Key Takeaways

Five platforms, one real question: can the bot actually qualify a lead, or does it just chat with one?

• Drift pioneered website-chat lead qualification but now starts near £22,500 a year and is being folded into Salesloft's sales platform.

• Fin (formerly Intercom) prices a lead qualification at £7.50 an outcome, ten times its standard resolution rate.

• ManyChat is the strongest pick for Instagram and Facebook comment-to-DM funnels, though its AI add-on leans closer to keyword matching than real qualification.

• Tidio is the budget generalist for small ecommerce sites, but WhatsApp isn't native and deep lead scoring isn't its strength.

• Cue is built WhatsApp-first, with unlimited seats on every plan starting at £159 a month.

A lead messages your website chat widget at 9:47 PM asking about pricing. Nobody replies until 8 the next morning. By then they have messaged two competitors and booked a call with one of them. That gap, the minutes between "I'm interested" and "someone replied", is where a lead generation chatbot either earns its subscription or wastes it.

Picking the wrong one is not just a wasted trial. It is leads that never get asked the right qualifying question, sit in the wrong queue, or never reach a CRM at all. Here is how five platforms actually handle that job, and where each one falls short.

What should you judge a lead-generation chatbot on?

Every platform below gets measured against the same five things:

• Channels covered: where your leads actually message you today, not just where the vendor wants to sell you seats.

• Qualification depth: whether the bot asks real qualifying questions and scores the answers, or just deflects FAQs and calls it a day.

• Pricing transparency: real published numbers you can plan a budget around, versus "book a call to find out."

• Setup effort: how much of the flow you can build yourself versus how much needs a developer or an implementation partner.

• CRM and lead routing: whether a qualified lead lands in your CRM automatically, or someone has to copy and paste it there.

Speed matters more than most teams budget for. Salesforce's State of Sales Report put a number on how fast expectations have shifted: 64% of people now want a real-time reply, up from 58% just two years ago. Most sales teams are still budgeting for "within a few hours." And 87% of sales orgs are already leaning on AI somewhere in the funnel, mostly prospecting and scoring, so a chatbot that only answers "what are your hours" isn't competing on the terms buyers actually expect anymore.

What does Drift do for lead qualification?

Drift built the category. Real-time website chat that engages a visitor, asks qualifying questions, and books a meeting with a sales rep, instead of making them fill out a static form. Salesloft acquired Drift in February 2024, and its Bionic Chatbots (GPT-powered since 2023) still hold natural conversations and know when to bring in a human.

The catch is cost and direction. Drift's Premium plan starts around £1,870 a month, close to £22,500 a year, with no published free trial. Pricing is not public. You book a call to find out what you would actually pay.

The catch

Salesloft is folding the standalone product into its sales-engagement platform, and the roadmap is genuinely unclear right now. No ticketing, no shared inbox, no SLA tracking either, so Drift solves the sales-side qualification problem and stops there. It won't touch the support conversation that happens after. Worth a direct call with Salesloft to check where the product is actually headed before signing anything multi-year.

What does Fin (formerly Intercom) do for lead qualification?

Fin resolves customer questions using a retrieval-based approach against your help centre content, and as of 2026 it runs as a standalone AI agent on top of Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk, or your existing helpdesk, not just Intercom's own. Pricing is usage-based: £0.74 per outcome (a resolution, a handoff, or a disqualification), with a 50-outcome monthly minimum around £37.

Lead qualification is priced separately and higher. A qualified lead costs £7.50, roughly ten times a standard resolution. If you run Fin inside Intercom's own helpdesk rather than standalone, seats start at £22 a month on top of the AI fee.

Where the bill gets ugly

Run the math before signing. A bot generating 200 qualified leads a month is a £1,500 line item on qualification alone, before a single support resolution gets billed. That premium per-outcome rate adds up fast on a high-volume top-of-funnel bot, and reviewers keep landing on the same complaint: final invoices coming in two to five times higher than the pricing page implied once seats and add-ons stack up.

