Chatbase alternatives (2026)

Chatbase is a capable product, and most people searching for an alternative are not leaving because it is bad. They leave for one of two reasons. The headline number on the pricing page is not the number on the invoice once the widget is actually being used, because the volume you priced on is not the volume you end up at. Or the product moved on without them: Chatbase's homepage, as of 31 July 2026, sells conversational agents across chat, email and voice to support organisations. If you have one website and you want it answered well, that is a lot of platform you will never open.

This is a survey, not a funnel. Four alternatives below — SiteGPT, Denser, CustomGPT and AnswerWeave — with who each suits, how each charges, and one real limitation each. Every competitor figure comes from that vendor's own published pricing, checked on 31 July 2026, with the page we read linked beside it; where a vendor publishes prices somewhere other than a dedicated pricing page, the link goes to the page we actually read. Where we could not verify a figure first-hand, the number is left out rather than guessed. AnswerWeave is one of the four and it is ours, so its limitations are listed with the same specificity as everyone else's.

Read the pricing model before you read the price

Headline prices in this category sit close together. The models do not, and the model is what decides your invoice in month six, once the widget is actually getting used. There are three in circulation.

• Credits. The unit is an abstraction rather than a message: plans are denominated in credits, so working out what an answer costs you means knowing how many credits an answer consumes, and that is not on the pricing page. You cannot compute next month's bill from it. That is usually what people mean when they say the invoice did not match the pricing page.
• Flat message allowance. A number of messages for a number of dollars. Easy to check, easy to forecast. The catch is usually elsewhere: a fee to remove the vendor's branding, or a cap on how many separate assistants you can run.
• Query tiers. Flat within a tier, but the step between tiers is where it bites. The allowance inside a tier can be tighter than the marketing implies, so the tier you priced on may not be the tier you end up on — check the query count, not the tier name.

The same job, priced four ways

Like-for-like configuration: 10,000 answers a month, one business, one website, vendor branding removed. Branding removal is included because a public-facing site is where a vendor's badge is hardest to live with, and leaving the fee out flatters some vendors more than others. All figures checked 31 July 2026 against the vendor's own published pricing.

Every figure quoted in the sections below comes from this table, checked 31 July 2026 against the linked page.

Two notes on the Chatbase row, because it is the largest number and therefore the one to be most careful with. The arithmetic is theirs, not ours: $120 buys the first 4,000 credits, credits bought after that are $40 per 1,000, and the branding fee is published as an annual figure rather than a monthly one — we have converted it, and said so, rather than quoting a monthly price their page does not print. And the whole row assumes one credit per answer. Chatbase's own page denominates plans in credits rather than messages, and we have not verified first-hand how many credits a given answer consumes, so we are not quoting a multiplier. Treat $459 as the figure for the one-credit-per-answer case only, and price your own mix on their page before comparing.

SiteGPT — the closest like-for-like

Suits a business that wants a flat plan and 10,000 messages for $79, without doing credit arithmetic. That list price is the lowest here; the $39 branding fee is what puts it at $118 like-for-like. Its allowances are stated in units a human can count, and if price per message is your deciding variable, it is the one to beat among the alternatives.

The pricing model is flat, with two things to watch. Branding removal is a separate $39/mo (sitegpt.ai, 31 Jul 2026), charged on top of the plan rather than folded into it, so check which line you are actually comparing. And chatbot count is capped per tier, which matters if you run several sites or several distinct sections of one.

The limitation: nothing in SiteGPT's positioning addresses what happens when the answer is not in your content. Their pitch is expert customer service — deflection, framed well and honestly. As of 31 July 2026 there was no accuracy or grounding claim on the page to evaluate, so if that behaviour matters to you, it is something you will have to test yourself rather than something you can buy against.

Denser — transparent invoice, tight allowance

Suits a buyer who has been burned by an unpredictable bill and wants the pricing page to be the whole story. Denser leads on exactly that, plus RAG with source citations and broad language support. Their attack on hidden fees is a fair one and they make it well.

The model is query tiers, and the tiers are where you have to read the claim carefully — it is a claim about the invoice, not about the allowance. It is true about the invoice: the tiers are published, and no hidden fees is what they lead with. It is weaker about the allowance. Standard at $119 covers 7,500 queries (denser.ai/pricing, 31 Jul 2026); the next step up is Business at $399 for 15,000. That is roughly triple the price for double the volume, and 10,000 queries a month is not a lot of traffic.

The limitation: the cliff. Price the tier above the one you think you need, because a modest traffic increase can move you across it. Transparent is not the same as cheap, and Denser only claims the first.

