On 2 March 2026, ManyChat introduced a new pricing model: five tiers, a free plan capped at 25 active contacts, and paid plans that bill by the number of people who interact with you each month. The complaint in ManyChat’s own community forum wasn’t really about the free tier. It was about the model — your bill grows with the size of your audience, whether or not you’re doing anything more with them.
One thing to check before you shop around: ManyChat’s help centre states the new plans apply to accounts created on or after 2 March 2026, and that accounts opened before then can’t switch to them yet. So if you’re an existing user, look at your own billing page before assuming your costs are about to jump. This post is most useful if you’re choosing a tool now, or if the per-contact model is what you want to get away from.
Either way, the comparison below is built around the thing that actually decides your bill — what you’re charged for — rather than feature checklists.
A note on honesty: we build Mentbot, which is #2 on this list. Every price here comes from the vendor’s own pricing page or help centre, checked on 30 July 2026, and we say plainly where each competitor beats us. ManyChat is still the right answer for a lot of people, and we’ve explained exactly when.
Four ways these tools charge, and the difference between them is thousands of dollars a year at scale:
| Model | What grows your bill | Who it hurts |
|---|---|---|
| Per active contact | Every unique person who interacts with you in a month | Anyone whose posts occasionally go viral |
| Per profile / per seat | Number of Facebook pages and team members | Agencies and multi-page sellers |
| Flat by volume | Daily message or comment throughput | Nobody, until you outgrow a tier |
| Free | Nothing | Nobody — but you get what you pay for |
A concrete example. ManyChat’s Essential plan is $17/mo on monthly billing ($14/mo if you pay for the year up front) and includes 250 active contacts, after which each extra contact costs $0.10. One product post that pulls 2,000 commenters puts you 1,750 contacts over — $175 in overage on a $17 plan. ManyChat warns you as you approach the limit and lets you set an overage cap, but capping it means capping your own leads to control your bill.
One caveat on every price in this post: most vendors advertise the annual-billing rate in large type and the monthly rate in small type. Where the two differ, we give both.
That’s the trade the rest of this list is really about.
Price: Free, forever, no tier games.
Facebook’s own tooling can send a private Messenger reply to anyone who comments on your page. It’s in Inbox → Automations, and it takes about ten minutes to set up.
Separately, Facebook can hide comments automatically: a keyword blocklist lives in Moderation Assist, and the profanity filter sits under Page Settings → General. Both are free and more capable than most page owners realise — they’re just in three different places, which is why people miss them.
Where it falls short: the automation applies to your whole page, so your meme post gets the same auto-DM as your product drop. Keyword matching is rudimentary, there’s no public reply component, and there’s no reporting — you will never know how many commenters it converted.
Choose it if: you get a handful of comments a day and you’re not sure automation is worth paying for yet. Genuinely start here. If it’s enough, you’ve saved yourself a subscription; if it isn’t, you’ll know precisely which limit you hit, which makes choosing a paid tool much easier.
Price: $9/mo (100 comments/day) to $49/mo (5,000/day), flat. Every feature on every plan, unlimited pages. 14-day free trial, no card.
We built Mentbot for one motion: someone comments, they get a public reply and a private Messenger message within a second, and then the comment can be hidden so your competitors can’t work through your buyer list. Setup is one rule covering every future post — all posts, posts carrying a hashtag, or comments containing your keywords — rather than a flow attached to each post.
The billing is by daily comment volume, not by contacts, so a post going viral uses up your day’s allowance and then resets. It doesn’t move you up a tier or generate an overage bill.
Where it falls short: there is no visual flow builder, no drip sequences, and no Instagram or WhatsApp — Facebook pages only. No AI. If you want any of those, we’re the wrong tool and one of the others on this list is better.
Choose it if: you sell in Facebook comments daily — product posts, live selling, fifty “how much?” a day — and you want the public-reply-plus-DM-plus-hide sequence running without building or maintaining anything.
Price: Chatfuel Light is free. AI PRO is $69/mo billed monthly, or $49/mo billed annually (29% off, charged as one annual payment). Verified against chatfuel.com/pricing on 21 August 2026.
