Chatbase vs Botsonic, compared on price, limits and handoff

Chatbase sells message credits, and what a reply costs depends on the model you pick, from 1 credit on smaller models to 6 on the largest Claude models. With an action switched on, one question can take two requests to the model and twice the credits. Credits renew on the first of each month and don’t carry over. So Hobby, at $40 a month, buys up to 700 replies, and fewer if you choose a bigger model. Standard is $150 for 4,000 credits and Pro $500 for 15,000.

Botsonic sells messages, and fixes the model by plan. Starter, at $19 a month, gives you 1,000 messages on GPT-4o mini. Professional, at $49, gives you 3,000 and adds GPT-4o, which Botsonic’s docs mark as using twice the messages. Advanced is $299 for 12,000. Run short and you can add messages part-way through the month, from $25 for 2,000, charged for the days left.

So Botsonic’s first plan costs less and carries a bigger allowance, though neither its pricing page nor its docs say exactly what counts as a message. The catch is in what you add. Taking the badge off costs $49 a month on Botsonic and $99 on Chatbase. A live handoff to a person costs Botsonic’s $199 Zendesk add-on, plus a Zendesk account, or Chatbase’s Standard plan at $150. For a founder, those extras are often the bigger part of the bill.

Choose Chatbase if you want room to grow into a full support platform. You can start free, pick from many models, and later add things Botsonic’s pricing page doesn’t list, its own helpdesk with takeover, phone calls, email and Instagram, and ready-made actions such as order lookups and refunds in Stripe and Shopify. Most of that starts on Standard, at $150 a month.

Choose Botsonic if you want a simple bot on your site and on messaging apps for the lowest first bill. Starter’s 1,000 messages come with WhatsApp, Messenger and Telegram, and removing the badge costs half what Chatbase charges. If you already run Zendesk, its handoff add-on puts your agents in the chat.

Both leave a founder with the same gap. When the AI can’t help, getting a person into the chat means a helpdesk, either Chatbase’s on a bigger plan or a Zendesk account behind Botsonic. And what customers ask about is kept for Chatbase’s Pro plan and Botsonic’s Enterprise. If you answer support yourself, there’s a third option.

The same questions arrive every day, and each one pulls you away from building. Deacon answers them on your site in seconds, at any hour, from your own docs and in the language your customer writes in. When your docs don’t cover something, it says it doesn’t know instead of guessing, 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, straight into their chat. That works on every plan, with no helpdesk behind it.

Then you write the answer once. Every question your docs missed is listed with an Answer this button, on every plan. What you write becomes a source Deacon answers from, so it can answer the next person who asks, and Save & check shows you the reply it now gives and how many other open questions your answer covers. The more you answer, the less it needs you.

You also see what customers are stuck on and what they want next. Every conversation is saved and searchable by what visitors asked. Topics group the questions, count the people who asked and label most of them, for example as a feature ask, a bug report or a how-to. That’s on the free plan too, and the same script counts your visitors, where they came from and which goals they reach.

The price has no add-ons to find later. Every feature is on every plan, the plans differ only in answers, knowledge, crawled pages and seats, and every plan answers with the same model, so nothing runs out faster on a better one. Nothing is billed past your plan’s answers, no plan upgrades itself, and there’s no badge to pay to remove. The free plan needs no card, has no end date and deletes nothing for inactivity.