In the last decade, conversational agents have been developed and adopted in several application domains, including education, healthcare, finance, and tourism. Nevertheless, chatbots still need to address several limitations and challenges, especially regarding personalization, limited knowledge-sharing capabilities, multi-domain campaign support, real-time monitoring, or integration of chatbot communities. To cope with these limitations, many approaches based on multi-agent systems models and technologies have been proposed in the literature, opening new research directions in this context. To better understand the current panorama of the different chatbot technology solutions employing agent-based methods, this Systematic Literature Review investigates the different application domains, end-users, requirements, objectives, technology readiness levels, designs, strengths, limitations, and future challenges of the solutions found in this scope. The results of this review are intended to provide researchers, software engineers, and innovators with a complete overview of the current state of the art and a discussion of the open challenges.