Are you looking for ways to enhance your website visitors’ experience? Adding an AI chatbot for your website might just be what you need. These chatbots can replace live virtual agents, boost customer service, convert leads, and much more using the power of artificial intelligence. They are easy to train and set up to serve your specific needs. In this post, we’ve found the most accessible AI chatbot solutions you can use on your website. See our recommended list below and start creating a better web experience today.
Reasons to Use an AI Chatbot on Your Website
There are many compelling reasons for solopreneurs and small businesses to use a chatbot for their website. Now powered by machine learning and AI language models, these chatbots have become game-changers for boosting user experience, engagement, and conversions.
Before selecting a chatbot, it is crucial to understand the specific solutions each can provide. This will help you choose a chat software that meets your feature and pricing needs.
To that end, here are some key features AI chatbots can offer:
- Lead Capture: AI Chatbots are perfect for optimizing landing pages to engage visitors and collect lead information, email addresses, and other details. Use these for sales calls and emails for your business.
- Live Support & Conversational AI Assistance: AI Chatbots use conversational AI technology (like ChatGPT) that can act as live customer service agents that answer questions about your product or service in real-time. By directing users to the relevant documentation, guides, product information, or frequently asked questions (FAQs), chatbots can answer 80% of your customer queries so your full-time staff can focus on the more complex tickets.
- Schedule Meetings: Some chatbots steer the conversation to schedule appointments and book meetings, so your staff doesn’t have to manage those as much.
- Employee Support: AI is perfectly suited to help employees find the right information from across large business intranets and internal microsites.
- Feedback Collection: You can use a chatbot on your website to gather customer feedback. This will help you improve your website and products based on direct input from customers.
These are just a few ways you can use AI-powered chatbots for your website. In fact, you can even build your own AI chatbot from scratch for even more tailored solutions.
For now, let’s explore the best solutions you can use right now.
Best AI Chatbots for Websites
Generative AI inside of chatbots might just be what you need. Here are our top recommendations:
1. Tidio
🥇 Best Website Chatbot Overall
Tidio is one of the best customer support chatbots available. Most of its plans help people build traditional chatbots based on workflows. Still, with Tidio+, users can get the power of AI incorporated into an advanced help desk solution. It also has cheaper AI plans that feature Lyro AI to convert messages about FAQs and other routine questions. Tidio has everything you need baked inside, including analytics, a help desk, chatbot building, and more.
Adding knowledge to Tidio’s data sources is straightforward. Once trained and ready to go, the chatbot can be installed using a simple plugin (WordPress) or a code snippet on the site.
What We Like About Tidio
- Flexible Plans: Tidio+ has unlimited chatbot use, while Lyro AI offers limited conversations per your pricing plan.
- Handoff to Live Agent If Needed: When the AI has reached the point where it is no longer helpful, it can seamlessly transfer a customer from a chatbot to a live human agent.
- Help Desk Automation: It has an integrated Help Desk, so each conversation is stored and can be escalated internally as needed.
- Versatile Cloud Solution: Tidio allows users to use their mobile app or log in through their website.
- Ecommerce Integrations: Has integrations with WooCommerce, Stripe, and Shopify to help users sell more through a shopping assistant. Tidio can help recover abandoned carts and provide product recommendations to customers needing help.
- Email Marketing: Since it is a service that already interacts with your customers and collects lead details, they’ve launched an easy-to-use email marketing platform that keeps everything under one roof.
What Could Be Improved
- Complex Pricing: Tidios products have grown and diversified over time, leading to a patchwork of products and pricing plans. This has often been hard to keep up with, but it has improved over the last year. Since the launch of Lyro, pricing has become more logical and coherent.
- Lack of Data Exporting: Tidio easily allows the export of lead data collected by the chatbot but offers fewer data options for actual conversations. Pulling that data and analyzing it in other software would be excellent.
🥇Why We Picked It
Tidio offers everything one might want from an AI chatbot. Users can choose between a mix of solutions (help desk, live chat, and conversational AI). Tidio is also intuitive and easy to use. The pricing may be high for hobbyists or small businesses; otherwise, it is top of the class.
See our full-length review of Tidio and how you can use it for your business or website.
