Tyra vs 360dialog

360dialog is the API-purist WhatsApp BSP out of Berlin, beloved by engineering teams who want to build their own thing on top. Tyra is a full customer conversations platform for European Shopify brands, with WhatsApp as a first-class channel alongside Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and SMS. Both are EU-hosted, both are direct Meta BSPs, and neither marks up message pricing. The choice comes down to whether you want to build the product yourself or buy one that already works.

Choose Tyra if

You run a European Shopify brand and want a working inbox, AI agent, and automation the day you sign up, not eight weeks of engineering later. You want WhatsApp alongside Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and SMS in a single thread per customer, so a support rep is not switching tabs to figure out who they are talking to. You want the AI to actually know your Shopify catalog, your stock levels, your policies, and your past conversations, rather than hallucinating product names. You want a Shopify-native app that respects how Shopify merchants actually work, with order context, abandoned-cart triggers, and discount-code generation built in. And you want all of this from an EU-built vendor with data hosted in Ireland, no Meta markup on messages, and an operator-friendly UI your team can run without an engineer on call.

Choose 360dialog if

You have an engineering team and you want to build a custom WhatsApp product on top of one of the cleanest BSP APIs in the market. 360dialog has been a Meta-approved BSP since the very early days of the WhatsApp Business API, the German engineering credibility is real, and their infrastructure has the kind of maturity you only get from years of running WhatsApp traffic at scale. Like Tyra, they do not mark up messages, so on raw BSP cost the two are essentially the same. If you are an ISV embedding WhatsApp into your own SaaS, or an agency building a bespoke product for a single large client, or an enterprise that wants the BSP layer and nothing else because everything else is already built in-house, 360dialog is genuinely the better answer.

API-first BSP vs full product

360dialog is, by design, a BSP and an API. They give you a clean pipe to Meta, a webhook for inbound messages, template management, and not much else. That is the entire product philosophy and they execute it well. If you want an inbox you build the inbox. If you want an agent you build the agent. If you want analytics you build the analytics or wire in a third-party tool. For a team with engineers and specific requirements no platform can meet, this is exactly right.

Tyra ships the whole stack. The inbox, the agent, the automations, the template management, the Shopify integration, the Stripe integration, the multi-agent routing, the analytics, the embedded signup flow, the EU-language UI. The BSP layer underneath is the same kind of direct Meta integration 360dialog runs, but it is a means to an end rather than the product itself. For most non-software-company buyers the math is straightforward: building a custom inbox and agent on 360dialog costs at least one engineer for two months upfront and ongoing maintenance after, while Tyra is sending real messages within the hour.

The honest framing is that these are different products for different buyers. 360dialog is infrastructure. Tyra is an application. Picking the wrong one is what causes the actual pain, not the price.

WhatsApp-only vs unified inbox

360dialog is WhatsApp. That is the scope and they are good at it. If your customers only ever message you on WhatsApp and you never want to support Instagram DMs, Facebook Messenger, or SMS in the same place, the focus is a feature rather than a limitation.

Tyra unifies WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, and SMS into one inbox with one customer profile per person across channels. For a European Shopify brand this matters more than it sounds. A customer asks a product question on Instagram, gets the shipping confirmation via Facebook Messenger, replies to a delivery problem on WhatsApp, and the rep handling them sees one thread with the order context attached. With 360dialog you would stack a separate Instagram tool, a separate email helpdesk, and a separate SMS provider on top, then try to glue them together. That is a real cost and it shows up in your team's daily workflow.

Shopify-native depth

This is where the two products are not really comparable. 360dialog does not have a Shopify app because they do not have an application layer at all. You build the integration yourself, or you pay an agency to build it, or you buy a separate tool that sits between 360dialog and Shopify.

