Denser vs Mendable
Mendable answers from technical documentation and publishes almost nothing about it: no paid pricing, no content limit, no retrieval mechanism, no citation guarantee. Denser publishes all four, and its retriever is open source on GitHub.
2,000+ businesses · free plan, no card required · 5-minute setup
Trusted by 2,000+ businesses worldwide
City of San José
Onondaga County
EOS Australia
Portfoliobox
Upsiide
Valk WeldingCity of San JoséOnondaga CountyEOS AustraliaPortfolioboxUpsiideValk WeldingDenser links each reply to the exact passage it came from, so a customer or an agent can confirm it in one click. Mendable does not publish a citation guarantee. An answer nobody can check is an answer nobody should act on.
A chatbot can only answer from the passage retrieval hands it, so retrieval quality sets the ceiling on everything downstream. Denser Retriever combines keyword search, vector search, and an XGBoost reranker, and on MTEB retrieval benchmarks that combination beats a vector-search baseline outright, by 13.07% NDCG@10 over top vector baselines on MS MARCO. Mendable does not publish its retrieval approach. In support, that gap is the difference between a correct answer and a confident wrong one.
A Denser bot holds up to 50,000 pages or 25 GB, published on the pricing page. Mendable publishes no content limit at all, so how much it holds, and how well it retrieves at that size, are both unknown until you are in a sales conversation.
Denser publishes every tier from $39 to $899 with the query allowance and content limit beside each. Mendable publishes a free tier and quotes everything else on request.
Mendable is aimed narrowly at technical documentation, and its team also builds Firecrawl, so there is real retrieval engineering behind the product. None of it is published. The pricing, the content limits, and the retrieval mechanism are all unavailable until you talk to someone.
| Denser | Mendable | |
|---|---|---|
| Source citations | Every answer cited to its exact passage | Not published on the pricing page |
| Retrieval | Hybrid keyword + vector + XGBoost reranking, MTEB-benchmarked above vector search alone. Open source (MIT) | Not publicly disclosed |
| Content per bot | 100 pages (Starter) to 50,000 / 25 GB (Enterprise) | Not published |
| Answer quality monitoring | Flags unanswered questions by cause and topic | Not advertised |
| Published pricing | Every tier and allowance published | Free tier only; paid plans custom |
| Entry paid plan | $39/mo, 1,500 queries | Not published |
| Remove vendor badge | Included on paid tiers | Requires a custom plan |
| Billing unit | One query per question on the latest Claude, GPT, or Gemini | Message credits; 3 per GPT-4 message |
| Self-serve signup | Card, no sales call | Sales conversation for paid use |
| Deployment | Widget, iframe, React, REST API, TS/Python SDKs, WordPress, Shopify, Slack, WhatsApp | Widget, API, integrations |
| Free plan | 20 queries/mo, ongoing | 300–500 message credits |
| Best for | Teams who want to buy without a sales cycle | Negotiated deployments over technical docs |
Real cost
This is the one comparison on the site with no cost table, because only one of the two products publishes one.
| Denser | Mendable | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry paid plan | $39/mo, 1,500 queries | Quoted on request |
| Mid tier | $119/mo, 7,500 queries | Quoted on request |
| Top published tier | $899/mo, 50,000 queries | Quoted on request |
| Unbranded deployment | Included on paid tiers | Custom plan required |
| Time to a number | Immediate | A sales conversation |
Read from mendable.ai on 19 August 2026, where no paid pricing is published and the free allowance is quoted as both 300 and 500 message credits in different places.
Switching
Mendable indexes documentation, guides, and technical resources. Denser takes the same material, so migration is a re-index.
Ask your hardest technical questions and check the passage behind each Denser answer — for documentation assistants this is the only meaningful acceptance test.
If branding removal was the reason you needed a custom plan, that disappears: unbranded deployment is included on Denser's published paid tiers.
Denser flags the questions it could not answer by cause and topic, which for a technical assistant is a direct list of documentation to write.
Questions
Yes, particularly if you want to evaluate and buy without a sales cycle. Both answer questions from technical documentation, but Denser publishes every tier and allowance — $39 to $899 — while Mendable publishes only a free tier and quotes paid plans on use case and usage.
Mendable publishes a free plan with a few hundred message credits and does not publish paid pricing. Its FAQ states that custom plans are priced on use case, total usage, and any custom development work, so a paid figure requires contacting them.
Yes, though the figure is inconsistent in its own documentation — the site quotes both 300 and 500 free message credits in different places. GPT-4 messages consume three credits each rather than one, so the effective capacity is roughly a third of the headline on the stronger model.
Only on a custom or enterprise plan. Denser includes unbranded deployment on its published paid tiers, starting at $39/mo, with no sales conversation required.
No. Firecrawl is a separate product from the same team that turns websites into LLM-ready markdown or structured data, and it is widely used. Mendable remains the chatbot product, and this comparison concerns Mendable rather than Firecrawl.
Re-index the same documentation and technical resources in Denser, then deploy the widget or call the REST API. Because both products train on content you already own, there is nothing to export — and if branding removal was forcing you onto a custom plan, that requirement disappears.
Point Denser at your website or upload your documents, ask the questions your customers actually ask, and check the source behind every answer. It takes about five minutes.
