Topic hub · 2 guides
The honest reasons not to buy this
AI Engine is free, mature and genuinely excellent, and about 100,000 sites use it. This hub takes the objections seriously: why anyone pays for something a free plugin also does, where the free option is the better choice, what finished rather than assemblable is worth, and who should close the tab and go install the free one.
What this hub covers
- Why pay when a free plugin exists
- Where the free option wins
- What finished is worth
- Who should not buy this
Start here
Can a chatbot really replace live agents? Mostly no
A chatbot takes the questions that repeat and whose answers are already written down. That is most of the volume and almost none of the difficulty, and the difference is the whole argument.
826,000 WordPress sites have a chat widget. Almost none of it is AI.
I pulled every chat and AI plugin on WordPress.org with more than a thousand installs. 38 of them matter, they cover 826,000 sites, and the shape of that number is not what the marketing suggests.
Related topic hubs
Named across this hub: AI Engine, Tidio, Chatbase, WordPress.org.
Put a real answer on every page.
Ask this site's own widget a question and watch it cite the page, or refuse. It is the same plugin, running on the same content you are reading.