What is a WordPress chatbot?
A WordPress chatbot is, put simply, a computer program that is designed to simulate conversation. There are two types of chatbot: Rule-based and AI.
Rule-based: A rule-based chatbot is powered through a series of programmed and defined rules. These rules can be simple or complex, but the chatbot can only answer questions within the rules that you program. Most of the chatbots for WordPress are rule-based, but some have basic AI abilities.
AI: AI (artificial intelligence) chatbots have machine learning abilities to understand the context and the language of the users they are interacting with. These types of chatbots are usually more expensive and are not needed for most businesses (you can get by just fine with a rule-based chatbot).
The benefits of having a chatbot for your WordPress website
Chatbots are a great way to provide your customers with 24/7 support. With 82% of customers saying that instant responses to their questions are important, a WordPress chatbot providing quick answers to questions, at any time of the day, seems critical for business growth.
As basically a slightly more advanced FAQ part of your website, chatbots can easily answer all the mundane, repetitive questions that you’re tired of answering, so you can get on with more important things. Research even shows that 74% of users prefer chatbots while looking for answers to simple questions so the benefit works both ways, with chatbots enhancing user experience.
Chatbots are especially great for initiating the conversation, before handing over the conversation to a human. Or, if you don’t want live chat on your website, you can get the chatbot to take the customer’s contact details and get back to them. This is a great way of collecting data and generating leads for your company.
So, you’ve decided you want a WordPress chatbot?
With hundreds, if not thousands, of WordPress chatbot plugins to choose from, deciding on a WordPress chatbot for your website can seem like a daunting task. But, we’ll show you that it doesn’t need to be. In this guide we’ll go through the best and easiest to use chatbots, so you don’t need to spend hours searching for yourself.
None of the WordPress chatbots listed below need coding or developmental experience. We know you’re busy running your business, so we have chosen the most user-friendly chatbots to recommend to you.
So What Are The 7 Best Chatbots For WordPress In 2021?
1. Hubspot
Hubspot is one of the easiest WordPress chatbots to set up. With just a few clicks on their website, you can have your very own chatbot up and running, ready to add to your webpage. Hubspot is great for people with little-to-no developmental experience. They even have a free tutorial on how to set up your Chatbot, and how to build your Chatbot strategy.
This is a great choice if you already have the Hubspot CRM plugin, as you won’t need to install anything else. Simply sign in to your Hubspot all-in-one plugin on WordPress, where you will be able to manage your chatbot and easily add it to your site.
Hubspot chatbots offer:
- Answering basic customer service questions
- Offering Email subscription
- Book meetings
- Lead qualification
- Collect and store contact data
- Live chat integration
- And more
Pricing: You can set up a basic Hubspot chatbot for free, but you’ll need to sign up for a payment plan for additional features, starting at £38/ $45 month.
2. Landibot
Landibot is a simple, yet fun, WordPress chatbot. Instead of just the usual text replies, you can program your bot to answer with a combination of text, gifs, and emojis. This is a good option if you want your business’s tone to be a bit more informal, as it creates an engaging and relaxed way to support your customers.
Landibot is easy to set up and straight away starts you on an integrated tutorial. The chatbot builder is also a simple design, with a wireframe system of blocks and lines. They also offer pre-built chatbot templates.
Landibot chatbot offers:
- Answering basic customer service questions
- Email support
- Messenger and WhatsApp integration
- Custom CSS and JS
- Collecting data
- Generate and qualify leads
- Run surveys
- And more
Pricing: A standard bot with 100 chats per month and basic features is free, but you’ll have to upgrade to a payment plan for more chats/ additional features. Payment plans start at $38.
3. Drift
Drift is quite an expensive WordPress chatbot, so is only worth considering if you’re a medium or big-sized business.
The feature that sticks out the most on Drifts platform is their Conversational Marketing Software. This is an AI feature that identifies your website visitors and creates a personalised chatbot experience based on who they are and their engagement with your website. This means that your customers will get different chatbot conversations depending on who they are, and these conversations will have machine learning capabilities.
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However, there are cheaper WordPress chatbots with similar machine learning abilities, so it is hard to justify Drift’s hefty price tag.
Drift includes:
- Advanced Marketing and Sales tools (including Conversational Marketing)
- Drift exclusive tools such as Drift Intel, Drift Prospector, Drift video, and more.
