RCS vs WhatsApp: Which is the Best Choice for Your Business?

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RCS & WhatsApp: The new benchmarks for professional messaging
WhatsApp and RCS offer similar services: conversational messaging enriched with media and features. Similar, but not identical of course. Before diving into comparing the two channels, let’s outline the basics.

RCS - The Future of Text Messaging
Rich Communications Services (RCS) is a new messaging protocol. It was created to replace SMS and MMS messaging, and to elevate text messaging to modern standards. RCS offers many of the features found on popular messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger , and iMessage. And as a bonus, it allows users to communicate with your business within their phone’s native messaging app, similar to SMS, without the need to download an additional app.

Does this mean that RCS also has the same global reach as its predecessor, SMS? Well, carriers have to enable RCS messaging in their region(s), but it’s not as widely supported as SMS yet. Apple has announced that they will be adding RCS support to iOS 18 and later, which is great news for the popularity of this channel.

According to Statista , more than half of the world’s smartphone users own phones running Android, but iOS is gaining ground among younger generations. About 35% of Millennials owned an iPhone by 2023, followed closely by 31% of Gen Z. The availability of RCS to this group of people will significantly increase its global reach.

WhatsApp - The messaging giant
Introducing WhatsApp almost seems superfluous. With about two billion monthly active users worldwide, most are probably already familiar with the app. This channel surpasses both WeChat (1.3 billion) and Facebook Messenger (930 million) in terms of global users, and it is the third most popular social network in the world, after Facebook and YouTube.

WhatsApp offers its users an alternative to text messaging, dependent on internet access and with a ton of media-rich features like media sharing, gifs, emojis, and group chats to enhance conversations. It is available in all app stores and on most operating systems. Meta (the developers behind WhatsApp) launched the WhatsApp Business platform as a tool for businesses to leverage this channel for business communication.

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Channel awareness
It is important to note that WhatsApp as a channel is much more known to consumers than RCS. Most people use, or have at least heard of WhatsApp, and are aware of both the channel and its capabilities.

RCS, however, is a lesser-known name. Interestingly, most people have probably already used RCS without realizing it. Newer Android phones have RCS enabled automatically, but because the messages arrive in the same inbox as SMS and MMS, consumers may not even notice that they are actually sending and receiving RCS messages. This means that, from a consumer perm coo email list e RCS may be relatively unfamiliar. However, RCS may be more intuitive to use. Using it from within the native messaging app is a low barrier for consumers — even if they may mistakenly call these messages SMS.

RCS vs WhatsApp: Channel Comparison
Now that both channels have been introduced, let's compare them on five key factors: features, coverage, security, automation possibilities, and costs.

1. Features
Both WhatsApp and RCS offer rich user experiences. Especially from a consumer perspective, the channels’ features overlap a lot: sending and receiving images and videos, delivery receipts, group chats, gifs, emojis, and even “user is typing” notifications are available for both WhatsApp and RCS.

For business messaging, they also have overlapping features like checkmarks for verified senders, carousels, and suggested replies or interactive buttons. However, WhatsApp has a longer history in business messaging, and it shows.

In addition to its verified green checkmark and interactive buttons , the WhatsApp Business platform offers more features tailored to specific business messaging use cases like marketing, service, utility, and authentication. Features like WhatsApp message templates, carousels, product messages , newsletters , WhatsApp feeds, WhatsApp business search, payments on WhatsApp, and clickable ads for WhatsApp .