Zoko alternative: Replio

Zoko sells on WhatsApp for Shopify stores. Replio answers customers with a real AI agent across WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, Telegram and your website. Here is an honest side-by-side, including the jobs Replio does not do.

Zoko is a WhatsApp commerce platform built around Shopify. It syncs your catalog into chat, takes orders and tracks shipments on WhatsApp, runs broadcast and cart-recovery campaigns, and gives your team a multi-agent inbox. Replio is an AI customer-support agent: it answers automatically from your own knowledge base across WhatsApp, Instagram DMs, Messenger, Telegram and an embeddable website widget, in the customer's own language, and hands off to a human when the conversation needs one.

Those are two different products that happen to overlap in the WhatsApp inbox. Whether Replio is the right Zoko alternative depends entirely on which half of Zoko you actually use every day, so this page starts by splitting that up rather than by listing features.

Replio vs Zoko at a glance

The four jobs a Zoko alternative has to cover

Teams searching for a Zoko alternative are usually paying for one tool that does four separate jobs. It is worth naming them before comparing tools, because Replio replaces two of them outright, changes the shape of a third, and does not do the fourth at all.

1. Answering questions. Where is my order, do you ship here, is this in stock, what is your returns window. This is the bulk of the volume and the job Replio was built for.
2. Staffing the inbox. Somebody has to pick up what the bot cannot close. Both tools give you a shared inbox with assignment and handoff.
3. Running campaigns. Broadcasts to opted-in contacts, welcome messages, follow-ups. Both tools do this, with different triggers.
4. Selling in chat. Catalog, cart, checkout and shipment tracking inside WhatsApp, wired to your store. This is Zoko's core, and it is the one Replio does not replace on WhatsApp.

If jobs one to three are where your hours go and job four is a nice-to-have you rarely touch, Replio is a straight upgrade. If job four is how your revenue actually arrives, keep reading to the honest section below before you switch anything.

Where Replio is stronger

One AI agent across five channels, not one

Replio gives the same knowledge and the same customer memory to WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, Telegram and a website widget. A customer who asks about a delivery on Instagram and follows up on WhatsApp gets the same accurate answer both times, from the same knowledge base, without you maintaining five sets of canned replies. Zoko centres on WhatsApp, so a second channel means a second tool and a second inbox.

Instagram is where a lot of retail questions actually start

For brands that market on Instagram, the first message is very often a DM or a comment on a post, not a WhatsApp chat. Replio answers Instagram DMs with the same agent, brings post comments into the same inbox, replies to them privately, and can send an instant DM when somebody comments a keyword you choose. That last one turns a post into a conversation without anybody watching the notifications.

Unlimited messages, so a good month does not raise the bill

Every Replio plan includes unlimited messages: incoming customer messages and every reply from the AI or your team, with no monthly cap and no message capacity to buy. Plans differ by channels and team seats only. Starter is $150/month with every channel, every feature and 3 seats; Pro is $300/month with 5 seats; Business is $450/month with 10 seats, advanced analytics and API access; extra seats are $20/month each. There is also a WhatsApp-only plan at $70/month, and a free plan covering Telegram and the website widget. On WhatsApp you connect your own number and pay Meta's per-conversation rates directly to Meta, with no markup added by Replio.

More than one WhatsApp number on the same account

You can connect several WhatsApp numbers to one Replio account, for example a sales line and a support line, or a number per country. All of them are answered by the same AI from one shared inbox, and replies always go out from the number the customer wrote to. There is no extra Replio fee for the additional numbers.

It reads the screenshot the customer sends

Retail support runs on screenshots: a payment receipt, a photo of the item that arrived damaged, a screenshot of the order confirmation. Replio understands images in context rather than asking the customer to type it out again, and it logs the complaint against that customer so the next agent sees the history.

It answers in the customer's language without you configuring anything

Replio auto-detects the language of each message and replies in it, across 50+ languages, from the same knowledge base you wrote once in English. On Pro and Business, Live Translate also lets a single-language team read and reply to those conversations in their own language from the inbox.

Where Zoko is the better choice

This is the part most comparison pages leave out, so here it is plainly. If any of the following is core to how you sell, Zoko is the better tool and switching to Replio would be a downgrade:

• You sell through a WhatsApp catalog. Replio does not sync a Shopify catalog into WhatsApp and does not run catalog checkout in chat. It can answer product questions and share details and links from your knowledge base, but the customer completes the purchase on your store.
• Cart abandonment is a real revenue line for you. Replio has no store-event triggers, so it cannot fire a recovery message when a cart is abandoned or an order status changes.
• You depend on order and shipment lookups inside chat. Zoko pulls that from Shopify. Replio answers from your knowledge base, not from live store records.
• WhatsApp is genuinely your only channel and you have no interest in Instagram, Messenger, Telegram or a website widget. Replio's multichannel plan is priced for teams that will use more than one.

Plenty of stores run both: Zoko or the storefront for buying, Replio for the support and the other four channels. That is a legitimate answer, and a more honest one than pretending a support agent replaces a commerce platform.

Replio does sell in chat on Telegram, with product listings, Buy buttons, Telegram Stars payments and a Mini App storefront, so if you are open to selling there the gap narrows. It is a different channel from WhatsApp, not a replacement for WhatsApp catalog checkout, and it is worth saying so rather than blurring the two.

Moving from Zoko to Replio

1. Start on a channel you are not already using. Connect Instagram, Telegram or the website widget first and let the AI answer there for a few days. Nothing about your WhatsApp setup changes while you do this, so there is no risk to live orders.
2. Load your knowledge once. Paste your FAQs or import your website, a file or a Google Doc. This is the step that decides answer quality, and it is the one worth spending an hour on.
3. Move the WhatsApp number when you are ready. A WhatsApp Business number can only be connected to one platform at a time, so migrate it to Replio or to a Business Solution Provider and connect it, or start with a fresh number and keep both running in parallel while you compare.
4. Decide what happens to the storefront half. If catalog checkout matters, keep it where it is and let Replio handle support. If it does not, you can retire it.

The free 14-day trial covers everything with no card, and after it expires the account drops to the free plan rather than switching off, so an evaluation cannot accidentally cut your support off.

Frequently asked questions

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Last updated 2026-09-02. Competitor details are based on publicly available information at the time of writing and may change, so please verify current pricing and features on each provider's website.