A chatbot answers the person who is on your website right now. An AI ISA works the thousands of people in your CRM who are not.
Chatbots got good. The question is no longer smart against dumb. It is who starts the conversation, and how long it lasts.
One visit, or the whole database.
Rows are dimensions, not feature ticks. Two of them go to the chatbot.
| Substrait | An AI chatbot | |
|---|---|---|
| Who starts it | It opens with leads already in your CRM | Someone has to land on your site |
| What it knows | That lead’s whole record before it writes | Your pages, your listings, this visit |
| How long it keeps trying | Months. Years, if the lead said next spring | The visit, and whatever it captured |
| Where it lives | Inside Sierra, Follow Up Boss or GoHighLevel | A widget on your website |
| Who it talks to | Only the leads you point it at | Every visitor, named or not |
| When it cannot answer | Hands the thread to the assigned agent | Takes a message or pages whoever is around |
| Anonymous traffic | No. It needs a contact record | Yes, and that is its best trick |
| Speed on a live visitor | Not our job. We are not on the page | Under a second, every time |
Read the last two rows honestly. A chatbot reaches people we never see. Most of your site traffic never fills in a form, and a widget talks to them anyway. Nothing we do replaces that.
Buy the widget for these.
Someone opens a listing at 11pm and asks about the taxes. A widget answers before they scroll. Nothing else on the internet is faster.
Most of your traffic never becomes a lead. There is no record, no phone number, nothing to work. A chatbot talks to them anyway.
Price, square footage, the HOA, whether it is still available. Off your own pages, in seconds, with no one on call.
There are free tiers. Serious ones start around a few hundred a month. For what it does on your website, that is cheap.
The 2023 version of this argument is dead.
We looked properly before writing this page. Here is what a good chatbot does in 2026, sourced from the vendors themselves.
The current generation runs on a language model. It answers in your words, off your own pages. It does not fall over when a question is phrased sideways.
Roof AI sells natural-language property search on a brokerage site. A visitor describes what they want. The widget returns homes.
Putting a showing on a calendar from inside the chat is standard now. It is not a premium add-on any more.
Real Geeks sells Geek AI Text, which follows up by SMS off website activity. Its own docs talk about a three month conversion timeline.
In July 2026 Sierra AI, the customer service company with no relation to Sierra Interactive, launched agents that pursue one goal across days, weeks or months. That is enterprise software. Nobody is selling it to a twelve agent brokerage yet.
Every one of those wins starts the same way. A person is on your site. That is the whole category in one sentence, and it is not a criticism. It is what a widget is for.
You have thousands of contacts. On any given day almost none of them open your website. A widget cannot reach one of them.
A few products sold as chat now text leads for months and write back to the CRM. That is an AI ISA wearing a widget. Compare it to us on that job. This page will not help you.
What each one actually costs.
Published prices only. Where a vendor does not publish, that is what the row says.
| Product | Published price | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Chatbase | Free, then $40 to $500 a month | General site widget, billed by message credits |
| Tidio | From $24.17 a month | General site chat. Its Lyro AI agent starts at $32.50 |
| Serviceform | From 299 euros a month | Site widget with a real estate practice. Final plan quoted on a call |
| Intercom Fin | $29 to $132 per seat, plus $0.99 per resolution | Support desk AI. Not built for real estate leads |
| Roof AI | Not published | Brokerage site widget. You have to talk to sales |
| Substrait | $179 to $1,079 a month | By database size. No setup fee, no per-message billing |
Every competitor figure above was read on the vendor’s own pricing page on 29 August 2026. Roof AI publishes no price, and we would rather say that than repeat a number off a listicle. Third-party roundups had Serviceform at $429 and $599 a month; its own page says 299 euros. Substrait prices are the founding-member rate, 40 percent off list. Full tiers are here.
The work that has nothing to do with your website.
You paid for every lead in that database. A widget only meets the few who came back. We consider every lead in there, every day.
Someone chats once and leaves. If nothing follows, that thread is over. We open the next one, and the one after that.
A lead who said not until next spring is still being worked next spring. Follow-up that outlasts anyone’s patience.
Every text, note, logged call and email on that lead before it writes a word. A widget starts from nothing every time.
What the lead already told you stays answered. The budget, the timeline, the street they liked: all of it changes what comes next.
Notes, tags, stages and tasks update as the conversation happens. Nothing waits for someone to log it afterwards.
Messages go out from your office’s own number, in your agent’s name. There is no AI persona in front of your leads.
Every message clears twenty-five guardrails before it sends. Sixteen of them are published in full.
The moment one of your agents replies to that lead, it stops. The conversation is theirs from then on.
A chatbot and an AI ISA are not the same purchase.
If your problem is your website, buy the chatbot. Visitors bouncing without asking anything, questions nobody answers until Monday, a contact form that gets two fills a week. A widget fixes that, and it fixes it for less than we cost.
Do not pay us to answer your website. We are not on it. We will not greet a visitor, and we cannot talk to someone with no record in your CRM.
We earn our keep on the database. Thousands of paid leads nobody has spoken to since last year. Nurture that stopped at message four. Contacts your agents will never get back to, because there are only so many hours.
Running both is a normal answer, and a good one. The widget catches the stranger. We work the list. Just do not let two systems text the same person about the same thing.
Chatbots and AI ISAs, answered.
Still deciding? Compare every AI, or read what an AI ISA actually is.
Is an AI chatbot the same as an AI ISA?
Can a chatbot follow up with my old leads?
Do I need both a chatbot and an AI ISA?
How much does a real estate AI chatbot cost?
Can a chatbot text my leads?
Will a chatbot know what my lead told us last year?
Does Substrait put a chatbot on my website?
Keep the widget. Work the database.
One flat monthly rate by database size. No setup fee, no per-message billing, no per-seat billing.