Who is Tidio Best For?
Tidio is an excellent solution for businesses with either a customer support team that relies on chat or an inbound sales team. It seamlessly integrates with leading website platforms like WordPress and various popular messaging channels, allowing you to implement advanced chat solutions wherever your customers are.
Community Reviews and Ratings
Tidio offers a solution that its customers love. Even though some feel the pricing is a little high, they still see its value. They also nail small details, like with their WordPress plugin—many SaaS companies build WordPress plugins but don’t keep them up to date, but Tidio’s plugin is highly rated and used.
Pricing
Tidio also has a free chatbot plan to get started. They offer a paid Chatbot plan that starts at $29 monthly. For AI chatbot plans, check out their offerings under Lyro AI.
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2. Botsonic
🥈Best Chatbot with Integrations
You probably have heard of Writesonic, but have you heard about its chatbot? Botsonic is a chatbot-building platform that lets you create conversational AI experiences for your website users. It features many integrations to connect your sales and support data to it for even better customer conversations.
Botsonic makes creating and designing chatbots that match your website and brand simple. Training your chatbot is as easy as uploading documents or pointing to specific data already on your website. It vectorizes your data to quickly train the AI to have on-point interactions with your website visitors. It’s an excellent no-code chat solution easily deployable on any website CMS or platform.
What We Like About Botsonic
- No-code Builder: Botsonic offers a no-code website chatbot builder with a drag-and-drop interface that is easy to design and launch your chatbot.
- Advanced AI: Built leveraging GPT 4, arguably the most advanced AI model on the market.
- Brand Customization: Chatbox customization allows changing chat window colors, logo, and avatar to match your brand.
- Easy Installation: It has a simple embed process that makes it usable on any website. It also has a developer-friendly API, allowing more custom integrations with web applications.
- Helpful Integrations: Integrates with several popular tools like Slack, WordPress, Salesforce, Notion, Shopify, Whatsapp, and more.
- Free Plan: Botsonic offers a generous free plan that allows users to have their chatbot hold 100 monthly conversations. That’s a great stepping stone before a business needs to start paying for it.
What Could Be Improved
- Slow Customer Support: For a company that builds AI customer support chatbots for other businesses, it is ironic that some users have reported that Botsonic’s customer support can be very slow.
- Training Data Formatting: Some users say it’s hard to know how to format their data so that the AI can accurately recite it. Sometimes, using large chunks of text isn’t the best way to feed it data.
🥈 Why We Picked It
Botsonic is about as uncomplicated as they come. It has an impressive pricing structure (with a free plan) and simple-to-use tools for building out chatbots. This simplicity should make it a contender for anyone in the market for a website chatbot. What had us sold was its integrations with other solutions that business owners use all the time.
Interested in learning more? See our detailed Botsonic review.
Who is Botsonic Best For?
Botsonic is perfect for website owners interested in an AI chat solution but doesn’t need a fuller help desk solution. Powered by GPT 4, it can help with customer support and assist customers around the clock.
Community Reviews and Ratings
Reviewers and users are simply impressed with Botsonic. They offer a compelling piece of software that is easy to use. They also love that with the paid plans, they can create as many separate chatbots as they need (with different training data for different needs), which makes some tasks much easier.
Pricing
Botsonic has a free plan with paid plans starting at $20 per month (before discounts).
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3. Chatbase
🥉 Best Simple Chatbot Solution for Websites
Chatbase is another easily trainable AI builder for businesses and websites. Known for its bare-bones simplicity, Chatbase allows users to train the chatbot using multiple data sources and build a website chat interface to help site visitors. It does not provide human chat support (live agent) but makes creating conversational AI experiences easier than ever. It’s the perfect way to create a ChatGPT chatbot specifically for your audience.
Chatbase makes adding custom knowledge from multiple data sources very simple. By simply uploading a document or adding a link to your website, you can create a chatbot that can answer any question about the content.
What We Like About Chatbase
- Easy Training: Chatbase is easy to train by pulling in files, sitemaps, or individual URLs.
- Lead Generation: Ability to ask for customer information (email, name, etc.) to help fill your lead pipeline.
