Meta Business Agent vs Replypop 2026: The AI That Answers vs the AI That Sells

On June 3, 2026, Meta launched the Meta Business Agent globally. It is an AI agent that lives inside WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. It answers customer questions, recommends products from your catalog, qualifies incoming leads, books appointments, and hands off to a human when needed. It is free to activate today, and over a million businesses are already using a version of it.

If you run a business on WhatsApp or Instagram, you have probably already seen the headlines and wondered whether you still need anything else.

This is an honest comparison. Full disclosure: Replypop is us, and Meta's agent overlaps with a lot of what we do. We are not going to pretend it is bad, because it is not. Instead we are going to show you exactly where the line sits, so you can decide what your business actually needs.

Quick Verdict

	Meta Business Agent	Replypop
Best for	Customer service and FAQ answering at scale	Turning inbound DMs into qualified, booked sales
Price	Free now, paid subscription tiers coming	Free to start, paid plans from $29/month
Setup	Native, activate in minutes	Connect your channels, guided setup
Channels	WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram	WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger
Answers customer questions	Yes	Yes
Lead qualification	Basic	Built around custom qualification questions
Lead scoring (hot / warm / cold)	No	Yes
Sales pipeline / CRM view	No	Yes (lead list + Kanban pipeline)
Books calls on your calendar	Appointment booking	Proposes and confirms sales meetings, owner gets notified
Exportable lead data	Lives in your inbox	Full lead records, notes, and pipeline you can export
Control over AI behavior	Generic by design	You define the questions, tone, and what counts as a hot lead

What Meta Business Agent Does Well

Let us be clear about the strengths, because they are real.

It is native and free to start

There is no third party to connect, no API to provision, no extra login. You turn it on inside the WhatsApp Business app, Instagram Pro, Messenger, or Meta Business Suite, and it works. For a small business that just wants its DMs answered after hours, that is hard to beat.

It answers customer questions at scale

Meta's agent is excellent at the customer service job: someone asks "are you open Sunday?" or "do you have this in size medium?" and it answers in the customer's language, in your tone, around the clock. With a product catalog connected, it can recommend items and point people in the right direction.

It has Meta's distribution and reliability

It is built by the company that owns the platform. It will not get rate limited or cut off by an API policy change, because it is the platform. For pure messaging reliability, that matters.

If your main problem is "customers message me and nobody replies fast enough," the Meta Business Agent solves that, and it is free today. We will say that plainly.

Where It Falls Short for Sales

Here is the honest line. The Meta Business Agent is built to answer. It is a customer service responder first. The gaps show up the moment you treat your inbound DMs as a sales channel rather than a help desk.

It answers leads, but it does not manage them

The agent can qualify a lead in a conversation. What it does not give you is the system around that lead afterward. There is no scored lead list, no pipeline view of who is hot versus cold, no place where your follow up lives. The conversation happens, and then it is just another thread in your inbox.

Replypop is built the other way around. Every inbound conversation becomes a lead with a score, a stage, and a place in your pipeline. You can see at a glance which five people are worth calling today instead of scrolling through a hundred chats.

It does not score intent

"Qualified" is binary in most setups. But a person asking your price is not the same as a person asking how soon you can start. Replypop scores leads hot, warm, or cold based on the qualification questions you define, so your sales effort goes where the intent is highest.

Your follow up has nowhere to live

A conversation answers a question in the moment. A sale usually takes more than one touch. Meta's agent handles the chat, but the notes, the next step, and the record of what each lead said are not gathered anywhere you can work from later. When you come back tomorrow, it is just threads.

With Replypop, every lead has its own record: the answers they gave, their score, their stage, your notes, and their place in the pipeline. Your follow up has a home, and you can export all of it whenever you want.

You have limited control over how it qualifies

Meta's agent is generic by design, because it has to work for a million businesses at once. Replypop lets you decide the exact questions that qualify a lead, the tone the AI uses, and what counts as a hot lead for your specific business. The AI is tuned to how you actually sell.

So Which One Do You Need?

This is not really "better versus worse." It is two different jobs.

Choose Meta Business Agent if

Your main goal is answering customer questions and reducing missed messages.
You want something free and native with zero extra setup.
You mostly do support and FAQ, and a connected catalog covers your needs.
A single, native responder inside your Meta apps is all you are looking for.

Choose Replypop if

Your inbound DMs are a sales channel, not just a support queue.
You want leads scored and organized in a pipeline, so you know who to call first.
You want booked sales calls landing on your calendar with the owner notified, not just appointments buried in a chat.
You want a lead record and pipeline you can work from and export, and control over exactly how the AI qualifies.
You want a tool dedicated to sales, not a feature inside a larger platform.

The Honest Bottom Line

The Meta Business Agent is a genuinely good customer service AI, and the fact that it is free and native means a lot of businesses should turn it on. If all you need is faster answers in your DMs, start there.

But answering a customer and closing a sale are different things. Meta built an agent that responds. Replypop built an AI sales assistant that qualifies, scores, and books, with a pipeline and ownership of your data on top. The native option is convenient. The sales option is the one that turns conversations into revenue you control.

If inbound DMs are where your business actually gets customers, that difference is the whole game.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Meta Business Agent free? It is free to activate right now. Meta has said it will introduce paid subscription tiers and token based pricing for larger businesses in the coming months.

Can Meta Business Agent book appointments? Yes. It can book appointments inside the conversation. What it does not provide is a sales pipeline, lead scoring, or sales meetings synced to your calendar with owner notifications, which is where a dedicated sales tool like Replypop goes further.

Does Meta Business Agent qualify leads? It can qualify leads in a conversation, but qualification is basic and the leads are not scored or organized into a pipeline you manage afterward.

Can I use both? For the role of answering your DMs, you pick one AI per channel. The real question is whether you want a free responder built for support, or a sales assistant built to score leads and book calls. Pick based on whether your DMs are mostly support or mostly sales.

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