# SmartBot Alternative for Shopify: Any Catalog, One Price

> SmartBot prices by your Shopify catalog size: cross 500 products and it jumps to $100/mo. Arbyn is flat $99/mo for any catalog size, no product cap ever.

Source: https://arbyn.app/compare/smartbot

## How SmartBot charges

Unlimited chats, priced by catalog. SmartBot does not meter conversations on any paid tier. What sets your plan is how many products it has to index: 50 on the free plan, 500 on Starter at $30/mo, 3,000 on Growth at $100/mo, 20,000 on Pro at $300/mo. The free plan is a one-time 300 AI chats plus a 7-day Growth preview, and AI email reply is not listed below the $100/mo Growth tier.

SmartBot's paid plans genuinely do not cap conversations. On BestChat's own pricing page, every paid tier carries the line "Unlimited AI chats." What moves the price is your product catalog, and the cheapest tier that lists AI email reply is $100/mo, more than Arbyn's flat $99.

## Where SmartBot beats Arbyn

- Onboarding is genuinely fast. SmartBot auto-learns your catalog, pages, and policies with close to zero setup, and reviewers praise it unprompted.
- For a small catalog it is cheaper, and billed annually it can beat us outright. Under 500 products, Starter is $30/mo against Arbyn Agent's $99/mo, and Growth billed annually works out to $80/mo, genuinely under our flat price.
- The track record is real: 4.7 stars across 409 reviews, Built for Shopify certified, live on the App Store since August 1, 2023.

SmartBot's onboarding is legitimately good. It reads your products, pages, policies, and FAQs automatically and starts answering in minutes, and reviewers say so without being asked. It also genuinely does not meter conversations on any paid tier, so a store that only needs chat answers and stays under 500 products can run it for $30 a month, well under Arbyn's flat price. Paid annually, Growth is $80/mo, which undercuts Arbyn's $99 outright for catalogs up to 3,000 products. We are not going to pretend otherwise.
It also carries a real credential: Built for Shopify certification, 4.7 stars across 409 reviews, and about three years live on the App Store. Starter and up include a WhatsApp live agent handoff, so a conversation the bot cannot finish does reach a person. A store with a small, stable catalog, modest ticket volume, and no need for the AI to touch an order has a legitimate case for picking it.

Switch to Arbyn anyway when: you need AI email replies and not just chat, you need the AI to actually change the shipping address and issue the refund on your approval rather than hand it to a human, or your catalog is past 500 products and still growing.

_2023_

## Where Arbyn wins

### Flat price, any catalog size

$99 a month whether you sell 50 products or 50,000. SmartBot's price is set by how many products it has to index, not by how much support you actually do, so listing new products can move your bill even when ticket volume never changes.

_Cross 500 products and the catalog meter moves you from Starter at $30/mo to Growth at $100/mo, a $70/mo step driven by catalog size alone._

### Acts on the order, not just tracks it

Arbyn updates a shipping address inside the conversation on its own, and issues a refund or starts a return on your approval, and writes the action to the Shopify order timeline. Across SmartBot's own listing and BestChat's site, the furthest their language goes is order tracking and other post-sales service. They never claim more than that.

_SmartBot's own "Works with" list includes Gorgias, a helpdesk where a person can take those actions. Their docs hand the conversation off. They do not claim to resolve it._

### Email included from day one

Arbyn answers support email in your brand voice on the free $0 Starter plan, 150 AI conversations a month, every feature on. The cheapest SmartBot tier that lists AI email reply is Growth at $100/mo, a dollar more than Arbyn's unlimited plan.