- Tool Integration: Integration with many highly used tools like Slack, Notion, and Messenger.
What Could Be Improved
- Slow to Add Integrations: Unfortunately, Chatbase has been promoting specific integrations (Shopify, Messenger, etc.) on the homepage for over a year that are still listed as “coming soon” in their help articles. Development grinding to a standstill doesn’t inspire trust in the rest of the platform. They have released Notion as a data source, which does spell some hope.
🥉 Why We Picked It
As we’ve mentioned, Chatbase is one of the simplest chatbots to set up on this entire list. Not every situation calls for a complicated chatbot that does five different things. Chatbase lets users upload data, gives basic styling options, and can collect lead information from users. Other than that, there’s not much to break.
Want to see more about what we like with Chatbase? Check out our full Chatbase review.
Who is Chatbase Best For?
Chatbase is ideal for websites looking for another way to share information with site visitors. It does this in a bare-bones UI. Those looking for a simple chatbot solution for their website with low costs and a low learning curve will find Chatbase to be a boon.
Community Reviews and Ratings
Though Chatbase is short on help documentation and customer support, it has created a simple platform that users love using. Many people run simpler or lower-stakes chatbots than with other solutions. Most of the time, this works because they are after something easy to get running.
Pricing
Chatbase offers a free plan with paid plans starting at $19 per month.
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4. DocsBot
DocsBot AI is another grassroots chatbot project that helps users create custom AI chatbots. It does it all. DocsBot is like a custom-trained ChatGPT. However, it can also be installed on a website to benefit customers and site visitors. It gets regular updates and is built by a WordPress heavyweight, Aaron Edwards.
It is excellent for customer support, but DocsBot AI tries to make the specialized knowledge you give even more helpful with creative use cases. Not only can it be used as a website chatbot, but it can also be used as a custom-trained AI writer or personal chatbot. As an AI writer, you can train it to write marketing materials while retaining your exact voice and brand identity. It considers the full scope of your business, ensuring trustworthy content generation. This is really helpful since it can use customer pain points and know which features move the needle for them.
What We Like About DocsBot AI
- Multiple Integrations: DocsBot AI connects to Notion, Zendesk, and Intercom to train chatbots using data from other services.
- Easy Installation: Quickly add to WordPress with a plugin or embed on other CMSs with a simple script.
- AI Content Writing: Leverage your personal data to create an AI writing assistant with this chatbot.
- Internal Use: Feel free to use DocsBot for internal training and record-keeping. Always find what your team needs when this chatbot has the answers.
What Could Be Improved
- High Price: DocsBot is a well-built AI chatbot solution that comes at a premium. Its monthly pricing does not include AI usage—you’d have to use your own OpenAI API key, which is a separate cost from the solution. This is desirable in many situations, but for those looking for a simple solution, this complicates the pricing.
Who is DocsBot Best For?
DocsBot AI is a super handy tool for businesses of any size. It can automate customer interactions and provide a lift for content creation. It’s especially useful for folks who want to make customer support a breeze. DocsBot AI is an incredibly flexible tool with excellent developer support.
Community Reviews and Ratings
DocBot AI does not have many public reviews on major review sites.
Pricing
Paid plans for DocsBot AI start at $19 per month.
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5. Intercom
For serious support organizations, Intercom has long been a top tool in the space. It’s an all-in-one support and help desk solution and what we at Elegant Themes use! Intercom connects support agents to website visitors, creates knowledgebase, and now offers conversational AI to save more time. Fin AI is a capable AI assistant that handles routine questions and routing to make offering support easier.
Intercom’s Fin AI feature is wonderful. It helps customers and support staff do more by answering questions using a connected knowledge base. If Fin can’t help, it sends the customer to a live agent or adds them to a queue. For those with excellent support documentation, Fin AI makes it easy to pair those docs with customers as a first line of defense. Fin makes it easy for customers to find the right information and even converses with them using natural language.
What We Like About Intercom
- Live Engagement: Intercom facilitates real-time customer engagement with live agents.
- Help Desk System: Offers a complete help desk and documentation system for running a support organization.
- Conversational AI: Features Fin AI for a conversational AI partner that can hold its own.
