Chatbase vs PepoChat: Which AI Support Agent Fits Your Team in 2026?

If you are searching for a Chatbase alternative, or trying to settle a "Chatbase vs PepoChat" debate inside your team, this page is the side-by-side. It is written from Chatbase's own pricing and documentation pages, fetched in September 2026, and from PepoChat's product as it ships today. Prices change, so check each vendor's pricing page for current numbers before you decide.

The comparison is for small and mid-sized teams who want an AI support agent on their website. An AI support agent is a chatbot that answers from your own knowledge base, takes actions in your other tools, and hands the conversation to a person when it should. Both products fit that definition; they differ in how you pay, what you get before paying, and how far beyond the website they reach.

Full disclosure: this is PepoChat's blog. There are sections below where Chatbase is plainly the stronger choice, and their docs are linked throughout so you can check every claim.

Chatbase vs PepoChat at a glance

How does the pricing model differ?

The biggest difference is not the price but the unit you buy.

Chatbase sells message credits. A message credit is the unit deducted every time the agent replies, and the number of credits per reply depends on the model you pick. Chatbase's FAQ lists most models at 1 credit per response, with GPT-5.2 and the Gemini Pro and Flash models at 2, Claude Sonnet at 3, Grok 4 and GPT-5.5 at 4, and the Claude Opus models at 5 or 6. So 4,000 credits on the Standard plan is 4,000 replies on a 1-credit model, or fewer than 700 replies if you standardise on an Opus model.

The Chatbase pricing page, as of September 2026, lists Free at $0 with 50 credits, Hobby at $40 a month with 700 credits and 2 agents, Standard at $150 with 4,000 credits, 3 agents and 3 seats, and Pro at $500 with 15,000 credits, 5 agents and 5 seats. Annual billing takes 20% off. Beyond that, auto-recharge adds credits at $40 per 1,000, extra agents cost $25 each per month, and removing the "Powered by Chatbase" badge is a $99 monthly add-on. Check their pricing page for current numbers.

When credits run out, the FAQ says the agent displays "This AI Agent is currently unavailable. If you are the owner, please check your account." Plan around that: enable auto-recharge or accept that the widget goes dark until the month resets.

PepoChat has two plans. Free includes 500 AI replies and 10 knowledge sources a month with every feature on the free plan. Pro removes both limits, allows up to five team members and adds priority support; the pricing page has the price. There is no annual plan and downgrading keeps your conversation history. Every reply costs one reply, because there is one model (OpenAI's gpt-4o-mini) rather than a menu.

Credits let you pay for a stronger model on the conversations that need it, and Chatbase's model list is genuinely long. A flat reply count means your bill is predictable and a traffic spike never changes the cost per answer.

What is actually on the free tier?

Chatbase's Free plan is a trial in all but name. As of September 2026 it lists 50 message credits, one member, 1 MB of training content, no AI actions, "limited access to models", and the pricing page notes that agents are deleted after 14 days of inactivity. Fifty credits confirms the product answers from your data; it is not enough to put in front of customers. The helpdesk inbox, voice and auto-resync appear on Standard or above, and the pricing table only lists a per-agent AI action allowance from Standard upward.

PepoChat's free plan is the product. Actions, team inbox, calendar booking, meeting memory, widget customisation, domain allow-list and analytics are all on Free; Pro differs only in the reply cap, the source cap and the seat count. When a free workspace reaches 500 replies in a month, new conversations are routed to the team inbox with a friendly message rather than failing, so the widget never goes dark. You can start a free workspace without a card and run it in production for as long as 500 replies covers you.

Knowledge sources and their limits

Both products build a knowledge base, the private collection of documents and pages the agent retrieves from before answering.

Chatbase accepts uploaded files, text snippets, website crawls, sitemaps, individual links and, on the Pro plan, support tickets as a source. The limit that matters is total training content, which the pricing page caps at 1 MB on Free, 10 MB on Hobby, 20 MB on Standard and 40 MB on Pro. Automatic re-syncing of sources is listed as a Standard feature.

PepoChat counts sources rather than megabytes. A whole site crawl or a sitemap import is one source; a single link is one source; a file is one source. Free workspaces get 10, Pro gets unlimited. The crawler follows same-site links breadth-first up to 50 pages and three levels deep, honours robots.txt, and accepts include and exclude path filters. URL sources are re-fetched weekly and only changed pages are re-indexed, on every plan. Scanned PDFs are read by a vision model, and articles you publish in the built-in Help Center are mirrored into the knowledge base automatically. The training guide walks through the setup.

