The Forrester New Wave™Standalone Chatbots For IT Operations, Q2 2019
The Eight Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up
The Ultimate Bot Framework
Botpress is an on-prem, open-source bot building platform for businesses
Flow Editor
Use the most sophisticated and flexible conversational flow management system on the market.
NLU
Natural Language Understanding.
Deeply understand the meaning and intents behind every messages.
Analytics
See how your bot is being used.
Quickly and progressively iterate to make your bot smarter every day.
Multi-channel
Instantly deliver your bot on all the major messaging channels. We support Messenger, Skype, SMS, Webchat and many more.
Authoring UI
Ships with a graphical interface.
Non-developers can manage the bot post-deployment.
SDK & APIs
Infinitely extensible and customizable.
We make it really easy to integrate with 3rd-party applications and APIs.
By developers, For developers
We’re making bots fun, easy and ultra productive for you. Forget about implementing your own NLU, Dialogue Manager and Channels. It’s all included.
Focus on what’s really exciting: building world-class conversational experiences between humans and computers.
Get Started nowDocumentationBuild locally, Host anywhere
Remain the sole owner of your data and conversational data. Botpress runs anywhere: on your computer, on your premises or on any cloud provider.
Don't worry about propriatery lock-ins; when you use Botpress, everything is stored in your own dedicated database in an easy-to-export format. There is no lock-in and you’ll always be free to migrate your bots to any other system or software vendor.
Futuristic technology, Today
Leverage technology from the very latest research and discoveries in artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms. Trust us, you won't need a PhD in AI to use the cutting edge stuff – that's on us.
Watch our pretty cool videoModular Architecture
Because Botpress is based on a modular architecture, developers and companies can build on top of Botpress to add new features by creating and publishing modules to the Botpress Marketplace (available soon).
Learn more about our philosophyOur philosophy behind Botpress
Architecture
In terms of architecture, not only should the architecture make it easy to combine components for a given use case and make the path to extensibility and customization as easy as possible, it should take into account the needs of all the bot stakeholders, not just the end users of the bot. The bot builder does not have to build a best practice architecture from scratch, we has already done that for them.
Openness
Openness means many things including being able to see and change the source code, being able to use a free version until you are comfortable with the technology and being able to easy integrate with any software out there via an api. Users can find code examples they need in an open source directory on github or follow any bot directory to get insights into best practice bot building.
Ease of use
While a professional platform always has a learning curve, the functionality should be intuitive to use and maximize the productivity of the user in question. It should never been hard to build simple bots but also not limit the bot builder to just creating simple bots. Botpress is built around a flow builder that allows creator to design and customize each flow and node within a flow for a conversational use case. Ease of use also means the ability to get help quickly and effectively and it means using well understood, popular technologies. Botpress builder sdk is built on javascript, specifically node.js which is a very well understood technology.
Scope
Having the widest range of out of the box functionality available for designing and implementing the interactions between users and bots is key. Botpress offers the important integrated components of a bot framework out of the box such as a visual flow builder, a native NLP engine, the ability to connect to third party tools (such as third party NLP engines including Dialog Flow, Watson and Luis), connectors to chat platforms, easy integration with existing systems and much more. It’s hard to find a competing framework that offers such a wide range of out of the box high quality components.
Rigor
Rigor is an important element of any professional tool. It is important that professionals can manage the process of creating software by dividing the work between various roles and collaborate using well established processes such as source control and being able to automatically test and debug new releases.
Wow factor
Wow factor is the ability of the platform to quickly deliver features that users will love. This means providing intelligent functionality that appears almost like magic to users, be it the ability to respond to voice commands or direct a conversation back to the “happy path” without the user noticing. A business wants its brand to be associated with advanced technologies that simplify user’s lives and bots are a great opportunity to do that. Just like a magician however, the way the bot is built needs to guide the experience to the functionality that makes the best use of the AI and technology at hand, and away from functionality where the current stats of AI and cognitive computing will not live up to user expectations..
Customizability
The ability to customize the platform is critical, as every bot project has specific customizations required for the use case at hand. Not being able to truly customize the platform means ending up with clunky and hard to use workarounds that are bad for the success of the bot in the long term. Most platforms, especially SAAS platforms, don’t allow true customization but only integration. Customization however does not mean much without already having a lot of useful components and a great architecture. The ability to customize without having a modular framework means having to design the architecture and build most of the components from scratch as is the case for Microsoft Bot Framework and Botkit. With unlimited resources. Microsoft Bot Framework has many nice features which is why we integrate with it. In our minds, however, a great bot framework needs much more than the Microsoft Bot Framework offers.