CustomGPT — priced for a different buyer

Suits mid-market teams buying breadth: many assistants, very large content volumes, more of a platform purchase than a website widget. If you are consolidating several internal knowledge bases rather than answering questions on one marketing site, it belongs on your list.

On pricing we have to stop short. We could not establish a figure for the 10,000-answers configuration from CustomGPT's own pricing page that we would be willing to publish, and the rule we hold ourselves to is that a missing number is fine and a wrong one is not. Read their pricing page directly and price your own volume.

The limitation, then, is the one we ran into ourselves: pricing that takes real effort to map to a specific volume. That is a fair signal about who the product is built for, and it is not a business with one website. For that buyer, the surface area is larger than the problem.

AnswerWeave — for sites where a wrong answer is expensive

Suits a business whose website is a sales channel rather than a support queue — a firm, a clinic, a practice, an agency — where a confidently invented fee, deadline or eligibility rule costs more than saying nothing. The whole product is built around one behaviour: it answers from your content, shows the pages it used, and says so when it does not know.

That is four mechanisms, not an adjective. Every question is searched twice, by meaning and by keyword, and the two result sets are merged, so wording alone does not decide whether a question gets answered. What comes back is scored, and below the threshold the assistant switches to a different prompt — it answers differently rather than worse, telling the visitor the content does not cover it and offering to pass the question on. Sources listed under an answer are the ones the answer actually cited, not the three closest matches. And when it tells a visitor the content does not cover something, it will not attach a source it did not actually cite: the automatic here-is-the-closest-page-anyway fallback is switched off on those replies.

Pricing is flat, with no fee to remove branding at any tier and a free plan with no card required — current plans and volumes are on the pricing page. Sources can be a website crawl, a sitemap, a URL list, or PDF, DOCX, TXT and Markdown files for the content that was never published. Install is one script tag.

<script src="https://answerweave.hazentech.com/widget/widget.js"
  data-bot-id="YOUR_BOT_ID"
  data-api-key="YOUR_PUBLISHABLE_KEY"
  data-api-url="https://answerweave.hazentech.com"
  data-color="#1d4ed8">
</script>

The limitations, stated as plainly as everyone else's. We are newer and smaller: one production deployment, no named enterprise logos, no wall of reviews to read before you decide. We do the website and nothing else — no email or voice channels, no agent workflows, no ticket queue, no seats. And we are only the cheapest row in our own table because we do not charge to remove branding. On list price SiteGPT's Growth is $79 and ours is $10 more, so if the confidence behaviour is not something you care about and you are happy to run their badge on your site, that $10 is the entire argument and they should have it.

When to stay on Chatbase

If you need chat, email and voice in one place, Chatbase sells that as a single platform and we do not — we do the website and nothing else. We go through this trade in more detail in our full Chatbase comparison, including the cases where they are the better choice. Check the other three against their own pages rather than taking our word for what they do not do. If you have a support organisation with seats and a ticket queue, their product is shaped for you and ours explicitly is not. If model choice matters and you are comfortable in credits, the flexibility is real. And if you are at a volume where an enterprise conversation makes sense, brand and scale count for something during procurement, whatever engineers think of that.

On our side switching is a re-crawl and a script tag; for a single site that has been about a day's work for us, but price your own case and add whatever unwinding your current setup takes. It is rarely worth doing to save $40 a month. It is worth doing if the pricing model no longer matches how you use the thing, or if the product's centre of gravity has moved away from your use case.

How to choose

Ignore the feature grids for a moment. Two questions decide this, and both are about your own site rather than anyone's product.

1. What does a wrong answer cost you? If a hallucinated price or deadline is an awkward email, optimise for cost per message and buy the cheapest flat plan that covers your volume. If it is a refund, or a complaint you have to answer for, then how the system behaves at the edge of its knowledge is the product, and it is the only thing worth testing. Nothing here is legal advice. If a wrong answer on your site could create a regulatory or contractual problem for you, that question belongs with your own counsel or compliance lead, not with a comparison post.
2. What is the bill at three times today's traffic? Take your current monthly conversations, triple them, and price that number on each vendor's own page. Credits and query tiers are the two models that change character when you do this. A flat plan usually just gets a bit more expensive; the other two can jump a tier or start metering.

Then run one test on the shortlist. Load your real content, and ask the assistant something your site genuinely does not cover — an edge case a customer would plausibly raise. What comes back is the difference between these products. Everything else on the pricing page is negotiable; that is not.