What Could Be Improved
- Mobile App Features: Intercom’s mobile app is beneficial for managing customer interactions on out-of-office devices but doesn’t have feature parity with the main platform.
- High Cost: Intercom is considered one of the best help desk products on the market but comes with pretty hefty costs. It’s most worthwhile for medium and large-sized businesses.
Who is Intercom Best For?
Intercom is a great match for multiple types of businesses. Some industries that it handles well are eCommerce/retail, SaaS, and service-based industries with lots of support tickets. Intercom is great for adding a personal touch while staying efficient. Learn more about Intercom if you think it has what you need.
Community Reviews and Ratings
Intercom users love its platform, and many have switched to other services. Its live chat, help desk, and AI chatbots, pulled together, make a compelling tool for businesses scaling their support operation.
Pricing
Pricing starts at $39 per month per seat with Fin AI Compose and FAQ answers.
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6. Botsify
Botsify is an easy-to-use chatbot platform that allows small-to-medium-sized businesses to create, deploy, and manage AI-powered chatbots for customer support and engagement. It is built to help automate sales processes and customer support and balance growing workforce needs with AI.
Botsidy is also easy to train and easy to install on a website. It works much like others on this list. However, it stands out by having specific features and pricing for agencies looking to add an AI website chatbot creation service to their business.
What We Like About Botsify
- Multilingual Support: Botsify offers a multilingual AI chatbot.
- Whitelabel Option: Provides a white-label platform for agencies to offer chatbot-building services.
- Integration Capabilities: Integrates with popular messaging apps and platforms.
- Ecommerce Friendly: Integrates with WooCommerce and other eCommerce platforms.
- Agent Fallback: Features agent fallback for when AI has done its job, but it is time for a human to step in.
What Could Be Improved
- Needs Better AI Implementation: Users report that working with Botsify can be rather basic in terms of what the AI can do with conversations. It uses Google’s DialogFlow, a manual way of building a chatbot.
Who is Botsify Best For?
Botsify is an excellent option for smaller businesses. It has most of the tools they’d need at pricing that matches their budgets. They offer a do-it-for-you development team that can help build you an AI-automated chatbot for business and help deploy it.
Community Reviews and Ratings
Botsify is appreciated by agency owners who get used to the platform and can use it with multiple clients. The pricing structure is prohibitive for those who only need to use it on one website.
Pricing
Starting at $49 per month for 5k chat interactions across two chatbots.
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7. Landbot
Landbot is a versatile chatbot platform that enables businesses to create engaging, interactive chatbots for customer support, lead generation, and more. Their core product offers more of a traditional chatbot, though they’ve launched Landbot AI as a beta experiment for their chatbot platform. That brings more conversational AI to the fore which makes for better conversations and less training.
What We Like About Landbot
- No-code Builder: Landbot features a simple no-code chatbot flow builder that allows easy control over interactions.
- Customization: Offers a wide range of customization options and integrations.
- Versatile Use: Landbot can be used for customer support and lead generation to grow email and SMS lists.
What Could Be Improved
- Design System: Users have experienced issues designing some chatbots with certain elements like Logos not always loading the rest of the chatbot.
- Low Monthly Messages: 500 chats per month is low for the money compared to other chatbots, but its features and integrations may make up for that.
Who is Landbot Best For?
Landbot is perfect for almost any type of business that gets a low of incoming queries. With Calendly, Mailchimp, and Stripe integrations (plus others), its uses are many.
Community Reviews and Ratings
Most users very much enjoy using Landbot and recommend it to others.
Pricing
Free plan with 100 monthly chats and paid plans starting at $45 per month.
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8. ChatBot.com
Chatbot by LiveChat is an AI chatbot that brings a full suite of customer support tools to businesses. It enables companies to create web chatbots and reduce dependencies on a 100% human support team. Its multiple integrations make it easy to incorporate into existing workflows and communication channels, including social media.
ChatBot is a great platform for businesses that know their customer support and sales teams will grow on the platform. It offers multiple plans for chatbot usage on websites, but it also integrates with other communication channels beyond a website, including Facebook Messenger, Slack, and more. Customers can also extend their usage of ChatBot’s sister products, LiveChat and HelpDesk (all three straightforwardly named), to create a cohesive support and sales department built on the technology.
