CustomGPT versus AINIRO comparison

We have previously compared HubSpot and AINIRO's ChatGPT chatbot. In this article we will compare CustomGPT versus our chatbot. This allows you to see both chatbots side by side, and even test both chatbots for yourself if you want to compare the difference yourself.

The CEO of CustomGPT is a friend of mine, and we support each other, and celebrate the other when we reach a milestone. So you might say we're "friendemies". However, when you chose a ChatGPT chatbot, it is important to compare your alternatives, to understand which you should chose. Which chatbot you should chose probably depends upon your use case. However, some things are fairly universal, and not dependent upon your particular use case. The test was conducted by scraping 50 web pages from CustomGPT's website. You can see how I created the chatbot below.

Scraping CustomGPT

As you can see, CustomGPT's website has 92 pages, and we only scraped 50 pages - So our demo chatbot won't be able to answer everything related to CustomGPT. Creating the demo chatbot took about 5 minutes in total, and I didn't change it or improve upon it after I was done. So this was a "5 minute job" for me.

Personalized experience

The first thing our chatbot will do once you start your conversation with it, is to ask you for your name. The name will be stored creating a personalized experience, where the chatbot will use your name in its conversation with you in the future, and even remember your name 3 months down the road if you return to it.

CustomGPT's chatbot dives right into the conversation without asking for your name, resulting in a colder less personalized experience. Notice, what questions you initially ask a user for using our chatbot can be configured, and you can ask for email, phone numbers, etc. This data can also be integrated with your CRM, email campaigns, etc. Below is how CustomGPT "greets" you.

Screen "real estate" usage

Another thing I personally think is not good with CustomGPT is how much of its "real estate" is being used for chrome, such as buttons, explanations, etc. The above two screenshots of ours and CustomGPT's chatbot would probably accurately be describing how the experience would be over a phone with a small screen. I'm not sure if CustomGPT have frontends that works on your phone, but the above left very little space for the actual conversation.

Our philosophy here is to "simply get out of the way" and allow the user to control the conversation as much as possible, while CustomGPT's philosophy seems to be to "guide the user" explaining what the user can do - Spending a lot of screen real estate, resulting in that it's close to impossible to actually have a conversation with their chatbot from your phone.

The only reason why I noticed this, was because I wanted to zoom in and create a smaller browser window such that I could create higher quality screenshots. It might be that CustomGPT have already solved this, but it did not come across like that in my demo.

CustomGPT seems to want to "give you a button for everything", while we're doing the Scandinavian design, to remove as much "things" as possible to make the chatbot itself the centre of attraction

Unless you want your chatbot to work on phones, I guess these are "opinions", and not neutral metrics though.

What is CustomGPT?

This was my first question to both chatbots, and the first screenshot is of our chatbot answering that question.

As you can see our chatbot delivers "selling language", such as "trailblazing", "robust", and actively tries to sell CustomGPT's product. This is because our chatbot was configured to function as a sales executive for CustomGPT. This is of course optional, but for an E-Commerce website I suspect using language such as this is important to increase sales. Below is CustomGPT chatbot's response.

I find CustomGPT's answer colder and less convincing, but that might just be me. Others might have different opinions here, and as I started out with, which chatbot is better depends upon your use case I suspect. However, our chatbot does a better job at convincing me about that CustomGPT is a great product - At least in my eyes ...

The one thing CustomGPT have that our demo chatbot does not have is an image of Alden next to its responses, which is kind of cool. In a production chatbot we can deliver this, so that's not a problem. If you want a photo of your CEO or somebody else next to your chatbot's answers, this is something we can very much deliver - But the demo chatbot did not have this.

Yet again, our CustomGPT demo chatbot was created in 5 minutes 😉

Can CustomGPT scrape my website?

This was the next question I asked both chatbots. For the record, I know the answer to these questions (obviously!), and I happen to know that CustomGPT can scrape your website as long as it has a sitemap - However, my questions are to identify the quality differences in responses from both chatbots, so the answer isn't as important as the way it answers.

