Botpress

Botpress is an open-source conversational AI platform founded in 2017 that has become one of the leading alternatives to Microsoft Copilot Studio and Voiceflow for teams that prioritise self-hosting flexibility, open-source values, and platform-agnostic deployment. The platform combines visual flow design with multi-LLM support across OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Cohere, Google Gemini, and Mistral, plus built-in natural language understanding, knowledge base integration, and deployment across web chat, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Slack, and custom channels through API webhooks. Pricing has five tiers: Pay-as-you-go starting Free with $5 monthly AI credit and 500 messages, Plus at $89 per month (or $79 billed annually) with knowledge base indexing and live chat support, Team at $495 per month for mid-sized teams with RBAC and 50,000 messages, Managed at $1,495 per month plus AI Spend for teams that want Botpress engineers to build and maintain bots through hands-on managed service, and Enterprise with custom contracts typically starting around $2,000 per month for advanced security, SLAs, and white-glove onboarding. LLM token usage is billed at provider rates with no markup. Self-hosted Botpress V12 is available free under MIT license for full code control and data residency. Botpress serves over 600,000 developers globally and is widely used by SaaS companies, agencies, and enterprises building conversational AI without vendor lock-in. The platforms strongest differentiation is the combination of visual no-code flow design accessible to non-developers with full code-level customisation when needed, plus the ability to self-host. Limits: enterprise governance features (granular RBAC, advanced audit logs) are less mature than Microsoft Copilot Studio for procurement-heavy organisations; usage-based AI Spend on top of base subscriptions can make total cost less predictable than flat-rate alternatives; channel costs (WhatsApp via Meta, SMS via Twilio) are billed separately and can exceed Botpress fees during high-volume campaigns.