Chatbase alternatives in 2026
Chatbase answers from your documents. A Telegram support agent reads your live orders and booking slots. What each one has, and what it costs per seat.
In short. Chatbase turns your documents into an agent and answers from them, on any website, with voice and telephony once you reach $120 a month. A Telegram support agent starts from the same place — nine kinds of source, indexed and retrieved — and then does something Chatbase does not: it reads your live business data. Order status by number, shipment tracking, the caller’s own bookings, free slots, business hours, and two actions it will take once the buyer confirms. Chatbase prices per seat and per message credit; here Pro is 400 Telegram Stars per 30 days for the whole workspace. Two rows go the other way, and they are worth reading before the price.
Search “Chatbase alternatives” and you get twenty tools that turn a PDF into a chat bubble, each cheaper than the last. This page is not that. What follows is not a document chatbot, and if a website widget that answers from your help centre is the whole job, the honest answer is to compare Chatbase with Intercom’s Fin or Tidio and close this tab.
Why Chatbase gets picked
Because it is the shortest distance between the documents you already have and a working agent.
Point it at a site or upload a folder, and there is a chat bubble answering from your material the same afternoon. That is genuinely the product, and the surrounding machinery is real: multiple separate agents, helpdesk and ticketing integrations, an API, analytics, and from the Standard tier, voice, telephony and outbound campaigns.
Prices from their own page. Free is 50 message credits a month with one agent that gets deleted after 14 days of inactivity. Hobby is $32 a month for 500 credits and 2 workspace seats. Standard is $120 for 4,000 credits and 3 seats. Pro is $400 for 15,000 credits and 5 seats. Enterprise is custom.
Three numbers that decide more than the tier list: extra credits are $40 per thousand, extra seats cost, and removing Chatbase branding is $1,188 a year.
Where the job stops matching the tool
The mismatch is not about which model answers better. It is about what the agent is allowed to know.
A document agent knows what you wrote down. Ask it “where is my order” and the best it can do is explain how shipping generally works, because the order is not in a document — it is in a database it cannot see. That is the majority of real support volume: not “what is your refund policy” but “where is mine”, “when am I booked”, “can you move it”.
Closing that gap on a document chatbot means an API integration, a developer, and a tier that allows it. Which is fine if you have those. If you are one person selling in a Telegram channel, the integration is the project, and the chatbot is the easy part.
What is actually here
An agent with twelve tools, not a search box over your PDFs.
It answers from your material. Nine source types get indexed: a crawled website, pasted text, CSV, PDF, DOCX, a Notion page, a YouTube video, a voice recording, and hand-written entries. A question about the refund window is answered from the refund window.
It reads live business data. By number: order lookup and shipment tracking. For the person asking: their orders and their bookings. About you: your catalogue, your services, your free slots, your business hours. None of this is a document — it is the same data the storefront runs on, read at the moment of the question.
It can act, with the buyer’s consent. Two of the twelve tools write rather than read: cancelling a booking and taking a callback request. Both require the buyer to confirm before anything happens, so an agent that misunderstands does not quietly cancel someone’s appointment.
It hands over. Escalation to a human is a tool like any other, so the agent can decide the question is beyond it rather than improvising.
It runs in two places. Natively in your Telegram bot, and on any external website through an embeddable launcher — the bootstrap endpoint answers with wildcard CORS, so a Tilda, Shopify or WordPress page can load it directly.
What is really missing, said plainly
Three things, and the first one is not close.
- Voice and telephony. Chatbase sells both from its Standard tier. There is no smaller version here — there is none. If support has to answer a phone, stop reading.
- One agent per workspace. A database constraint enforces exactly one. Chatbase’s $32 tier gives five. Separate agents for separate brands means separate workspaces, which is heavier than a dropdown.
- A shared credit pool. The AI budget is one pool for everything — support replies, content generation, images. A support reply costs 2 credits, and Pro includes 500 a month, so a month of heavy support and a month of heavy publishing compete with each other. Top-ups exist, but the arithmetic is yours to do.
Honestly, where Chatbase wins
- Voice, telephony and outbound campaigns. Absent here entirely.
