Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Espressive Barista vs Sendbird comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 1, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Espressive Barista
Ranking in Help Desk Software
15th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
IT Service Management (ITSM) (14th), AI-Powered Chatbots (3rd)
Sendbird
Ranking in Help Desk Software
13th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
7
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Social Software (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Help Desk Software category, the mindshare of Espressive Barista is 0.5%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Sendbird is 0.1%, down from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Help Desk Software
 

Featured Reviews

Jim Lobao - PeerSpot reviewer
Has helped enhance our support ability, reduced our resolution time, and reduced our service desk costs
Espressive Barista's natural language processing and conventional AI still have room for improvement. We haven't yet found anything that resembles true AI that can learn autonomously without human intervention. However, Barista does help us identify and address some of these areas, allowing my team to step in and create intents and responses to questions. When a user asks a question that Barista doesn't immediately understand, we can recognize the pattern, capture it, and link it to a common intent. This is highly beneficial for acquiring such data, but it's a reactive approach and still requires curation. Natural language processing still has some way to go. One of our challenges is that our internal employees haven't yet adopted a natural way of interacting with Barista. Getting people to be concise and to the point, rather than being verbose as if they were interacting with a human, has been an ongoing challenge. While they may feel comfortable being conversational in Slack, expecting a human-like response, Barista is a different entity. Barista isn't interested in their recent vacation; it just wants to know they're locked out of their account. So, some users may assume Barista understands their intent when they say, "I'm back from vacation and locked out of my account." Barista, however, may interpret this as a request for the holiday schedule. Therefore, we're gradually educating our users to adapt their communication style for better success with Barista. Conversely, we desire Barista to adapt its behavior based on the interaction, the language used, and the way people communicate. I wholeheartedly desire an AI that can continuously learn and adapt to our organization's evolving needs. This is the most challenging aspect, as it involves understanding our organization's terminology, procedures, and toolsets. We've made significant progress in this area. However, from an NLP standpoint, we still face challenges with our nearly 3,000 Slack channel users, each with their unique communication styles. People ask questions in various ways, and sometimes there are misunderstandings. They want to interact with us naturally. However, we still struggle with natural language processing. People don't always realize that the bot is a virtual agent designed to be concise and efficient. Sometimes, less is more. It's been a difficult transition for people to grasp that they're conversing with a virtual agent, not a human. They still expect human-like interactions, such as discussing their weekend or holidays or simply pasting screenshots of errors. However, the bot can't interpret screenshots. If they provide the error code and some context about the application, the bot can better understand the issue. So, the key challenge is bridging the gap between human expectations and the bot's capabilities in terms of natural interaction.
Pranay Koley - PeerSpot reviewer
Facilitates user communication with rich features
In our company, we are using Sendbird for building a chat feature within our salon application.  I am using the Flutter framework to implement the chat feature, which facilitates communication between users and businesses, specifically salon shops There are many useful features with Sendbird. I…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable feature is its scalability."
"The solution is available to support us instantly as required."
"With respect to its natural language processing capabilities, it recognizes things that you wouldn't think it would recognize. Even in cases where it doesn't, it's pretty easy to go in and make the adjustments that are needed."
"The bot is pretty easy to update and keep up to date. Espressive itself is pretty easy to work with."
"We have the ability to alter phrases, create new phrases, or enhance phrases, or change paths. From the dashboard, we are able to get a lot of information we need about what people are asking, where they are dropping off from conversations, and where they do not get the information they need."
"Our developers have used the Barista Control Center to extend the platform by adding content, and they've found it fairly easy to do and manage"
"I like Expressive Barista's integration with Microsoft Teams."
"Its ability to recognize phrases has gotten smarter over time."
"There are many useful features with Sendbird."
"Sendbird provides many features for real-time messaging, such as receipt ID and typing indicators."
"The Sendbird developer portal provides each step, including methods, making it easy to implement."
"Features similar to WhatsApp, such as online and offline statuses, message reactions, and replies, add significant value."
"Sendbird is very flexible, and they have made great strides towards optimization."
"Sendbird is reliable and generally crash-free."
"The backend system was managed by Sendbird, eliminating the need for caching systems or local storage on user devices."
"The most valuable feature for us, besides chat, was file transfer, as we used it for sending files and images in chats."
 

Cons

"I would like to see improvement to the out-of-the-box verbiage, with the questions going to the right place."
"Expressive Barista could improve by adding native integration with WhatsApp, one of the top communication channels in South Africa. When we're trying to sell Barista to customers, we have to tell them that the solution doesn't have out-of-the-box support for WhatsApp. We can develop it, but then we need to have a conversation about how much that will cost."
"I would like to see the continued expansion of all of the automation capabilities."
"What would make things easier is more detail, out of the box, about what is helping out of the box. We're struggling a little bit to get that data. We want more information about what Barista has brought in that the employees are using, out of the box. We want more visibility into the things that we ourselves haven't done the interaction for."
"My only comment would be if they wanted to use this as an IT service management tool, maybe they could think about Barista making tickets and having change management and problem management capabilities."
"The reports provided by the solution are not customizable."
"Espressive Barista's natural language processing and conventional AI still have room for improvement."
"Although they've done some work on their metrics dashboard, there is some fine-tuning to do for people that just want to go in there at a glance and see their metrics."
"The documentation for integrating with the Flutter framework is lacking detailed information."
"Their pricing is very high compared to competitors, which is a concern for us."
"A major issue was the requirement for a separate connection to Sendbird, resulting in a delay when initiating the chat."
"More analytics tools could be integrated into Sendbird."
"At times, there are unexpected behaviors where the documentation suggests something different from how the SDK actually behaves, requiring us to create workarounds."
"The documentation for integrating with the Flutter framework is lacking detailed information. Initially, I struggled to connect users and manage tokens for active and offline sessions, which caused frustration."
"Impersonating a user or using a template user to send messages for development purposes would be very useful."
"I thought that there should be the audio and the video call functionality as well."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"User-based licensing has been working well for us, and we believe we are deriving significant value from it."
"The solution is affordable."
"The price for the licensing is fair."
"The pricing isn't overly burdensome. It's going to be interesting to see how new models come in with new capabilities but, as it is, as a base system, it's pretty good."
"It is expensive. It's not a cheap thing."
"There is a starter plan for $399 per month, and a pro plan for $799 dollars."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Help Desk Software solutions are best for your needs.
846,617 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
51%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
7%
Retailer
4%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Espressive?
The most valuable feature is its scalability.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Espressive?
Espressive has been very accommodating in trying to meet our needs and adapt to our current situation. User-based licensing has been working well for us, and we believe we are deriving significant ...
What needs improvement with Espressive?
Espressive Barista's natural language processing and conventional AI still have room for improvement. We haven't yet found anything that resembles true AI that can learn autonomously without human ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Sendbird?
Testing Sendbird is challenging due to the trial limitations of only one hundred users. The subscription cost is quite high, which prevents us from subscribing before the project completion and use...
What needs improvement with Sendbird?
The documentation for integrating with the Flutter framework is lacking detailed information. Initially, I struggled to connect users and manage tokens for active and offline sessions, which caused...
What is your primary use case for Sendbird?
In our company, we are using Sendbird for building a chat feature within our salon application. I am using the Flutter framework to implement the chat feature, which facilitates communication betwe...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Sendbird Calls, Sendbird Desk
 

Overview

Find out what your peers are saying about Espressive Barista vs. Sendbird and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
846,617 professionals have used our research since 2012.