Chatbase does one thing and does it well: train an AI agent on your content and put it on your site. FlowCastle is a flow builder that also answers with AI. The choice comes down to whether you want the AI to be the whole product or one node inside something larger.
TL;DR
Chatbase is an AI agent product. You give it your content, it answers questions, and the quality of those answers is the entire proposition. FlowCastle is an automation product with an AI node in it. The AI answers what it should; buttons, conditions, API calls and human handoff cover everything else.
If a well-tuned AI answering machine is what you need, Chatbase is a clean, focused buy. If the chat has to do things — look up an order, verify an account, book a slot, then follow up three days later — Chatbase has no layer for that and FlowCastle is built around it.
At a glance
Chatbase prices and limits verified on chatbase.co/pricing, 8 September 2026.
| | FlowCastle | Chatbase |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | 2,000 automation events/mo (≈250 conversations), unlimited contacts, nothing is deleted | 50 message credits/mo, 1 agent, agent deleted after 14 days idle |
| First paid plan | $9/mo — 7,500 events (≈900 conversations) | $40/mo Hobby — 700 message credits |
| Next plan up | $29/mo — 50,000 events | $150/mo Standard |
| Cost per AI answer | ~$0.01 on a fast model ($5 per 250 credits; 0.5 credits per answer) | $0.04 per credit ($40 per 1,000 on auto-recharge) |
| Non-AI messages | One automation event per inbound message or button tap; everything the bot does in response — buttons, menus, conditions, API calls, code, replies — costs nothing | Draw down message credits |
| AI allowance | 100 credits/mo (~200 answers on a fast model), same on every plan; beyond that a $5 / 250-credit top-up or your own LLM key, both via support | 50 free, 700 on Hobby, buy more at $40/1,000 |
| Remove "powered by" branding | Included on any paid plan (from $9) | $99/mo add-on |
| Extra agents / bots | Unlimited on every plan | $25/agent/mo |
| Trained on your website | Yes, website → knowledge base import | Yes — this is the core product |
| Visual flow builder | Yes — the whole product | No |
| Calls your own API mid-conversation | Yes, as a node, with branching on the response | Via actions/tools, no visual branching |
| Deterministic paths (buttons, menus, conditions) | Yes | Limited |
| Contacts, tags, variables, drip sequences, broadcasts | Yes | No — the conversation ends and that is that |
| Analytics | Per-step funnel per flow, goals, conversion by source, plus Pulse: AI reads conversations and drafts the fix | Chat logs, topic analytics, sentiment |
| Telegram, email, MTProto | Yes — same flow | No |
| Payments in the chat widget | No (Telegram only) | No |
Where Chatbase is the better choice
- The AI answer is the product. If all you want is a well-tuned agent over your documentation, Chatbase is focused on exactly that and does not ask you to think about flows at all. Simplicity is a feature.
- You want heavy AI volume with a self-serve card. Chatbase's Hobby plan gives 700 credits for $40, and auto-recharge is a checkbox. Our per-answer price is roughly four times cheaper, and you can also run the AI on your own LLM key — but both that and topping up mean emailing support. If you plan on thousands of AI answers a month and want it handled with a card, Chatbase's buying experience is currently better than ours.
- You do not need anything after the conversation. No contacts, no follow-ups, no sequences. Chatbase does not carry that weight, which keeps it simple.
Where FlowCastle is the better choice
AI is one node, not the whole answer. Chatbase sends every question to the model, which means a visitor asking "what are your hours" costs a credit and can, in principle, be answered wrong. In FlowCastle, predictable questions become buttons that answer instantly, cost no AI at all, and cannot hallucinate. The AI handles the long tail. You choose the line.
The chat can finish the job. Order status, account verification, booking — an HTTP request node, a condition on the response, a message, a handoff. Chatbase can call a tool, but there is no visual branching, no waiting three days, no tagging the contact and following up.
The visitor becomes a contact. Tags, variables, drip sequences, broadcasts, goals, funnel analytics. In Chatbase the conversation ends and nothing persists into your marketing.
The price of not being on the free plan. Chatbase charges $99 a month to remove its branding, $25 a month per extra agent, and deletes an idle free agent after 14 days. FlowCastle removes branding on any paid plan from $9, and bots are unlimited on every plan including free.
The honest limit on our side: the included AI allowance is 100 credits a month — around 200 answers on a fast model — and today it does not increase when you upgrade. Past it there are two routes, both through support rather than self-serve: top up at $5 per 250 credits, or run the AI on your own LLM provider key so it bills to your provider account. Per answer we come out at roughly a quarter of Chatbase's price, but their buying experience for high AI volume is smoother than ours today.
Which question are you actually solving?
A useful test. Write down the five things visitors ask you most.
If all five can be answered from a page on your website, Chatbase will handle them and you can stop reading. If two of them start with "where is my", "is my", or "can I book" — those need a system lookup, and no amount of AI training will produce the answer, because the answer is not in your content. That is the split.
FAQ
Is FlowCastle an AI chatbot like Chatbase?
Partly. It has an AI node that answers from a knowledge base built from your website, and that node is genuinely comparable. The difference is that it sits inside a flow, alongside buttons, conditions, API calls and human handoff, rather than being the whole product.
Which is cheaper?
Per AI answer, FlowCastle — about $0.01 on a fast model against Chatbase's $0.04 per credit, and you can bring your own LLM key instead. For non-AI traffic FlowCastle is dramatically cheaper: we bill one interaction when a visitor writes or taps, and the bot's replies, conditions and lookups cost nothing. But Chatbase's included allowance is larger on a paid plan (700 credits for $40 against our 100), and their top-up is self-serve while ours goes through support.
Does FlowCastle train on my website like Chatbase?
Yes. Website import reads your pages into a knowledge base the AI node answers from.
Can Chatbase call my API?
It supports actions and tools, but without a visual flow you cannot branch on the response, wait, or route to a human based on what came back.
Will my Chatbase agent's training transfer?
The source content will — point our website import at the same pages. Prompts and tuning will not; you will rebuild those, and in FlowCastle a good share of what you tuned prompts to handle becomes buttons instead.
Want the full picture of the widget itself? See the website chat widget page.