Zoko Review (2025): Zoko Features, Pricing & Best Alternatives

Zoko positions itself as a WhatsApp platform purpose-built for Shopify stores that lets businesses turn chat into sales. It’s ideal for small to medium Shopify businesses wanting to drive sales via WhatsApp, but growth-stage B2C companies must carefully validate costs and enterprise readiness. This is because Zoko’s pricing scales with message volume and its infrastructure lacks public SLAs and advanced automation support.

In this review, we’ll take a closer look at what Zoko offers: its features, pricing, strengths and weaknesses, and help you decide if it’s the right fit for your business. We’ll also compare it with an alternative product, such as respond.io, for growing businesses.

What is Zoko?

Zoko is a commerce-first WhatsApp CRM built around Shopify integration. It enables businesses to sync product catalog directly to WhatsApp, send order notification updates, recover abandoned carts and run broadcast campaigns. Zoko also provides a multi-agent shared WhatsApp inbox and markets basic ChatGPT-powered AI bot capabilities.

Zoko’s positioning is clear: “WhatsApp built for Shopify stores”, which turns chat into a revenue channel rather than merely support. You can launch WhatsApp commerce quickly with Zoko, but if your future involves multiple channels or heavy workflow branching, you’ll need to evaluate accordingly.

Zoko review, at a glance

Ratings & user feedback

• G2: 4.5 / 5 (5 reviews)

• Shopify App Store: 4.8 / 5 (259 reviews)

Overall positive themes

• Users praise Zoko for its automation, seamless Shopify integration, chatbots and broadcasting. Many see a lot of improvement in their efficiency and sales, highlighting features such as cart recovery workflows via WhatsApp.

• Their support team is also responsive and supportive.

Overall negative themes

• Critiques often mention onboarding friction, pricing escalations and the need to understand WhatsApp API complexities behind the scenes.

Who is Zoko best for?

Zoko is best suited for:

• Shopify-native small to medium businesses selling online and using WhatsApp as a primary commerce and communication channel.

• Businesses with moderate volume, focused on conversion via chat and cart recovery.

• Businesses that want a WhatsApp-centric CRM without heavy multi-channel ambition.

If your business expands to include channels beyond WhatsApp or heavy concurrency, Zoko may feel restrictive in the future.

Zoko plans 2025

Zoko’s cost is structured as:

1. Base subscription or tiered plan fee

2. Zoko WhatsApp pricing: WhatsApp messaging (API) charges by Meta

3. Feature, fair-use and overcharge fees on Zoko platform

The main differences between each Zoko pricing plan lie in their fair usage limits and the number of agents included.

Each plan has a “fair use” number of agents. Extra agents are an extra cost per agent.

• Plus: 5 agents; $15 per extra agent (monthly)

• Elite: 10 agents; $12 per extra agent (monthly)

• Max: 30 agents; contact Zoko for more agents

Other notable details:

• Zoko Flows: Prebuilt e-commerce flows are typically free, but custom flows may incur “per flow” charges at $5.99 per flow, per month.

• Instagram is an additional add-on, priced $9.99/month.

The entry cost is competitive, but as you scale, expenses may add up as your conversation volume increases or you require more advanced features. If you value clear, predictable pricing as you grow, you may want to consider respond.io.

Zoko pros and cons

Pros

• Deep Shopify integration
  Zoko automatically syncs product catalog, order details, cart recovery and supports in-chat sales.

• Multi-agent shared inbox
  Multiple agents can use the same WhatsApp number to use the shared inbox with team handovers, private notes and assignments.

• Pre-built flows & automation tools for commerce
  Useabandonedcart recovery, order updates, broadcast campaigns and sequence flows built for Shopify use cases.

• Bot or AI integration
  There’s also the option to use ChatGPT-powered bots or automated responses on top of conversation flows. Remember to add credits to your ChatGPT account for Zoko AI to work.

Cons

• Complex pricing
  Many users report that once scaling, flow steps, agent or fair-use charges can accumulate heavily.

• Channel and integration scope limitation
  Zoko is heavily WhatsApp- and Shopify-centric, with some Meta surfaces, but other channels (email, TikTok, Telegram, WeChat, etc.) are not available.

• SLAs & reliability transparency limited
  Zoko does not publish enterprise-grade uptime guarantees or service-level commitments.

• Scalability complexity.
  As volume or flow complexity rises, performance, API latency or rate limits may become constraints.

Notable capabilities

• Flows & automation (Zoko Flow builder)
  You can build multi-step workflows (e.g., abandoned cart, order notifications, upsell prompts). Most are prebuilt and free, while you can also customize your own.

