Workflows
Paced auto-replies that answer your contacts with a human-like delay.
Workflows are simple automatic replies that run on your session. They answer known contacts with fixed text, with no AI involved, and send at a human pace.
Built-in rules
| Rule | When it replies | Reply | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ping | The message is exactly ping | pong | none |
| Greeting | The message is exactly hello, hi, salam or bonjour | A short greeting that says a person will get back to you | Once per contact per 24 hours |
Matching ignores case and a trailing !, ., , or ?. Anything else is left for you to answer.
Who gets a reply
Workflows reply only to contacts on your allowlist. They never reply to:
- your own messages;
- groups and status updates;
- messages that are not text, such as images or voice notes;
- contacts that are not on your allowlist.
Turn a rule on or off
All rules start off.
- Open Workflows in the web app.
- Switch on the rule you want.
- Send
pingfrom an allowlisted contact to check that it answers.
Switch the rule off the same way to stop it.
How pacing works
Auto-replies are designed to look like a person typing, not a bot:
- WaFine waits a short "reading" delay, then a "typing" delay that grows with the reply length.
- Replies on one session go out one at a time, a few seconds apart.
- Each contact gets at most two auto-replies per minute, and each session at most six.
- When a limit is reached, the extra reply is dropped, not queued for later.
- If WhatsApp or WaFine signals that the session is sending too fast, auto-replies pause for a while. A failed reply is never retried.
Auto-replies also count against your session's send budget.
Good practice
- Keep the greeting rule for contacts who write to you first; it never starts a conversation.
- Answer real questions yourself soon after the greeting, as it promises.
- Do not enable OpenWA's own auto-reply rules on the same number if you self-host: two engines answering the same message look like spam.