Chatbase vs Botpress, train an agent or build one

Chatbase sells message credits. Every reply spends 1 to 6 of them, depending on the model you choose, and with an action switched on, one question can take two requests to the model and twice the credits. Credits renew on the 1st of each calendar month, and unused ones are lost. The free plan has 50 a month, with limited access to models. Hobby, at $40 a month, or $32 a month billed yearly, has 700. That’s 700 replies on a 1-credit model, and 116 on a 6-credit one. Chatbase pricing goes through each plan and add-on.

Botpress sells conversations. One counts when a visitor sends at least 2 messages in the billing month, whether the AI or a person answers, and one that runs into a second month counts in both. Tests in Botpress’s emulator count too. Plus, at $189 a month, or $150 a month billed yearly, includes 250 of them. What the AI model costs sits on a second meter. Plus includes $25 of it, and Botpress says every conversation includes $0.10. The free plan has 25 conversations, with no period given, and no top-ups or overages.

So the bills track different things. Chatbase’s tracks how hard the model works, so the model you pick decides how far a month goes. Botpress’s tracks how many people talk to your agent, with the model’s cost on a meter of its own. Its first paid plan costs more, and from 95% of the quota it buys more for you, as the next sections show.

Choose Chatbase if you want an agent answering from your content today, without building anything. There’s a free plan, and Hobby costs $40 a month. The same agent runs on 16 channels, and it can act in the tools you connect, letting a customer track a Shopify order or change their Stripe plan from the chat. Check the plan before you count on those, though. The helpdesk, voice, phone calls and integrations such as Stripe and Zendesk start on Standard, at $150 a month.

Choose Botpress if you want to decide exactly how the agent behaves, and someone on your team will build it. You can describe it in Viber, lay it out in Studio or write it in TypeScript, and give it tables to query and web search for what your docs don’t cover. Botpress Desk, a helpdesk with tickets, comes on every plan, and Plus drops the Botpress branding. Budget for the packs, though, because at 95% of its 250 conversations, Plus starts buying more for you at $65 per 100.

Both are built to grow into a support operation, with helpdesks, actions and channels a team works across. If you’re a founder answering support yourself, and you’d rather not build an agent or keep track of credit rates and packs, there’s a simpler third option.

Most founders don’t want to build an agent. They want the questions their docs already answer off their plate, so they can get back to the product. Deacon answers those in seconds, at any hour, in the language your customer writes in, and only from your own content. When your content doesn’t cover a question, it says it doesn’t know rather than making something up, and asks for the visitor’s email. You get an email when they leave one or ask for a person, and the reply you type in Deacon’s dashboard shows up in their chat if it’s still open. There’s no canvas to lay out and no flow to draw. You add one script tag, or hand the prompt to your coding agent.

Every question your docs didn’t cover waits in the dashboard with an Answer this button. Write the answer once and it becomes part of what Deacon knows. Save & check then shows you the reply Deacon now gives, and how many other open questions your answer covers. The more you answer, the less it needs you.

It also tells you what your customers need. Every conversation is saved and searchable by what visitors asked. Topics group the questions, count how many people asked and label most of them, as a feature ask, a bug report or a how-to, so you can see what to fix and what to build next. That’s on the free plan too, where Chatbase records no analytics until you pay. And the same script counts your site’s visitors, where they came from and which goals they reach.

The pricing stays simple. Every feature is on every plan, the free one included, and the plans differ only in answers, knowledge, pages from your website and seats. Every plan answers with the same model, so there’s no credit rate to keep an eye on. Nothing is billed past your plan’s answers, no pack is added for you, and no plan upgrades itself. There’s no badge to pay to remove, and the free plan needs no card, has no end date and deletes nothing for inactivity.