If your documentation is one large site, PepoChat's "a crawl is one source" rule is generous and the 50-page crawl depth is the limit to watch. If you have many small, unrelated documents, PepoChat's 10-source cap on Free will push you to Pro sooner.

How does human handoff work in each?

Human handoff is the moment the AI stops answering and a person takes over. How that moment is triggered, and where the conversation lands, decides whether customers trust the bot.

In Chatbase, handoff is an action. The Escalate to Human action creates a ticket in Chatbase's own Helpdesk or in Zendesk, Salesforce, Intercom, Zoho Desk, Freshdesk, HubSpot, Help Scout, Gorgias or Odoo. Most of those targets receive an AI-written summary of the conversation; Zendesk can receive the full transcript. Chatbase also lists live-chat handoff routes (its own live chat, Salesforce and Sunshine) and a phone-transfer action. The Helpdesk inbox itself is a Standard-plan feature, so on Hobby you are handing off into a third-party tool.

In PepoChat, handoff is built into the answer loop. The agent searches the knowledge base for every reply; when it finds nothing relevant, or the visitor asks for a person, the conversation is escalated to the team inbox with its full transcript. Operators see conversations live with unresolved, escalated and resolved statuses and reply as themselves; there is no separate helpdesk product to enable and no plan gate. If you already run Zendesk, Freshdesk or Zoho Desk, a prebuilt action can also create a ticket there. Our handoff post goes into the trigger design in more detail.

The trade-off: Chatbase's destination list is longer and includes live-chat transfer, which matters if your agents already live in Intercom or Gorgias. PepoChat's inbox is simpler, but escalation is grounded in retrieval, meaning the bot escalates because it could not find an answer rather than because a rule fired.

Appointment booking: calendar link versus real calendar

Chatbase offers Calendly and Cal.com actions under its Scheduling category. The Cal.com action works from your event URL alone, with no API key, and handles both reading availability and making the reservation. There is a 12- or 24-hour time-format setting; the docs we read do not describe timezone conversion, so test that with a visitor in a different region before you rely on it.

PepoChat connects to a PepoSmart scheduling calendar with an API key. You choose which meeting types the agent may offer and write a short "when to offer this" note for each, and the agent gets a check-slots tool and a book tool per type. Slots are shown in the visitor's local time and the booking is made in the host's timezone, so the model never does timezone arithmetic. PepoSmart re-validates the slot at booking time to prevent double booking, assigns a host (round-robin is supported), creates the Google Meet, Zoom or Teams link, and sends confirmations and reminders. Paid event types are excluded. Details are in the appointment booking guide.

The obvious limit on the PepoChat side is that it requires PepoSmart. If your team lives in Calendly, Chatbase's action is the shorter path.

Meeting memory: the feature Chatbase does not have

Meeting memory is PepoChat's ability, when enabled, to recall a verified visitor's past meetings from PepoSmart meeting notes so a returning customer does not have to re-explain themselves. It is off by default and only works after the visitor verifies their email with a one-time code. The agent sees dates, key interests, commitments and summaries; raw transcripts, recordings and third-party details never cross, and access is logged on both sides.

Chatbase has no equivalent; its context is the current conversation plus whatever an action returns. If your support involves recurring calls with the same people, this is a real differentiator; if not, ignore it. We explain the design in what is meeting memory.

Actions and integrations

Chatbase groups its AI Actions into support and handoff, commerce (Shopify, Stripe, WhatsApp Catalog), lead capture (lead collection, custom data, custom forms), scheduling, and other (custom API actions, Slack notifications, web search, custom buttons). Actions can be restricted to run only inside "procedures", Chatbase's plain-language workflows, which is a sensible guard for refunds or escalations. The pricing page allows 10 actions per agent on Standard and 20 on Pro, and none on Free.

PepoChat ships prebuilt, editable actions for Stripe (look up plans, update or cancel subscriptions), Shopify (live order status), WooCommerce (order by number or by email), Zendesk, Freshdesk and Zoho Desk (create and check tickets), HubSpot and Salesforce (find contacts, file tickets or cases), Slack and Discord (post an alert), Jira (create an issue), Mailchimp (subscribe) and Zapier (POST to a Catch Hook). Zoho Desk, Salesforce, Slack and HubSpot connect with one-click OAuth; the others take a pasted API key. Custom actions call any HTTPS endpoint with templated URL, headers and body, typed inputs with optional format regex, and an allow-list of response fields the AI may see. All of this is on the free plan.

