I am a long time bot user across a lot of different platforms. When I saw the capability that BotStar offers, it made sense to fully stack. This platform seems to have the best of most worlds, however it is still a little quirky from a workflow perspective when dealing with complex bots. Here are a few of my initial thoughts since diving into the platform:

1. There are lots of features here that can be utilized to create very simple or VERY complex bots. I love the use of the Module function which allows you to group like items together, keeping your visual flow very clean. It can be a bit tricky sometimes to know what should be nested and what shouldn't so I would recommend visually mapping it out ahead of time as there is no way to easily "nest" created items after they have been built.

2. The jump logic leaves much to be desired. Right now, movement is very fluid, with plenty of options to get in and out of different areas of the flow. However, when working with multiple levels of nesting, there are use cases where you may need to jump to a specific block in another module. Currently, this cannot be accomplished, so the bot design will need to be developed with that in mind.

3. Capturing user data and storing it is cumbersome. I'm used to services like ManyChat, MobileMonkey, Quriobot and others that make accessing and viewing all interaction data very easy. With BotStar, you have to manually define what data you want to capture (which is both a pro and a con depending on the scenario) and there are some oddities when it comes to website chat vs Facebook for audience capture. Facebook obviously gives some standard data as soon as someone engages with your page, so the contact is created automatically. As it stands currently, you must capture a First Name AND email address in BotStar in order for a contact to show up in your audience list. In most use cases, this would not be an issue as you are looking for subscribers. However in instances where you want to potentially use usernames or other information as the leading indicator of a contact, those cannot be manually set as of right now unless you have the first name and email address of the contact already stored.

4. It can be a bit difficult to know when to use flow variables vs responses vs user attributes for storing data, and since you are required in some cases to have all three, naming conventions are very important. This is something you will want to determine ahead of time as there is often a requirement to pass one piece of data through all three in order to have it stored everywhere you need it. Example: response.userName, user.UserName, and {userName}.

5. There are some UI bugs that are still to be worked out, but overall the building experience is very smooth. They have thought through the visual flow very well and it is by far the most polished builder interface I have experienced yet.

All in all, BotStar is off to a great start.