WaSMS vs Interakt: Which One Fits Your Business Best
A side-by-side look at pricing, features, and the real tradeoffs between WaSMS and Interakt.
Choosing between WaSMS vs Interakt usually comes down to one question: are you running an ecommerce store that lives inside WhatsApp commerce features, or do you need a broader inbox that also covers SMS and email? Interakt built its reputation specifically around WhatsApp commerce — catalogs, cart recovery, order updates — while WaSMS is a free, multi-channel platform with WhatsApp, SMS, and email under one AI-trained inbox.
Here's how they actually compare.
Pricing Side by Side
Interakt prices on a subscription basis, typically tiered by message volume and feature set, with WhatsApp API conversation costs from Meta layered on top, as with any official WhatsApp Business API tool. Check Interakt's current pricing page for exact figures, since plans and message-cost pass-throughs change over time.
WaSMS doesn't have a subscription tier at all for its core features: WhatsApp via your own number pairing, SMS via your own Android phone gateway, email via a free-tier Brevo account, the AI, and agentic AI actions are all free forever. The only cost you carry is your own gateway hardware — a spare phone, PC, or a low-cost VPS.
WaSMS vs Interakt: Feature Parity
Both platforms give you a shared inbox for WhatsApp conversations and broadcast/bulk sending. Where they diverge:
| Feature | Interakt | WaSMS |
|---|---|---|
| WhatsApp commerce (catalog, cart recovery) | Strong, ecommerce-native | Not the primary focus |
| Shopify / ecommerce integrations | Deep | Available via API |
| SMS in the same inbox | No | Yes |
| Email in the same inbox | No | Yes |
| AI trained on full conversation history | Limited | Yes, core feature |
| Agentic AI (bookings, follow-ups, escalation) | Limited | Yes |
| Pricing | Subscription + API costs | Free |
Where Interakt Leads
If you run an online store and want WhatsApp abandoned-cart recovery, a product catalog customers can browse inside a chat, and order-status automation tied directly to your storefront, Interakt's ecommerce-specific tooling is more mature in that exact use case — it was built around that workflow from the start. A business whose main channel really is WhatsApp commerce, with SMS and email handled elsewhere, may find that focus valuable, especially if it's already deep into the Shopify ecosystem.
Where WaSMS Leads
The moment your business needs more than WhatsApp commerce — a customer texting your SMS number, someone emailing support, and a WhatsApp conversation all needing the same context — WaSMS's single-inbox, single-AI model becomes the bigger advantage. An agency called Bright Signal switched because their clients contacted them across all three channels interchangeably, and they wanted the AI to know the full history no matter which channel a message came in on, not a separate bot per channel.
The free-forever model also matters at scale: a growing team doesn't pay more as it adds agents or seats, since WaSMS doesn't charge per seat at all. That changes the math meaningfully for a business that expects to double its support team within a year.
If ecommerce catalog and cart-recovery are your single most important feature, weigh that specifically — WaSMS covers WhatsApp messaging and AI well, but isn't built as a storefront-in-chat tool the way Interakt is.
Migration
Switching from Interakt to WaSMS involves exporting your contact and order-related data, see our contact import guide for the CSV format WaSMS expects, then re-pairing your WhatsApp number to WaSMS's gateway. If you rely heavily on Interakt's native catalog and cart-recovery flows, plan to rebuild that logic using AI Actions or your storefront's own automation before fully cutting over, since that specific feature set isn't a like-for-like swap.
As with any WhatsApp platform change, message history stays with the old tool — start the new inbox from your next conversation forward rather than expecting a full history import.