Tyra is in the Shopify App Store with a native integration that reads orders, customers, products, inventory, and fulfillment status in real time. The AI agent uses this data directly rather than a stale export. Abandoned-cart messages trigger from Shopify events. Discount codes are generated inside Shopify and sent through WhatsApp without copy-paste. Order status updates are sent without templates needing per-order data injection by hand. For a Shopify brand this is the work you would otherwise be doing in code or in Zapier, and it is the reason most Tyra customers came from a stacked setup that included a raw BSP and a pile of glue.

AI agent grounded in your catalog

360dialog has no built-in AI agent. You bring your own. That means picking an LLM vendor, designing the prompts, building the retrieval over your catalog, wiring it into the WhatsApp message flow, handling escalation to humans, and maintaining all of it as your catalog and policies change. It is doable, and engineering teams do it, but it is a real project.

Tyra's agent is built in and grounded in the live Shopify catalog, your knowledge base, and your conversation history. It knows what is in stock right now, what your return policy is, what the customer ordered last month, and when to hand off to a human. It uses Meta's WhatsApp formatting directly without markup translation layers, so messages render the way Meta intends. For a brand without a machine learning team, the gap between "no agent" and "agent that actually works on your catalog" is the entire reason to pick a platform over a BSP.

Self-serve onboarding, compared honestly

Both products onboard fast for what they are. 360dialog is among the quickest BSPs to get a number provisioned and an API key in your hands. If you are an engineer, you can be making API calls the same afternoon you sign up. That is genuinely impressive and most BSPs cannot match it.

Tyra's onboarding measures something different: time from signup to your support team actually answering customer messages. Connect Shopify, connect WhatsApp via embedded signup, import templates, configure the agent on your catalog, and you are live. Most brands do this in under an hour without writing code. The two onboarding stories are not in competition, they are aimed at different people. An engineer at 360dialog and an operations lead at Tyra both feel the product was built for them, because it was.

Frequently asked questions

Is 360dialog cheaper than Tyra?: At the BSP layer the message cost is essentially the same because neither company marks up Meta's pricing. 360dialog charges a per-number subscription on top, Tyra charges a software fee that includes the inbox, agent, and integrations. If you compare 360dialog plus the engineering and third-party tools you would need to match Tyra's surface area, Tyra is usually cheaper. If you only need the BSP layer because everything else is built in-house, 360dialog is cheaper.
Can I use 360dialog as my BSP and Tyra as my UI?: No. Tyra is a direct Meta BSP, and a WhatsApp number is registered with exactly one BSP at a time. You are either on Tyra or on 360dialog. Switching between them is a standard Meta BSP-to-BSP transfer and takes a few days end to end.
I am building a SaaS that needs WhatsApp as a feature. Should I use Tyra or 360dialog?: Probably 360dialog. They are built for ISVs embedding WhatsApp into another product. Tyra is built for end customers running their own brand. We will tell you the same thing on a sales call.
Has 360dialog been around longer than Tyra?: Yes, considerably. They were one of the first Meta-approved BSPs in Europe and that operational history is a real asset. Tyra is newer and focused on a narrower customer profile, European Shopify brands, where the depth of integration matters more than the breadth of the partner network.
How does data hosting compare?: Both are EU-hosted. 360dialog is in Germany, Tyra runs on AWS in Ireland. Both are GDPR-native and both can answer the procurement questions a German or French enterprise buyer will ask.
What does migration from 360dialog to Tyra look like?: The number itself transfers via Meta in roughly one to three days. Templates are resubmitted on Tyra and approved by Meta within a few hours to a day each. If you have built a custom UI on 360dialog, the harder question is whether your team is ready to move to Tyra's interface and rebuild any custom logic as Tyra automations. We will be honest on a call about whether that switch is worth it for your situation.
Do I have to pick one forever?: No. Both companies do BSP-to-BSP transfers. The cost of switching is real but bounded, and the WhatsApp number, the customer history with Meta, and the template approvals all carry over.

Ready to see Tyra in action?

Book a 30-min demo and we'll show you how Tyra can help your European Shopify brand deliver better customer conversations.