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Chatbase is great for creating AI chatbots without needing tech skills, but it can’t do much beyond building chatbots.
Read this Chatbase review to learn more about:
- What Chatbase is, how it works, and its key features
- How much Chatbase costs and a breakdown of each pricing plan
- Chatbase’s pros and cons
- How Lindy stacks up against Chatbase
Let’s now discuss what Chatbase is.
What is Chatbase?
Chatbase is a chat application builder that lets you create custom AI chat agents trained on your data. You can integrate Chatbase into your website and other applications like Shopify or your Bubble-built web app.
The platform provides several chat-centric functions: By using a Chatbase-built chatbot, you can accelerate your customer support, generate leads, and effectively engage clients or potential clients.
If you want to bolster your customer engagement and support with AI-driven chat solutions, Chatbase might be a solid option. It doesn’t require technical skills or programming to set up, making it a viable option for many businesses and industries.
Getting started with Chatbase
After landing on Chatbase’s homepage, navigate to the Try for Free button at the top of your screen and set up a free account. After providing some basic information, you’ll reach the building interface.
If you want to learn more about the platform before building your chatbots, you can find some resources, like Documents, Support, and Changelog, at the top right side of your screen.
The help documentation thoroughly walks you through all the processes you’ll execute when setting up your chatbot. It starts with a helpful best practices section to get you off on the right foot and to ensure you build an effective chatbot.
You’ll also learn how to successfully implement some more difficult functions, like setting up an API, integrating with other tools, and building a knowledge base. If you have any issues, you can ask the AI-powered search function, and you’ll get a precise and actionable response.
You can contact support if you run into any issues working on your Chatbot. Additionally, the Chatbase team will inform you about recent changes or updates they’ve made to the software, which you can access by pressing the Changelog button.
Create a chatbot with Chatbase
Access the building interface by pressing the Chatbots button at the top of your screen. You’ll get the ball rolling by building up your knowledge base. Do this by uploading PDFs, documents or other files, providing a link to your website, or just typing the knowledge base in yourself.
After you’ve fed Chatbase all your data, click Create Chatbot on the right-hand side of your screen. You’ll then be ushered over to the building interface, which Chatbase calls the Playground. This is where you’ll breathe life into your chatbot by following these steps:
- Choose your language model: Chatbase offers a wide range of LLMs like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and GPT-4 mini, Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude 3 Opus, Gemini 1.5 and Gemini 2.0, CommandR+, and others.
- Set the temperature: This sliding scale lets you determine how predictable your chatbot’s responses will be. A lower value means your bot will have more reserved responses that stick to your data; a higher value allows your chatbot to let its creative juices flow a bit.
- Choose a system prompt: The system prompt is essentially a persona that your chatbot will embody — these include a customer support agent, sales agent, life coach, and a few others. This persona will help shape your chatbot’s responses.
- Provide instructions: You can instruct your chatbot, “You are an AI chatbot who assists customers with their inquiries, problems, and questions…” You can also tell the chatbot what tone to use, provide a better description of its role, etc. These instructions can help shape your AI bot’s “personality.”
- Test it out: Once you set all your parameters, you can interact with your chatbot as if it were live. Just type in questions from anyone’s point of view: Curious lead, loyal client, or disgruntled customer. You can re-configure instructions and even add to the knowledge base to pinpoint your desired response types.
Once you finish building your chatbot, you can fetch the embed code on your website by clicking the Connect tab at the top of your building interface and then selecting the Copy Iframe or Copy Script commands. Then, paste the code to your website’s HTML, and your chatbot should be up and running.
Key features of Chatbase
Chatbase allows you to execute the following:
- Train a chatbot on your data: Train your chatbot on nearly any data you already have, like PDFs, URLs (website addresses), blogs, technical data sheets, technical instructional guides, your Ph.D. thesis, and any other file source you can imagine. This means you can create your own customized expert in chatbot form.
- Customize chatbot responses: After your training, you’ll be able to tailor your chatbot’s personality to aptly reflect how you want to present the data it will reference. This customization ensures that your chatbot aligns with your brand voice, provides consistent meaning, and can precisely handle particular scenarios.
- Leverage analytics for learning: Chatbase offers advanced analytics tools that monitor chatbot interactions, providing insights into user behavior and chatbot performance. These analytics can help you identify areas for improvement, understand common customer queries, and optimize the chatbot's responses over time.
