Alternative
UltraMsg vs WALayer.
A hosted WhatsApp gateway with a simple send API, billed per instance. Here is how the two differ, where UltraMsg 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.
UltraMsg
- Billing
- Flat fee per connected number
- Channel
- Unofficial gateway — operates against WhatsApp's terms
- Source
- Hosted product, closed source
- 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- On their site — we do not quote it, because a price we copied last quarter is not a price.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 UltraMsg is the right answer
Reasons to not choose us.
A comparison where the other side never wins is an advertisement. These are real.
- Your integration is one endpoint — send a text — and you want the smallest possible surface to learn.
- You do not need groups, channels or communities, and are unlikely to.
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.
- 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.
- Twenty-two message types, plus groups, communities, channels and labels, are on every plan rather than gated behind a tier.
Migrating
What moving actually involves.
Every migration in this category has the same irreducible step, and no vendor can remove it.
The simplest of these migrations, because the integration surface is small. Re-pair the number, repoint the webhook, and the send call is close to a one-line change.
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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