Alternative
WAHA vs WALayer.
A self-hosted WhatsApp HTTP API, distributed as a Docker image, with a choice of engines. Here is how the two differ, where WAHA 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.
WAHA
- Billing
- Free software, you pay for servers
- Channel
- Unofficial gateway — operates against WhatsApp's terms
- Source
- Open source, built on multiple — 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- On their site — we do not quote it, because a price we copied last quarter is not a price.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 WAHA 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 to run it yourself and prefer a single container to a stack.
- You want to pick the underlying engine rather than have it chosen for you.
- You are prototyping and want something running locally in minutes with no account.
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.
- Multi-tenancy, placement and lease supervision are the product here rather than something you assemble. Running one instance is easy; running a fleet of independently owned sessions safely is the hard part.
- 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.
If you are running a single instance for a single business, self-hosting may well be the right answer and this page is not trying to talk you out of it. The migration itself is re-pairing and repointing webhooks.
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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