Chatfuel SDK vs Landbot
Landbot rents you a chat counter on three channels. Chatfuel SDK is the application — seventeen entry points, one balance, and the code is yours.
Side by side
| Feature | Landbot | Chatfuel SDK |
|---|---|---|
| What you get | ||
What it is | A hosted account you rent | An app you own |
Source code | ||
Licence | “Non-exclusive, revocable and non-transferable”, per §1 of their terms | MIT |
Where it runs | Landbot’s cloud; no self-hosting published | Vercel, your own server or Docker |
Who owns the software | “Landbot reserves all intellectual property rights over its methodology, models and software” | You do, and the repository is yours |
Exporting a flow | A PNG of the canvas | The whole application, as source |
Moving a bot somewhere else | A template that downloads into another Landbot account, web agents only | Deploy the same app anywhere Node runs |
A downgraded account | Deactivated after six months on the free plan | Nothing to downgrade — the app is yours |
| What it costs | ||
Published plans | €0, €32, €80, €160 and from €400 a month billed annually, the two smaller plans €40 and €100 monthly | $20 for one bot, then from $100 |
What you are billed for | Chats a month — 100 free, then 500, 2,500, 2,500, custom | Bots in the workspace, and one balance of credits |
A conversation counter | “A structured conversation… following a rule-based flow” | None — conversations are not metered |
A second meter when the AI answers | “AI chats are tracked and billed separately”; 100, 300 and 500 included | AI tokens come off the same balance |
Going over | €0.05 an extra chat, €0.10 an extra AI chat | Top the balance up, or move up a plan |
Seats included | 1, 2, 3, 3 and 5+; €25 a month for another | No seat charge |
A second WhatsApp number | €100 a month, on the two plans that carry one | No per-number charge |
On top of Meta’s per-message fee | €0.05 a delivered template message, “fixed and applies globally” | Two published meters: AI tokens, and a cent a conversion event |
When the month’s chats run out | On the free plan “the bots will stop working until the next month”; on a paid plan every extra chat is billed | Nothing stops — there is no chat allowance to exhaust |
| The app around it | ||
Shared inbox with human takeover | ||
Seat roles | Six: Admin, Bot Builder, Bot Viewer, Chat Manager and two agent levels | Owner, admin and member, with per-bot grants |
Contacts you can filter and save views over | Fields on a customer record, exported as CSV | |
Deals board by sales stage | ||
Bookings calendar | An AI Appointment Assistant block, and a Calendly integration | |
A knowledge base the agent answers from | ||
Conversions reported to Meta | Webhook blocks against the Graph API, hashing one identifier at a time | Fourteen names on seven triggers, built in |
Instagram publishing | ||
An AI copilot for the operator | ||
An admin panel over every workspace and bot | ||
| Your brand, your customer | ||
Removing their footer branding | “Only possible… in the Professional and Business plans” | There is no footer to remove |
Your name and logo on the application | The bot is themed; the platform stays Landbot’s | |
Your own domain | The widget embeds on your site; the product is app.landbot.io | |
Reselling it | “Landbot’s non-exclusive sales intermediary”, one partner account each | Your app, your customers |
What the reseller licence grants | “Non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable right to… promote, market and distribute the Services” | MIT: use it, change it, sublicense it, sell it |
What you keep on a sale | 20% recurring, up to two years | The price you set, in full |
Looking like the vendor | A partner site may not “resemble the Landbot Website” | It is your site, under your name |
Your own sign-up and your own price | ||
| Building on it | ||
Custom code in a flow | A JavaScript Code block — not on WhatsApp, not on Messenger, not on the free plan | It is a React app; you write whatever you like |
Platform API | Token auth, “limit: 10/second” | A vendored GraphQL client, as source |
Webhooks | Professional and up | |
A host application you can extend | Their Core SDK builds “your own UI on top of the Landbot conversation engine” | The application is yours — every screen and every route |
Reaching a channel they do not list | APIchat: a bridge you write and host | Seventeen entry points, already there |
A catalogue of named native integrations | Sixteen, Zapier’s “4000+ apps” among them | |
A template library to start from | More than fifty, web and WhatsApp | |
A bot you can run without deploying anything | ||
An analytics dashboard over conversations | Block-by-block conversion and drop-off, goals, twelve months of history | |
| Money and terms | ||
Published price | €32 to €400+ a month, by chats | $20 to $2,050 a month, by bots and balance |
A free tier | ||
Trial | 14 days with everything included, no card | A trial the wizard opens, and a promo code worth $100 of credits |
Retention if you stop paying | Deactivated after six months on the free plan | The code and the deployment stay yours |
Deleting your data | “Permanently erased from our servers, and no restoration will be possible” | Your deployment, your database, your call |
A data region the vendor guarantees | EU — “All instances are located in Google’s servers in Belgium, Europe” | |
Where a conversation can start
Landbot’s own platform page lists the channels it builds for as “Web (in four different formats) · WhatsApp · Facebook Messenger · API (develop & integrate into any 3rd-party app)”. Instagram and TikTok are not among them, and their help centre’s channel category covers Messenger and APIchat only. APIchat is a real bridge to anything else — but their developer guide describes it as middleware you write and host. Here is every entry point on each side.
