Looking for the best WhatsApp CRM (customer relationship management) software? Here's what a real WhatsApp CRM actually does, the features that matter, and how to turn scattered WhatsApp chats into a tracked sales pipeline.
Quick answer: The best WhatsApp CRM depends on how you sell. Shortlist tools on Meta's official Cloud API, then compare team inbox, automation, CRM depth, Shopify or catalogue support, frequency caps and whether Meta's message fees are passed through at cost or marked up. Stores suit Shopify-native tools; sales-led teams suit pipeline CRMs.
If your sales team talks to customers on WhatsApp but tracks deals in a spreadsheet, or not at all, a WhatsApp CRM is the fix. The hard part is choosing one. Dozens of tools claim the label, their price pages mix subscription fees with Meta's message charges, and the cheapest plan is rarely the cheapest bill. This guide gives you the criteria we use when we evaluate tools for clients, a comparison of well-known options checked on each vendor's own site in October 2026, and an honest note on where our own product fits.
Judge a WhatsApp CRM on eight things: official API access, the team inbox, automation, CRM depth, catalogue support, pricing transparency, frequency controls and data handling. Features you will see in every demo, such as broadcasts and templates, matter less than these.
Meta's older self-hosted On-Premises API reached its sunset on 23 October 2025; Meta says messages sent to or from numbers still registered on it "will not be delivered". Any vendor you shortlist in 2026 should be on the Cloud API. Tools that drive the consumer or Business App through browser automation are a different category altogether and risk your number being banned.
You pay two bills: the vendor's subscription and Meta's per-message charges. The second can outgrow the first, so compare the total, not the headline plan.
Since 1 July 2025, Meta charges per delivered template message, priced by category (marketing, utility, authentication) and the recipient's country, with rate cards in 16 currencies including SGD, INR and AED. Vendors then handle those fees in one of three ways:
Meta changed what it charges for on 1 October 2026, and it affects every tool on this list. According to Meta's pricing documentation, service messages (free-form replies inside the 24-hour customer service window) are now charged after a free tier of 1,000 per business phone number each month, and utility templates sent inside an open window, free since July 2025, are charged again. Vendors confirm the same change: Wati's help centre says in-window utility templates "were free from July 2025 through September 2026" and are now "billable again"; respond.io and AiSensy describe the 1,000 free service messages. Budget for utility and service messages rather than assuming they are free, and ask any vendor whose price page still says otherwise when it was last updated.
The table below uses only what each vendor states on its own site. All prices and claims were checked in October 2026; prices exclude Meta's message charges and tax unless noted, and they change often.
| Tool | Entry price (checked Oct 2026) | Meta fees | Partner status it states | CRM depth | Commerce and trial |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| respond.io | Starter $79/month | Not included; passed through without markup | Meta Premier Partner and BSP | Workflows, AI agents; HubSpot and Salesforce integrations | Free trial; multi-channel inbox |
| Gallabox | Basic ₹2,399 ($112)/month, billed annually | Billed with Gallabox markup | Official Meta Business Partner and BSP | Zoho and HubSpot from Essential; Salesforce on Advanced | Shopify on Basic; free trial, no card |
| Interakt | Growth ₹2,799/month (+taxes) | Per-message rates listed; "No Markup Charges" on Enterprise only | Not stated on the pages we checked | Sales pipelines, auto-assignment | Shopify catalogue sync; 14-day free trial |
| AiSensy | Free forever plan; paid add-ons | Prepaid credits at AiSensy's rates | Official BSP | Tags, campaigns, chatbot builder add-on | Shopify integration |
| Zoko | Starter $49.99/month plus usage | Paid directly to Meta; Zoko fee per conversation on Starter | Meta Business Partner | Tags and segments | Built for Shopify; 7-day free trial |
| Kommo | Base $25/user/month, on 6-, 9-, 12- or 24-month terms | Paid directly to Meta | States it uses the official WhatsApp API | Full sales pipelines | 14-day free trial, no card |
| HubSpot | Needs Marketing Hub or Service Hub Professional or Enterprise | Not stated in the help article | Not stated in the help article | Full CRM | 1,000 template messages a month, shared across connected accounts |
| Zoho Bigin | Express $7/user/month billed yearly ($9 monthly) | Not stated on pricing page | Not stated on pricing page | Pipelines; email and WhatsApp Business integration | 15-day free trial |
| Wati | Plan prices load dynamically; we could not verify them | Rates shown only after login | Not verified | CRM integrations by tier, HubSpot from Pro | Shopify add-on $4.99/month; 7-day free trial |
| Our WhatsApp CRM | Quoted per client, billed in SGD or INR | Discussed during scoping | Built on Meta's official WhatsApp Cloud API | 11 specialised agents, admin controls | Per-customer frequency caps |
We have not ranked these tools, because the right choice depends on how you sell. A tool that is perfect for a Shopify store can be wrong for a property developer.