• Broadcasts & segment campaigns
  Zoko supports segment-based campaigns and broadcasts to WhatsApp contacts.

• Shared inbox & team collaboration
  Chat assignment, agent handover and private internal notes under the same WhatsApp number.

• Bot integration (ChatGPT)
  Integrate AI conversational bots to handle queries and respond when agents are unavailable or for FAQs.

Zoko is excellent for businesses centred on WhatsApp commerce within the Shopify ecosystem. However, if you anticipate high volume, complex routing or multi-channel growth, Zoko may impose hidden constraints. You’ll be safer looking at platforms like respond.io.

How to use Zoko

1. Sign up and connect your WhatsApp Business API number via Zoko’s onboarding.

2. Connect your Shopify store to sync catalog, orders and customer data.

3. Enable the shared inbox, assign agents and define routing rules.

4. Create flows and broadcast campaigns.

5. Optional: Activate chatbots, custom flows or message templates.

Setup is relatively intuitive for Shopify merchants, but advanced flow logic may require support or input from a developer.

Zoko's scalability & limitations

• Conversation volume: As message volume scales, exceeding fair-use caps can lead to extra fees.

• Flow complexity: Deep branching or high-step flows may hit performance or step-cost limits.

• Operational risks: Without published enterprise SLAs, downtime or performance issues could impact high-stakes projects. The risks could be higher.

• Additional expenses: Hidden fees (flows, overages, agents) could decrease margins.

In short, Zoko is great for small to medium-sized business Shopify stores and may support scaling up to a point. But mid-market and high-scale B2C brands should validate growth limits early on with a platform with proven enterprise reliability.

Quick-start features

Zoko provides several quick-start features:

• Prebuilt flows: Recover abandoned carts, order notifications and more.

• Pre-approved WhatsApp templates for broadcasting promotions, reactivation and more.

• Quick replies: Create pre-composed messages for faster responses to customers.

These provide a fast launch pad, though heavy personalization or custom branching may need additional customized work.

Verdict

Zoko is a solid choice for Shopify-centric businesses looking for a simple, ready-to-use WhatsApp commerce platform. Its Shopify alignment, catalog sync and shared inbox make it ideal for small to medium businesses focused on cart recovery, order confirmations and conversational selling.

However, scaling B2C companies should take note of its pricing complexity, limited channel coverage and lack of enterprise-grade reliability.

In short: Start with Zoko if you’re a small business. But if you’re scaling or plan to manage conversations across multiple channels with deeper automation and enterprise reliability, plan your upgrade path toward respond.io.

Best Zoko alternatives

If you're evaluating beyond Zoko, these are the best Zoko alternatives:

1) Respond.io: Ideal for fast-growing businesses ready to scale. Respond.io is an omnichannel platform with robust workflows and mature enterprise-ready AI.

• Connect to a broad coverage of channels, comprising WhatsApp, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, VOIP and more.

• Automate intelligently: Use advanced AI Agents that understand context, draw from your business knowledge and deliver natural replies across every channel.

• Manage customer pipeline: Monitor and engage Contacts at every stage of the customer journey with the Lifecycle view built into the shared unified inbox.

• Gain actionable insights: Use the Reports module to analyze trends, track agent productivity and understand customer journeys. These insights can then help teams make data-driven decisions and improve overall performance.

2) Interakt: A low-cost WhatsApp and Instagram-focused CRM. It has basic AI and affordability, but is less robust at scale.

3) Sleekflow: It’s also a regional omnichannel option, but lacks enterprise readiness.

When comparing, always ask: Does the alternative match the needs of your company? If they don’t, that’s where respond.io wins in terms of scalability and reliability.

Zoko vs respond.io (2025 comparison table)

Zoko review takeaways

Zoko serves as an excellent entry point for WhatsApp-driven Shopify commerce, offering simplicity and quick wins for smaller teams. But as your customer base expands and expectations rise, you’ll need a platform that can grow with you.

That’s where respond.io comes in, with its omnichannel reach, mature AI Agents and enterprise-grade infrastructure, it provides the flexibility and reliability needed for growth-focused B2C companies. So, if your long-term growth strategy includes managing multiple channels, building advanced automation and ensuring predictable ROI at scale, respond.io is the natural next step.

Try Zoko as a WhatsApp + Shopify commerce starter if you’re a small business, but use respond.io to future-proof your customer engagement for growing beyond WhatsApp.

Further reading

If you’ve found this article helpful, here are some more for you to check out:

• Sleekflow vs Respond.io: 6 Key Features Compared - Which is Better?

• Respond.io Alternative: 4 Respond.io Alternatives to Consider

• Wati vs Respond.io: 6 Features Growing Businesses Need