What are WhatsApp Flows?
Flows are Meta’s way of putting a structured, form-like experience inside a WhatsApp chat — screens with inputs the customer fills in without leaving the conversation. They are built and hosted through Meta’s tooling, and they are a genuinely different thing from sending messages, which is why not every tool supports them.
What they are for
Collecting several structured answers in one interaction: a booking with a date and a party size, an application with fixed fields, a survey.
The advantage over asking question by question is that the customer completes it in one go rather than over six exchanges.
What they cost you in practice
They are defined in Meta’s tooling and reviewed like other message assets, so a Flow is a build rather than a message you write.
Changing one is a change to a published asset, not an edit to a sentence. That matters if the questions change often.
When a plain conversation is better
Two or three questions. A Flow is heavier than the problem.
Anything where the next question depends on a human reading the last answer.
Anything you expect to reword frequently.
When a web form is better
When the same form needs to work for people who are not on WhatsApp at all.
When you need file uploads, payment, or anything a chat surface does not do.
A link to a form in a WhatsApp message is often the pragmatic answer, and it works today with no additional platform surface.
PingPlug does not support WhatsApp Flows. It collects structured information with its own forms, which are ordinary web pages you share or embed and whose submissions land against the contact. That is a different trade — a link rather than an in-chat experience — and worth knowing before choosing, rather than after.