Chatbots have become one of the easiest ways for small businesses, marketers, and e-commerce teams to stay available 24/7 without growing headcount. A good bot can greet website visitors, answer routine questions, collect leads, nudge shoppers back to their abandoned carts, and even route complex issues to your team. Instead of juggling dozens of chats manually, you can let automation handle the repetitive conversations and step in only when a human touch is really needed.
But not all chatbot tools are built for the same job. Some focus on social media and ads, others on website conversion or customer support, and a few work as true omnichannel marketing platforms. Below, we’ll walk through five strong chatbot builders through the lens of small business, marketing, and e-commerce needs. You’ll see what each one does best, what their free or trial options look like, how pricing is structured, and which features matter most in everyday use.
SendPulse is a cloud-based, no-code all-in-one marketing automation platform that brings together chatbots, email campaigns, SMS, and web push notifications in one place. It’s built for teams that want more than “just a bot” and prefer one dashboard for most customer communication. For small businesses and e-commerce brands, this means you can run newsletters, automate social media chats, and send transactional messages without stitching together a dozen tools. The interface is friendly enough for non-technical marketers, but still powerful when you want to build more complex flows. Overall, SendPulse positions your chatbot as a central part of a wider, automated customer journey rather than a standalone gadget.
Core Features Availability
Website chat widget – You can embed a chatbot widget on your site to greet visitors, answer FAQs, and capture leads right where the purchase decisions happen.
Instagram DM + comment automation – The Instagram bot can automatically reply to DMs and trigger flows when someone comments under your posts, helping you convert social engagement into conversations and leads.
Official WhatsApp Business API support – As an official WhatsApp Business provider, SendPulse lets you build serious WhatsApp flows with interactive messages, templates, and commerce features that respect WhatsApp rules.
Facebook Messenger support – You can build Messenger bots alongside your Instagram and WhatsApp automation for consistent communication across Meta channels.
SMS and email in the same system – Beyond chat, SendPulse includes SMS and email so you can follow up outside messaging apps and keep all your contacts in one place.
Omnichannel continuity – Contacts are unified across channels, so if a customer talks to you on Instagram and later via WhatsApp or email, you don’t end up with three separate profiles. (Supported channels are Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, TikTok, Telegram, Viber)
Rich UI elements – The builder supports quick reply buttons, carousels, and product-style cards, making your conversations more visual and easier to navigate for users.
Growth tools: links, QR codes, popups – You can generate chat links and QR codes and embed pop-ups or forms to encourage sign-ups to your chatbot from your website or offline materials.
Broadcasts, segmentation, and drip campaigns – SendPulse supports compliant broadcasts, advanced segmentation by attributes and events, and multi-step automated sequences (via Automation 360) to nurture leads and customers over time.
E-commerce triggers and abandoned cart recovery – You can fire flows on events like page visits, purchases, or cart abandonment and send reminders or extra incentives to bring shoppers back.
AI and multilingual support – There’s integration with AI models for smarter responses, plus automatic language detection and support for multilingual bots so you can serve international audiences.
Unified inbox, human handoff, and analytics – A shared inbox lets your team jump into live conversations when needed, while bot-to-human handoff rules, funnel stats, conversion events, and tracking (including Meta’s server-side events) help you understand what the bot actually delivers.
Pricing and plans
SendPulse offers a free plan with 3 chatbots, 500 subscribers, and 10,000 messages per month, which is quite generous for a small business getting started. When you’re ready to scale, paid plans start at about $8/month (with annual billing) and increase based on audience size and volume. Because the same platform covers email, SMS, and chatbots, you effectively get multiple tools for the price of one—making SendPulse one of the most cost-effective options in this comparison.
MobileMonkey (now operating under the Customers.ai brand) is a no-code OmniChat marketing and sales platform centered on social messaging. It’s especially attractive to marketers who live inside Instagram and Facebook and want to use automation to capture leads from comments, DMs, and ads. The tool aims to unify conversations from multiple channels into one inbox and provide shortcuts for campaigns like giveaways, lead magnets, and quick qualification flows. For a small business focused heavily on social media, MobileMonkey can feel like having an extra team member handling DMs all day.
Core Features Availability
OmniChat website widget – You can use a chat widget on your website, though the strongest functionality still revolves around social channels rather than deep web automation.
Instagram DM + comment auto-reply – The platform is geared toward Instagram automation: it can auto-reply to comments and DMs, turning engagement on posts into private conversations and leads.
