WhatsApp CRM alternatives

wacrm is an MIT-licensed, self-hosted WhatsApp CRM — shared team inbox, contacts, sales pipelines, broadcasts, and no-code automations on the official WhatsApp Business API, with the source on GitHub. It is the closest open-source counterpart to hosted tools like Kommo and Trengo if owning the code and data matters to you. For an omnichannel help desk rather than a sales CRM, Chatwoot is the stronger open-source option.

Three reasons, in the order they usually matter: cost that does not scale with headcount (no per-seat fee, so adding agents is free), data ownership (everything lives in your own Supabase project and you can export it any time), and the ability to modify the product — the MIT licence lets you fork, rebrand, and resell it. The trade-off is that you operate it yourself.

When you need several channels in one inbox today (Kommo, Trengo and respond.io all do email, Instagram, and Telegram; wacrm is WhatsApp only), when you need a formal help desk with SLA timers and CSAT surveys, when you want a one-click Shopify app, or when you would rather pay per seat than run infrastructure. Each comparison here says plainly where the competitor wins.

Contacts, yes — export them as CSV from your current tool and import them into wacrm. Historical chat transcripts and pipeline history do not transfer automatically between systems, so plan to carry your contact list and start fresh on threads. Rebuilding pipeline stages takes a few minutes.

The software is free with no licence fee and no per-agent charge. You pay for hosting (modest — it runs on inexpensive managed Node.js hosting plus a free-tier Supabase database) and for Meta's WhatsApp Business API messaging, which is billed by Meta at the same rate no matter which CRM sits on top.

A managed Node.js plan that comfortably runs the app is $3.99/month on a 48-month term and $16.99/month at renewal, with unlimited bandwidth and room for five apps. The database can start on Supabase's free tier. The equivalent on a metered platform starts at about $20/month for one deploying seat before any usage, because free tiers there are generally restricted to non-commercial use. The hosting comparisons above show the full arithmetic.

For a small or mid-sized app, a flat plan is cheaper — and more importantly it is predictable. Usage-based platforms are genuinely competitive while you stay inside their included allowances, and most teams there are paying for seats rather than traffic. The bill changes character once you pass the allowances: transfer, requests, compute and builds are each metered, so the invoice moves with a traffic spike. Pick metered if spiky global traffic is your normal; pick flat if you want the number in your budget to be the number on the invoice.