- Integrate with other platforms: Chatbase supports integration with several third-party applications, such as Zapier, Make, Google, and many more. This helps you deploy your chatbot on several different platforms. For instance, you can command your chatbot to conduct Google searches and report findings, allow clients to book appointments directly through a scheduling tool like Calendly, connect with your Instagram DM to live chat with followers, and much more.
How much does Chatbase cost?
Chatbase offers 4 separate pricing plans. Here’s a quick table to give you an idea of what you’ll get with each plan:
An in-depth look at each Chatbase pricing plan
Let’s examine what you’ll get with each Chatbase pricing plan.
The Free Plan
Chatbase’s free plan lets you build and test your chatbot at no cost. You can create one chatbot with a 400,000-character limit on training data, and it allows embedding on unlimited websites.
You’ll also get 100 message credits per month. Message credits are the currency that Chatbase uses to measure how much your chatbot uses the underlying AI model. Here’s how the credits are calculated:
- If you select OpenAI’s GPT-4 or Claude 3 Opus, you’ll expend 20 message credits for each response generated.
- GPT-4 mini costs only 10 message credits.
- Claude 3.5 Sonnet and all Gemini models require only 1 credit per response.
The Free plan is ideal if you have minimal chatbot needs, or you want to test Chatbase’s capabilities before forking out any cash.
The Hobby Plan ($40/month)
The Hobby Plan includes 2,000 message credits per month — about 100 responses using GPT-4 or Claude 3 Opus and 2,000 responses from most other models. You’ll be able to build one chatbot with an 11,000,000-character limit training base, making it ideal for handling mammoth knowledge bases.
You’ll get up to 5 AI Actions that your chatbot can execute, allowing it to multitask. For instance, you can have it answer questions, search specific websites to harvest info, and complete other actions. The Hobby plan opens the doors to Chatbase’s integrations, which you can plug into your chatbot for increased functionality.
This plan is excellent for individuals and small businesses seeking a robust AI-powered chatbot tool to handle customer requests, execute lead generation, or gather data.
The Standard Plan ($150/month)
This plan includes 12,000 message credits per month, allowing for high-volume AI interactions, and supports 2 chatbots.
The Standard Plan lets you add up to 3 seats, making it ideal for small teams. It also includes 10 AI Actions per chatbot, enabling more workflow automation and task handling.
Because of the message credits and ability to let 3 people work on the chatbot, the Standard Plan is great for businesses with a fair amount of customer service needs.
The Pro Plan ($500/month)
If you’ve got a busy chatbot and need to support high-volume AI chatbot interactions, the Pro Plan is a great option. You’ll get 40,000 message credits per month, allowing plenty of responses.
You can create and manage up to 3 chatbots, which you can train to execute different functions or work together in tandem.
It also provides 15 AI Actions per chatbot, so you can automate even more repetitive tasks and streamline workflows. This, combined with its large number of message credits, makes the Pro Plan a great option for larger businesses with many customers.
Pros & cons of Chatbase
Now, let’s glance at the positives and negatives that come with Chatbase:
Pros
✔ No tech skills required: You won’t need a technical background or any coding skills to use Chatbase. It’s easy enough to start using right after you sign up, so you won’t have to spend loads of time studying up or watching tutorials.
✔ Simple website embedding: Once you get your chatbot trained, and it's passed your testing with flying colors, putting it on your website is as simple as copying an embed code and pasting it to your website’s HTML.
✔ You can select from several LLMs: Some AI chatbots are limited to 1 or 2 LLMs only, but Chatbase gives you a bundle of options. This is helpful if your chatbot only needs to provide simple responses in bulk — in this case, you can set your LLM to a Gemini model or Claude 3.5, which only charge one messaging credit per response.
Cons
❌ Limited to chatbots only: While the chatbots you create can execute a variety of tasks, Chatbase is limited to texting only. Your chatbot won’t be able to assist you with inbound or outbound calls, organize your inbox, or negotiate on your behalf.
❌ Rigid pricing: While the $40/month Hobby Plan is priced well enough for small businesses and entrepreneurs, the next version (Standard) is over $100/month more. This may make it difficult for businesses to opt for Chatbase, especially when they need more functions than the Hobby Version but not as many as the Standard.
❌ Not ideal for complex workflows: If you need to design a highly complex workflow, Chatbase probably falls short. It lacks the depth required for advanced multi-step processes, decision trees, or dynamic interactions that involve conditional logic and extensive user data handling.
