Botpress vs Voiceflow, two chatbot builders compared

Botpress charges by the conversation, which it counts once a visitor sends at least 2 messages in the billing month. Plus is $189 a month, or $150 a month billed yearly, for 250 conversations, and Team is $939 a month, or $750 billed yearly, for 1,500. The AI model’s cost comes off a second allowance, $25 on Plus and $150 on Team. Before you reach either, Botpress buys more for you. At 95% of the conversation quota it adds a pack of 100, at $65 on Plus, and it won’t let you turn that off. At 95% of the AI allowance it buys a $10 grant at cost. The free plan has 25 conversations, with no period given and no top-ups.

Voiceflow’s pricing page shows no plans or prices. It offers agencies a free trial without a card and businesses a demo. Its billing documentation names four plans, Free, Pro, Business and Enterprise, and says their current prices are inside Voiceflow, under Plans and Billing. Free is a one-time grant of credits that doesn’t renew. Paid plans get a monthly allowance that resets each billing cycle, and auto top-ups stay off until you switch them on.

What Voiceflow does publish is what each thing costs in credits. A visitor message is $0.005, the model’s tokens are charged by the thousand at each model’s rate, and a phone call is $0.05 a minute, plus speech-to-text and text-to-speech. So on Botpress you can price a month before you sign up, and the bill can grow on its own past the quota. On Voiceflow you can price a message, but not a plan, until you’re inside.

Choose Botpress if your customers write to you on WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram or Messenger, or if you want a helpdesk in the same product. Botpress Desk comes with every plan, the free one included. It also suits a developer who’d rather write the agent in TypeScript than draw it, and a buyer who wants the prices up front. Plan for the packs, though, because from 95% of its quota Plus adds 100 conversations at a time for $65.

Choose Voiceflow if the phone matters. It makes and takes calls on a number that comes with your plan, where Botpress keeps voice for Enterprise. It also suits a team that wants each step under control, with environments for testing, A/B traffic splits and AI scoring of transcripts, and agencies building for clients. Handoffs go to a contact centre you already run, such as Zendesk, and you’ll need to sign up to see the price.

Both assume you want to build an agent, and someone has to design it, test it and keep it working. If what you want is the questions your docs already answer taken off your plate, there’s a third option with nothing to build.

When you run support yourself, every hour spent on it is an hour away from the product, and an agent you have to build is one more product to maintain. Deacon skips the build. It reads your docs, website and files, and answers your customers from them in seconds, at any hour, in whatever language they write in. When your content doesn’t cover a question, it says it doesn’t know instead of inventing an answer, and asks for the visitor’s email. You get an email when they leave one or ask for a person, and you reply from Deacon’s dashboard, with no helpdesk to set up. Install is one script tag, or a prompt your coding agent follows.

Deacon gets better the more you answer. Each question your docs didn’t cover appears with an Answer this button, and the answer you write becomes a source Deacon answers from. Save & check shows you the reply it now gives, and how many other open questions your answer covers, so over time it needs you less.

It also turns support into customer insights. Every conversation is saved and searchable by what visitors asked, and Topics group the questions, count who asked and label most of them, as a how-to, a feature ask, a bug report and so on. Analytics › Widget shows how many people wrote in, the share answered and the languages they wrote in. The same script counts your visitors, their sources, goals and funnels, and the JavaScript errors they hit, with no second tool to add.

And the bill doesn’t move on its own. Every feature is on every plan, the free one included, and the plans differ only in answers, knowledge, pages from your website and seats. There are no packs bought for you and no per-message rates. Nothing is billed past your plan’s answers, no plan upgrades itself, and no plan carries a badge to pay to remove. The free plan needs no card, has no end date and deletes nothing for inactivity.