Below is how our chatbot answers. Notice how it's adressing me by my name. Another crucial feature I was not able to have CustomGPT show me was hyperlinks directly embedded into the content of the answer itself. As you can see, our chatbot adds hyperlinks directly into the answer from ChatGPT. I suspect CustomGPT cannot do this, because of our unique scraping technology. Our website scraping technology is something I happen to know for a fact is the envy of the entire industry ... 😉

Below is CustomGPT's response. Notice, no name, no inline hyperlinks, no emoticons, and a much colder response in general. But I guess these are in the eyes of the beholder, and other use cases might have different needs. And yet again screen real estate usage becomes a real problem ... 😕

Show me the CustomGPT logo

This was my next question. As you can see in our 5 minute demo chatbot, it has no problems with showing the CustomGPT logo. This is because as we scrape websites, we turn the HTML into markdown, which allows us to keep images as they are, and ingest these directly into the chat stream returned by OpenAI.

CustomGPT's chatbot cannot show images, and returns some generic "I am an AI language model" answer. Another thing which I find annoying is that if it knows the logo is on the website, why can't it provide a hyperlink to the website, such that I can at least click it and see the logo?

How do I contact CustomGPT?

This was my next question to both chatbots. The first screenshot is from our chatbot, and as you can see, it gives you both a clickable hyperlink to their email address, in addition to clickable hyperlinks to their FAQ, blog, documentation, etc.

Below is CustomGPT's answer to the above question. This time it gave me a link to their email address, but not a link to their FAQ, documentation, blog, etc - Only a link to send emails. Personally, I think that when a chatbot tells you where to find information, it's kind of a big deal that it shows you where that information is with a hyperlink or something - But it might just be me being biased here of course, and how important you think these features are might be different from how important I think they are. But at least I can click the email address.

Bandwidth usage

Another crucial thing with chatbots is that they require download bandwidth. If you open up CustomGPT's website in incognito model in your browser, you will see it requires 20 to 120 seconds to load. A lot of this is because of YouTube, Google Analytics, etc - However, the page as a whole was 28MB the last time I measured. This implies that the page is basically unavailable on your phone over anything but a 5G connection. I'm not sure how much of this is their chatbot, but a qualified guess would be roughly 2 to 5 MB.

Bandwidth usage has drastic consequences for everything on your website. Search Engine Optimisation being one thing. The more "stuff" your website loads, the slower it becomes. The slower your website is, the more users will click back before it loads, and the lower Google will score your site in its SERP.

Amazon did research into this 20 years ago, and found they lost 5% of their customers by adding 5% additional "stuff" to it. The industry rule of thumb is you lose 10% of your users for every 1 additional second your site needs to load.

If CustomGPT's chatbot is 5MB in size, and each megabyte takes one second to download, this implies you're losing 50% of your customers as you add CustomGPT's chatbot on your site. For a research website such as MIT, which is one of CustomGPT's actual customers, this might not be such a big deal. But for an E-Commerce website losing 50% of your website visitors because your site takes 5 more seconds to load is basically "a chapter 11 incident" (bankruptcy!)

Our chatbot is 47KB in size, in total. This means it is 1% of the download size of CustomGPT, assuming their chatbot is 5MB. This implies in theory you could run our chatbot on a single Commodore 64 from 1981, while CustomGPT would require 78 similar machine to run.

Integrations

CustomGPT have Zapier integration, which is good. We also (obviously!) have Zapier integration, we just don't brag about it. First of all, because Zapier is ridiculously expensive, and we prefer to integrate directly with your chosen CRM, E-Commerce, Support System directly. One of the unique things we can do that I don't think CustomGPT can do is to browse the web, work with live data, etc. You can see some example below.

CustomGPT have none of the above features as far as I know ...

Conclusion

The conclusion depends upon which use case you need a chatbot for. If you don't care about screen real estate, having the chatbot work from your phone, download speed (downloading CustomGPT's website on an empty browser cache for me takes 30 to 120 seconds), sales language, displaying images, hyperlinks, personalized experience by having the chatbot remember your user's names, collecting emails, names, phone numbers, lead generation, CRM integration, support system integration, etc, etc, etc - CustomGPT might be the better option. If you think the above parts are important, you can contact us below, or create your own demo chatbot here.

Contact AINIRO