- Many integration options (including Hubspot, Marketo, SalesLoft, google analytics, and more).
- And more.
Pricing: Drift’s plans are customisable, but usually cost from $400 a month for a plan including chatbot features.
4. Intercom
Intercom is a clean and simple chatbot with a lot to offer. A great feature of Intercom’s chatbot is its easy conversational builder, which can help you to avoid overcomplicating your conversations.
And unlike most chatbots, that will end a conversation at an email subscription, you can choose to give your customers additional options.
Their ‘business messenger’ chatbot experience also boasts 300+ apps that you can integrate into your chatbot, making it a vast and compact application. For example, you can sell directly within the messenger, meaning faster selling times.
Similar to Drift, Intercom also has an option to personalise messaging with their ‘custom data platform’ based on customer and behavioural data. And like Landibot, you can incorporate emojis for a fun experience.
Intercom chatbot offers:
- Answering customer questions
- Booking meetings
- Lead qualification
- Management tools
- Customer data platform
- Human takeover
- 300+ apps to integrate and extend Intercom with (Hubspot, Mailchimp, google meet, Shopify)
Pricing: from $79 per month (they offer a free 14-day trial).
5. Ada
Ada is another great option for a WordPress chatbot with advanced marketing tools and some AI capabilities.
Using 100+ languages, Ada uses Conversational AI and conditional logic to personalise your customer’s experiences. It provides tailored answers depending on their information, intent, and interests.
Like Intercom, you can also sell within the chatbot, which can increase selling times and drive new revenue.
You can also incorporate emojis, pictures, media or video into your conversations, for a more engaging conversation.
Ada offers:
- Answering customer questions
- Collects data and data insights
- Analytics dashboard
- AI capabilities with their Conversational AI
- Lead qualification
- And more
Pricing: Ada doesn’t publicly display its pricing, as it is custom. So if you’re interested in an Ada chatbot for your WordPress website, you’ll need to get in touch with them and ask.
6. Botsify
Botsify is a fast answering WordPress chatbot (with responses answered within 1 second) with an emphasis on converting potential leads.
Their instant page-messaging feature grabs the attention of visitors viewing your site, turning them into potential customers.
You can track online-users activity for customer optimisation and translate your native language into 190+ languages with their multi-language feature.
Botsify has basic conversational AI, in that it can recognise keywords that will trigger pre-build workflows. Conversational plans are also easy to set up with their story tree feature.
Botsify also integrates easily with WordPress, Facebook messenger, WhatsApp, SMS, Amazon Alexa, Shopify and more.
Botsify offers:
- Answer customer questions
- Superfast response time
- Lead generation
- Tracking and analysis
- Media incorporation
- Human takeover
- Easy integration to major platforms
Pricing: from $40 for limited chatbots and basic support features, but you will need to upgrade for more chatbots/ features. Offers 14-day free trial.
7. VideoAsk
For something completely different, and a bit more personal, to the rest of the chatbots on this list, check out VideoAsk.
This platform allows you to film yourself answering questions for your chatbot conversations. So instead of your customers getting chatbot text replies, they’ll get pre-recorded answers from you to watch. This interactive video essentially turns you into a human chatbot, giving your customers a more “human” experience.
You can easily set up logic jumps (routing rules) to answer customer questions and generate quality leads. VideoAsk also integrates with Hubspot, Salesforce, stripe, Calendy and more.
VideoAsk offers:
- Answer customer questions
- Interactive video
- Lead generation
- Tracking conversations
- Speech to text transcription
- Integration to other platforms
Pricing: Free for up to 20mins video or audio processing a month + basic features. Starting at £18 per month for 100 minutes+ and additional features.
If video chatbots like VideoAsk interest you then you should also check out Synthesia. It’s still in beta and not quite ready yet, but it’s a chatbot to keep an eye on.
With Synthesia you can create an avatar and generate videos from text. Videos can be up to 30 minutes long and you can customise them with custom image or video backgrounds and background music.
It comes with 40+ built-in avatars and synthetic voices but there is also an option to create your own avatar and use your real voice, for a more personalised experience. Starting from $30 a month, this avatar-video chatbot feels like it could be the future of chatbots.
Need some help setting up your WordPress chatbots?
Take a look at our WordPress support plans and schedule a consultation, we’ll be happy to help.
