Eva vs respond.io: which one fits your business?

respond.io brings chats, email and calls together with cross-channel history. It also publishes enterprise controls that matter to an IT team: single sign-on, multiple workspaces, masking, custom channels and automatic notices to other systems.

What it does not publish matters too: no contact-tier price table, Starter and Enterprise overage treatment, onboarding scope, support target or Enterprise price. Every published fact below keeps its source.

respond.io organizes work: its AI agents greet, answer, book and route. Documented actions include closing, assigning, updating contact fields and lifecycle stages, adding comments, triggering workflows and handling calls.

From Growth up, workflows automate routing, assignment, follow-ups and escalations. Its help center documents HubSpot and Salesforce connections that synchronize contacts, deal stages and conversation history.

Voice exists from Advanced: inbound calls only, capped at three minutes, with 32 languages listed and a Latin American voice named Mauricio. That is real conversation-operations infrastructure.

On public pages reviewed 28 July 2026, quoting from your catalog, recognizing a product from a photo and taking payment in the thread are not described. Eva searches a file or API catalog, returns up to 25 candidates and verifies the record.

Eva also matches a customer photo against catalog images and returns candidates with confidence and evidence. API catalog sources sync every 24 hours; file sources refresh when you upload them again.

Eva has no public self-serve signup or free trial; onboarding is assisted. Enterprise controls respond.io publishes on Advanced, including single sign-on, are built when Enterprise is signed with Eva.

Setup is included: we configure everything Eva does today, at no extra cost. Eva goes live in up to 5 business days once access and catalog are ready. respond.io does not publish implementation scope, timeline or price.

A Monthly Active Contact becomes active when they message, call or receive a conversation your business starts. Starter publishes unlimited active contacts; Growth and Advanced start at 1,000; Enterprise is custom.

Entry pricing is $79 USD, $159 USD and $279 USD per month billed yearly, or $99 USD, $199 USD and $349 USD month to month.

Overage is 100-contact blocks: $12 USD on Growth and $15 USD on Advanced, charged at cycle end without interruption. Its selector shows 1,000, 2,500, 5,000, 10,000 and more than 10,000 contacts.

respond.io says blocks suit temporary or seasonal spikes and sustained usage should move up a plan. It does not publish each tier price, or Starter and Enterprise overage treatment.

AI Credits are a fair-use multiple of the contact limit; when depleted, AI pauses until the monthly refresh, including annual subscriptions. There is no self-service overage price; customers are routed to Sales.

Eva spends one credit per agent reply, zero for customer or team messages, and one per ten campaign sends. Plans include 5,000, 9,000 and 15,000 credits; a 1,000-credit top-up is $49 USD and never expires.

Thirty messages from one customer are one active contact for respond.io and thirty credits for Eva. Long repeated conversations favor their unit; many short conversations ending in a quote favor ours.

Seats sit above the plan: Starter includes five users and each extra costs $12 USD per month. Growth and Advanced include ten, at $20 USD and $24 USD.

Meta's WhatsApp fees are outside every subscription. On 28 July 2026 respond.io documented free service conversations, per-message marketing and authentication templates, and utility-template charges outside the customer-service window. From 1 October 2026, under Meta's official rate card, utility templates inside the 24-hour window cost USD 0.0085 per delivered message in Mexico and service messages are free up to 1,000 per phone number per month. Rates vary by country and category.

Click-to-WhatsApp ads open a free entry point window in which Meta charges nothing for delivery while it stays open. Balance top-ups run from $10 USD to $2,000 USD; every top-up or auto-recharge has a Stripe transaction fee of five and a half per cent.

When the balance runs out, the WhatsApp channel is suspended and cannot send messages, broadcasts, workflows or automations until restored. Ask who monitors it and which alerts exist.

The complete picture is a plan, seats, contact blocks, monthly-resetting AI allowance and a separate WhatsApp balance. With Eva, Meta bills your own WhatsApp Business account directly; Eva does not collect those charges.

respond.io states that more than 10,000 brands in more than 180 countries use it, it has a strong Latin American presence, and it has official partnerships with Meta, TikTok, OpenAI and AWS.

It also says it became a WhatsApp Business Solution Provider in 2023 and was selected for the first WhatsApp Business Calling release in 2024. We did not inspect Meta records; its page defines neither an active customer nor country-level counts.

Its cases describe Sicar resolving inquiries faster with higher satisfaction and E4CC consolidating 22 branches across four Latin American countries. They publish no raw data, complete baseline, control group or independent audit.

Its security page states ISO 27001, AWS hosting and encryption in transit and at rest; we did not inspect its certificate or audit report. Enterprise price, its contact allowance, workspace count, API rate limits, onboarding scope, support service levels and the volume-discount formula are not public. The reviewed pages do not establish regional data residency, support hours in a given language, or a language-specific support target either.

Eva has open items too: the payment links Eva sends your customers are SPEI bank transfers, with no card option yet, and Eva does not automatically send payment confirmation. There is no public self-serve signup or trial; single sign-on and audit logs are built when Enterprise is signed.

Ask both vendors for a live demo on your catalog and a real customer question. Ask in writing about the billable unit, overage, invoicing entity, currency and support target before signing.