There's also a change of ownership to plan around. Salesforce signed a deal in June 2026 to buy Fin for roughly £2.7 billion, not yet closed. Anyone signing a multi-year contract right now is also betting on how that transition plays out.

How does Cue handle lead generation and qualification?

Cue is built WhatsApp-first, with Cue's AI Agents handling the first touch across Cue's WhatsApp channel, Messenger, and web chat from one shared inbox. A lead who messages at 2:12 AM gets a real, on-brand reply instead of a missed-message notification the next morning, and the conversation, along with whatever the AI captured about intent and budget, sits in the same inbox an agent already works from.

Cue's pricing plans start at £159 a month (Starter, up to 1,500 monthly active contacts, unlimited seats included). Pro+ runs £336 a month, and Enterprise £478 a month for up to 10,000 monthly active contacts. AI Agent resolutions are billed separately from £0.89 to £1.49 depending on volume, and the chatbot builder is a £350-a-month add-on. Every plan includes unlimited seats, which is unusual against competitors that charge per agent on top of the AI fee.

WhatsApp for Business's 2026 State of Business Messaging report found 67.7% of consumers actually call a chatbot reply helpful. MANCOSA, a South African distance-learning provider, is a real example of what that looks like in practice: their WhatsApp lead flow into a CRM drove a conversion rate 156% above target, with web chat overachieving by 163%.

Is ManyChat good for lead generation?

Yes, specifically for turning Instagram comments and DMs into conversations. A user comments a keyword on your post, ManyChat fires a personalised DM within seconds, qualifies the lead through a flow, and can push the contact into your CRM. It also covers Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, SMS, and email from the same builder.

Pricing restructured in March 2026 to a contact-based model. The free plan dropped to 25 active contacts. Paid plans start at roughly £11 a month for 250 contacts (Essential), £22 for 2,500 (Pro), and climb from there as your list grows.

The AI isn't really the strong part

That £22-a-month AI Step add-on behaves more like keyword matching than a conversational agent that can handle a follow-up question. Meta also bills WhatsApp messages separately on top of the ManyChat subscription. And because the whole plan scales with contact count, a campaign that actually works ends up inflating your own bill. ManyChat is built for social-channel lead capture, full stop, not for a business whose leads mostly arrive on WhatsApp or a website.

Does Tidio work for WhatsApp lead capture?

Not natively. Tidio's core strength is web chat and a rule-based chatbot builder, with an AI layer (Lyro) sold as a separate add-on starting around £29 a month for 50 AI conversations. The free plan covers 50 conversations, Starter runs about £22 a month, and Communicator around £45.

Basic lead capture works well: collecting an email address, triggering a flow based on visitor behaviour. It is a genuinely easy setup for a small ecommerce or service business that mainly needs a website chat widget.

What Tidio doesn't do

WhatsApp isn't built in. Setting it up means configuring the WhatsApp Business API separately through Meta, which is more than most of Tidio's small-business audience wants to take on alone. And real qualification, several questions deep, scored, routed to the right rep, just isn't the platform's strength. Teams that need that workflow tend to outgrow Tidio fast.

What should a lead-generation chatbot actually do?

Whichever platform you land on, these are the jobs worth checking for before you sign anything.

• Answer the first message instantly: a lead who messages at midnight should get a real reply, not a "we'll get back to you" holding pattern.

• Ask real qualifying questions: budget, timeline, use case, whatever actually separates a hot lead from someone browsing. Scripted FAQ deflection is not qualification.

• Score and route automatically: a qualified lead should land in the right rep's queue or CRM record without anyone copying and pasting.

• Hand off cleanly: the bot should know when a question needs a human, and pass over the full conversation history, not force the lead to repeat themselves.

• Follow up on its own: a lead who goes quiet after the first message needs a nudge, not a dropped thread.

