Respond.io is a business messaging platform from the Hong Kong based company of the same name, that connects customers from any channel to every team. As consumers grow to demand personal communication on a wide variety of channels, businesses are looking to their software vendors and partners to innovate and deliver these customer experiences. Respond.io is designed to meet this challenge, simply.
$99
per month
WATI.io
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
WATI is a SaaS platform that helps businesses communicate with their customers through customer engagement software built on WhatsApp’s Business API. With it, businesses can conduct personalized conversations, be accessible and engage with customers in real-time.
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).
If your userbase is small. Want to set up and start using the system quickly, then go for Wati.io. Easy setup, integration with google sheets, chrome extension, Zapier, Woo-Commerce, an option of the no-code chatbot, etc. will ease up too much work. Pricing-wise, it's costlier than other tools. Also, it's for WhatsApp only. IF you want to do the same with Instagram or Facebook, or LinkedIn, then it will not be possible on Wati.io.
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)
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.
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.
