Chat Widgets for Rasa

Updated: Aug 31, 2022

Here’s a quick review of the available web chat widgets designed for use with Rasa:

The official Rasa docs include a page on connecting your own website which currently references the closed source Rasa Chat Widget.

Summary

Here’s a summary of the features of each of the widgets:

Criteria Botfront Rasa Chatroom Chatbot Widget
Open Source  
Active Devel    
Buttons
Image  
Video    
Carousel    
Markdown  
Message Delay      
Speech Input      
Channel Socket Socket REST REST
UI Widgets Excellent Good Good Excellent

Active Development

The Botfront and Chatbot Widget stand out here. You can see the closed PR activity to see that it’s under active development.

It’s harder to judge the development activity on the Rasa Chat Widget since the repo is not publicly available. There are changelog entries included with Rasa X. If you search for chat you’ll find widget related changes (but also Rasa X changes). There’s also no release history.

The Chatroom widget has been archived. The last update was April 2021.

Open Source

The Botfront, Chatbot Widget and Chatroom widgets are open source while the Rasa Chat Widget is not. Related to this is the lack of documentation for the Rasa Chat Widget. There’s a reference page here.

Channel Support

Both the Botfront and Rasa Chat Widgets use the socket.io channel which is preferred. The Chatroom and Chatbot Widget use the REST channel.

Components

Botfront and Chatbot Widget have the longest list of supported components includes buttons, images, video and carousels. It also supports a message delay feature. Chatroom supports buttons and it also supports speech to text.

I think the Rasa Chat Widget supports buttons but I can’t find any documentation on supported widgets.

Unique Features

  • Botfront Rasa Webchat - Supports a good list of chat widgets and is the only actively developed open source widget choice.
  • Chatbot Widget - Supports even more widgets than botfront.
  • Rasa Chat Widget - One really nice feature is the Storybook page that allows you to try the widget out against your bot.
  • Scalable Minds Chatroom - It’s the only widget that supports speech to text so you can talk to your bot (your site must use https).