Botshido

Description

Most chatbots just answer. Botshido answers from your own site, in a voice that sounds like your brand, and points visitors to the right next step. And it is built to be used responsibly: consent first, your data in your own database, and privacy tools included.

Visitors ask a question in a chat widget and get an answer based on your pages, posts and instructions, not generic internet knowledge. You connect your own account with OpenAI, Mistral AI, Anthropic (Claude) or xAI (Grok), tell the chatbot who it is and what it knows, and place it on your site. There are no message limits in the plugin and no markup on AI costs: you pay your provider directly, at their prices.

Why Botshido

1. It knows your site, not the internet.

Build the knowledge base from your posts and pages, FAQ pairs, and training text or files. For each question Botshido finds the relevant excerpts and answers from them. Tell it what to say when it does not know, to reduce made-up answers.

2. A character, not a generic widget.

Give your chatbot a personality: a name, your own avatar and chat button icon, a tone of voice (from serious to funny, from formal to casual), colors, fonts and an opening line, with a live preview while you work. You can even add a large side avatar that stands next to the chat window. Start from one of three bundled characters (Ninji, Leo or Aria), or import a template file (ZIP, with its images), and make it sound like your brand, not like a manual.

3. It guides, it does not just reply.

Quick-question buttons and content blocks show the right link, button or card at the right moment: when a visitor mentions a keyword, or after a number of messages. A question about opening hours can end with a “Book now” button instead of a paragraph. (Botshido Pro adds fully guided conversations with branches, lead collection and human handoff.)

4. GDPR-friendly by design.

Botshido gives you the tools to run a chatbot responsibly:

• Consent before anything happens. Turn on the consent notice and the chat does not start until the visitor accepts. This is enforced on the server: no message is sent to the AI provider, and no analytics event is recorded, without consent. Visitors can also decline.
• Your texts, your policy. Edit the notice, the accept and decline buttons, and link your own privacy policy.
• Your data stays on your site. Conversations and analytics are stored in your own WordPress database, not on our servers.
• You decide how long to keep it. Set automatic retention for conversations and analytics: older records are deleted for you.
• Data minimization. Analytics store a minimized page address: tracking parameters and personal query strings are dropped.
• WordPress privacy tools. Conversations and analytics events are included in the WordPress personal data export and erase requests.
• Clean uninstall. Deleting the plugin removes its tables and settings.

Compliance also depends on your privacy policy and on your agreement with the AI provider, so this is not legal advice.

5. Your costs stay under your control.

Bring your own key. There is no per-message fee from us and no markup. Switch provider or model whenever you want. Built-in per-visitor rate limits and a daily cap on AI requests (adjustable by developers with a filter) help protect your API bill from runaway usage and abuse.

6. See what works.

Built-in analytics show how many visitors saw the widget, opened the chat and started a conversation, so you can tune your opening line and your content. Conversations are saved in your WordPress admin, so you can read what people really ask.

7. Easy to set up.

A setup wizard walks you through the key, the model and your first content. Place the chatbot as a floating widget on the whole site, only on selected pages, or anywhere with the [botshido] shortcode. It is multilingual-ready, with WPML and Polylang integration, and answers in the language the visitor writes in (quality depends on the model).

Everything in the free plugin

• One chatbot with its own prompts, provider, model, tone and appearance
• Four providers, all included: OpenAI, Mistral AI, Anthropic (Claude) and xAI (Grok)
• Knowledge base from posts and pages, FAQ pairs and training text or files, with keyword search
• Floating widget or [botshido] shortcode, with page-level display rules
• Quick questions and content blocks with keyword and message-count triggers
• Your own avatars and icons (chatbot, visitor, chat button and a large side avatar), colors, fonts, texts and live preview; three bundled templates and ZIP template import with one-step undo
• Analytics, conversation history, setup wizard
• GDPR tools: consent notice, retention, privacy export and erase

Pro features

Botshido Pro is a separate paid license, bought on botshido.com. The code for these features is not part of this plugin:

• Unlimited chatbots and a public chatbot switcher
• Guided conversational flows, lead collection and advanced triggers
• Human handoff with availability hours and operator notifications
• Embedding-based (semantic) retrieval and URL import for the knowledge base
• A/B testing of opening messages and analytics CSV export
• WooCommerce integration
• Online template library, template export and creation of chatbots from templates

API keys

You need an API key from at least one supported provider. Keys can be stored in the plugin settings or defined as PHP constants (NINJAIBOT_OPENAI_API_KEY, NINJAIBOT_MISTRAL_API_KEY, NINJAIBOT_ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, NINJAIBOT_GROK_API_KEY) in wp-config.php.

External services

This plugin connects to third-party AI services to generate chat responses and (optionally) text embeddings for the knowledge base. Requests are only sent to the provider you configure, and only when a visitor uses the chat (or when the knowledge base is indexed with embeddings enabled).

What is sent: the visitor’s chat messages, the conversation context, your configured prompts, and relevant excerpts of your indexed site content. Your API key is sent to authenticate each request.

• OpenAI (api.openai.com) — chat responses and embeddings. Terms of use, Privacy policy
• Mistral AI (api.mistral.ai) — chat responses and embeddings. Terms of service, Privacy policy
• Anthropic (api.anthropic.com) — chat responses. Terms of service, Privacy policy
• xAI (api.x.ai) — chat responses. Terms of service, Privacy policy

Additionally, if you configure lead-collection webhooks or index external URLs into the knowledge base, the plugin sends requests to the hosts you explicitly allow via the ninjaibot_allowed_webhook_hosts filter. The Pro version can also download chatbot templates, with their images, from botshido.com; this feature is not part of this free plugin.

Freemius (api.freemius.com, wp.freemius.com) — this plugin uses the Freemius SDK for licensing, updates and optional usage insights. Nothing is sent until an administrator opts in on the activation screen (it can be skipped). After opting in, Freemius receives the site URL, WordPress and PHP versions, the plugin version and the administrator’s name and email address; it never receives chatbot conversations, your content or API keys. Terms of service, Privacy policy

Source code and third-party libraries

All JavaScript and CSS written for this plugin is shipped as editable source (assets/admin/, assets/public/, assets/js/, assets/css/ and inline code in the PHP templates). There is no build or compilation step. In particular, assets/admin/js/ninjaibot-flow-editor.js is the original, formatted source of the flow editor; there is no separate generated version. A JavaScript formatter is optional and is not needed to run or rebuild the plugin.

Bundled third-party libraries:

• marked 18.1.3 (MIT) — assets/public/js/marked.umd.js, the unmodified UMD build from https://github.com/markedjs/marked
• DOMPurify 3.4.8 (Apache-2.0 / MPL-2.0) — assets/public/js/purify.min.js, the unmodified official release build; source at https://github.com/cure53/DOMPurify
• Freemius SDK (GPLv2+) — vendor/freemius/, https://github.com/Freemius/wordpress-sdk