HiQBot is an AI customer conversation platform. One inbox holds your website chat, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, Telegram and LINE, an AI agent answers from your own documents, and a person on your team can take the thread without the customer starting again. The clearest difference from ManyChat is the meter. ManyChat bills by active contact, which its pricing page defines as any real person you interact with in a billing period, counted once however many messages you exchange. Go past the included number and it charges for each extra one. HiQBot does not count contacts at all. It meters AI replies, one credit for one reply at the Core level, and when the credits run out the AI stops answering rather than billing you.
Weighing more than one tool? See how the alternatives compare.
Where these numbers come from. HiQBot figures were read from our own plans API on 28 August 2026. ManyChat blocks automated readers, so we could not open their live pricing page. Every ManyChat figure here comes from their own page HTML as archived on 28 July 2026, and carries that date rather than today’s. Check it before you buy. Most pages that compare tools to ManyChat print no ManyChat price at all, which is a worse answer than a dated one.
We publish this page, so weigh it accordingly. The right-hand column is not a courtesy. ManyChat is the better buy in every case listed there, and you would find that out in week two anyway.
The price
ManyChat quotes each plan twice, once billed monthly and once billed annually, and its page renders the annual figure by default. Pro is $29 a month on annual billing and $39 on monthly. That is the plan where WhatsApp and the AI features begin, so the number a monthly customer actually pays is 34% above the one that gets quoted. We have printed both columns below.
| HiQBot | ManyChat | |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | None. 7-day trial | Yes, 25 active contacts, 4 live automations, their branding on the first message |
| Entry paid plan | Solo · $49/mo · 1 seat · 2,500 credits | Essential · $17/mo monthly, $14/mo annual · 250 active contacts |
| Plan where the AI starts | Solo, $49. Same engine on every plan | Pro · $39/mo monthly, $29/mo annual |
| Plan where WhatsApp starts | Solo, $49 | Pro · $39/mo monthly, $29/mo annual |
| Middle plan | Starter · $139/mo · 2 seats · 6,000 credits | Business · $99/mo monthly, $69/mo annual · 7,500 active contacts |
| Upper plan | Growth · $229/mo · 5 seats · 10,000 credits | Advanced · $199/mo monthly, $139/mo annual · 25,000 active contacts |
| What the price scales with | Nothing. The plan is the plan | Active contacts, meaning unique people who message you in a month |
| Overage | None. AI replies pause instead | $0.10 down to $0.004 per extra contact, depending on plan and billing basis |
| Extra capacity | Credit pack, $20 per 1,000 credits | Automatic, at the overage rate for your plan |
| Shortest commitment | One month | One month. Annual plans cannot be downgraded mid-term |
ManyChat figures from their pricing page as archived on 28 July 2026. Their page notes that prices exclude tax and vary by billing country. HiQBot figures from our plans API on 28 August 2026.
The meter
ManyChat counts active contacts, and its own FAQ is clear about what that means: a contact becomes active when messages are sent or received through ManyChat, by automation, AI, broadcast or the inbox, and one person counts once for the month regardless of how much you talk. Essential includes 250 of them.
So picture a reel that works. Three thousand people comment and get a DM back. On Essential, 250 are included and the other 2,750 bill at ten cents each, which is $275 of overage on a $17 plan. The same month on Advanced, where extra contacts are $0.004 on annual billing, costs $11 of overage. The meter is not expensive or cheap. It is expensive at the bottom and cheap at the top, which is a strange shape for a plan aimed at people whose first viral post is ahead of them.
ManyChat handles the moment reasonably. Automations keep running rather than stopping, you can set a threshold that refuses overage, and if you upgrade inside the same cycle the overage accrued so far is forgiven. Worth knowing, and worth saying, because the shape of the bill is the complaint that fills their community forum.
HiQBot does not count people. A credit is one AI reply at the Core level, a stronger level draws more, and the level is yours to set per inbox. Three thousand conversations that each take two replies is 6,000 credits, which is what Starter includes. Run out and the AI stops until the plan renews or you add a pack at $20 per 1,000. There is no bill you did not agree to, because there is no overage to agree to.
