Botpress is a developer platform for building chatbots. saavos is a finished product you point at your website. Same problem, opposite philosophies. Botpress repriced in May 2026 — Plus is now $89/mo for new workspaces, AI Spend is bundled, and they launched Desk (a human-AI helpdesk layer for Team and above). They're moving upmarket. We're still $9/mo and live in five minutes. Last verified 2026-05-19.
saavos | Botpress | |
|---|---|---|
| Builderduct type | Managed SaaS — finished product | Dev platform + cloud |
| Starting price | $9/mo Solo | Plus $89/mo (new workspaces after May 14, 2026) |
| AI Spend billing | Flat — no per-token math | Bundled into conversation allotments as of May 14, 2026 (was pay-per-token) |
| Human-AI workspace (Desk) | ✗ | ✓ on Team ($495/mo) and above — upon request |
| Time to first working bot | 5 minutes | Hours to days — you're building it |
| Coding required | None | Not required, expected for anything non-trivial |
| Self-host option | ✗ | ✓ (OSS core) |
| Workflow / flow builder | ✗ — RAG + LLM only | ✓ rich |
| Default model | frontier Claude | Configurable — you pick, you pay per token |
| Always-newest model included | ✓ auto-upgrade when Anthropic ships better | Configurable — you handle migrations |
| Knowledge base RAG | ✓ on by default | ✓ via Tables, manual setup |
| Citation grounding | ✓ inline by default | Partial — depends on your build |
| Multi-channel | Website + embed today | Website + WhatsApp + Slack + Telegram + Teams + more |
| Lead capture + email export | ✓ built-in — zero config, CSV export, GDPR consent | Build it yourself via Tables + custom flow |
| Best fit | Non-dev solopreneurs | Engineering teams · agencies building for clients |
Botpress gives you Lego blocks. We give you the assembled Lego set. If your time costs more than $9/mo (it does), the free tier's “1,000 free AI messages” is irrelevant — you haven't shipped yet. Our $9/mo gets you ~1,000 conversations on a bot that is live in five minutes, not on a project you finish next Saturday.
Botpress can do citation grounding — if you wire it into your flow correctly via Tables and prompt engineering. We've made the trade-off for you: citations on by default, retrieval thresholds tuned so the bot refuses cleanly when it doesn't know.
Botpress bundled AI Spend in May 2026 — so the pay-per-token surprise is gone. But $89/mo is still 4.7x our $9/mo Solo. You get roughly the same website-chatbot outcome. The $70/month difference is real money for an indie SaaS founder at $0–$1k MRR.
If your use case is non-standard — multi-step workflows, custom API calls mid-conversation, complex business logic — Botpress lets you build exactly what you need. We don't (and won't) have a flow-builder.
WhatsApp, Slack, Telegram, Teams, Messenger — all first-class. We ship website + embed today and add channels incrementally. For an agency building cross-channel bots for clients, Botpress is the better platform.
OSS core means you can run the platform on your own infrastructure. We're hosted-only. If data residency or self-host is a hard requirement, Botpress wins on day one.
Their May 14 update dropped Plus from the old price to $89/mo for new workspaces, bundled AI Spend into conversation allotments (no more per-token billing), and added unlimited bots on all paid plans. Botpress also launched Desk — a human-AI helpdesk workspace for Team and Managed customers. The $89 entry point makes Botpress cheaper than it was for small teams but still 4.7x our $9/mo Solo. The structural difference stays the same: Botpress is a platform you build on; saavos is a finished product.
Botpress's preview gets you 1,000 AI messages, but you still have to BUILD the bot. With us you're shipping a working bot in five minutes for $9/mo and 1,000 conversations. The Botpress preview is great if you have an engineer; not great if your time costs more than $9/mo.
Yes for the knowledge content — point us at the same URLs and we crawl them. The bot logic doesn't carry over because we don't have a flow-builder. But if you're moving from Botpress to us, you're probably moving away from custom logic by definition.
Usually yes — they expose the building blocks for custom builds you bill clients for. We're a finished product. For an agency building dozens of bespoke bots, Botpress is the right call.
Last verified: 2026-05-19. Botpress pricing taken from botpress.com/pricing and may change. Found something wrong? Email us and we'll fix it.
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