Thena alternative: the $29 to $79 cliff, and how to skip it
Thena Starter lists $29 per user a month on annual billing, stops at five users, and stops again at a thousand tickets. The next plan is $79 per user. A five-person team crossing that line goes from $145 a month to $395. BotFerry charges 9€ for the workspace and counts relayed messages instead of seats.
Prices checked 28 July 2026. Written by the BotFerry team, so read the Thena column as a competitor's account of a competitor and follow the source link before you decide.
The short version
Pick Thena if you want AI in the loop by default. AI is in every tier, and Standard adds the agent studio, web chat, MCP and APIs. That is a platform, and $79 a seat buys a platform.
Pick BotFerry if what you use Thena for is capturing a Slack request and answering it from a channel the requester cannot see. Flat 9€, unlimited operators, no ticket ceiling to cross.
BotFerry vs Thena, side by side
Swipe the table sideways for the other columns.
| BotFerry This is us | Thena | |
|---|---|---|
| Billing unit | Flat monthly, whole workspace | Per user, per month, billed annually |
| Entry price | 9€ / mo Starter: 3 bots, unlimited operators | $29 / user / mo Starter, up to 5 users, 1,000 tickets / mo |
| Five operators, one month | 9€ / mo | $145 / mo |
| Volume on the entry plan | 5,000 messages | 1,000 tickets on Starter |
| Operator replies land back in the original thread | Yes | Yes |
| Flat price, operators not billed per seat | Yes | No |
| You create the Slack app and hold the token | Yes | No |
| Relay vendor keeps no message content | Yes | No |
| Several separate front doors on one plan | Yes | Not published |
| One private thread per request | Yes | Yes |
| Attachments relay both directions | Yes | Yes |
| Internal notes the requester never sees | Yes | Yes |
| Ticket statuses, assignment, queues | No | Yes |
| SLA timers and escalation | No | Yes |
| Reporting and analytics | Activity log only | Yes |
| AI drafting or AI agents | No | Yes |
| Email or web chat intake | No | Yes |
| One-click install, no app to build | No | Yes |
Prices read 28 July 2026 from each vendor's own pricing page, linked below. BotFerry bills in euro, the others list dollars, so treat the two currencies as separate numbers rather than a converted total.
The volume row does not compare like with like. One BotFerry message is a single hop across the ferry, either a mention carried into your ops channel or a reply carried back. A ticket, conversation, or credit elsewhere covers a whole exchange. Seat prices in the rows above are directly comparable.
Sources: Thena
Two ceilings on one plan
Thena Starter carries a seat ceiling and a volume ceiling. Five users, a thousand tickets a month, $29 per user on annual billing. Whichever you hit first pushes you to Standard at $79 per user, and Enterprise lists $119. Growth in either direction, more people answering or more people asking, moves you up the same ladder.
Work the numbers for a support team that doubles from five to ten over a year while volume outgrows a thousand tickets. Starter at five users is $145 a month. Standard at ten is $790. The product did not change, the invoice went up five and a half times.
BotFerry has one ceiling, relayed messages, and it moves in steps of 9€ to 19€ to 39€ for the whole workspace. Starter covers 5,000 messages across three bots, Team 20,000 across ten, Business 80,000 with bots unlimited within fair use. Adding the sixth operator costs nothing because operators were never the meter.
Tickets and messages are different units
A Thena ticket covers a whole exchange, from the first question to the resolution. A BotFerry message is one hop across the ferry: either a mention carried into your operator channel or a reply carried back. So a thousand Thena tickets and 5,000 BotFerry messages are not the same allowance dressed differently.
A rough translation: if your average request takes four messages of back and forth, 5,000 relayed messages is around 1,250 conversations. Compare the seat prices directly, because those are the same unit, and treat the volume rows as each vendor's own accounting.
What Thena does that BotFerry never will
Thena leads with AI in every tier and puts an agent studio, an AI web chat widget, MCP and public APIs behind Standard. It handles Slack and email on Starter, adds Microsoft Teams at Enterprise, and gives you the ticket lifecycle you would expect: statuses, assignment, escalation, reporting.
BotFerry has no AI, no APIs, no email intake and no web chat. It relays Slack messages between two channels in one workspace. If your plan for support involves an AI agent answering the first line before a human sees it, this comparison ends here and Thena wins it.
What BotFerry does that Thena does not
You own the Slack app. The wizard writes a manifest, you create the app in your own workspace, install it, and the token stays with you. Revoke it in Slack and the relay stops without a conversation with us. Thena installs as Thena's app with Thena holding the token, which is one click faster and one owner further away.
We hold no message content either. Thread mappings and a log row with a type, a reason and a timestamp: that is the whole of what survives a relay. There is no ticket database, so nothing to export and nothing to leak. Teams handling HR or payroll requests through a Slack front door tend to like that; teams that need last quarter's transcript do not.
And several front doors run on one plan. @Support, @IT Help and @Feedback as three separate Slack apps, three private operator channels, one shared message pool and one invoice.