SendPulse vs ManyChat: Chatbots Beside Email or DMs First

The short answer: if your sales start in Instagram or TikTok DMs and comments, and a few hundred people message you each month, ManyChat is the specialist: Essential is $17 a month paid monthly for 250 active contacts, and Pro, which adds WhatsApp, SMS, email and AI-powered automation, is $39 for 2,500 (ManyChat Pro plan, Essential plan). If you want the chatbot and the email list in one account, with every email a bot collects landing in a mailing list that can start an email automation, SendPulse does that, with chatbot Pro at $12 a month for 500 subscribers and a free tier of three bots (SendPulse chatbot pricing, mailing list article). Checked on 26 October 2026.

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ManyChat's pricing page returned a bot check on 26 October 2026. Its plan prices here come from ManyChat's own help-centre plan articles, read the same day.

Count your conversations first:

1. Price the audience each one bills. ManyChat bills Active Contacts, people who interact during the billing month; SendPulse bills every chatbot subscriber you can message, or the people you talked to in the last 30 days if that number is higher (Active Contacts, SendPulse subscriber rules). For example, 4,000 people have messaged your bot over time and 600 do so in a month. ManyChat counts 600: Essential would add 350 x $0.10 = $35 of overage to $17, so Pro at $39 is cheaper. SendPulse counts 4,000, which needs its 5,000 tier at $48 a month.
2. Start from where your email list lives. If you already email customers from SendPulse, a bot there adds captured emails and phone numbers to a list named after the bot and can trigger an email or SMS flow (mailing list article). If your email sits in another tool, ManyChat Pro integrates with email, SMS, CRM and commerce tools, while Essential syncs contacts to Google Sheets (Pro plan).
3. Decide what a good conversation is. An email or phone number captured, or a sale, per hundred conversations. Count last month's by hand before automating anything.

What each plan includes

From ManyChat's Essential, Pro and Active Contacts articles, and SendPulse's chatbot pricing, subscriber rules and MCP page.

The differences that count

Engaged people or everyone you could message

ManyChat charges for the people who talk to you this month, so a large, quiet audience costs nothing until it wakes up (Active Contacts). SendPulse charges for everyone you could message, so deleting contacts with no conversation in 30 days is how you stay inside a tier, and its help article explains the filter for finding them (subscriber rules). A big, quiet back catalogue of DMs is cheaper on ManyChat; a small audience that talks every month is cheaper on SendPulse.

Email inside the account or connected to it

SendPulse sells email, chatbots, SMS and a built-in CRM under one login, which is why a bot's captured contacts flow straight into an email list (SendPulse homepage). ManyChat starts from the DM and treats email as one of the channels Pro can connect (Pro plan). Neither is the mistake. One fits a business where the inbox closes the sale, the other a business where the DM does.

WhatsApp costs, on top of either plan

Both pass on Meta's per-message charges. ManyChat's guide lists rates by country, for example $0.1836 per marketing template in the Netherlands, and from 1 October 2026 service replies are charged too, with 1,000 free per WhatsApp number each month (WhatsApp pricing guide). SendPulse's pricing page states the same October change and 1,000 free service messages a month per bot (SendPulse chatbot pricing). WhatsApp is not on ManyChat Essential.

Prices, checked on 26 October 2026

From the same ManyChat articles and the SendPulse chatbot pricing page. ManyChat's Business price is not in those articles, and its pricing page could not be read on 26 October 2026.

An AI step that answers DMs, tested first

ManyChat's AI Step sits inside an automation: you give it a goal, such as finding out what the person needs, and context about your products, prices, FAQs and tone; it generates tasks you can edit, and works on Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok and Telegram (AI Step guide). Before setting it live, use Save and Start Chat to talk to it yourself. Run ten test conversations a real customer would start: a refund, a discount request, a question your FAQ does not answer. Fix the context after each failure, and only then add the trigger. SendPulse's MCP server can send messages and run chatbot flows from an AI client (SendPulse MCP), so on SendPulse the approval step is a rule you set, not one the tool enforces.

Free first, then a plan

SendPulse's free chatbot tier, three bots, 500 subscribers and 10,000 messages a month, can run a real Instagram bot for a month (SendPulse chatbot pricing). ManyChat's free plan covers 25 Active Contacts, and Essential and Pro include a 14-day free trial (Active Contacts, Pro plan). Build the same comment-to-DM flow on both and count captured emails.

ManyChat keeps automations running past the Active Contact limit and adds the overage to the next bill without asking, after notices at 70%, 90% and 100% (Active Contacts); that protects your funnel and ManyChat's revenue in the same move, so treat the 70% notice as the date to decide on an upgrade.

Choose SendPulse if your job is

• Collecting emails and phone numbers in chat and emailing those people from the same account.
• Running bots across several messengers on a free tier, then paying by subscriber count.
• Keeping chatbots, email, SMS and a simple CRM under one login.

Choose ManyChat if your job is

• Selling through Instagram and TikTok comments and DMs, with automations built for them.
• Paying only for people who engage each month.
• Putting an AI Step into DM conversations on Pro.

If the DMs, the email list and the sales records already sit in three places that disagree, a chatbot will not settle which one is right. The Startup Fixer, a one-week review I sell, is built for untangling that kind of stack.

FAQ

Do my ManyChat automations stop when I pass the limit?

No. They keep running and the overage is added to the next bill; automations can pause only if the account grows well beyond the plan's maximum without an upgrade (Active Contacts).

Does someone who messages me twice count twice on ManyChat?

No. The same person within one billing month is one Active Contact, though someone on two platforms can count twice unless the same phone or email links them (Active Contacts).

Can SendPulse upgrade my chatbot plan automatically?

Yes. Turn on balance auto-recharge in account settings and choose chatbots under automated plan upgrade, and the bots keep running when you pass the limit (subscriber rules).