Security
Data security and privacy are issues that will become more and more important over time. Privacy and security need to be a first principle when designing a bot platform. It is important for the bot developer to be able to control how and where the bot is installed, including be able to install the bot on-prem on an internal server if needs be.
Ability to Collaborate
There are many groups that interact with a bot before and after its deployed. Groups such as the developers and other creators, admins, content managers, integration managers and the human agents in case the request needs to be escalated to a human. Each of these groups needs their own set of interfaces and functionality. Each group has its own responsibilities and expertise. The bot builder, bot builder sdk and the platform in general needs to enable these groups to the work they need to on the bot and share and collaborate on the project in an efficient way.
“When our clients need a chatbot platform, we turn to Botpress. It’s best-in-class, feature-rich, easy to use, and gives us the flexibility to deploy on-prem or in the cloud.”
“From very simple chatbot to more elaborate scenario with 3rd party system integration, Botpress allowed us to swiftly build either proof-of-concept or production grade chatbot for a very diverse set of clients. This has been made feasible thanks to features like the flow editor or the ability to quickly insert your own custom functions to drive the chatbot behaviour.”
“Botpress automates much of the boilerplate setup that comes with starting a bot-based application. Using the framework has allowed us to prototype and deploy production bots faster than ever before.”
Botpress | Enterprise
Secured Dashboard, Role-based Access Control (RBAC), Service Level Agreement (SLA), Automated Regression Testing and more.
Many Fortune 500 companies are using Botpress Enterprise in production today. Learn why they chose Botpress over other solutions.
We are passionate about building bots. While there are many common pitfalls in chatbot design, a well executed chatbot can greatly increase the customer experience, engagement and satisfaction and at the same time generate large returns on investment.
A great bot to us is a bot that provides the customer with the best possible experience in getting the job that they need to do done. It must make the best use of all the features available to it in the channel in question, including voice, graphical and AI features.
In short, the experience should be far superior to the experience of using a website, apps, phone or another mechanism to achieve the same outcome. This includes choosing the best venue to interact with the bot functionality. Should the bot be on the web, on a smart speaker, on facebook messenger, on email or slack for example?
Aside from increasing customer engagement and satisfaction, the bot can also dramatically lower the cost of providing customer service for companies. The bot can be used to answer simple customer support questions and fall back to a human agent for more difficult questions. This can materially reduce the need for customer support staff.
When we say experience of using the bot, we mean the full experience, including the aesthetics and personalization and the amount of friction in terms of physical effort (taps to install and sign on, taps or voice commands to use the bot) and mental effort required in completing the task (such as the precision required in using it and the discoverability of required functionality).
In short a great bot is a great software product. No great software product was ever created without a professional process and a high level of creativity in both the design and technical departments.
As a professional bot builder, your first consideration when setting out to build great chatbots is the framework you use.
Botpress is already the market leader in open source chatbot frameworks and even more so for on-prem enterprise frameworks. What the tens of thousands of developers who choose Botpress understand is that Botpress ranks highly on the nine main criteria on which chatbot platforms need to be judged.
The criteria are architecture, openness, ease of use, scope, rigour, wow factor, customizability, security and ability to collaborate.
Companies that skip due diligence, choose a framework on the basis of price or go with less comprehensive offerings from well known names, like Google, Facebook or Microsoft Azure, will pay the price in the long term either in the quality of the bot from a security, control, extensibility or functionality point of view.
Who uses Botpress?
Botpress has been built for and is used by professional chatbot developers. Like professional designers use photoshop, professional bot builders use Botpress.
In 2017, in collaboration with large solution providers, Botpress started delivering highly customized and scaleable chatbot services to a large number of enterprise giants. Large enterprises normally have done research into different platforms and understand the criteria and requirements for assessing bot frameworks outlined above. Even though large enterprises have a greater need for data security and scale, the criteria for choosing a bot platform apply to small as well as large business.
Despite being built for scale, we want Botpress to be widely adopted and want to give solution providers and developers (that don’t have the same security, support or scale requirements) the same powerful tool that enterprises use to create their bots for smaller businesses. To this end we offer a “free forever” commercial version of Botpress. This version is available with support from the community forum.
Start-ups can also massively reduce their development costs by using the free version of Botpress to develop great bots in record time. It is critical that start ups get from idea to proof of concept to minimum viable product as quickly as possible. Start-ups want to be able to focus on implementing the custom logic and not on building all the supporting infrastructure for the bot.
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