Chatfuel is one of the oldest Messenger bot builders and remains the most direct substitute for ManyChat: visual flow builder, Instagram + Facebook + WhatsApp, shared inbox, templates, Shopify and Stripe integrations. It’s an official Meta partner, as is ManyChat.
The more interesting difference is what it doesn’t meter. Chatfuel’s plan limits page states that plans include unlimited active contacts and unlimited messages, with fair-use limits applying to AI processing instead. If per-contact billing is the reason you’re reading this, that’s the single most relevant fact on this page.
Where it falls short: the jump from free to $69/mo (or a $49/mo annual commitment) is steep with nothing in between, and the AI usage limits are the thing to read before you commit — that’s where the metering moved to, not where it disappeared. It’s also a broad platform, so you’re learning a flow builder either way: you’re swapping vendors, not swapping approaches.
Choose it if: you want everything ManyChat does without contact-based billing, and you’re comfortable with a flow builder. If Chatfuel itself is the one you’re weighing leaving, our dedicated Chatfuel alternatives comparison goes deeper on that specific choice.
Price: Standard $89/mo, Pro $109/mo, Expert $139/mo on monthly billing ($67 / $82 / $105 annual). Those are the entry rungs — each tier scales up with the number of profiles and users, to 60 profiles and 20 users, so Expert runs from $139 to $799/mo depending on size. Enterprise from $465/mo. EU businesses without a valid tax ID, Polish companies, and private individuals pay 23% VAT on top.
NapoleonCat is a social media management suite — scheduling, analytics, a unified inbox across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, X and Google Business Profile — with auto-moderation as a headline feature. It covers ad comments as well as organic ones, which most tools on this list don’t.
Read the tier table carefully, though. Automatic comment hiding and deletion is on the Expert plan only — from $139/mo monthly, or $105/mo annually. If auto-hiding is the feature you came for, that’s the real price, not the $89 on the front of the pricing page.
Where it falls short: cost, if comments are all you need. You’re buying a scheduling and analytics suite to get the moderation. Billing is per profile and per seat, so it scales with pages managed, not messages sent.
Choose it if: you manage several brands or platforms, you run Facebook and Instagram ads and need the comments underneath them moderated, or you’re an agency reporting to clients. For those jobs it’s well-priced. For “I sell things in my comments”, it isn’t.
Price: Starter $79/mo, Growth $159/mo, Advanced $279/mo, plus Enterprise. 7-day free trial.
respond.io is an omnichannel conversation platform: WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, TikTok, email, SMS and web chat into one team inbox, with routing, assignment, AI agents and a CRM layer. Comment-to-DM capture is one entry point among many.
Where it falls short: the price. The $79/mo entry is nearly nine times Mentbot’s and more than four times ManyChat’s Essential — because you’re buying a support and sales operation, not a comment tool. Wasted on a solo seller.
Choose it if: you have multiple agents handling conversations, you need routing and assignment, and conversations arrive from more places than Facebook comments. It’s the natural upgrade when your team outgrows a shared login.
Price (monthly / annual): Free — 25 active contacts, 4 active automations, 2 channels, “Powered by Manychat” on your first message. Essential $17 / $14 (250 contacts). Pro $39 / $29 (2,500). Business $99 / $69 (7,500). Advanced $199 / $139 (25,000). Overage runs $0.10 down to $0.004 per extra contact depending on tier. AI is included on Pro and above in this model, not sold as an add-on.
We should be fair here: ManyChat has the best visual flow builder in the category, an enormous template library, a decade of agencies and courses around it, and official Meta partnership across Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and TikTok. None of the smaller tools on this list come close on ecosystem.
The free plan is a sandbox rather than a usable plan — one Reel with a keyword trigger can exhaust 25 contacts in an afternoon. But the paid plans didn’t get worse in features. They got more granular in billing, which is a problem only if your audience grows faster than your revenue from it.