One PepoChat caveat: action execution is at-least-once, so a non-idempotent POST can, rarely, run twice; do not wire refunds or payments as actions. Chatbase's "only use in procedures" setting addresses a similar concern from a different angle.

Chatbase is ahead on web search, custom forms and buttons, and a WhatsApp catalog connector. PepoChat is ahead on prebuilt helpdesk and CRM connectors on the free plan and on the response-field controls for custom actions.

Channels: where Chatbase is clearly ahead

Chatbase's Channels page lists a chat bubble, a hosted help page, a full-screen "Center Stage" mode, native iOS and Android SDKs, email, Slack, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, phone via Twilio or SIP trunking, plus Zapier and WordPress. One agent, trained once, answers in all of them.

PepoChat is a website widget: one script tag, a 6 KB async loader, an iframe created on first click. There are no native WhatsApp, Messenger or Slack channels and no announced date for them. If a meaningful share of your support arrives through messaging apps, this row alone should decide the comparison in Chatbase's favour.

Voice: same agent versus separate assistant

Chatbase's voice channel answers inbound phone calls on a Twilio number or an existing SIP trunk, and its documentation says the voice agent uses the same knowledge, actions and instructions as the chat agent. Voice and telephony are listed on the Standard plan and above.

PepoChat's voice is optional in-widget voice powered by Vapi. You connect your own Vapi account with a public key and assistant id, and the voice assistant is configured on Vapi's platform. It does not yet share the chat agent's knowledge base and does not appear in the team inbox. That is a real gap, and if voice is central to your plan, Chatbase's integrated approach is the better one today.

Team seats, security and maturity

Chatbase counts members per plan: one on Free, three on Standard, five on Pro, with custom roles, SSO and audit logs on Enterprise. Its homepage states it is "trusted by over 10,000 brands" and lists SOC 2 Type II, GDPR and HIPAA compliance, and the plan ladder runs up to an Enterprise tier with SLAs and a success manager.

PepoChat invites team members by email with owner, admin and member roles; invitations expire after seven days; Pro allows up to five members. Each organisation's data is isolated, credentials are AES-256-GCM encrypted and cannot be read back from the dashboard, and operators sign in with a verified email and password or Google. We do not currently publish a SOC 2 or ISO certification, a DPA, or deflection statistics. Whichever vendor you choose, ask for the compliance documents your own buyers will ask you for.

Where each product is stronger

Chatbase is stronger on:

• Channels: messaging apps, email, native mobile SDKs and phone from one agent.
• Model choice: a long menu of models, priced by credit.
• Integrated voice that shares the chat agent's knowledge and actions.
• Scale and maturity: larger plan ceilings, an enterprise tier and published compliance certifications.
• Handoff destinations: ten helpdesks plus live-chat and phone transfer.

PepoChat is stronger on:

• Every feature on the free plan, with 500 replies a month and a widget that keeps working when the cap is hit.
• Predictable flat pricing with no credits, add-ons or annual lock-in.
• Real-calendar booking with slot re-validation, host assignment and timezone handling done outside the model.
• Meeting memory for returning, verified visitors.
• Grounded handoff into a built-in inbox on every plan.
• Prebuilt helpdesk, CRM and commerce actions without a plan gate.

Which one should you pick?

Bootstrapped SaaS or indie product, under a few hundred conversations a month. PepoChat. The free plan covers the whole workflow, the Stripe and helpdesk actions are included, and the inbox is where your one or two operators will live.

Ecommerce store with social-media customers. Chatbase. Instagram and Messenger DMs are where those customers are, and Chatbase answers there natively; PepoChat cannot. If your store's support is mostly on-site "where is my order" questions, PepoChat's Shopify and WooCommerce actions handle those on the free plan.

Agency, consultancy or clinic that books calls. It depends on your calendar. Calendly users get a quick path in Chatbase; teams on PepoSmart get re-validated slots, host rotation, reminders and meeting memory in PepoChat.

Mid-market support team with an existing helpdesk and phone line. Chatbase, most likely. Integrated voice, ten helpdesk targets and a plan sized for volume fit that team better than PepoChat's two-plan structure.

Team that wants to try before committing budget. PepoChat, because there is nothing to unlock. Run it on Free for a month, watch the inbox, then decide whether Pro is worth it.

What to do next

If your customers are on your website, install the widget with the one-script-tag guide, load your site and PDFs as sources, and let the free plan's 500 replies tell you how the agent performs on real questions. If they are on messaging apps, Chatbase's Standard plan is the fair comparison point, and its pricing page will have the current numbers. Either way, the PepoChat pricing page lists what Free and Pro include so you can put the two side by side for your own volume.