When choosing a platform to power customer conversations and automation, it's vital to consider your business needs, team structure, and technical resources. Two notable players in this space are Zaapi and Sendbird—each offering powerful capabilities, but with very different approaches.

This comparison highlights how each platform serves its target audience, based on core features, pricing, and support offerings.

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	Zaapi	Sendbird
Omnichannel Capabilities (logo)		Offers chat SDKs to build custom inboxes within apps
Social Media (list)	Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, LINE
E-Commerce (list)	Shopee, Lazada, Tiktok Shop
Marketing and Sales Automation
Chatbot Automation Workflows	✅ Easy-to-use	✅ Easy-to-use
Workflow Automation & AI Agent	Starting at $98/month ✅ Unlimited Workflows	Starting at $349/month ✅ AI agent focused
AI Knowledge Sources	✅ Document uploads and web resources	✅ Document uploads and web resources
Customer Support
Customer Support	✅ Chat support with human agent	⚠️ Ticket and Community Support
Onboarding Support	✅ Chat support with human agent	❌ Enterprise tier ONLY
Pricing
Entry	Basic: Starting at $13 per month 1 user ($9 per additional user) 5,000 contacts ($0.005 per additional contact)	Starter: Starting at $349/month UNLIMITED contacts 🔥 AI-Agent
Mid-tier	Pro: Starting at $19 per month 1 user ($15 per additional user) 5,000 contacts ($0.010 per additional contact) Basic Automtaions	Pro: Starting at $499/month UNLIMITED contacts 🔥 AI-Agent
Advanced	Advanced: Starting at $98 per month 1 user ($18.75 per additional user) 5,000 contacts ($0.015 per additional contact) 🔥 UNLIMITED workflows 🔥 AI-Agent	Enterprise: Custom pricing

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1. Omnichannel Capabilities

Zaapi provides out-of-the-box omnichannel integration with the most popular platforms for social commerce in Southeast Asia and beyond. These include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, LINE OA, Shopee, Lazada, and TikTok Shop. The key benefit is that all conversations are managed from a single dashboard—the All-in-one Inbox—without requiring any coding. This unified approach is crucial for businesses that want to be present on multiple top omnichat channels where their customers are active.

In contrast, Sendbird is not an omnichannel chat platform by default. It offers chat SDKs and APIs designed for developers to build custom chat experiences inside their apps. This gives ultimate flexibility, but also means businesses need technical resources to create and manage their own chat solution.

2. AI Agent and Workflow Automation

Both platforms offer AI agent capabilities and automation tools, but with different positioning.

Zaapi includes powerful automation in all its plans. You can cut costs, not productivity, by letting AI handle the work, with unlimited workflow capabilities available at a highly accessible price point. To understand the full scope, you can explore the capabilities of Zaapi’s Automation feature. This focus on efficiency makes it one of the 7 must-have AI tools to accelerate business growth for SMBs.

A key automation feature for social sellers is setting up automatic comment replies on Facebook and Instagram, turning public engagement into private sales conversations instantly.

Sendbird puts a strong emphasis on AI agents as a core, high-end product offering, with plans starting at a much higher price point. It’s positioned for larger teams or enterprise-level apps that want to deeply integrate AI-powered interactions into their existing platforms.

3. Proactive Engagement: Broadcast Messaging

Beyond reactive chat, effective customer communication involves proactive outreach. Zaapi enables businesses to send targeted messages to thousands of customers at once with its Broadcast feature. This is ideal for announcing promotions, new products, or important updates directly through the chat apps your customers use daily.

4. Ease of Use vs. Developer Flexibility

This is the most significant difference between the two platforms.

Zaapi is designed for non-technical users, offering a plug-and-play experience with a visual chatbot builder and a unified dashboard. No coding is required, and you can learn how to build a chatbot without coding in minutes. This makes it an ideal choice from our list of the top 10 chatbots for online sellers.

Sendbird, on the other hand, is built for product teams and engineers. It’s developer-first, offering APIs and SDKs to customize every part of the chat experience. While powerful, this approach requires significant development resources to implement and maintain.

5. Data-Driven Decisions with Analytics

Understanding your customer interactions is key to growth. Zaapi provides a comprehensive and easy-to-understand analytics dashboard. You can use insights from the dashboard to turn chats into sales by tracking conversation volumes, team performance, and customer response times. If you're new to the concept, you can learn more about what a dashboard is and why it’s essential for your business.

6. Customer Support and Onboarding

The support experience also differs significantly:

• Zaapi provides live chat support with a human agent on all paid plans, along with personal onboarding to help new users get started quickly.
• Sendbird offers ticket-based support and community documentation. Hands-on onboarding support is typically reserved for Enterprise plans, which may be a limitation for smaller teams.

7. Pricing Structure

Pricing is another major distinction:

• Zaapi offers highly competitive pricing designed for growing businesses. Plans start as low as $13/month, with the advanced plan including the AI Agent and unlimited workflows available for just $98/month.
• Sendbird’s entry-level AI Agent plan starts at $349/month, with mid-tier plans reaching $499/month. While it includes unlimited contacts and full AI functionality, it is positioned for companies with larger budgets.

Conclusion

Zaapi and Sendbird are both strong platforms—but designed for very different use cases.

• Zaapi is ideal for growing e-commerce businesses and brands looking for ready-to-use omnichannel tools, affordable automation, and hands-on support in a no-code, business-friendly platform.
• Sendbird is best suited for product-led companies with dedicated engineering teams that want to build fully custom chat experiences into their apps using a developer-first infrastructure of APIs and SDKs.

Ultimately, the choice depends entirely on your team's resources and business goals. Do you prefer a powerful, ready-made solution that gets you started today, or a flexible framework that you can build upon with a development team?

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Source

- https://sendbird.com/pricing

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