ManyChat overage per extra active contact
| Plan | Billed monthly | Billed annually |
|---|---|---|
| Essential | $0.10 | $0.082 |
| Pro | $0.05 | $0.038 |
| Business | $0.025 | $0.018 |
| Advanced | $0.004 | $0.0028 |
Read from ManyChat’s pricing page as archived on 28 July 2026. An extra contact costs 25 times more on Essential than on Advanced.
The people
Automation is the easy half. The question that decides whether a tool works for a business is what happens when the bot cannot help and a customer is waiting. Both products have a shared inbox. They differ on how many people can work in it and when routing turns up.
| HiQBot | ManyChat | |
|---|---|---|
| Seats on the entry paid plan | 1 on Solo | 1 on Essential |
| Seats that can answer conversations | 2 on Starter, 5 on Growth | 2 on Pro, 3 on Business, 5 on Advanced |
| Extra seat | $15 per month | $25 per month |
| Maximum seats | Up to 50 through the add-on | 3 on Pro, 5 on Business, 10 on Advanced |
| Assigning a conversation to a person | Starter and up | Business and up, at $99/mo monthly |
| Live human support from the vendor | Priority support on Growth | Email only. No live channel on any plan |
Two details in that table are worth pulling out. ManyChat caps how many seats you may buy, so Pro allows one extra at $25 and then stops at three. And assigning a conversation to a named person arrives on Business, at $99 a month on monthly billing. Below that the inbox is a shared view that everyone reads and nobody owns, which is workable for one person and gets confusing at three.
Check this yourself
Their pricing page lists AI Goals, AI Comments, AI Replies, Knowledge, the AI Step and intention recognition as Pro features, with no separate charge and no usage meter anywhere in the comparison table. Their product page for AI says something else, twice: that ManyChat AI is an add-on to the Pro plan and costs $29 a month. Their help centre says the same. The product page and the help centre appear to predate the current plan structure.
We are not claiming one of those is a trick. We are saying that if you are budgeting, you cannot currently tell from ManyChat’s own site whether AI is included in $39 or costs $39 plus $29, and that is worth ten minutes with their sales team before you commit.
A second one, same shape. ManyChat’s WhatsApp page describes Meta billing per conversation in 24-hour windows, with the first 1,000 conversations each month free. Meta retired that model on 1 July 2025 and now bills per message, and its developer documentation marks conversation-based pricing as deprecated. There is no blanket free monthly allowance under the current rules. If you are sizing a WhatsApp budget, size it from what Meta charges now, not from that page.
The channels
ManyChat covers social messaging plus SMS and email. It has no website chat widget and no LINE. HiQBot has no SMS and no bulk email. Neither of us is the complete set, so the useful question is which absences you would notice.
| HiQBot | ManyChat | |
|---|---|---|
| Website chat widget | All plans | Not offered |
| All plans | All plans | |
| WhatsApp Business API | All plans | Pro and up |
| Facebook Messenger | Starter and up | All plans |
| Telegram | Starter and up | All plans |
| LINE | Starter and up | Not offered |
| SMS | Not offered | Pro and up |
| Not offered | Pro and up, 10k to 100k sends by plan | |
| Channels usable at once | Every channel the plan includes | Any 2 on Free and Essential, any 3 on Pro, all on Business and Advanced |
The row people miss is the last one. ManyChat caps how many channels you may run at once by plan, two on Essential and three on Pro. A business selling on Instagram and WhatsApp with a website widget is already at three, and the widget is not on the menu. On HiQBot the channels the plan includes are the channels you can use, and they land in one inbox where the same customer is one person with one history.
Comment to DM
Comment automation is what ManyChat is famous for, and HiQBot does it too: a rule watches one post, matches a comment, can answer in public, and opens a DM. Ours matches on meaning as well as keywords, so a rule set up for “price” also catches “how much”, and you can paste a sample comment and see whether it would have matched before the rule goes live.
The part worth comparing is not the trigger. It is what the tool refuses to let you build. Instagram restrictions are the loudest complaint in ManyChat’s own community, with users reporting bans and 30-day DM blocks after a post took off. Those limits are Meta’s and they apply to every automation tool including this one. What a vendor can do is stop you shipping the patterns that attract them. These five are validation errors in HiQBot, not advice in a help article.
