Honest comparison
FlowChat vs Chatbase
We’re going to tell you when Chatbase is the better fit. We only want customers we’re actually going to keep.
You're shipping the bot to customers — not internal users — and you need every answer to be auditable, refusable, and procurement-ready. The 'confidently wrong' failure mode is a deal-breaker for you.
You're rolling out an internal-facing agent that needs to take actions across SaaS apps (create a Linear issue, post to Slack, query a database). Their workflow features are more developed.
Where we genuinely differ
Refusal as a default versus configurable guardrails. Chatbase has good guardrail tooling — you can configure the bot to decline certain topics, escalate when uncertain, etc. The configuration is powerful, but it’s opt-in: your team has to know what the failure modes are and tune for them. FlowChat refuses by default whenever retrieval confidence is low, with no configuration required. For teams who’ve been burned by a hallucinating bot before, the difference between “configurable” and “default” is the difference between getting it right after the third incident and getting it right on day one.
Auditability for procurement. If your buyer is sending a SOC 2 questionnaire and asking for a per-conversation audit log with immutable retention, Chatbase’s standard conversation history isn’t quite what they’re asking for. FlowChat ships procurement-grade audit on every plan — immutable, exportable, with retention you control up to 7 years on Enterprise.
Agent actions are their thing, not ours. Chatbase’s real differentiator is the workflow / agent-action layer — the bot can do things across your SaaS stack, not just answer. We’re deliberately narrower: we focus on docs-grounded answers with refusal discipline. If you need a bot that creates Jira tickets in mid-conversation, Chatbase is honestly the better fit.
Side-by-side
| FlowChat | Chatbase | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | 14-day trial, no credit card | Free tier (limited messages) |
| Starting paid price | $49/mo | $32/mo |
| Citations on every answer | Every sentence linked to source | Sources shown; not enforced per-claim |
| Refuses when uncertain | Says 'I don't know' + related pages | Configurable guardrails; not refusal-by-default |
| Crawls JavaScript-rendered docs | Headless browser; works on any modern docs site | Improving; some JS-heavy sites still have gaps |
| Audit log per conversation | Immutable, exportable, retention up to 7y | Conversation history; not procurement-grade audit |
| SAML/OIDC SSO | Enterprise tier | Pro+ tier |
| Self-serve onboarding | ||
| Workflow / agent-action support | Roadmap; not priority | Their main differentiator |
Comparison reflects Chatbase's public product as of 2026-Q2. Both products ship monthly; we update this page when either changes substantially.
How most teams think about it
Customer-facing chat with content from your docs → FlowChat. Internal agent that takes actions across SaaS apps → Chatbase. Some teams run both: us on the public help center, them inside the team.
See it in action.
The live demo on our homepage runs the production retrieval pipeline against this site. Ask the same questions you’d ask Chatbase and watch how they get handled differently.