Update, 6 October 2026: An earlier version of this article listed hellomateo package prices. hellomateo now only shares prices in a sales consultation, so we have removed them and updated the article.
You opened hellomateo's pricing page and read "Make an appointment" four times. There is no price and no calculator.
So now you are looking for a hellomateo alternative before you sit through another sales call. Fair enough.
Most comparison lists would now tell you which tool is "better". This article first asks you one question that decides everything else.
Is There an Alternative to hellomateo?
Yes. For WhatsApp marketing in the DACH region, the most relevant hellomateo alternatives are charles, Superchat, ChatWerk, Sinch Engage and Chatarmin.
Which one fits comes down to a single question: do you sell through physical stores or through an online shop? hellomateo is built for businesses with physical locations. If you run pure e-commerce, the road usually leads somewhere else.
The 5 hellomateo Alternatives at a Glance
| Tool | Strength | Fits | Public pricing |
|---|---|---|---|
| charles | WhatsApp commerce for large brands | Brands with an in-house CRM team and enterprise budget | No |
| Superchat | Broad messaging suite, many channels | Local service businesses and smaller teams | Yes, from €89 |
| ChatWerk | Low starting plan | Small shops on a tight budget | Yes, from €69 |
| Sinch Engage | Channels beyond the standard set, enterprise-leaning | Corporates with multi-country setups | Inconsistent |
| Chatarmin | WhatsApp marketing plus AI agents with shop access | D2C shops on Shopify, Klaviyo, JTL, Xentral | On request |
Details on each tool follow further down. First, a look at why hellomateo becomes a question for online shops at all.
What hellomateo Is, and Who It Was Built For
hellomateo is a platform for customer communication across WhatsApp, email, SMS, Instagram, Facebook, phone and physical mail.
The operating company is MATEO Estate GmbH, based in Potsdam, registered at the Potsdam district court under HRB 39844. It was founded in 2021 by three former SAP employees: Christian Strauch, Domenik Fox and Philipp Steinrötter.
The company name has a history. According to a press release by Investitionsbank des Landes Brandenburg dated 5 June 2024, the company originally focused on the real estate sector. It only later pivoted to messaging software. In the same year, Brandenburg Kapital came in with a seven-figure seed round.
What the platform does today, based on its own product navigation:
- Shared inbox for WhatsApp, email, SMS, Instagram and Facebook
- WhatsApp newsletters including opt-in management and link click tracking
- AI assistant in chat plus AI telephony that picks up phone calls
- Review management wired directly into Google Business Profiles
- Postal campaigns, meaning printed letters including production and delivery
- Prebuilt industry automations ("Model Company") as a template kit
The company reports more than 2,100 customers, more than 50 million messages sent and a Google rating of 4.9 across 123 reviews (source: hellomateo.de/preise, as of October 2026).
Short version: this is a decent product. Messaging, AI telephony, review management and postal mailing in one tool is rare in the German market.
A quick note on search: mateo.estate still runs the company's original product, a communication tool for property management firms. Same company, different product. If you searched for "mateo whatsapp", you meant the messaging software.
The Breaking Point: hellomateo Counts Locations
This is the most important section in this article.
Look at how the packages are cut (source: hellomateo.de/preise, as of October 2026):
| Package | Locations | WhatsApp numbers | User accounts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Premium | 1 | 1 | 10 |
| Business | 3 | 3 | 30 |
| Business Plus | 3 | 3 | 30 |
| Enterprise | 10 | 10 | 100 |
The first line of every package is the number of locations. Contacts, orders and message volume play hardly any role in how the packages are cut.
Even the contact form on the pricing page asks for “number of locations” as a required field, with options for 1 to 5, 5 to 10, and more than 10.
And the pricing FAQ spells it out: package costs depend on the number of locations and the feature set.
