Continually

What Continually is

Continually is a no-code website chatbot builder with live chat attached, made for capturing leads and answering visitors around the clock. Its own pages describe it as "the easiest way to add live chat or a custom chatbot to your website". The company, Continually Ltd, is registered in Northern Ireland and describes itself as a small team. The reader it fits is a founder, a marketer or a small sales team that wants a bot on a site this afternoon rather than a helpdesk project next quarter.

What you build and how

The core of the product is the bot builder. The company calls it a drag and drop builder and says it lets you "build complex bots without breaking a sweat". You assemble the conversation visually, and a bot can use images, GIFs, videos and emojis alongside text. The company's pages list unlimited chatbots and a set of chatbot templates, so a new bot can start from an existing flow instead of a blank canvas. They state that these features come on any plan.

You also decide how a bot appears. The feature list names a few appearance options: start the bot automatically, show a welcome message, show a button, or use your own button. For developers there is a way to control the widget from your own page code, for example to load a specific bot programmatically or to show and hide the widget as needed.

Live chat sits in the same product. Visitors can chat with your team, and the company says anyone in your team can quickly reply through the inbox, or take over a conversation a bot has started. The pages also mention iOS and Android apps for replying on the move. This is the company's own position on bots versus people: one customer review on its site says chatbot software should supplement live chat rather than replace it, and that Continually moves visitors into live chat when they need it.

Scheduling is the third piece. You connect a calendar, set your availability, and visitors can book meetings with you from the site without anyone emailing back and forth. The company frames this as qualified leads going straight to your calendar. You get Slack and email notifications whenever a lead arrives or a meeting is booked.

Everything the bots collect lands in lead profiles. The company says these show all the conversations you have had with a lead and any lead information captured. If you want the data elsewhere, you can export leads to XLS. The company also says leads can be sent to 1,500+ apps. The route is Zapier, plus native integrations that it names as Mailchimp, Drip, ActiveCampaign, HubSpot and Moosend, so a captured lead can reach an email list or CRM.

Installation is one line of code. You add the embed code to your website, or use the WordPress plugin. The pages add that Continually automatically sends event data to Google Analytics when it detects a tracker on your page, so conversation activity can show up in the reports you already read.

What the pages state

Pricing is the thinnest part of the picture, and it is worth being plain about it. The home page promises a free account, says "Free forever", and the comparison page says "Continually is free for small businesses" with no credit card required. The page also offers a 14 day free trial, again without a card. The company's pages do not list paid plan names or monthly prices, and they do not say which limits apply to the free account. The company does say its plan allowances are generous and points to its pricing page for the detail, so check that page before you plan around a volume.

One paid-plan fact is stated. The comparison page says the concierge onboarding service requires a subscription to the Professional or Enterprise plan. With that service the company says it will help you recreate chatbots that match playbooks you set up in Drift, configure integrations so your tools keep working together, and train your team. It adds that you get priority support during your first 30 days.

The company is also open about its competitive stance. On a page written for people considering a switch from Drift, it says Drift custom bots require scheduling a demo with a sales rep and paying to upgrade, whereas Continually lets you try features for free and cancel any time with no notice. It says it is a small team, so support comes from people who know the product, that it publishes a product roadmap and that it ships improvements and new features each week. Those are the company's claims about itself, and the page notes the comparison was last updated on May 4th, 2020 and rests on published customer reviews and its own customer survey data. It also states that Continually Ltd is not affiliated with Drift.

On social proof, the home page shows a rating of 4.9/5 from 25 reviews, a Product Hunt mark of #2 Product of the Day, and a link to its reviews on Capterra. Three testimonials appear on the page. One reviewer says they are getting 4x more subscribers and returning visitors since adding the bots. Another says capturing leads rose about 50% in conversion rate after setup. These are customer statements about their own sites.

The company offers a customer story as well, saying a leads agency saved time by moving from scheduling meetings manually by email to automated bookings on its website, and that the result arrived in 1 hour.

Who it suits and who it does not

Continually suits a solo founder, a freelancer or a small business that wants a conversational lead capture on its site with little setup. The visual builder, the templates and the one-line install keep the work small, and the free account lets you try a real bot on your own pages. A small marketing team that already lives in Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign or HubSpot gets a direct route for leads, and anyone using Zapier gets many more.

It is less obviously the answer for a larger support organization. The pages describe a chatbot, a live chat inbox and a scheduler. They do not describe ticketing, a help center, a knowledge base the bot reads from, or the many-channel inbox that dedicated support suites offer. A team that wants the bot to answer from a library of documentation should confirm that on the company's own pricing and features pages first, because the pages here describe bots you build yourself in the editor.

The limitation to weigh is the quiet pricing. A reader cannot tell from these pages what the free account caps or what the paid tiers cost, and the comparison page was last updated in 2020. Treat the Drift comparison as the company's own positioning, and confirm current plan limits before you commit.