CommentFor, ManyChat, LinkDM and Chatfuel.

Every capacity below was read from the vendor's own pricing page on 28 August 2026, and how ManyChat and Chatfuel meter was re-checked on 10 September 2026, with Chatfuel's plans and metering read again on 21 September 2026 when it had re-priced against ManyChat's Active Contacts page and Chatfuel's plan limits. Plans change; treat this as a dated snapshot, not a live feed.

Three different ways these tools charge you

The category does not split in half, and over time the unit you are billed in will usually matter more than the headline price does:

• By people who engaged that month. ManyChat meters active contacts: someone counts in a billing month only if they interacted with you during it, and the count resets each month. Quiet contacts stay in your list without counting. Past the included amount, their paid tiers charge for each further active contact.
• By AI work. On the plans its limits page documents, Chatfuel makes active contacts and messages unlimited and meters the AI processing behind each reply against a fair-use allowance per billing period; it lists keyword replies, button flows and broadcasts as not drawing on that allowance.
• By messages sent. CommentFor and LinkDM meter DMs sent. A large but quiet audience costs nothing extra; heavy senders pay more.

One caveat on ManyChat, because it decides which of these you are actually on: active-contact billing started on 2 March 2026 and applies to accounts created from that date. As of 10 September 2026 ManyChat was still moving older accounts across in stages, country by country, so an account opened before then may not be on this model yet — their billing page is the place to check.

What each one meters you on

Where each of us wins, plainly

Against LinkDM — the other tool here that meters DMs — the published capacities line up directly:

• Free tier. 500,000 DMs a month against their 1,000, both on one account, both free; ours carries a short CommentFor line on each DM. Ours needs no card and has no expiry; we have not checked their terms on either.
• Accounts — nearly three times as many. Ultra includes 500,000 DMs a month in total, shared across up to 27 accounts^†; their Platinum+ lists 300,000 DMs a month and 10 accounts. If you run accounts for clients, that is the comparison.
• First paid tier — theirs includes more DMs. Their first paid tier includes 25,000 DMs a month; our Pro includes 10,000.

Against ManyChat and Chatfuel the comparison is not arithmetic, because they meter something else entirely — and not the same something as each other. See below.

Reading the tables honestly

The rows do not line up, because the units are not the same. ManyChat counts the people who engaged with it that month; we and LinkDM count messages sent; Chatfuel counts neither: its plans meter conversations. Comparing "their Pro" to "our Pro" is meaningless — the names are marketing, not measurements.

The useful exercise takes two minutes: estimate the DMs you send in a month, and how many different people you expect to hear back from in that same month. If a lot of distinct people engage each month, active-contact pricing climbs with them. If you send heavily to a smaller set who keep coming back, it may be the cheaper side.

One number worth knowing before you read anyone's marketing, ours included: Instagram permits 750 private replies per hour per account. That caps everybody at roughly 540,000 a month per account, whatever a plan is called. When a tool advertises "unlimited" sending, that is the ceiling it is describing — no vendor can go past it.

Channel coverage

ManyChat and Chatfuel cover several messaging channels. LinkDM covers Instagram and Facebook. CommentFor is Instagram-first: Instagram is live with the full feature set, Facebook Pages is built and waiting on Meta permissions, and WhatsApp, Telegram, YouTube and Threads are planned but not built. If you need WhatsApp automation this month, we are not your tool, and we would rather say so here than after you have paid.

What we are built on

CommentFor is an approved Meta Tech Provider and runs entirely on Meta's official Instagram Platform API: you connect with Instagram Login on a professional account, and every reply is a genuine private reply within Meta's rules. No scraping, no automation of a logged-in session, no password sharing. ManyChat lists itself a Meta Business Partner and Chatfuel an Official Meta Partner, and both build on the official APIs too. We have not independently verified the technical basis of every tool in this market, and it is worth checking on any tool you evaluate — the ones that drive a logged-in session put your account at risk rather than theirs.

The rules nobody can engineer around

Instagram permits one private reply per comment, within a seven-day window, under that limit of 750 private replies per hour. Those are Meta's rules, not any vendor's feature. The only real difference between tools is whether they pace sensibly underneath them and tell you honestly when a send will not go out. We wrote up how those limits work in detail.

Where CommentFor is genuinely different

• Rewind — sweep a post that has already gone viral and DM the people who commented before you set anything up, within Meta's seven-day window.
• Next post — arm an automation before you publish and it attaches to the next Instagram post within minutes, so DMs start in the first minutes of the post rather than after you remembered.
• A free tier you can actually run on — 500,000 DMs a month with a short CommentFor line on each, no card, no trial clock, no expiry.
• One job, done properly — keyword triggers on posts and reels, and tracked links, on every plan. On the paid plans: story replies and mentions, public comment replies, follow gates, and email capture forwarding to Kit or Flodesk.

Where someone else may suit you better

• You send heavily and run no AI replies. Chatfuel's limits page puts active contacts and messages on unlimited and meters AI processing instead, so a sender whose flows are keyword replies, buttons and broadcasts may never reach the resource it bills for — their page puts it as "static actions don't count". The catch is what happens if you do use AI and pass the allowance: their page says the bot pauses and the assistant stops replying until it resets. It describes no overage charge for that allowance. We count the DMs themselves: each plan includes one monthly DM allowance. Read its plan limits against what you actually run.
• You want WhatsApp in the same tool. ManyChat and Chatfuel both cover it; we do not.
• You want SMS or email as well. ManyChat carries those; the channels Chatfuel lists on its pricing page are Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, and SMS and email are not among them. We offer neither.
• You want a visual builder for long branching conversations. That is ManyChat's strength rather than ours, as far as we can tell from their published material.

Our bet is that most Instagram creators and shops want one job done well rather than ten done adequately. That is a bet about you, and you know your situation better than we do.

How to decide

Run the honest questions in choosing a comment-to-DM tool against every tool on your shortlist, this one included. Our numbers are on Pricing, the shipped feature list is on Features, and what is live versus coming per channel is on Instagram and the other channel pages.