Botpress vs The Competition
Botpress is the only modular bot framework.This means that anyone—whether from our own team, or a member of the development community—can add any functionality to the framework that they require. This allows Botpress to offer a broad range of bot functionality off the shelf, and add much more over time than other platforms.
To get an idea of this difference in architecture and philosophy, look at how Botpress compares to a couple of other major platforms:
| Botpress | Chatfuel | Microsoft | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intuitive graphical interface | ✓ | ✓ | ❌ |
| Open source | ✓ | ❌ | ✓ |
| Community modules | ✓ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Source-controlled | ✓ | ❌ | ✓ |
| Bot templates | ✓ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Rapid development | ✓ | ✓ | ❌ |
| Automated testing | ✓ | ❌ | ✓ |
All it’s all about balance
Different tools work well for different jobs. We love the simplicity of tools like Chatfuel—but simplicity should not limit your technical ambitions. Tools like the Microsoft Bot Platform are great—but creating and managing bots should not be reserved only for skilled developers.
So Botpress is a framework that we built with professional chatbot developers in mind (including content teams). Our target customers are enterprises, agencies, and start-ups who need to be able to build great bots with limited resources.
A framework that is great at building, and builds great bots
Botpress is built with a simple design philosophy: to be great at building great bots.
As you can see from the table above, this sets us apart from other standard platforms, which either focus on being great at building bots that are…well, not great—or not great at building great bots.
What is “great” anyway?
In our minds, a great framework is one that gives the developers maximum control over the bot functionality and at the same time makes it easy to add all the common infrastructure features. This allows for all the development effort to be spent on the customer experience. Resources are always limited, so the framework needs to allow developers to create a great bot within the constraints of time and money.
We define a great a bot as one that provides the customer with the best possible experience in doing what they need done. It must make the best use of all the features available to it in the channel in question, including graphical and AI features.
In short, the experience at a minimum must be superior to the experience of using a website, app or other conventional mechanism to achieve the same outcome.
Ideally, the experience is so good that it creates growth through referrals, and increased transactions.
User experience
When we say experience, we mean the full experience—including the aesthetics and personalization, the experience of having to switch applications to do different tasks, the experience of having to sign up for a website or download an app. One of the big advantages of a bot for example is that it can remove friction by allowing many operations to take place in the place where the user is already communicating, in the messaging app itself.
In short, a great bot is a great software product. And the reality is, no great software product was ever created without code in just a few minutes by amateurs.
Other frameworks
There are of course frameworks including the Microsoft Bot Framework that allow developers to build sophisticated bots through code. Could great bots not be built on these frameworks as well as on Botpress?
In theory, yes, they could be—if you had unlimited resources. Microsoft Bot Framework has many nice features (which is why we integrate with it). But in our minds, a great bot framework needs much more than something like the Microsoft Bot Framework, or those like it, are able to offer.
A bot development framework should offer at least the following (and the main frameworks do):
- Connectors to various chat platforms
- Some sort of conversation flow manager
- At least basic analytics
- Access to NLP engines
What is missing from the main frameworks, and what we have built at Botpress, are features such as:
- Content management decoupled from flow
- Multiple NLP solutions
- Marketing tools such as tagged market segmentation and A/B testing
- Advanced analytics
- Human in the loop (allowing human agents to take over the bot or drop in on the conversation)
- The capability to easily build more components for bots, and thereby create a growing pool of common features that are available to developers
The Botpress difference
In our minds there is a deep relationship between the quality of a bot, and the quality of the framework it was built on.
Sure, it’s possible to build a chatbot in a few minutes that works for all the major chat platforms. There are many self-service “no code” platforms that do a great job of making it easy to build a bot in five minutes through a visual interface without using any code.
But building a great bot that will seamlessly fit into your business processes and give your customers a great experience? That’s where Botpress fits in.