Match the tool to your sales motion first, then compare prices within that group.
Look for native Shopify sync, catalogue messages, abandoned-checkout reminders and order updates. Zoko, Interakt, Gallabox and Wati all advertise these. Check how the tool caps reminders per customer, not per cart.
Property, education, B2B services and clinics need pipelines, owners, stages and follow-up tasks. Kommo and Bigin are pipeline-first CRMs with WhatsApp built in; HubSpot suits teams already on its paid hubs.
If WhatsApp sits alongside Instagram, Messenger, email and web chat, an omnichannel inbox such as respond.io is designed for routing and handover at volume.
If two or three people can answer every chat the same day, start with the free Business App. Our guide to how the WhatsApp Business Platform works explains when you outgrow it.
Ask questions that a demo will not answer on its own. These are the ones that separate tools in practice:
On an Indian D2C store we manage, low-ticket orders made "sales are up" misleading because the client needed high-value orders to be profitable. We report revenue and average order value alongside purchase count. Ask the same of any CRM dashboard: message counts and read rates are not results.
Most of what we know about WhatsApp CRMs comes from building and running them, and the lessons turn into buying criteria.
One pipeline beats several inboxes. For a Kolkata real-estate developer, we built a CRM where leads from Meta ads, WhatsApp and walk-ins land in one pipeline. WhatsApp messages fire on site-visit confirmations and sale closures, booking forms and sale agreements generate as PDFs, and real sale outcomes are sent back to Meta's conversion API so ad optimisation learns from actual sales, not just form fills. The buying lesson: check whether a CRM can send closed-deal data back to your ad platforms. Without it, your ads optimise for cheap enquiries. The full story is in our real estate CRM case study.
Frequency control is a feature you should test, not trust. On our own WhatsApp CRM platform, a shopper complained about abandoned-cart reminders "once every day" because reminders were capped per cart instead of per customer. We now cap marketing messages at 2 per contact per rolling 7 days and nudges at 1 per contact per 24 hours, while order-status messages are never capped. We covered this and related delivery bugs in our platform explainer; for buyers, the point is to ask each vendor to show the cap in the product.
The plumbing fails more often than the AI. A hosted chatbot we run went dark because of a CDN security rule and an expired credential, not a model problem. Ask vendors how they monitor tokens and webhooks, and how quickly they alert you.
Disclosure: this is our own product, so weigh this section accordingly. It is built on Meta's official WhatsApp Cloud API and runs 11 specialised AI agents, each handling a distinct job rather than one generic bot, with admin controls for quotas, plans and audit logs. Pricing is quoted per client and billed in SGD or INR; there is no public price list, which is a drawback if you want to compare self-serve. It suits businesses that want the setup and automation done for them. If you want a self-serve tool you configure yourself tonight, several of the options above are a better fit.
Choose by sales motion, then by total cost, then by control. Stores should favour native Shopify and catalogue support; sales-led businesses should favour pipelines and the ability to send closed deals back to ad platforms. Price the full bill using your own message mix, including utility messages, because markups and the October 2026 billing change can make a cheap plan expensive. And before signing, make the vendor show you per-customer frequency caps and a revenue report. Those two screens tell you more about whether a tool will protect your customers and prove its value than any feature list. If none of the off-the-shelf tools fits your process, our automation and workflow engineering team builds custom integrations.
Often yes, but check with the vendor first. Moving a number to the WhatsApp Business Platform changes how it is managed, and some setups let the Business App and the platform share a number while others require migration. Back up chats, confirm what happens to your existing history, and test with a secondary number if you can.
A chatbot answers messages automatically. A WhatsApp CRM records every conversation against a contact or deal, assigns it to a person, tracks pipeline stages and reports on outcomes. Many tools now combine both, but a chatbot without CRM features will not tell you which conversations turned into revenue or who owns the follow-up.
Rarely. Most vendors list a subscription that excludes Meta's per-message charges, which depend on message category and the recipient's country. Some pass these through at cost, some add a markup and some sell prepaid credits at their own rates. Ask for a quote based on your expected monthly mix of marketing, utility and service messages.
Usually, but plan for it at the start. Confirm that you can export contacts, conversation history and opt-in records, and ask how your phone number and approved templates move to a new provider. Contracts with minimum terms, such as six-month billing, also affect how quickly you can switch, so read the renewal terms before signing.