Can You Build a Chatbot with Chatwoot? Yes — Here's How
By ThinkCloud
Short answer: yes. Chatwoot supports chatbots out of the box, and you have three practical ways to build one — depending on how much you want to automate and how much code you’re willing to touch.
This guide covers all three, what each is actually good at, and how to decide.
What Chatwoot gives you for free
Chatwoot is an open-source customer engagement platform with a unified inbox. Two pieces matter for chatbots:
- Agent bots — a bot is a type of agent in Chatwoot. You can attach one to an inbox, and it handles conversations before (or instead of) a human.
- The Channel API — your own code can send and receive messages in a conversation, which means anything you build can live inside Chatwoot’s inbox rather than in a separate tool.
So the question isn’t whether you can build a chatbot with Chatwoot. It’s which approach fits your case.
The three ways to build a Chatwoot chatbot
1. Connect an existing bot platform (fastest for AI bots)
If you’ve already got a Dify / Flowise / Rasa / custom LLM service, point it at Chatwoot through the Agent Bot API. Chatwoot forwards messages to your endpoint and posts the reply back.
Good for: teams that already run an AI bot elsewhere and just need Chatwoot as the front end. Trade-off: you’re maintaining a second platform, and the bot is a black box — you can’t easily see or edit why it answered something.
2. Build a menu-driven chatbot by hand (the do-it-yourself route)
Use Chatwoot’s Agent Bot API directly and write your own logic: read the incoming message, match it to a menu option, reply, store state.
Good for: developers who want complete control. Trade-off: this is real software. You own the state handling, the fallbacks, the “user typed 7 but there are only 5 options” edge cases — and every menu change becomes a code change. Most teams underestimate this. What looks like a 2-day project becomes a permanent maintenance item.
3. Use a no-code visual menu builder (what most businesses actually want)
This is where ChatKit comes in — our visual chatbot builder for Chatwoot.
You design the conversation as a menu tree in a drag-and-drop editor: text messages, submenus, input selects, forms, and article replies. You see a live chat preview as you build. It goes live on any Chatwoot inbox — website, WhatsApp, Telegram, or Facebook — and hands off to a human agent with full context when the conversation needs one.
Good for: businesses that want a chatbot they can actually maintain themselves. Trade-off: menu-driven bots are intentionally predictable — they don’t improvise answers. For an FAQ/qualify/route bot, that’s a feature: your customers get the same correct answer every time, and you never have to wonder what the bot will say.
Which one should you pick?
| If you… | Use |
|---|---|
| Already run an AI bot elsewhere | Agent Bot API (option 1) |
| Have developers and want full control | Build it yourself (option 2) |
| Want menus, forms and handoff without code | ChatKit (option 3) |
| Need both — predictable menus plus AI answers | ChatKit for the flow, hand off to AI for open questions |
That last row is the one most support teams land on: a deterministic menu handles the 80% of questions that are always the same, and anything genuinely novel gets escalated to a person (or an AI assistant mode) with the conversation history attached.
What you can automate on day one
Once a bot is connected to your Chatwoot inbox, the quickest wins are:
- Answer the repeat questions — hours, location, pricing, “do you ship to…”
- Qualify and capture leads — a short form that writes straight into the contact record
- Route by intent — billing goes to billing, sales goes to sales
- Hand off with context — the agent opens the chat already knowing what was asked
- Cover the hours you’re closed — a bot answering at 2am beats a form nobody fills in
Frequently asked questions
Is a Chatwoot chatbot free?
Chatwoot itself is open source and self-hostable, and its agent-bot and API features are included. The cost is in building and maintaining the bot — which is exactly what a no-code builder removes.
Do I need to know how to code?
Not if you use a visual builder. ChatKit is designed so a non-developer can create menus, forms and responses, preview them, and edit them later without touching code.
Can the bot hand off to a human agent?
Yes — that’s the point. Menu-driven bots handle the routine, then transfer to a person with the full conversation context, so the customer never has to repeat themselves.
Can my Chatwoot chatbot work on WhatsApp, not just my website?
Yes. Because the bot lives on the inbox rather than the channel, the same menu works across website chat, WhatsApp, Telegram and Facebook — you configure it once.
What about AI? Can I use an LLM instead of menus?
You can route to an AI assistant, and many teams do it as a hybrid: menus for the predictable paths, AI for open-ended questions. The trade-off is that AI answers vary, which is a problem for anything with a correct answer (pricing, policy, hours).
Book a free 15-minute consultation to see what a Chatwoot chatbot would handle for your team — or explore ChatKit.