Facebook Messenger bots – MobileMonkey originally started with Messenger bots, so there is solid support for building flows, capturing emails, and sending follow-up messages on Facebook.
SMS messaging – SMS capabilities are available, allowing you to reach users by text and run multi-channel follow-ups across chat and SMS.
Omnichannel inbox – The OmniChat inbox unifies messages from Messenger, Instagram, web chat, and SMS, so your team doesn’t have to check several separate apps.
Rich message elements – You can use buttons, quick replies, and galleries, which work well for product showcases or guided navigation in conversations.
Social growth tools: links, QR codes, comment triggers – MobileMonkey supports “link to Messenger” style growth tools, QR codes that open chats, and keyword-based comment replies for growth campaigns.
Broadcasts and drip campaigns – Marketing-friendly features like broadcasts (within channel rules) and drip campaigns let you send a series of messages to nurture leads, announce promotions, or deliver mini-courses.
Tag-based segmentation – You can tag users based on behavior or answers, then target specific segments with tailored messages.
AI Q&A and multilingual NLP – The file notes AI-powered Q&A and multilingual conversational NLP support, helping your bot understand and respond in multiple languages beyond simple keyword matching.
Pricing and plans
MobileMonkey provides a free plan that includes 250 contacts, access to the Instagram channel, and branding after the first 10 messages. Paid plans for its InstaChamp product start at around $9.95/month, with more advanced features and higher limits available as you move up tiers. The trade-off: while the entry price is low and social features are strong, abandoned cart flows and deeper e-commerce automation are not provided out of the box, and WhatsApp support is more limited.
TARS is a no-code platform focused on “conversational landing pages” and lead generation. It’s designed to replace static web forms with interactive experiences that guide visitors through questions and answers in a chat-like format. This approach can lift conversion rates on landing pages, particularly for industries like finance, real estate, or services, where you need to qualify leads. TARS also offers a WhatsApp engagement suite, making it suitable for campaigns where you want users to start conversations directly from ads. For small businesses with high-value leads, TARS is mainly about squeezing more value out of each website visit.
Core Features Availability
Website chat and conversational landing pages – TARS specializes in website bots and standalone conversational pages that function as smart forms, ideal for capturing and qualifying leads.
WhatsApp engagement suite – It supports WhatsApp chatbots using the official API, letting you run campaigns, send template messages, and handle two-way customer chats.
Click-to-WhatsApp ad support – You can funnel traffic from Facebook/Instagram click-to-WhatsApp ads into TARS bots, turning ad clicks into structured conversations.
Messenger support – There is support for deploying bots on Messenger, though the main focus is on web and WhatsApp rather than deep social marketing automation.
Popup and embedded bot forms – TARS bots often appear as embedded widgets or pop-ups, replacing traditional forms and reducing friction for users who dislike long questionnaires.
Audience segmentation – You can create audiences based on user responses and status, which can later inform who receives which campaigns, especially in WhatsApp.
WhatsApp campaigns and templates – The platform handles WhatsApp templates, categories (like marketing vs. utility), and basic commerce-related flows, making message approval and localization easier.
AI Builder (Tars Prime) – TARS includes an AI mode that can build chatbots from knowledge bases, allowing semantic understanding of questions instead of strict scripts.
Multilingual support – It supports building chatbots in more than 25 languages, giving you flexibility for international or multilingual audiences.
Live chat handover – A live chat handover feature lets human agents take over conversations when needed, useful for complex questions or high-value leads.
Pricing and plans
TARS offers a freemium plan with 50 conversations per month, access to base AI models, a mini knowledge base (around 100 documents), community support, and three months of data retention. This gives you room to test on a small scale. However, paid plans start at $499/month for 500 conversations, which is more in the enterprise territory. For many small businesses, this price level makes TARS a strategic choice only if each converted lead has high value.
Outgrow is a no-code platform for interactive content—things like quizzes, calculators, polls, and chat-style experiences that collect data and generate leads. Instead of focusing on ongoing chat conversations, Outgrow focuses on short, structured interactions that end with a result (like a score, recommendation, or estimate). For marketers, it’s a way to turn passive website visitors into participants who answer questions and share contact details in exchange for personalized outcomes. If your priority is content-driven lead generation rather than ongoing messaging, Outgrow can be a creative option.
Core Features Availability
Website chat-style widgets – Outgrow lets you embed chat-like experiences on your website, often styled as conversational quizzes or small “bots” that ask questions step by step.
