin integration and human takeover, it’s easy to see why Botsify is among the best chatbot building platforms. The service is free for one bot.

ChattyPeople

Perfect for ecommerce and customer-focused bots, ChattyPeople lets you tweak pre-defined personality templates to design your custom bot. Why is it so great for ecommerce? Because it integrates easily with payment systems like PayPal and Stripe. Because the service is beginner friendly, ChattyPeople is one of the best chatbot building platforms for smaller businesses who want a bot up and running quickly.

Motion AI

This chatbot development platform is most notable for its versatility and trainable natural language processing. Motion AI helps you build a bot for Facebook Messenger, Slack, SMS, email, web and Smooch—giving you a great amount of freedom without having to code. The service’s visual editor lets you map out your bot’s conversation flows, then build your bot bit by bit with modular parts. Platform access plans begin at only $15/month, making Motion AI an affordable development platform for your chatbot.

Gupshup

Great for everyone, Gupshup provides both coding and non-coding tools. This empowers novice botmakers to build the bots of their dreams, while advanced users can develop powerful and sophisticated custom chatbots from scratch. You can connect your Gipshup bot to all the major messaging platforms, including conversational UI assistant platforms like Google Home or Amazon Alexa. Gupshup also offers a channel for interbots, which can dramatically boost your bot’s functionality. Finally, enjoy fully integrated NLP without the need to train it yourself.

CHATBOT FRAMEWORK COMPARISON

Meya.ai

The first in our chatbot framework comparison is Meya.ai. This bot framework connects your bot to a dizzying array of different integrations, making it one of the best bot frameworks to tap your bot’s potential. When it comes to building bots from scratch, the framework includes nearly all the chatbot tools you need for development: a flow and code editor, live debugger, conversation visualizer and tool for testing the bot. You can code in Bot Flow Markup Language, Python or Node.js—then test and debug in real time.

Microsoft Bot Framework

Microsoft Bot Framework includes tools for building a bot, publishing it to platforms and sharing it to a wide audience. Using the open-source BotBuilder SDK from Microsoft, you can build dialogs for your bot using Node.js and C#. Once it’s ready, connect it to your conversational UI platform of choice with the Bot Connector. Finally, the Bot Directory lets you share your bot and discover new ones.

The framework offers sophisticated features like natural language processing and cognitive services. And this platform isn’t just for bots, though; you can also create a Cortana skill to open your software or service to millions of Windows 10 users with conversational UI.

Beep Boop

Beep Boop excels as a chatbot development platform when it comes to fast an easy setup for your bot. The service was originally for hosting Slack bots, but it’s since expanded to host Facebook Messenger ones as well. Simply set up your code on Github, then connect to Beep Boop. From there, link to your platform of choice and you’re good to go—that’s it!

Natural Language Processing Services

Some of the platforms above include natural language processing features, while others don’t. If you want to take your chatbot’s language understanding to the next level, NLP is among the most vital of chatbot tools for more intelligent conversations. Wit.ai and API.ai are two leading platforms for NLP; the former is completely free, while the latter is an enterprise solution. Its free plan gets you 6,000 requests per month. In addition to NLP, API.ai also offers speech to text/text to speech capabilities.

You’ll make great benefit out of these best chatbot development platforms. Don’t forget to sign up for Botanalytics and get your analytics data for free to improve your bot’s performance.