| Entry point | Landbot | Chatfuel SDK |
|---|---|---|
| Instagram is not among the channels Landbot lists, and no Instagram surface appears in their help centre. Reaching one means writing an APIchat bridge yourself. | ||
| Direct messages | ||
| Comments on a post | ||
| Comments on an ad | ||
| Story replies | ||
| ig.me links | ||
| Click from an ad | ||
| A channel Landbot lists and runs the Meta onboarding for. The entry points inside it are another matter: only the direct message is documented. | ||
| Direct messages | ||
| Click from an ad | Arrives as an ordinary direct message | |
| Click from a post | Not published | |
| Messenger is a listed channel, with their own caveats: one bot may be active on a page at a time, and not every builder feature works there. | ||
| Direct messages | ||
| Comments on a post | Not published | |
| m.me links | Not published | |
| Click from an ad | Not published | |
| TikTok | TikTok is not among the channels Landbot lists, and no TikTok surface appears in their help centre. | |
| Direct messages | ||
| Comments on a post | ||
| Click from an ad | ||
| Web widget | The channel Landbot was built around, and the one both sides simply have. | |
| Direct messages | ||
When to choose which
Choose Landbot if
- You want a free tier. Theirs is €0 forever with 100 chats a month and no card; we do not have one.
- You want a bot live on your site with nothing to deploy — one HTML snippet, and no application to host.
- You want to start from a library: more than fifty free web and WhatsApp templates.
- You want a catalogue of named native integrations — sixteen, including Zapier’s four thousand apps. Ours is the API and the code around it.
- You want a dashboard over conversations: block-by-block conversion and drop-off, goals, twelve months of history.
- You want the vendor to guarantee where the data sits: theirs is in Google Cloud, Belgium.
Choose Chatfuel SDK if
- Instagram or TikTok is where your customers write first — comments, story replies and ads included.
- A conversation counter deciding when the bot answers is not something you want to sell.
- You run bots for several clients and want them on one balance, at a price you set.
- The inbox, the contacts, the deals, the bookings and the AI belong in the same app.
- You want the source under MIT, and a coding agent that already knows it.
Move a bot over
One command scaffolds the app and writes only the modules you pick. The flow you drew in Landbot is a canvas you rebuild once; everything downstream of it — the inbox, the CRM, the reporting — is already in the app.
- Run the wizard, pick the modules, give it the app name and the logo.
- Connect the bot; the WhatsApp number is approved through Chatfuel, an official Meta partner.
- Rebuild the flow on the canvas, then turn on the entry points Landbot never listed.
- Deploy it on your own domain, and add the auth module when you want customers signing in to you.
Questions
Landbot define a chat as “a structured conversation between your bot and an end user, following a rule-based flow”, and each plan includes a fixed number a month. On the free plan their help centre says the bots stop working until the next month; on a paid plan every extra chat is €0.05. Chatfuel SDK has no conversation counter at all — your plan is a balance, and conversations do not draw on it.