oChats vs Wati: Which WhatsApp Business API Platform Wins?

The Market, in Numbers

Wati has built a large WhatsApp-first customer base — a real, established option if WhatsApp is the only channel you'll ever need.

About oChats: oChats is an omnichannel messaging platform built on the official WhatsApp Business API, unifying WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, Telegram, LINE, WeChat, and Email into one shared team inbox. Unlimited agents, contact tagging, pipeline tracking, and automation come included on every plan, priced as one flat annual fee instead of a per-seat bill that grows every time you hire.

Feature-by-Feature Comparison

Feature data compiled from oChats' published pricing page and public third-party listings for Wati (Capterra and independent Wati pricing reviews). Both platforms pass through Meta's WhatsApp conversation fees separately from their own subscription price; Wati-specific markup figures come from third-party review sources, not Wati's own marketing.

Who Should Pick Which

Whether you're already on Wati and weighing a switch, or comparing oChats as a fresh Wati alternative, here's who each platform fits best.

Real Cost Comparison: A 10-Person Team With 5,000 Contacts/Month

A 10-person team rules out Wati's Growth plan outright — it caps at 3 users with no additional seats purchasable. That leaves Wati's Pro plan, which includes 5 users and allows extra seats at a confirmed $24/user/month.

*We're being upfront about a real limitation here: Wati's own pricing page displayed different Growth/Pro dollar figures across separate visits during this research (its pricing appears region/currency-dependent and possibly A/B tested), so we can't publish a reliable base subscription price for Pro. What is confirmed directly on Wati's pricing page is the $24/user/month cost for seats beyond the 5 included on Pro — 5 extra seats to reach a 10-person team adds $120/month on top of whatever the base plan costs. Wati also doesn't bill by contact count directly; instead it charges per message/conversation against a prepaid credit balance at Meta's per-country rate plus a markup, so the true monthly total for 5,000 contacts depends on how many of them are actually messaged and through which template category. Confirm current pricing and credit costs directly on wati.io/pricing before budgeting.

Wati's Third-Party Integrations

Wati's own help center confirms real CRM integrations with HubSpot, Salesforce, and Zoho (Zoho is the most extensively documented of the three), plus LeadSquared, Kylas CRM, and Bitrix24. On e-commerce, Shopify is Wati's deepest integration by far (a paid add-on at $4.99/month), alongside WooCommerce and AiTrillion. Wati also connects via Zapier, Make.com, and n8n for broader automation reach.

What Switching From Wati to oChats Actually Involves

Wati publishes one of the more detailed migration guides in this comparison set. Its own documentation states the process: disable two-factor authentication on your current provider account, start onboarding with the new provider and choose to migrate an existing WhatsApp account, verify your phone number by OTP, and finish onboarding — Wati states this typically completes "within a few minutes" once those steps are done. What carries over: your display name, quality rating, Official Business Account status, and messaging limits. What does not carry over: message templates (these need to be resubmitted and re-approved on the new platform) and chat history.

1. Turn off 2FA on your Wati account and confirm your display name has no pending change requests — both are prerequisites for a clean number migration.
2. Migrate your WhatsApp Business API number following Meta's standard BSP-to-BSP process, which Wati's own docs confirm typically completes within minutes.
3. Reach out to oChats for free onboarding. oChats includes free 1-time onboarding support on every plan to help with the migration and set up your team inbox.
4. Re-submit your message templates and export any contact data you want to keep, since neither transfers automatically.

Day-to-Day Experience for Support Agents

Wati is built specifically around WhatsApp, with a mature chatbot template library and its Astra AI agent for the platforms it supports. That focus is a strength for WhatsApp-only teams, but it also means agents working across other channels (Instagram, Telegram, LINE, WeChat) need a separate tool, since those aren't part of Wati's core product.

oChats' shared team inbox covers 7 channels — including WhatsApp — from a single unlimited-seat plan, so agents handle every channel from the same inbox without switching tools.

Security & Compliance

Wati's own help center confirms per-customer data isolation (a separate database and dedicated container per customer), twice-daily backups retained for 365 days across multiple Google Cloud Platform regions, and a documented October 2024 penetration test. A dedicated hosting add-on ($1,000/month) lets a customer choose their hosting region. Wati's formal Trust Center could not be independently verified in this research pass (it returned an access error on direct fetch), so we can't confirm SOC 2 or ISO 42001 certification status directly — some public reports suggest Wati may be pursuing these, but treat that as unconfirmed rather than a completed certification.

oChats is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure. If a specific compliance certification is a hard requirement for your organization, confirm current certification status directly with each vendor before choosing a platform.

AI Capabilities: What Each Platform Actually Does

Wati splits its AI into two products. Wati Copilot assists human agents on every plan: it suggests replies in real time, summarizes long threads, translates messages instantly, and scores conversation quality automatically. Astra, gated to Pro/Business plans, is a no-code autonomous agent that trains on your website, help docs, CRM records, and up to 365 days of WhatsApp history, deploys across Web, WhatsApp, and voice calls, and can book meetings, update CRM records, and hand off to a human agent with context preserved. Both run on a credit-based system with monthly allotments that vary by plan.

oChats does not currently ship a packaged, no-code AI Agent product feature — it offers direct API-level integrations with ChatGPT and Deepseek that let technically-inclined teams build and connect their own AI-powered chatbot through oChats' Custom Channel integrations. A native, no-code AI Agent is not live on oChats today.

Frequently Asked Questions