How do the five platforms compare at a glance?

How should you choose between these platforms?

Start with where your leads already message you, not with a feature list. If most conversations start as Instagram comments, ManyChat's comment-to-DM flow will out-convert a general-purpose chatbot every time. If you're an enterprise B2B team with a £22k+ annual budget and a website that already drives serious traffic, Drift's qualification engine is mature, provided you are comfortable with its uncertain product direction under Salesloft.

If your team already runs a help centre and wants an AI layer bolted onto Salesforce, HubSpot, or Zendesk, Fin is a reasonable fit as long as you model the per-outcome cost at your real lead volume first, qualified leads at £7,50 each add up quickly. If your business is small, budget-conscious, and mostly needs a website widget, Tidio is the easiest to set up in an afternoon.

If most of your leads and support conversations already happen on WhatsApp, or you want one inbox that covers WhatsApp, Email, Messenger, and web chat without stitching three tools together, that is the gap Cue is built to close.

What results have customers seen from WhatsApp lead capture?

MANCOSA, a distance-learning university in South Africa, needed to turn WhatsApp, social, and website enquiries into registered students instead of losing them to slow follow-up. They built a Cue chatbot and live chat flow that answers course questions, sends the prospectus in-chat, and funnels every lead straight into their CRM.

The result, per MANCOSA's Cue case study: a WhatsApp conversion rate 156% above target, and a web chat conversion rate 163% above target. Education and distance learning have their own enrolment cycle and a strongly WhatsApp-native student base in South Africa, so treat this as a real, attributable result rather than a number that automatically transfers to every industry or region.

Pricing and features verified as of July 2026.

FAQ

Which chatbot platform is best for qualifying leads on WhatsApp?

Cue is built specifically for WhatsApp-first lead qualification, with AI Agents that ask qualifying questions and route the result into a CRM from the same inbox used for support. ManyChat also covers WhatsApp, but it treats the channel as one of several social channels rather than the primary one.

How much does an AI chatbot for lead qualification actually cost?

It ranges from around £22 a month for a basic small-business setup (Tidio plus the Lyro add-on) to £1,870-plus a month for an enterprise platform like Drift. Fin charges £7.50 per qualified lead on top of a £37 monthly minimum, and Cue starts at £159 a month with AI resolutions billed separately from £0.89 to £1.49.

Can a chatbot route a qualified lead straight into a CRM?

Yes, most platforms in this comparison support CRM routing, but the depth varies. Cue and Fin route qualified leads automatically based on AI-scored answers, while ManyChat and Tidio lean more on rule-based triggers that need more manual setup to reach the same result.

What happened to Drift after the Salesloft acquisition?

Salesloft acquired Drift in February 2024 and is folding the standalone product into its sales-engagement platform. The AI qualification engine still works well, but the product's long-term roadmap is less certain than it was as an independent tool.

Is ManyChat good for lead generation on Instagram?

Yes, it is one of the strongest tools available for turning Instagram comments and DMs into qualified conversations, thanks to its comment-to-DM trigger. It is weaker once a lead needs a genuine multi-turn qualifying conversation rather than a scripted flow.

Does Tidio support WhatsApp for lead capture?

Not natively. Tidio requires the WhatsApp Business API to be configured separately through Meta, which adds setup work beyond what most small teams using Tidio's other channels are used to.

How fast should a business respond to a new lead?

As close to instantly as possible. Salesforce's State of Sales Report puts real-time reply as the expectation for 64% of consumers now, and a same-night reply to an after-hours lead converts noticeably better than one that waits until the next morning.

Next steps

1. List the two or three channels where most of your leads actually message you today.

2. Match that list against the "Best for" column in the table above, not the platform with the longest feature list.

3. Model the real cost at your monthly lead volume, not just the advertised starting price, especially for Fin and Drift.

4. Trial your shortlist with a real qualifying flow, not just a demo script, and check where each one hands off to a human.