Stay on ManyChat if: you use the flows. If your automation is “comment WORKSHOP → get the PDF → three-message sequence → book a call”, nothing else here does that as well, and switching to save $20/mo would cost you the thing you’re actually paying for.
Leave if: you only use the comment trigger. You’re paying for a flow builder you don’t open, on a billing model that punishes exactly the posts you want to have.
Search “ManyChat alternatives” and you’ll meet a dozen names you’ve never heard of, most from 2025–2026, most priced between $9 and $30 flat: ReplyRush, InstantDM, DMdaddy, BunnyBooster, Spur, LinkDM and others. Several look genuinely reasonable, and flat pricing is the right instinct.
Two cautions, offered as a competitor who’d benefit from you distrusting all of them — so weigh it accordingly:
Most of the listicles ranking them are written by the tools themselves. A post titled “15 best ManyChat alternatives” that happens to rank its own product first is an ad. That includes ours; the difference we can offer is that every price in this post came from the vendor’s own pricing page rather than from another listicle.
Check the API question before you pay. Anything automating Facebook comments should work through Meta’s official Pages API with permissions you grant in a Facebook login screen. Tools that ask for your Facebook password, or that run as browser extensions clicking buttons on your behalf, put your page at risk of restriction. This is the single check worth doing on any tool here, ours included.
| Tool | Entry price (monthly) | Billing model | Free option | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Meta Business Suite | Free | — | Unlimited | Low volume, testing the idea |
| Mentbot | $9 | Flat, by daily comments | 14-day trial | Selling in Facebook comments |
| ManyChat | $17 ($14 annual) | Per active contact | 25 contacts | Multi-step flows and campaigns |
| Chatfuel | $69 ($49 annual) | Flat; unlimited contacts, limits on AI usage | Free tier | ManyChat’s features, no contact metering |
| respond.io | $79 | Per contact | 7-day trial | Teams with an omnichannel inbox |
| NapoleonCat | $89 (auto-hide: $139) | Per profile + seat | 14-day trial | Multi-platform moderation, agencies |
All prices verified against vendor pricing pages and help centres on 30 July 2026, and stated at the monthly rate unless marked. Check before you buy — this category re-prices often, as March demonstrated.
Answer one question: what do you do after the comment?
Most people asking about ManyChat alternatives are in the first group and paying for the second. That’s the whole finding.
Is ManyChat still free in 2026? There is still a free plan. Under the model introduced on 2 March 2026 it covers 25 active contacts per month, 4 active automations and 2 channels, with ManyChat branding on the first message you send — enough for testing, not for running a page. ManyChat’s help centre notes these plans apply to accounts created on or after that date, so if you signed up earlier, check your own billing page rather than the public pricing page.
What is an “active contact”? Any unique person who sends or receives a message through the tool in a monthly billing period — one person equals one contact regardless of how many messages you exchange. This is why viral posts are expensive on contact-based billing: every commenter you reply to is billable, whether or not they ever reply.
Which is cheapest for a small Facebook seller? Meta Business Suite, at zero. Among paid tools, Mentbot at $9/mo — though the honest caveat is that it only does Facebook comments, so “cheapest” is only meaningful if that’s all you need.
Can I move my Messenger conversations to a new tool? Your conversation history belongs to your Facebook page, not to the tool, so it stays put when you switch. Disconnect the old tool’s triggers before connecting a new one, or both will fire private replies on the same comments.
Is any of this against Facebook’s rules? Private replies to comments are an official Page feature, and every tool here works through Meta’s API. What breaks the rules is unofficial browser scripts and anything asking for your account password — that’s what gets pages restricted.
If you’re leaving ManyChat because of the billing rather than the features, don’t replace a flow builder with another flow builder. Work out what you actually do after a comment arrives, then buy only that.
If the answer is “reply, DM them, hide the comment, and let a human close it”, that’s the job Mentbot was built for — 14-day free trial, no card, and you can compare a week of Messenger conversations against your last week on ManyChat before deciding. Our head-to-head with ManyChat goes deeper on that specific choice, and the full auto-reply setup guide covers the free Meta option in detail if you’d rather start there.
