Chatbase vs MagicForm

Chatbase

The fastest route from a folder of help docs to a working support widget, and priced accordingly once real traffic arrives. Credits are the whole story: 700 messages a month on Hobby ($40, or $32 billed yearly) is a small site's volume, and the plans that carry real traffic cost $150 and $500 a month. There is no free plan to fall back on, so budget from expected conversations, not from the feature grid.

Pros

• +Crawl-and-embed setup produces a usable widget in an afternoon with no retrieval plumbing to write
• +Actions and human handoff mean it degrades into a ticket rather than a dead end
• +Every paid plan carries a 7-day trial, and the yearly toggle takes 20% off

Cons

• −The free plan is gone, so evaluation is limited to a 7-day trial
• −API access is gated to Standard at $150/month ($120 billed yearly), several times the entry price
• −Overage at $40 per 1,000 credits is steep next to the in-plan rate on Pro
• −Each plan includes a single agent; more cost $300 per agent a year, and removing branding $1,188 a year

MagicForm

A cheap way to put a lead-capturing chat widget on a small-business site, but the message caps bite fast: 500 messages a month is a slow week for a site with real traffic. Pick it for conversational lead capture, not for deflecting support tickets.

Pros

• +Entry price sits below most agent platforms with comparable setup effort
• +Email, webhook and Zapier handoff covers most small-business CRMs
• +White-label domains on Premium make it resellable by agencies
• +Setup is instruction-text plus an embed snippet, no build step

Cons

• −Message allowances are small relative to the price
• −No public developer API; integration is webhook-and-Zapier only
• −Small team with no published roadmap, so feature pace is hard to predict
• −Only unlimited messaging removes the cap, and that is the $399 tier

Is Chatbase cheaper than MagicForm?

On published entry prices, Chatbase starts lower — $32/mo against $49/mo for MagicForm. Entry price is the lowest paid plan as we last verified it; what each plan includes differs.

Which has a public API, Chatbase or MagicForm?

Chatbase ships a public API, as of our last verification. A public API for MagicForm is not confirmed by us — check its developer docs before you plan an integration.