No social or SMS channels – The platform is intentionally focused on on-site content, not on messaging apps (no Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, or SMS support according to the file).
Rich interactive UI – You can build multi-step flows with questions, logic jumps, and results screens, making the experience feel more like a guided assessment than a typical bot.
Pop-ups and embeds – Outgrow experiences can appear as pop-ups or embedded blocks on a page, providing flexible options for where and how you capture leads.
UTM tracking and analytics integrations – The tool supports UTM parameters and links with analytics platforms, so you can measure performance by campaign and traffic source.
Lead capture and form elements – Within the interactions, you can collect emails, phone numbers, and other data, then pass them on to your CRM or email platform.
No broadcasts or drip campaigns – Outgrow doesn’t send ongoing messages; instead, it focuses on the one-time interactive experience and subsequent hand-off to your marketing systems.
No e-commerce triggers – There are no built-in cart, purchase, or visit triggers—Outgrow’s role is to collect data and generate leads rather than power the full sales cycle.
Visual builder and logic – You get a no-code builder with branching logic, enabling marketers to design experiences without developers.
Template library – Outgrow offers industry-specific templates (for quizzes, calculators, chatbots, etc.) that you can customize for your brand.
Pricing and plans
The platform offers a 14-day free trial, after which Outgrow moves onto paid tiers. Example tiers include a Freelancer plan around $22/month with basic features, an Essentials plan around $115/month with higher traffic and more capabilities, and then Business/Enterprise levels that scale by the number of content pieces and usage. There is generally no ongoing free plan beyond the trial, so you should expect to subscribe if Outgrow becomes part of your regular lead-gen toolkit.
MobileMonkey is strongest when your marketing revolves around Instagram and Facebook. If most of your leads come from social content and ad campaigns, its comment triggers, DM automation, and OmniChat inbox can help you turn engagement into contacts and simple sales flows. Just keep in mind that e-commerce automation, like abandoned cart recovery, is more limited and that WhatsApp and web-first use cases are not its core strengths.
TARS is ideal when each lead is valuable and you care deeply about conversion rates on landing pages and WhatsApp campaigns. Its conversational landing pages, AI-enhanced flows, and advanced WhatsApp campaign and template management make it a good fit for B2B, financial services, or high-ticket offers. The downside is clear: pricing starts high, so it’s often best for companies that can justify enterprise-level spend to get more out of each visitor.
Outgrow stands out as the creative, interactive option. If your strategy leans heavily on quizzes, calculators, and interactive content to generate leads, Outgrow gives you a playful, engaging way to collect data. It’s great at that single job, with a strong template library and detailed funnel analytics. However, it’s not designed as a messaging hub: no Messenger, WhatsApp, or SMS, and no ongoing broadcast or drip features. You’ll typically use Outgrow alongside another tool that handles your day-to-day customer conversations.
Across all of these, SendPulse emerges as the most balanced and business-friendly solution. It combines omnichannel reach (website, Messenger, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, SMS, and email) with deep automation features like segmentation, event-based triggers, abandoned cart recovery, and drip sequences. Unlike tools that specialize in just one channel or one stage of the journey, SendPulse supports the whole lifecycle—from first contact to repeat purchases—using chatbots plus email and SMS in the same ecosystem.
From a pricing and value standpoint, SendPulse is also especially compelling. The free plan gives you enough capacity (3 chatbots, 500 subscribers, 10k messages) to meaningfully test use cases, and the entry paid tier is affordable compared to bigger names, especially considering how much it bundles in. You don’t have to bolt on a separate email service, SMS gateway, or complex integrations just to run simple marketing funnels; the platform is already designed for that kind of work.
If you’re a small business owner, marketer, or e-commerce manager choosing a single tool to build around, the question is: do you want a specialist or a multi-tool? MobileMonkey, TARS, Outgrow, and Tidio all excel in narrower scenarios—social media marketing, conversion-focused landing pages, interactive content, or support automation, respectively. SendPulse, by contrast, gives you a flexible, future-proof foundation that can start with a simple FAQ bot and gradually grow into a full omnichannel marketing and service system as your needs expand.
So while there’s no “one size fits all,” if you’re looking for the best overall balance of features, channels, automation, and price based on your dataset, SendPulse looks like the smartest long-term choice. And if you want to team up your chatbot with something more traditional, like email marketing, check out this email marketing services comparison article.