The industry navigation confirms the picture. hellomateo addresses opticians, hearing care professionals, car dealerships, fashion and retail, furniture and kitchen stores, electronics retail, gyms, medical supply stores, plus banks and insurance companies. Almost all of those sell across a shop floor. E-commerce is one industry page among many.
If you run a chain of eight optician stores, this logic is a feature: you see numbers per location, assign rights per team and get a dedicated number for every branch.
If you run a D2C shop with 40,000 contacts and zero stores, you are paying for a structure you do not even have. Your growth happens in your shop.
What Is Fair to Say
hellomateo includes unlimited active contacts in every package. Outgoing messages are listed at €0.05 to €0.11 on the pricing page. That matches Meta's own range, and according to its German blog, hellomateo passes Meta's fees on without a markup.
Against tools that bill per contact block, hellomateo can actually come out cheaper on very large lists. Credit where it is due.
You can also try it first. According to the pricing FAQ, you can get to know hellomateo free of charge, with test access on request. How long it runs is not stated there.
What to Clarify in the Sales Call
The AI chat assistant and AI voice are add-ons in the Premium package.
In Business Plus, the pricing page states that you pick two out of AI chat, AI telephony and postal campaigns. You only get all three with Enterprise. Included AI answers: 1,000 in Business Plus, 2,000 in Enterprise.
What hellomateo costs: pricing on request
hellomateo does not publish package prices. The pricing page shows “Book a meeting” on all four packages. You get the actual price in a consultation call.
What the pricing FAQ does disclose is how the price is built. According to hellomateo, five components go into it:
- Package costs, depending on locations and feature set
- One-off setup
- One-off training
- Possible interface costs charged by your industry software provider
- Meta fees for outbound messages, passed on without markup
On top of that comes a minimum term of 12 months (source: hellomateo.de/preise, FAQ, as of October 2026).
In practice: for a fair comparison with tools that publish their prices, you need the offer in writing. Ask in the call about the package price for your number of locations, the one-off costs for setup and training, and the add-on price for the AI assistant.
And ask them to explain how an online shop with no store fits into the location logic. The answer tells you more about fit than any feature list.
Shop Integration: Zapier on One Page, Native on Another
For a shop operator, this is the most expensive detail. So here is exactly what sits where.
For Shopify, hellomateo describes the route via Zapier. Step by step, including creating a Zapier account and pasting an API key. The outbound link for Shopify points to zapier.com (source: hellomateo.de/integrationen/shopify, as of October 2026).
The glossary entry, by contrast, describes direct integration for shop systems. It states that order data and customer contacts are synchronised automatically (source: hellomateo.de/ressourcen/glossar/e-commerce-integration).
Which version applies to your shop is best settled in the call. Specifically:
- Does the connection run through Zapier or through a native interface?
- Which fields sync in which direction?
- What happens at 5,000 orders a month?
Why it matters: on Zapier you pay per task, and abandoned cart flows burn through a lot of them. A native, bidirectional connection runs without task quotas and does not depend on a third party's limits.
The 5 hellomateo Alternatives in Detail
charles
Based in Berlin, clearly built for conversational commerce. According to Capterra, charles integrates with Shopify, Klaviyo, Emarsys and Zendesk, among others.
On Capterra, charles sits at 4.4 across 21 reviews, with 84 on OMR Reviews.
Worth checking the labelling on that Capterra sample: some of the reviews are marked there as vendor-referred and incentivised. Reviewers mostly praise the account support. One criticism comes up repeatedly: reporting and KPI tracking do not go far enough for some users, alongside requests around segmentation (source: Capterra, charles reviews).
charles only shares prices through sales. Its own website and OMR Reviews show no figure. Plan time for sales conversations from the start.
Pick charles if you are a large brand, have your own CRM team and run WhatsApp as a full revenue channel with enterprise expectations.
Superchat
A Berlin messaging suite that bundles email and SMS alongside WhatsApp in the same inbox. Its prices are fully published on the website, which is rare enough in this market to mention.