_AI email reply is not listed below SmartBot's $100/mo Growth tier. It appears on the Growth card and is absent from the Starter card on both of their pages._

## Cost at real volumes

| Scenario | Volume | Their cost | You save with Arbyn |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your catalogue grows | You list your 501st product | SmartBot: $30/mo becomes $100/mo | Arbyn: $99/mo flat, at any catalogue size |
| A customer wants their money back | Refund or address change, mid-chat | SmartBot: never claims to act on the order | Arbyn: changes the address itself, and prepares the refund for you to approve |
| A customer emails instead of chatting | Support email, not the widget | SmartBot: AI email reply starts at $100/mo | Arbyn: answers email on the $0 plan |

Source: [bestchat.com/smartbot-pricing.html](https://www.bestchat.com/smartbot-pricing.html). Every SmartBot figure here comes from BestChat's own SmartBot pricing page: the five tiers, the product caps, the 20% annual discount, the "Unlimited AI chats" line that appears on every paid tier, the "AI email reply" bullet that first appears on Growth, and the $680/mo Enterprise tier that is published there and not on the Shopify App Store listing. The App Store listing corroborates the Free, Starter, Growth and Pro tiers and carries the 4.7 stars across 409 reviews and the Built for Shopify badge. Both pages checked July 2026. SmartBot's product caps have moved before (200/1,500 earlier in 2026, now 500/3,000), so re-verify before relying on any number here. Verified against

## Pricing

- **Arbyn Starter** - $0/month, permanently free. 150 conversations / month. Resets 1st of each month.
- **Arbyn Agent** - $99/month flat, unlimited conversations. Or $990/year (2 months free, saves $198, 17% off).
- **There is no trial.** Billing starts immediately on the Agent plan. The free Starter plan is permanent.
- The conversation cap is the only difference between plans. There is no feature gating.

## Channels

Live today: **support email** and **on-site live chat**. That is the complete list.

SMS, Instagram DMs, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Voice are on the roadmap and are NOT live. Arbyn does not edit orders or change line items. Money-moving actions (cancel, refund, discount, gift card, reship, return) require the store owner's approval, and then Arbyn performs them. Running them fully autonomously is a beta authorization and is in development. Shipping address changes are already autonomous.

## What Arbyn does on a Shopify order

- **Change the shipping address**: Live. Arbyn does this on its own. Arbyn updates the shipping address on the Shopify order itself, inside the conversation, and writes the change to the order timeline.
- **Cancel an order**: Live. You approve it, then Arbyn cancels the order. Anything that moves money waits for the store owner's approval. That is a deliberate control, not a missing feature. Once you approve, Arbyn fires Shopify's order cancellation itself and confirms it to the customer.
- **Issue a refund**: Live. You approve it, then Arbyn issues the refund. Arbyn prepares the refund against the original payment method and sends it to you. On approval it files the refund in Shopify. You can cap the value it is allowed to prepare, per channel.
- **Apply a discount**: Live. Arbyn creates a real Shopify discount and applies it to the cart, handing the shopper a checkout with the code already on it. It can also issue a discount code on an order once you approve it.
- **Send a gift card, or reship an order**: Live. You approve it, then Arbyn does it. Arbyn creates the gift card, or raises the replacement order, in Shopify once you approve.
- **Start a return**: Live. You approve it, then Arbyn opens the return. Arbyn opens the return in Shopify on your approval.
- **Look up a gift card or store-credit balance**: Live. Arbyn does this on its own. "Do I have store credit left?" is a question most support tools answer with a human. Arbyn reads the balance itself, for a verified customer or from the code they give you, and reports the masked card, the balance and the expiry. If there is no card, it says so rather than guessing.
- **Handle a subscription question**: Live. You choose what it does. Arbyn knows which of your products are sold as a subscription, shows that on the product card in the conversation, and sends a subscriber to their subscription management page to pause, skip or cancel. It answers how your subscriptions work from your own knowledge, but it does not read an individual customer's contract, so it will not state their renewal date or status. Most cancels are a customer with product piling up, and the fix is getting them to the page where they can slow the cadence down. Reading the contract itself is on the roadmap.
- **Answer support email and live chat**: Live. Arbyn reads every inbound support email and every chat, works out the intent, pulls the live Shopify context, and replies in your brand voice.

Money-moving actions (cancel, refund, discount, gift card, reship, return) require the store owner's approval, and then Arbyn performs them. Running them fully autonomously is a beta authorization and is in development. Shipping address changes are already autonomous.