Top 5 Chatbase Alternatives in 2023
Custom GPT chatbot solutions for your website to automate customer support and lead generation
In the ever-evolving AI landscape, chatbots powered by ChatGPT have been a game-changer for streamlined lead generation and customer support. Sophisticated virtual assistants that understand and engage with users in natural language in any language are now only a few clicks away, enabling automated conversational experiences for end users while enhancing operational efficiency for business.
OpenAI not only made conversational AI more accessible to a mass market with ChatGPT, but by extending developer tools via their API, made it possible for startups to build viable businesses on top of ChatGPT. Before we committed resources to building Botsheets, a ground-breaking use of the ChatGPT API for lead generation, we analyzed more than 100 “Custom GPT” business solutions and we’ll examine 5 of the more popular tools on the market alongside Botsheets and highlight key market differentiators.
Chatbase
Chatbase was one of the earliest market movers when OpenAI released its API for ChatGPT. With the mass market just recently discovering the magic of chatbots powered by OpenAI’s transformer technology to generate content, immediately businesses were keen to explore the possibilities of creating their own custom GPT chatbots for their website to serve their customers.
Chatbase’s simple and intuitive user experience was easy to adopt. Its main use case was to help businesses create a conversational knowledge base to automate customer support. You could upload documents in a variety of formats and instantly get a responsive chat widget you could embed into your website. The early success of Chatbase and the developer’s quick path to market as an early adopter spawned a plethora of other Custom GPT “wrapper businesses” in a short time thereafter, yet all offering the same value proposition without any key differentiators. This quicky saturated the market with Custom GPT chatbot solutions for business.
Chatbase’s low entry price point was attractive for businesses, including a free tier to quickly experience value, but their higher tiers were priced much higher than market alternatives which made the landscape wide open for others to try and capture some market share.
Chatbase’s AI powered knowledge base for websites was well received, however Chatbase and the businesses they served missed the opportunity to capture valuable first party data from website visitors. In short, they overlooked the most potent opportunity for a chatbot…lead generation. When the market asked for the ability to capture lead data, the effort was mediocre at best, providing the option to capture a name, email address, and phone number.
The end user experience also resulted in shoehorning form fields into a chat session which felt awkward, unnatural, and giving end users little reason to provide input.
Chatbase is still a viable option for automating customer support on your website and creating a conversational knowledge base, but with it’s lack of lead generation capabilities, there are likely better alternatives on the market.
1. Botsheets
Botsheets was built on the premise that nearly every business already uses spreadsheets to manage data and the company doesn’t want to change that, but rather build an AI layer on top of software businesses already use.
While Google Sheets provides a structured data format that makes it easy to train AI on business data, the Google Sheets API provides an easy way to get data into Google Sheets. While businesses might be able to accomplish the same task using something like Zapier, this adds 3rd party costs on a per-request basis that can already be accomplished with Botsheets, making market alternatives overly expensive for businesses that want to collect data.
Moreover, Botsheets takes a unique approach to data collection by enabling chatbots that autonomously ask questions to collect data. While every other Custom GPT solution is using ChatGPT to generate responses and Botsheets does the same, Botsheets uses OpenAI to generate questions, letting AI determine what to ask, how to ask them, and when to ask them in order to meet your lead generation goals. It accomplishes this through a simple wizard where you simply provide a goal for your chatbot and Botsheets will suggest data points you will want to collect. You can also add your own custom data points.
The simple “Wizard” approach to creating a chatbot is quite efficient providing other baseline features such as importing PDF documents and scraping a website to answer questions too, and if a Botsheets chatbot can extract data from user queries, then that only minimizes the number of questions your chatbot needs to ask. In short, a Botsheets conversational experience feels much more natural with a 2–way discovery experience between a customer and the business that wants to engage them.
Of course, the Botsheets solution comes with all of the other standard features you’d expect, such as code to embed a customizable widget, and the ability to access transcripts so you can identify opportunities to improve your chatbot, but efficiencies are realized by accessing data your chatbot collects in Google Sheets where you can securely analyze, share, collaborate, export, and sync your data with hundreds of 3rd party CRM or other tools. If you work with spreadsheets and your goal is to automate data collection with a chatbot powered by ChatGPT, then Botsheets is a logical choice with a free plan and flexible pricing as you scale.
