Alternative
Evolution API vs WALayer.
An open-source, self-hosted WhatsApp API server, widely used in the automation community. Here is how the two differ, where Evolution API is genuinely the better choice, and what moving would actually involve.
The shape of each
What you are actually choosing between.
Billing model and hosting model decide more than any feature list, and unlike a feature list they do not change every month.
Evolution API
- Billing
- Free software, you pay for servers
- Channel
- Unofficial gateway — operates against WhatsApp's terms
- Source
- Open source, built on Baileys — repository
- Current pricing
- On their site — we do not quote it, because a price we copied last quarter is not a price.
WALayer
- Billing
- Flat fee per connected number. Messages, media, groups and channels are not metered on any plan.
- Channel
- Unofficial gateway — the same terms exposure. We say so on /trust rather than in a footnote.
- Our pricing
- 1 number$6/mo · Solo
- 5 numbers$45/mo · Growth
- 10 numbers$45/mo · Growth
- 25 numbers$279/mo · Reseller
When Evolution API is the right answer
Reasons to not choose us.
A comparison where the other side never wins is an advertisement. These are real.
- You want the code. Self-hosting means no vendor can change your terms, raise your price, or shut down — and for some teams that alone settles it.
- Data residency is a hard requirement and running it yourself is the cleanest way to satisfy it.
- You have the operational capacity to run a stateful service, and would rather spend engineering time than money.
- Your volume is high enough that a per-number fee costs more than the servers and the hours.
Where we differ in kind
Not a longer feature list.
These are architectural choices rather than checkboxes, which is why they are worth writing down and a feature table is not.
- The operational work is ours rather than yours: session ownership, reconnection, warmup pacing, media handling and upgrades. Self-hosting does not remove that work, it relocates it to you.
- Session ownership is enforced, not assumed: a Postgres advisory lock, a renewable lease, and a monotonic epoch stamped on every write to session state, so a second process cannot corrupt the Signal ratchet and force a re-scan. On lease-renewal failure the runner disconnects rather than continuing optimistically.
Migrating
What moving actually involves.
Every migration in this category has the same irreducible step, and no vendor can remove it.
Genuinely consider not migrating. If a self-hosted deployment is stable and someone owns it, the honest advice is to keep it. The case for moving is when the person who owned it has left, or the on-call cost has become visible. Re-pair each number; there is no credential export path between platforms.
The step nobody can avoid: a WhatsApp session is device-bound crypto state, so it cannot be exported from one platform and imported into another. Every number must be linked again by QR or pairing code. Anyone claiming a zero-downtime transfer is describing something that is not possible.
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