The tiers: Free with a cap of 30 active contacts, Basic €89, Professional €149, Advanced €299, Enterprise on request. Paying annually brings that down to €79, €129 and €249 (source: superchat.de/preise).
Integrations are available as paid add-ons from Professional and included from Advanced. Put that line straight into your calculation.
On OMR Reviews, Superchat sits at 4.7 across 343 reviews (source: omr.com/de/reviews/product/superchat, retrieved 19 October 2026). If you want to compare Superchat and Chatarmin directly, our Superchat alternative article covers all the differences.
Pick Superchat if you want to bundle many channels and your business does not hinge on your shop system.
ChatWerk
The cheapest paid entry in this list, based in Nuremberg. Shared inbox, web chat, Telegram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Instagram, plus unlimited messages in every package and API access (source: chatwerk.de/en/pricing-2).
The Starter plan costs €69 per month on an annual contract, or €85 if you want to cancel monthly (source: chatwerk.de/en/pricing-2). ChatWerk adds a 10 % service fee per message on top of Meta's fees.
One detail before you sign: the Chatflow Builder, the module for newsletter campaigns and chatbots, costs €59 per month extra on the lower plans. It is only included from the Premium package upwards. So if you want to send WhatsApp newsletters, you pay more than the Starter plan.
Pick ChatWerk if budget is your hardest constraint and you are starting with the basics.
Sinch Engage (formerly MessengerPeople)
Formerly MessengerPeople, part of the Swedish Sinch group since the acquisition. Closer to channel infrastructure than to e-commerce.
Channel selection goes beyond the standard set. Alongside WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram Direct and Telegram, it also runs Apple Messages for Business, Viber and web chat through the same interface (source: omr.com/de/reviews/product/sinch-engage).
Pricing is where it gets murky. German comparison directories quote an entry point from €199 including all messengers, but they link to a pricing page that no longer resolves. Sinch's current German-language pricing page instead lists an SMS-oriented tier structure in dollars.
What that means for you: there is currently no reliable public figure for a WhatsApp setup in the DACH region. Ask in the call which price list applies to you at all.
Pick Sinch Engage if you scale internationally, need many channels and value channel infrastructure over e-commerce detail.
Chatarmin
That is us. Which is why it gets its own section, including the cases where we are the wrong choice.
Chatarmin as an Alternative to hellomateo: Who We Fit, and Who We Do Not
We build WhatsApp marketing for e-commerce. Our focus is shops, across one industry instead of 30.
We fit if:
- Your shop runs on Shopify, WooCommerce, Shopware, JTL or Xentral and you want a native, bidirectional connection
- You use Klaviyo and want segments, opt-ins and customer profiles syncing both ways
- You want abandoned cart, back-in-stock, post-purchase and win-back running as flows instead of manual campaigns
- You want to see which campaign brought in how much revenue, on top of open rates
- Your team sits in the DACH region and expects German-speaking support
The Real Difference: Answering Questions or Executing Tasks
This is where a tool for store networks and a tool for shops part ways.
hellomateo's AI answers questions. It tells the customer where the parcel is and hands over when things get complicated.
The AI agents in armincx by Chatarmin take action. They create a return, trigger a refund and change a delivery address, directly from the ticket.
How that is secured:
- Two separate agents: one with read access for product questions, order tracking and FAQs, a second with write permissions for anything that changes state
- An approval system for critical actions. Everything else runs through automatically
- Read and write access to Shopify and Xentral
- The phone call, the WhatsApp message and the email from the same customer land in one history
We are working towards agents handling complete process chains such as a full return on their own. Today the rule is: anything that changes state goes through the approval logic.
