Introduction

Voiceflow’s collaborative platform for building customer chat interfaces can work well for specific applications. That said, not all use cases are well suited to them. In this article, we’ll present 4 popular alternatives to Voiceflow.

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Initially, Voiceflow may appear to be an attractive option due to its no-code toolset and multiplayer setup. For larger teams especially, having a simple place to collaborate is helpful.

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There are a few drawbacks though to considering Voiceflow:

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Limited feature set: While Voiceflow contains a plethora of tooling to enable chat-based communication with customers, its focus on voice apps is limited. This is unfortunate because customers like speaking on the phone with sellers. Conversations build trust. Whereas SMS and in-browser messaging feel impersonal.

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Shallow programmatic coverage: While Voiceflow exposes a few API endpoints, the majority of the platform is no-code. Most customer-facing use cases require many integrations for gathering customer data, connecting triggers, etc. The limited API coverage suppresses enterprise abilities to build more unique tailored solutions to what their customers need.

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Pricing: As of this article’s writing, voiceflow costs teams $185/mo. For small businesses and early-stage startups, paying that much - before seeing any benefit via a free trial - is a turn-off.

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With these limitations in mind, let’s explore a few popular alternatives.

Voiceflow alternative 1: Bland AI

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Bland AI is a platform for AI phone calls that enable companies to engage and connect with their customers.

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You can use Bland’s API and no-code integrations to dispatch and receive AI phone calls, flexibly, for any use case, just like Voiceflow. The AI can understand and converse in natural language, and emulate the style of a friendly employee.

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But thanks to Bland’s focused effort on voice-based interaction, Bland proves exceptionally strong for engaging all types of customers in a hyper-personalized and targeted manner, enabling enterprises to build stronger relationships with their customers than they might with Voiceflow.

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When to choose Bland AI over Voiceflow

Here’s when Bland might be a better choice than Voiceflow:

You want to build hyper-personalized relationships with all your customers across digital channels, from signup, to purchase, to repeat purchase.
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You prefer a usage-based pricing model - rather than a high base fee

You have custom customer flows and want comprehensive API access to fully customize the entire experience.

Key info on Bland AI

Personalization: With Bland, enterprises can send fully-personalized phone calls to all their customers, at every single stage of their journey. Unlike an AI chatbot, Bland’s phone assistant feels human, empathetic, and helpful.

Fully customizable experience: Bland’s AI phone call offering is hyper-optimized, enabling sub-second responses and excellent conversational outputs that drive better customer experiences and more overall effectiveness in the real world. The same AI can improve customer experience by excelling in roles like customer support, and/or any other type of natural language based task.

Pricing: Customers only pay for phone usage - build voice apps for just $0.07/minute

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Voiceflow alternative 2: Dialogflow

Dialogflow is a platform for building chatbots and voice bots. Funny enough, Voiceflow appears many times when users search for ‘Dialogflow alternatives’ or even ‘Botpress alternatives’.

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By focusing on creating exceptional customer service toolkits for enterprises, Dialogflow hits the mark for large organizations looking to automate their inbound phone calls and chats.

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Generally, though, the underlying AI for chatbots has a limited ability to understand and effectively respond to intents. Additionally, the voice quality of the chatbots doesn’t quite pass the Turing Test - many people feel they’re talking to an AI, which takes away from the customer experience.

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When people call to speak to another human, ruining that experience can feel devastating.

When to choose Dialogflow over Voiceflow?

It might make sense to use Dialogflow instead of Voiceflow in the following cases:

You need a more comprehensive and integrations-rich voice bot for customers

You’re a large enterprise that wants the safety and security of building on top of a service offered by Google, one of the biggest tech companies in the world.

You like the flexibility Dialogflow affords

Key figures on Dialogflow

Pricing: Pricing on Dialogflow is usage-based like Bland - although it can be unpredictable. Dialogflow charges for the inferences, audio generation, and many other basic steps that occur during each call. Depending on the conversation, pricing may fall significantly higher or lower than expected.

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Call quality: Dialogflow's voice may sound very robotic to some callers, turning them off, and degrading the overall experience of the call.

Voiceflow alternative 3: Botpress

Botpress is a platform for quickly building custom ChatGPT bots for your website. You can provide your Botpress agent with information about your company, teach the AI how to respond to customers, and then watch as it quickly and easily helps them.

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While Botpress provides quick and easy onboarding, it lacks any voice-based interface for talking to users. For some use cases, that’s okay. But as we previously discussed, for natural language applications like customer service, voice apps can be more effective. Additional personalization and the ability to connect drive better customer engagement.

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Botpress’ simple interface and easy onboarding proves valuable to some users - but once again the lack of simple voice interaction is a drawback.

When to Choose Botpress instead of Voiceflow?

Here’s when you should consider using Botpress over Voiceflow.com:

You’re a startup that wants to add a ChatGPT bot to answer questions based on an existing knowledge base

Your customer engagement workflows are limited. You care more about providing Q&A tools - than building personal relationships.

Key figures on Botpress

Pricing: Botpress’ platform is usage-based, but pricing can quickly become prohibitive. Depending on volume, Botpress can cost as much as $1000/month, just for a simple messaging tool for customers. That’s expensive.

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Integrations: Botpress has over 20 integrations. Making it easy to hook data into.

Voiceflow alternative 4: Amazon Lex

Amazon Lex is a platform for conversational AI. When you teach an Alexa skill to Alexa, it has the power to sense an intent and perform a skill. Based on that paradigm, Alexa skill is a fantastic framework for building conversational AI.

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To a degree, Amazon Lex takes the Alexa Skill intent-to-action process and opens it up to developers. It offers similar features to Voiceflow, Botpress, and Dialogflow. While simultaneously being part of the AWS ecosystem.

When to choose Amazon Lex over Voiceflow:

Amazon Lex can be a great alternative to Voiceflow.com in the following cases:

You want a deeply configurable platform for chat-based customer communications

You’re a large enterprise that expects a high volume of text-based conversations and must ensure low downtime

You need the fantastic SLAs and security provided by AWS

Some stats about Amazon Lex

Free tier: AmazonLex offers a 12-month free tier for people getting started. Not bad! Usage based from there.

Conclusion

Choosing the right tool for engaging your customers is a tricky decision. Picking the one that has the most personalized, impactful, and revenue-driving effect on customers is a necessity.

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While Voiceflow offers a simple no-code platform for building chat applications, enterprises choose alternatives with a deeper focus on customer development. Bland offers that focus: personalized phone calls to customers that build relationships and drive revenue.

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We hope this overview of Voiceflow and its alternatives has been helpful to you.

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If you want to learn more about how to add AI phone calling to your application, you should visit Bland AI’s Discord community.

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See you there!