A rule that answers comments in public needs at least three wordings before it will save, or a single inline answer written for that post. The worker rotates them.
The first DM can carry a pool of openers. The worker picks per recipient, so a hundred people do not receive a hundred identical messages.
Rules are checked against a list of twenty-two public shorteners and refused. Use the real destination.
One external link per message. Instagram, WhatsApp and other Meta destinations are not counted as external.
Scripted flows are walked as a graph before they save. A step pointing back at itself or at an earlier step is refused, because that is an unpaced loop rather than a funnel.
None of that makes an account safe. It removes the five ways people most often make one unsafe. The setup itself, and what Meta allows in 2026, is covered on the comment to DM page.
Before you switch
Nobody broadcasts on Instagram. ManyChat’s own comparison table excludes Instagram from broadcasts, and HiQBot does not broadcast there either. That is Meta’s rule rather than a gap in either product. Our broadcasts are WhatsApp only, to people who opted in, using templates Meta approved.
WhatsApp costs money on top, on both tools. Meta charges per message and bills you for it whichever platform you connect through. ManyChat asks you to preload a wallet before WhatsApp automation runs. Budget the platform and the messages separately or you will be wrong twice.
The 24-hour window decides whether your reply arrives. Instagram and Messenger let you reply freely for 24 hours after the customer’s last message. Sequences built to fire on day three fail quietly, which is a recurring thread in ManyChat’s forum. Neither product can lift that limit.
We are more expensive to start. $49 against a free plan and a $17 tier. If you are one person testing whether comment automation does anything for you, start there and come back when a human needs to answer.
Switching
Connect the Instagram account and the WhatsApp number, upload the documents the agent should answer from, and rebuild the comment rules you are actually using. Most accounts have two or three that earn their keep and a drawer of experiments. Rebuild the two or three.
Flows do not port, and we would not import them if they did. A HiQBot rule opens the conversation and the agent takes it from there using your documents, so the long branching trees stop being the thing you maintain. If a conversation matters enough for a person, it goes to a person in the same thread. One caution on timing: ManyChat annual plans cannot be downgraded before the term ends, so check where you are in the cycle before you move.
Billed monthly, ManyChat lists Essential at $17, Pro at $39, Business at $99 and Advanced at $199. Billed annually the same plans are $14, $29, $69 and $139 a month. Most comparison pages quote only the annual column, which understates the plan where WhatsApp and AI begin by 34%. Figures read from ManyChat’s own pricing page as captured on 28 July 2026.
Not at the entry point. ManyChat has a free plan for 25 active contacts and a paid tier from $14 a month. HiQBot starts at $49. HiQBot becomes cheaper when the meter matters: ManyChat bills for every unique person who messages you in a month and charges overage above the included count, while HiQBot does not count contacts at all and has no overage.
ManyChat defines an active contact as any real person you interact with in a billing period, through automations, AI, broadcasts or the inbox, and states that one person counts once no matter how many messages you exchange. HiQBot has no equivalent. It meters AI replies, not people, so a customer who writes forty times in a month is not more expensive than one who writes once.
Yes, on every plan including Solo at $49. Meta’s own message fees are separate and are billed by Meta on a per-message basis, which has been the model since 1 July 2025.
Yes. The AI answers first and a human can take the thread in the same inbox. Live chat seats start on Starter at $139, which includes two, and Growth includes five. An extra seat is $15 a month.
AI replies pause until the plan renews or you add a credit pack. Nothing bills automatically. A credit pack is $20 for 1,000 credits, and unused monthly credits carry for two billing periods when the renewal is paid on time.
Yes, on every plan. A rule watches a specific post, matches a comment by keyword or by meaning, can reply publicly, and opens a DM. The mechanics are covered on the comment to DM page.
It can, on any tool, because the limits are Meta’s rather than any vendor’s. What differs is how much the tool lets you do about it. HiQBot refuses to save a rule that repeats one public reply, uses a link shortener, puts more than one external link in a message, or builds a follow-up that loops.
Seven days, your own Instagram and WhatsApp, your own documents. Keep ManyChat running while you do it and compare the same week on both.