Marketplace
Manychat
A chatbot builder for Instagram and Facebook that handles most of what a small business needs from DMs, then charges by how many people use it.
Our assessment
What is good
- +Free plan with 25 contacts and two channels lets you test before committing
- +Visual builder requires no coding or technical setup
- +AI conversations on Pro plan handle questions outside scripted flows
- +Unlimited automations on paid plans from $14 a month
- +Works across Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, and SMS from one interface
What to know first
- −Contact limit of 25 on free plan too low to handle real traffic
- −No built-in CRM or revenue tracking; relies on third-party integrations
- −Only works on Meta platforms and SMS; no support for email, Telegram, or web chat
- −Per-contact pricing above plan limits adds up quickly for high-traffic accounts
- −Documentation explains features but not how to structure automations for business goals
Buy it for
Small businesses that sell or take bookings through Instagram, Facebook, or WhatsApp and need to automate replies without learning to code.Do not buy it for
Anyone who needs a CRM, runs customer service outside Meta platforms, or wants to track revenue and attribution in the same tool.The full read
Manychat automates responses on Instagram, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and TikTok. You build conversation flows with a visual editor, trigger them from keywords or menu taps, and collect contact details or route questions to a human. It is built for businesses that sell through social media and need to answer the same questions hundreds of times without hiring someone to sit on Instagram all day.
The free plan gives you 25 active contacts a month — one contact is someone who interacts with your bot in a thirty-day window — and lets you connect two channels. You get four automations, which is enough to handle a welcome message and a FAQ, but not enough to run a product catalogue or a booking system. The Essential plan at $14 a month raises the contact limit to 250 and removes the cap on automations. Once you pass 250 contacts, you pay per contact above that.
The Pro plan at $29 a month includes 2,500 contacts and adds AI-powered conversations that can answer questions outside your scripted flows. That matters if your product range changes often or if you cannot predict what people will ask. Three users can work in the account at once, which makes it viable for a team rather than a single operator.
Manychat is a workflow tool, not a CRM. It stores conversation history and contact details, but it does not track purchase behaviour or lifetime value the way a dedicated customer platform would. Integrations exist for Shopify, HubSpot, and Google Sheets, so you can push data elsewhere, but you are responsible for connecting the pieces. The analytics show open rates and click-through on buttons, not revenue or conversion beyond what you tag manually.
Support is email and live chat on paid plans, with a help centre that assumes you know what a trigger is and what a flow does. There is no phone line. The documentation is thorough on what the tool can do and thin on why you would do it, so you need a clear idea of your automation before you start building.
It competes with MobileMonkey and Chatfuel on price, and with Intercom and Drift on features. Manychat is cheaper than Intercom and simpler than Drift, but it only works on the platforms it supports — if your customers are on Telegram or email, it does nothing. Where it works, it works well. A business doing $10,000 a month in Instagram sales will recoup the Pro plan cost in the first day if it keeps one person from answering DMs full-time.
Written 2026-09-01 by payless.host. Performance figures come from independent testers who publish their method. The section above is our own assessment. The prices below are copied from the provider's pricing page and are not affected by it.
What it costs
Manychat lists $0 a month with no separate renewal rate — the price is the same in the first term and afterwards. The three-year total below is simply thirty-six times that.
Prices read from the provider's own pricing page on 2026-09-01.
https://manychat.com/pricing
Where the introductory term or the renewal rate is not published, the three-year column is left blank rather than estimated.
We earn a commission when someone buys through our links. It has no effect on the figures above, which are read from the provider's own page and published as they are.