Comparing Chatbot Frameworks: A Study of RASA and Botkit

Abstract

Chatbots are gaining popularity in different sectors of our everyday life: from virtual assistants on our mobile devices, on different social media platforms to customer service agents on different websites. Due to this popularity of chatbots there exist multiple ’platforms’ and ’frameworks’ of varying characteristics for chatbot development. Hence, selecting the right ’platform’ or ’framework’ for chatbot development is a problem and the outcome of a study to better understand these frameworks can mitigate that problem to some extent. Studying every intricate details of all of the existing chatbot development platforms and frameworks in one single study is not feasible. In this thesis, two of the most popular open source chatbot development frameworks (RASA Stack and Botkit) to study and some topics closely related to chatbot development were taken into account for comparison. Goal was to compare these two frameworks and recommend which may be a better solution for chatbot development. Documentations of each framework were taken into account and two identical case study chatbots were implemented using each framework to study these frameworks regarding those related topics. Findings suggest, overall RASA framework would be more suitable for chatbot development than Botkit.