- Multiple agents on a cheap tier. Five on $32 versus one per workspace.
- Advanced analytics and helpdesk integrations. A mature ticketing story that does not exist here.
- Channel-agnostic from day one. Chatbase does not assume your customers are anywhere in particular. This assumes Telegram first, with the web widget second.
- Nothing to set up on the seller side. Chatbase does not need you to be running a shop, a catalogue or a booking calendar. Half of what makes the agent here useful only exists because the rest of the platform does.
Who is who
| AdminHub | Chatbase | |
|---|---|---|
| Shape | Support agent inside your Telegram bot, plus a web widget | Document agent as a website widget |
| Cost | Pro is 400 Stars per 30 days, whole workspace | $32–400/mo, per seat and per credit |
| Free tier | Yes — 30 credits a month | Yes — 50 credits, agent deleted after 14 days idle |
| Answers from your documents | 9 source types | Yes |
| Reads live orders and shipments | Yes | — |
| Reads bookings, slots, business hours | Yes | — |
| Takes actions | Cancel booking, request callback — buyer confirms | — |
| Escalates to a human | Yes, as a tool | Yes |
| Voice and telephony | — | From Standard |
| Agents included | One per workspace | 5 on Hobby |
| Removing branding | Included on Pro | $1,188/yr |
If… then…
| If… | Then… |
|---|---|
| Support has to answer a phone | Chatbase, and it is not close |
| Most questions are “where is my order” | Reading the order beats explaining shipping |
| You need separate agents for separate brands | Chatbase; here that means separate workspaces |
| Your customers already message your Telegram bot | The agent is where they already are |
| You have no shop, catalogue or bookings | Half the tools have nothing to read — Chatbase fits better |
| You publish heavily with AI as well | One credit pool covers both; do the arithmetic first |
| Branding removal matters to you | Included on Pro here, $1,188 a year there |
Where to start
Settle one thing first: what share of your support is lookup rather than explanation? Read the last fifty messages and count. If most of them are answerable from a help page, a document chatbot is the cheaper, faster answer and Chatbase is a good one. If most of them are someone asking about their own order, their own booking, their own slot — a chatbot that cannot see any of that will deflect a third of the volume and hand you the rest. Connect one knowledge source, ask it where your last order is, and see which half you are in.
For what the knowledge base can ingest, see an AI knowledge base for a Telegram bot. For the support flow end to end, see AI customer support on Telegram. To set it up, start at the AI support page.
What people usually ask
- How is this different from Chatbase?
- Chatbase builds an agent from your documents and answers questions out of them. This one does that too, and then keeps going: it can look up an order by number, track a shipment, list the caller's bookings, read available slots and business hours, and — with the buyer confirming first — cancel a booking or take a callback request. The difference is between knowing your FAQ and being able to look something up.
- What does Chatbase cost?
- Free gives 50 message credits a month and deletes an agent after 14 days of inactivity. Hobby is $32 a month for 500 credits and 2 seats. Standard is $120 for 4,000 credits and 3 seats, and that is the tier with voice, telephony and outbound campaigns. Pro is $400 for 15,000 credits. Extra credits are $40 per thousand, and removing Chatbase branding is $1,188 a year.
- Where does the agent actually live?
- In your Telegram bot, and on any website through an embeddable launcher — the bootstrap endpoint answers with wildcard CORS, so a Tilda, Shopify or WordPress page can load it directly. Telegram is where it is native; the web widget is the same agent answering somewhere else.
- What can it be trained on?
- Nine kinds of source: a crawled website, pasted text, CSV, PDF, DOCX, a Notion page, a YouTube video, a voice recording, and manually written entries. They are indexed and retrieved, so an answer about your refund policy comes from your refund policy.
- Can it do voice or phone calls?
- No. Chatbase sells voice and telephony from its Standard tier, and there is no equivalent here — not a smaller version, none at all. If support has to answer a phone, this is the row that decides it.
- How many agents can I run?
- One per workspace — there is a database constraint that says so. Chatbase's $32 tier gives you five. If you need separate agents for separate brands, that is a real limit here.