Respond.io vs. SMS.to

If you're looking to implement the WhatsApp business api for your official number in your product Respond.io is the solution to go because the truth is that there is no easy way and most of the providers will assume that you have developers in order to create your own implementation and many of the other solutions our there are not even close to Respond.io and they are usually expensive. Also, most of the Customer Service software out there will offer you the typical channel but will skip Whatsapp while Respond.io does the opposite (check it out for the free tier if you're not convinced).

Incentivized

SMS.to is ideal when you have a large number of users and you need to be charged by SMS delivered not by number of users. Let's put an example other solutions out there wanted us to pay user or contact which is illogican for a product that has more than 100K users because it doesn't matter if you send no message or you send 10 messages they will charge you per contact in the other hand solutions as SMS.to they will charge per SMS delivered which makes really economic the scenario specially if you only send to specific segments of contacts by making use of contact lists. A least appropiate scenario is when you need to send emergency/urgent SMS because for some resaon the SMS in this platform will be sent after 20-30 minutes even an hour I ignore why it happens but that's why we always try to schedule our campaigns and be sure they are generic marketing messages. For emergency/urgent SMS is recommended to use another platform.

Incentivized

• Easy integration with WhatsApp business api, you just need a verified number
• The CRM for WhatsApp is easy to use very friendly and let you make follow-ups to your users
• They finally implemented the broadcast option where you can schedule broadcast messages to a specific list of users.

Incentivized

• Bulk messaging.
• Easy to send notifications to customers.
• With SMS.to, it is easy to market our business thanks to the ability to send promotional messages.
• It's easy to use and affordable.

Incentivized

• You have to be patient with Respond.io since many features are still in development I wish they can make features faster
• In order to use WhatsApp business api you need a number that is provided by Twilio they also have implemented other number providers but it will be nice that they add more WhatsApp business number providers (since we have a US number instead of a Mexican number)

Incentivized

• Inbound SMSs not yet available in my country
• API Intergration, it is a bit complicated and i had to get a developer to help me understand it all

Incentivized

When we were implementing WhatsApp business api number in Bussi. We had 2 options the first Zendesk smooch.io and the second one a Twilio WhatsApp number. In the beginning, it seemed that Zendesk smooch.io was the option to go but the conversation was quite slow also the integration was easy but you needed to manage this conversation from zendesk which we were not completely sure about since it's more like a ticketing platform. Fortunately, we were looking and testing solutions until we found Respond.io, and even if they didn't have at the time the broadcast feature they let us know that feature was already in development so we felt that they were building a solution we were looking for so we decided to give them a few months and in those few months they built this feature and is a more dynamic way to answer customers than tickets so we decided to go with them.

Incentivized

I already pointed out this but basically we decided to go with SMS.to because 2 reasons:

1. It can be paid with paypal (first reason) we have some bad experience with other products because payment gateways may suddenly block your cards and you're unable to pay even if you want to use the service so when we saw that SMS.to has Paypal payment we just decided to go for this option.

2. You pay per message and not per contact this is ideal other platforms will ask you a monthly fee for marketing features that you're not looking plus paying per SMS or per contact we were just looking a straight forward software in order to send SMS campaigns.

Incentivized

• Most options we saw before Respond.io needed a minimum number of messages, contracts, or costly integrations from the side of the vendor while Respond.io is actually helping you to integrate the product with no extra cost.
• Our users choose the communication channel they want so before we were losing leads and money because we were not able to attend this channel.
• It requires a $0 investment to implement or maintain from the side of the developer area so we use our technical resources to develop our main core product not a WhatsApp chat integration feature.

Incentivized

• Easy communication.
• Better engagements thanks to fast delivery of messages.
• It's a great marketing software.

Incentivized