Botsheets vs. Manychat

Two tools that help marketers automate conversational experiences, but what’s the difference?

Manychat, an early mover in the chatbot space is considered to be the leader in “Chat Marketing”, providing a platform for marketers to automate conversations through social channels including Facebook Messenger, Instagram DM, and WhatsApp.

The platform servers mainly digital marketing agencies and small business. One of the main features of the chatbot platform they provide is what they call a “Flow Builder”. This is a no-code way to design a chatbot experience. Here is how it works. You add boxes onto a canvas and connect them together. Each box, technically referred to as a “Node”, serves a different function. One might be to display text, one might be to display an image, one might be to add or remove a tag for a user, and most importantly the canvas provides an easy way for marketers to visualize their conversational experiences as they build it without writing a single line of code.

While you can quickly see the value of the Manychat Flow Builder after just adding a few boxes, connecting them together, and then previewing a chat conversation, the big challenge is that most content is better served by a database rather than a static canvas where you might add a few boxes.
Let’s assume that you’re building a chatbot for a restaurant and you have a menu of food. If you use the Manychat Flow Builder to manage this content, it becomes an overwhelming mess to manage.

This problem is further complicated by the fact that “Galleries” a box that would allow you to add multiple images and present a series of cards in a conversation only has a maximum of number of 10 slots. There are several use cases where you would have more than 10 slots and be limited

• Real Estate listings
• Restaurant menus
• Ecommerce products
• Events
• A directory of people

These are some obvious use uses cases where you would want to retrieve data from a database and dynamically generate content. Marketers, the primary users of Manychat, don’t have the skills or resources to set up and manage a database, but since they already work with Google Sheets to manage marketing data, they could use Google Sheets as a database for managing chatbot content.

Botsheets makes it easy to do that. You simply add data into our Google Sheet templates, and you can add a box in the Manychat Flowbuilder that can include commands to search the Google Sheet and generate content for Messenger and Instagram DM.

As you can see in the example above, a real estate agent could easily manage listings from a spreadsheet, while their Manychat bot could search the Google Sheet and generate a gallery of cards in Messenger. The content is dynamically generated and can include specific parameters to search and render the content as well.

With the popularity in Botsheets for Manychat, we then added a number of other features that allow a Manychat bot to interact with Google Sheets, including the ability to generate selection lists, so you could for example present options for users to select, an interface not natively supported in a chatbot. Here is a complete overview of what you can do with Manychat and Botsheets:

What’s ideal about using Google Sheets as a database for chatbot content, in addition to providing a lightweight database, it provides the ability to securely share and collaborate, so if you’re an agency, you can easily share access to a Google Sheet with a client and have them contribute content without the client ever needing to access the Manychat dashboard.