2. Dante AI
Similar to Chatbase, Dante AI was both an early mover in the custom GPT wrapper space offering chatbots trained on your business data with a goal of powering a conversational knowledge base for websites.
Pushing a no-code solution it claims powers more than 100,000 businesses, Dante AI’s claim is that it already provides direct integrations with popular messaging platforms including Messenger, Slack, and Discord. Creating a knowlege base is intuitive and with support for multiple file types including the ability to not just import documents and scrape websites, but also images and videos. However, similar to Chatbase, Dante has limited functionality to support a lead generation use case. The execution of it’s lead generation functionality is restricted to traditional forms embedded into a chat experience.
Forms already have a high abandonment rate, with form styling matching Dante’s user experience having a 60% abandonment rate. It’s very likely that while a Dante AI conversational experience may be helpful for support automation, there is a good chance these conversational experiences have a low conversion when it comes to lead generation. Further if you want to get data out of Dante AI into a 3rd party system such as Google Sheets, you’re going to be paying additional fees on a per-request basis using Zapier. With an entry price point of just $10/month Dante will provide some value, but that should quickly add up with all of the extras you’ll want to really capture 1st party customer data on your website.
3. Fini
Fini is another advanced no-code AI chatbot platform that makes it easy to create a converational knowledge base for customer support. Like others mentioned here including Chatbase, Fini takes just a few minutes to set up by uploading and importing documents to train ChatGPT on your business.
Fini’s chatbots will mimics human-like conversation and lets you configure the tone your chatbot will use, and enables smooth human routing for problems better solved by humans. Fini also prvides easy integrations with Slack and Discord. Pricing includes a free plan with up to 50 questions/month and with plans scaling up to enterprise and providing unlimited queries with volume discounts. While Fini does make it easy to automate customer support, it lacks lead generation capabilities found in chatbot tools like Botsheets.
4. CodyAI
Cody AI offers a seamless no-code chatbot solution aimed at elevating customer service and boosting internal productivity. Another Chatbase alternative, Cody AI turns your existing knowledge documents into chatbots powered by ChatGPT
Its straightforward setup eliminates the need for coding or technical expertise and unlike other ChatGPT wrapper businesses highlighted, it facilitates team collaboration. To note that it offers pre-configured use-cases and integrates effortlessly with third-party messaging platforms like Slack and Discord. Pricing is comparable to Botsheets at $29/month for a starter package and scaling up to $249/month. Also similar to Botsheets provides chat logs so you can track all interactions with Cody — whether through the Interface, API, or Widgets — in one unified place. For your convenience, you can filter these logs by bot or date range, simplifying your access to essential information.
5. Chatsimple
Like other CustomGPT solutions profiled here, Chatsimple is another ChatGPT wrapper to create a conversational knowledge base for your website. While Chatsimple includes integrations with Salesforce and Hubspot, ideal integrations for lead generation and sales, it’s end user experience for lead generation is similar to Dante AI and Chatbase where form fields are are “shoehorned” into a conversational experience and doesn’t provide an elegant solution for data collection the way Botsheets does.
Chatsimple’s capabilities though match the brand with easy document ingestion, quick set up time, multi-language support and customizable widgets for your website to match your brand’s look and feel. Pricing is on par with other Custom GPT solutions on the market starting at $29 and a “Free” plan which is essentially serves as a free trial of the software.
Wrapping Up
While all of these AI chatbot solutions are essentially wrappers on top of ChatGPT, which one is right for your business is up to you. Chatbase provides a simple entry level solution for automating customer support but falls short on lead generation. Others such as Dante AI, Chatsimple, and CodyAI offer mostly the same capabilities as Chatbase but similarly also fall short on the lead generation use-case. Botsheets, while deeply focused on building on top of spreadsheets, provides all of the standard features you would expect to automate a knowledge base but puts lead generation up front as a core value proposition with unique capabilities to generate questions and capture leads in Google Sheets.