What We Like About ChatBot
- Advanced Logic: Utilizes advanced conditions and logic to steer the conversation in the desired direction.
- Multiple Integrations: ChatBot integrates with several chat services (WhatsApp, SMS, Email, etc.) to create a unified support platform.
- Customer Support: Provides customer support based on the integrated HelpDesk and can create support tickets.
- Product Displays: Displays product cards in chat to develop leads and even customers through Conversational AI.
- Visitor Tagging: Allows visitors to be tagged for powerful marketing and CRM segmentation campaigns.
- SaaS Integrations: Offers ten high-powered SaaS integrations + Zapier.
What Could Be Improved
- Low Message Usages: For the high cost of the lowest plan, ChatBot.com only provides 1,000 monthly messages. This platform can be expensive if not optimized and linked with their LiveChat and HelpDesk solutions. Best to look elsewhere if you’re only wanting an AI chatbot.
Who is ChatBot.com Best For?
For businesses seeking a customer-facing virtual chatbot solution for sales and customer support, ChatBot is the perfect choice. It seamlessly integrates with LiveChat’s other offerings, LiveChat and HelpDesk, to provide a comprehensive support system for any business. If your business has ambitions to expand on a large scale, the LiveChat ecosystem is worth considering. Need to know more? See our ChatBot.com review.
Community Reviews and Ratings
Chatbot.com is a reliable service. They have many cobranded products that are worth using together (LiveChat and ChatBot, for instance). The price can be a little high, but many users like its simplicity and the features it offers.
Pricing
ChatBot.com pricing plans start at $65 per month.
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Comparing the Best AI Website Chatbots
After covering each website chatbot above, let’s compare them based on a couple of different vantage points.
Feature Comparison of Top 3 Website Chatbots
Here’s a high-level view of necessary chatbot features and how each of our top 3 picks compares with the others.
Price Comparison of Chatbots for Websites
Price is easily one of the most important considerations when choosing a chatbot.
The Best Chatbot for Your Website
It’s easy to pick any old chatbot for your website, but choosing the right one will save you time and money. Make sure they have the right mix of features and pricing. Tidio is a great choice because of its decent pricing and tons of features. Botsonic is also worthy of consideration and happens to integrate with a lot of tools that could be helpful for your business automation. Chatbase is a rather simple option and should be considered if your needs are on the lighter side.
Chatbots aren’t the only way to elevate your business using AI. Whenever you have a repeatable task or something that takes a lot of manual work, an AI tool can often help you out. We’d recommend you look into the best AI website builders and AI marketing tools to help you stay on top of your website tasks and build your business audience.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can AI chatbots improve user experience?
AI chatbots can improve user experience by providing 24/7 customer support, answering frequently asked questions, and handling simple customer service requests, freeing up human agents to focus on more complex issues. They can also personalize the experience using customer data to tailor responses and recommendations.
Can AI chatbots work for websites that offer professional services?
Yes, AI chatbots can work for websites that offer professional services. They can be instrumental in providing quick and efficient customer support and handling basic inquiries or tasks. Secondly, chatbots can free up the time of human professionals to focus on more complex tasks and improve overall productivity.
How does AI influence customer interaction?
AI can influence customer interaction by providing personalized and efficient services through chatbots, voice assistants, and predictive analytics. It can help automate routine tasks, answer customer queries, and make recommendations based on their preferences and behavior. This can improve customer satisfaction, loyalty and increased revenue for businesses.
What is the effect of AI chatbots in engaging with customers?
AI chatbots can positively impact customer engagement by providing fast and efficient communication, personalized experiences, and 24/7 availability. They can handle repetitive tasks and answer common questions, allowing customer service representatives to focus on more complex issues. Overall, AI chatbots can enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Can chatbots work without AI?
Yes, chatbots can work without AI. Simple chatbots operate based on pre-defined rules and follow a decision tree to provide responses based on user inputs. While they may not be as advanced as AI-powered chatbots, they can still provide essential support and information to users.
Featured Image by Violet Sun / shutterstock.com
