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Three QR-linked WhatsApp APIs, three very different per-session prices. One of them costs roughly five times the other two, and it's not an accident — it's selling something the other two don't make a point of offering.
All three connect the same way, as a linked WhatsApp device over a QR scan, so there's no architecture debate here. The entire comparison comes down to how each one prices a connected number, and that number moves by a factor of eight depending which of the three you pick.
All three give you the exact same official WhatsApp Cloud API, at the exact same Meta message rates. What differs is who's charging on top of that, how much dashboard and support you get for it, and how much engineering time you're trading for the cheapest number on the page.
All three drive the same thing: a real Chromium instance running the actual WhatsApp Web client through Puppeteer. So this isn't a sockets-versus-browser decision like the Baileys comparisons. It's a question of community size, how much of the HTTP layer each one builds for you, and one license that stands apart from the other two.
"OpenWA" is actually two separate projects with two different licenses, and the more commonly meant one already ships its own REST layer, an MCP server and a plugin ecosystem. So the honest question isn't whether WAHA adds a service on top of a bare library. It's what WAHA's particular kind of flexibility buys you that OpenWA's doesn't, and vice versa.
Evolution API is free, open source, and can talk to both the unofficial WhatsApp Web protocol and Meta's official Cloud API from the same instance. WaHttp is a hosted, flat-rate layer over the unofficial protocol only. Here's an honest look at which one actually belongs in your production stack — written by the people who build WaHttp, with that bias disclosed upfront.
"Official" and "unofficial" WhatsApp APIs aren't really a quality tier, they're two different risk models with two different cost curves. Here's how they actually compare on ban risk, 2026 pricing, and who owns the integration — plus where a hosted session API like WaHttp fits between them.
WaHttp and WAHA both wrap the same unofficial WhatsApp Web protocol — the real question isn't "official vs unofficial," it's who runs the server. Here's an honest cost, control, and risk breakdown to help you pick.
Search engines still return results describing three ways to build on WhatsApp. One of them stopped delivering messages on October 23, 2025. Here is what actually remains, what the retired option still matters for, and how to choose between the two that are left.