Chatfuel vs. MobileMonkey Review
If you are like me, you’re always looking for an advantage in marketing your business. It might be a new marketing channel, a marketing strategy, or a marketing tool — you can get a big advantage when you’re an early adopter.
Which brings us to Facebook Messenger chatbots and the success we’ve been driving using Facebook bots for lead gen, sales, and customer service. Before you can start doing Facebook Messenger marketing, you need a tool to execute campaigns.
In this post we are going to compare two platforms for building Messenger chatbots and launching Facebook Messenger campaigns: MobileMonkey and Chatfuel.
This post compares MobileMonkey and Chatfuel’s Messenger chatbot platforms based on:
- Overall ease of use of each platform
- Messenger Broadcasting capabilities
- Natural language processing capabilities
- WordPress CMS integration
- How much they cost
Note that both chatbot platforms are designed for users with no coding skills. Both platforms feature a visual interface (or GUI) and both can be used to design a conversion funnel or integrate Messenger with your existing marketing stack. Because of this, we won’t look at the technical specifics or how to design funnels with either tool.
And of course, as is always the case with marketing platforms, a tool is not a silver bullet for success. The most important factor is how you use the tool.
Let’s dive into the comparison.
Overall Ease of Use
- Mobile Monkey: MobileMonkey has a visual drag-and-drop chatbot builder and Facebook Messenger ad tools. It offers several remarkable content widgets and website chat plug-ins to stay efficiently interactive with the audience. Therefore, when customers you’re chatting with receive a widget linking to your website, they’re more likely to interact with the content.
- ChatFuel: Unless you are a developer, you will probably find Chatfuel super complicated to use. Most users are likely to opt for the ease of use from MobileMonkey.
Messenger Broadcasting Capabilities
- MobileMonkey: When you set up a Facebook broadcast in MobileMonkey it’s called a chat blast. You pick your audience, choose the bot conversation to send, and then schedule it. It’s a straight-forward and sensible workflow.
- ChatFuel: MobileMonkey and Chatfuel have a similar set up of for sending broadcast messages to Messenger contacts but because the chatbot builder in MobileMonkey is easier, MobileMonkey wins on this front.
Natural Language Processing
- MobileMonkey: MobileMonkey get Multi-lingual Support. Support for conversational language processing for 30+ languages is included.
- ChatFuel: That is an area where ChatFuel is far behind MobileMonkey in terms of ease of conversational programming.
WordPress Integration
- Mobile Monkey: If you want to connect your business website with the 1.3 billion+ users on Facebook Messenger, then power your site with MobileMonkey’s WordPress chatbot plugin. It works just like a traditional website chat window, where users can chat with a support team member or get answers to questions – but with the added benefit of getting information on every single one of those users and setting up automated responses. When a user chats with a MobileMonkey powered site chat, the conversation they’re having is being facilitated through Facebook Messenger. That means every chat bubble conversation will have a history.
- ChatFuel: ChatFuel it’s far behind from Mobile Monkey as far as seamless WordPress Integration is concerned.
Technical Support
- MobileMonkey: MobileMonkey’s support is astonishingly remarkable. It’s surprising how enthusiastic their team is to train you. You can find several guides regarding MobileMonkey’s setup and installation. Upon setup, you get a kick-off call which provides all the details of your subscription along with an onboarding training and consulting session. The team at MobileMonkey is there 24/7. MobileMonkey also has a 5-star rated chatbot training course.
- ChatFuel: Offers terrible technical support that is the biggest reasons why you should choose MobileMonkey over ChatFuel.
Price Factor
- MobileMonkey: MobileMonkey currently has several chatbot pricing packages that are sized based on the businesses advanced automation needs. The Free plan allows for an unlimited number of contacts, which beats Chatfuel’s free plan that is limited to 1000 contacts. Along with a MobileMonkey Pro plan and even more advanced Pro Unicorn plan, they also have a Team plan that allows for up to 10 Facebook Pages and a custom Premier consulting service. The pro package should suffice if you operate on small or middle-scale business. The premier consulting plan is for larger organizations with high-touch marketing needs. You can avail MobileMonkey’s Pro subscription at just $19/mo and the Premier Consulting package is payable at an additional $149/mo.
- ChatFuel: Pricing is based on how many contacts you have, and it quickly becomes very expensive; that is the biggest disadvantage of Chatfuel.
| Chat contacts | ChatFuel Free Plan | MobileMonkey Free Plan | ChatFuel Pro Plan | MobileMonkey Pro Plan |
| 500 | $0 | $0 | $15 | $19 |
| 1000 | $0 | $0 | $20 | $19 |
| 2000 | – | $0 | $30 | $19 |
| 5000 | – | $0 | $55 | $19 |
| 10000 | – | $0 | $85 | $19 |
| 15000 | – | $0 | $120 | $19 |
| 20000 | – | $0 | $150 | $19 |
| 25000 | – | $0 | $180 | $19 |
Summary
I have tried to be as fair as possible to each platform. Based on extensive use, MobileMonkey is a clear winner over ChatFuel for the following reasons:
- Ease of use: After testing both, creating a chatbot MobileMonkey is a user friendly experience as compared to ChatFuel.
- Broadcasting capabilities: The workflow for building a Facebook chat blast is simpler and more intuitive in MobileMonkey than in Chatfuel.
- Natural Language Processing: Here MobileMonkey leads by 2 points. Chatfuel includes a live chat and a visual flow feature.
- WordPress Integration: Here MobileMonkey leads by 3 points because of the tools offered to make the best chatbot for websites. Chatfuel includes 13 tools to grow your subscriber list vs. 8 for Mobile Monkey. The big drawback to Chatfuel is that you only get to create four chatbots with their free version vs. an unlimited number with Mobile Monkey.
- Technical Support: MobileMonkey has excellent technical support and deep content for getting started with chatbots as compared to ChatFuel. Here MobileMonkey leads by 3 points.
- Price: MobileMonkey leads Chatfuel by a point due to MobileMonkey’s unlimited contacts and unlimited Facebook Pages free chatbot builder.
Though both Mobile Monkey and Chatfuel are great products, my current recommendation for building chatbots is MobileMonkey.
Mobile Monkey Scorecard
You can also take this section as a quick summary of MobileMonkey service quality across its most important components.
Here’s how MobileMonkey scored:
Features: ★★★★★ (5/5 stars)
Safety / Security: ★★★★★ (5/5 stars)
Ease of Use: ★★★★★ (5/5 stars)
Price: ★★★★★ (5/5 stars)
Support: ★★★★★ (5/5 stars)
Growth: ★★★★★ (5/5 stars)
Final Score: ★★★★★ (5/5 stars)
Chat Fuel Scorecard
You can also take this section as a quick summary of ChatFuel service quality across its most important components.
Here’s how ChatFuel scored:
Features: ★★★ (2/5 stars)
Safety / Security: ★★★ (4/5 stars)
Ease of Use: ★★ (2/5 stars)
Price: ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Support: ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Growth: ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Final Score: ★★★★★ (3/5 stars)
Final Verdict
Well, there you have it. Everything you need to know about MobileMonkey is right there for you to devour. It’s a fairly new service in the market, but the customer feedback, including mine, has positive things to say.
In short, MobileMonkey offers a brilliant chat bot builder, an enhanced Facebook ad tool with several formats to choose from, live chat, daily webinars, excellent support, and the list goes on. The stakes are in MobileMonkey’s favor so if you take my advice, I’d say this service will be worth your money.