How Lindy compares to Chatbase
Want to create powerful chatbots and automate with related tasks? Go with Lindy, a strong AI platform capable of creating chatbots and other AI agents to support those tasks
Here are a few reasons why Lindy is the best Chatbase alternative:
1. Lindy creates multi-functional chatbots
Lindy’s chatbots can be connected to other AI-driven workflows, such as CRM updates, updating FAQs, and more. You start by building a knowledge base with your documentation, adding FAQs, guides, and customer support insights.
With Lindy, your chatbot can:
- Choose from a wider range of AI models than Chatbase, including GPT-4o, GPT-o1, GPT-o3-mini and all the latest other models, ensuring your chatbot is powered by the best AI for your needs.
- Easily embed the chatbot on your website to handle customer queries, provide instant responses, and escalate complex support tickets to real human agents when necessary.
- Automate real-time actions, such as processing orders, updating customer records, or triggering Slack notifications, allowing you to focus on high-value tasks like closing deals and growing your business.
2. Lindy offers advanced integrations and automations
Lindy connects with your favorite business tools to automate workflows — something Chatbase lacks.
How Lindy outperforms Chatbase:
- Chatbase primarily focuses on AI chatbot interactions, though it does offer automation capabilities via Zapier and webhooks. Lindy, however, lets you build automations directly in the platform and has over 100 pre-built agents that won’t require much customization to put them to work for your business.
- Integrate Lindy with many popular tools like with Slack, Notion, HubSpot, or your CRM to automate workflows, streamline operations, and eliminate manual tasks. Aside from the direct integrations, you can use APIs to add almost any tool.
3. Create a team of chatbots (not just 3) and AI agent
Chatbase restricts you to 3 chatbots on higher pricing tiers ($500 per month). Lindy lets you build an entire team of chatbots and AI agents even on the Free Plan (although you’re limited by the number of tasks they can perform.)
For example, here’s an automated customer support flow:
- A ticketing support module can log a customer support request as soon as a customer submits an issue.
- An email agent can follow up with the customer and request additional details if needed. If the issue is complex, Lindy automatically escalates it to a human agent.
- The agent could review the customer’s history of purchases and support issues, as well as the knowledge base (where you can add up to 20 million characters on the paid plans) to answer the question in a natural conversational way. Or it can continue until the issue is resolved.
Chatbase enables automation through integrations, but does not support multi-agent collaboration natively.
Frequently asked questions
Does Chatbase offer a free plan or trial?
Yes, Chatbase does offer a Free Plan that allows you to train and deploy a limited-sized chatbot. You’ll be able to train on a 400,000-character limit and choose between 3 or 4 LLMs.
Can I train Chatbase on my own data?
One of the main selling points of Chatbase is the ability to share up to 11 million characters with your chatbot and that’s all you have to do to train it. You can use nearly any kind of data like PDFs, blogs, a website, and almost any other text.
What if I exceed my message credit limit?
If you exceed your message credit limit, you can still use your chatbot without interruption. Before you subscribe, you can opt for auto-recharge, which automatically adds 1,000 credits for $14 whenever your balance drops below a set threshold.
Or you can manually purchase additional message credits at a rate of $12 per 1,000 credits per month if you need more flexibility.
If you don’t take action, your chatbot may stop functioning until new credits are added or your plan renews.
Pick Lindy to execute more tasks
Our Chatbase review drove home this: If you only need a chatbot, Chatbase is a great option. You can add a large knowledge base and easily setup between 1 and 3 chatbots which will only share answers based on what you tell it.
However, it can be costly for such a small number of chatbots and if you want your chatbots to have advanced functionality without learning coding or integrating with Zapier, Lindy is a better option.
With Lindy, you can:
✔ Set up AI-powered chatbots without coding or Zapier integrations
✔ Automate real-time customer interactions beyond simple Q&A
✔ Assign AI agents to handle different tasks in your business
For example, if a customer submits a warranty claim for a damaged product, Lindy can handle the entire process from start to finish. It can verify warranty eligibility by checking the order history in your CRM, auto-fill a claim form and email it to the customer for a digital signature, notify the warehouse team to prepare a replacement order, and send tracking updates once the new product ships.
If you want a platform capable of more than just chatting with customers, sign up for Lindy’s free version today.
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