A Chatbase alternative that runs on your own AI key

What Chatbase does well

A fair Chatbase alternative page has to start with Chatbase’s strengths. Its central idea is training: you point an agent at a website, upload documents, and it answers from that material without you writing the knowledge by hand. For a site with hundreds of help pages or PDF manuals, that saves real work, and SiteTrellis does not do it yet.

It is also fully managed. Chatbase pays the model providers and you pay Chatbase, so there is no AI account to open, no key to rotate and no provider balance to watch. If you want one invoice and no contact with tokens at all, that is a genuine advantage, and a good reason many teams choose a managed builder.

Prices and limits change often, so treat every competitor number on this page as a pointer, not a quote. Chatbase publishes its current plans on its pricing page, and you should confirm anything below there.

Credits versus conversations

The clearest structural difference is the billing unit. Chatbase meters usage in message credits, and how many credits a reply uses depends on the model behind it. Third-party summaries report an entry paid plan at roughly $40 a month with 700 credits and two seats, extra credits sold in blocks, and a higher tier at roughly $150 a month with about 4,000 credits. These are reported figures that we could not verify against the vendor’s own page.

SiteTrellis counts conversations: one visitor session with at least one visitor message, whichever model answers. The Starter plan covers 1,000 conversations for $19 a month, and the AI itself is billed by your provider, not by us. Under 6 visitor messages per conversation, 1,500 tokens of prompt and knowledge sent every turn, and 180-token replies, our catalog estimates about $0.0018 of provider cost per conversation on Claude Haiku 5.5 and about $0.0359 on Claude Sonnet 5.5. These are list-price estimates; your provider’s bill is authoritative.

Which option costs less depends on your volume, your model and how long your chats run, and we do not claim either way. What changes is visibility: on a managed plan the credit multiplier per model is one more thing to learn, while with your own key the model price is public on your provider’s page. The cost calculator and our guide to what an AI chatbot costs show how to turn any quote into a cost per 1,000 conversations.

Chatbase and SiteTrellis side by side

Rows marked reported rest on third-party summaries gathered in October 2026. Where a cell says we found nothing, that describes our research, not a guarantee about the product.

Where SiteTrellis is behind

Before you leave Chatbase, weigh what you would give up.

• No website or PDF training. Knowledge is text you paste into the agent plus FAQ pairs, so a large help centre has to be condensed by hand. See Build your agent.
• No omnichannel. The widget is for websites. There is no WhatsApp, voice, email inbox or social channel.
• No visual flow builder and no native CRM or helpdesk connectors. You connect other tools through signed webhooks or custom HTTP tools.
• Not a helpdesk. There is a takeover inbox for chats, not ticketing.
• A new product. SiteTrellis has no public reviews yet, so you cannot read other customers’ experience.
• You manage an AI account. You create a key, keep credit at the provider and set a spend limit. Human takeover starts on the Starter plan, and replies arrive whole rather than streaming.

Choose Chatbase if, choose SiteTrellis if

Choose Chatbase if

• You want the agent to learn from your website or documents without writing the knowledge yourself.
• You prefer a fully managed service with no provider account to maintain.
• You need something SiteTrellis lacks, such as other channels or a visual builder.

Choose SiteTrellis if

• You want to pick the model, see the provider’s own invoice and change models without changing product.
• A focused body of pasted knowledge is enough: prices, policies, opening hours, the questions people really ask.
• You want ordered fallback, human takeover and signed webhooks without a top-tier plan.
• You are comfortable creating a key and setting a spend limit at an AI provider.

What you would do to move

Moving is mostly rewriting knowledge, which takes an afternoon for a small site.

1. List what the agent knows

   Open your Chatbase sources and note which answers visitors actually rely on. Most small sites need the top thirty questions, not every page.

2. Recreate the knowledge as pasted text

   Condense those sources into plain text and FAQ pairs. The prompt writing guide covers structure, and strict knowledge mode keeps answers inside what you pasted.

3. Create a key and a fallback

   Add a key from the provider you prefer (see the AI keys overview) with a spend limit, then put a second model behind it.

4. Test with real questions

   Take twenty questions from your past conversations and run them in the playground. Fix gaps in the knowledge, then publish.

5. Run both, then switch

   Install the SiteTrellis script on one page or a staging copy first. The Free plan’s 100 conversations are enough for this trial. Remove the old embed only when you are satisfied.