We do not fit if:
- You run eight stores and need numbers per location plus tiered permissions. hellomateo is the clearer choice there
- Your goal is collecting Google reviews for individual stores. We run review flows through Trustpilot and Reviews.io and do not manage Google Business Profiles. hellomateo does
- You want to send postal campaigns from the same tool. We do not offer that
- In-store telephony is your main use case, meaning you route calls per location and play back opening hours per branch. Our AI phone assistant works with order data and has no location structures. For a store network, that is the wrong logic
- Your shop is still small. Below roughly €500,000 in annual digital revenue, WhatsApp rarely pays for itself as a standalone channel, and we would rather tell you now than in the third call
We mean that. An optician with three stores sending appointment reminders and collecting reviews is better served by hellomateo. A D2C shop with 40,000 contacts and Klaviyo in the stack is better served by an e-commerce tool.
hellomateo Reviews: What Users Say Publicly
In this section, we only quote what is publicly visible.
Capterra Germany: users describe reactivating existing customers over WhatsApp as highly effective, with one reviewer reporting a ROAS above 500 %. Ease of use and a fast-responding support team come up repeatedly.
Criticism lands in two places: setting up automations is described as somewhat complicated, and product changes occasionally require re-learning (source: capterra.com.de).
OMR Reviews: 4.7 across 155 reviews (source: omr.com/de/reviews/product/hellomateo, retrieved 19 October 2026).
Google: 4.9 across 123 reviews (source: hellomateo.de/preise, as of October 2026).
Trustpilot: the opposite picture. Two reviews, both negative, criticising mobile usability and points that allegedly went unmentioned during the sales conversation (source: de.trustpilot.com/review/hellomateo.de). At two reviews, this is statistically meaningless. We include it anyway, because leaving it out would be the less honest option.
What is missing: there are no G2 reviews, which limits international comparability.
The overall picture: mostly satisfied customers, with friction when automations get complex.
When You Should Stay With hellomateo
Switching tools costs you opt-ins, setup time and patience. Stay if at least two of these apply:
- You have physical locations and the per-location package logic matches your structure
- Google reviews are a real revenue lever for you
- The AI telephony measurably takes calls off your team
- Postal campaigns are part of your marketing mix
- Your contact list is very large and billing without a contact cap saves you money
Switch only when your bottleneck sits elsewhere: Shop data does not arrive cleanly in the tool. Flows should hang off order data instead of appointment data. Or you cannot see which campaign brought in revenue.
Conclusion: Your hellomateo Alternative Depends on Your Business Model
hellomateo does solid work for businesses with stores, appointments and a Google profile. More than 2,100 customers and a 4.9 Google rating do not happen by accident.
The packages do count locations, though. And an online shop has none. That is where the search for a hellomateo alternative actually starts: with the business model, long before the feature list.
If you sell through stores, stay. If you sell through a shop, want abandoned carts recovered and revenue tracked per campaign, talk to us.
Book a 45-minute demo. We go through your stack. If hellomateo is the better fit, we will tell you.
Frequently Asked Questions About hellomateo Alternatives
Is there an alternative to hellomateo?
Yes. charles, Superchat, ChatWerk, Sinch Engage and Chatarmin are the most relevant alternatives in the DACH region, and for pure e-commerce, Chatarmin and charles sit closest.
What does hellomateo cost?
hellomateo only quotes prices on request, and the pricing page shows “Book a meeting” on all four packages. According to its FAQ, the price is made up of package costs based on locations and features, setup, training, possible interface costs and Meta fees.
Is hellomateo suitable for online shops?
It depends. The packages are cut by number of locations and the industry pages mostly address brick-and-mortar retailers, so pure online shops have better-suited tools.
Does hellomateo offer a free trial?
Yes. According to its own pricing FAQ, you can get to know hellomateo free of charge in advance, with test access available on request.
Is hellomateo GDPR-compliant?
It depends. hellomateo advertises GDPR compliance, servers in Germany and a data processing agreement, but you also need a clean opt-in for a compliant setup.
What is the difference between hellomateo and Chatarmin?
hellomateo is an omnichannel platform for businesses with physical locations, including review management, AI telephony and postal mail. Chatarmin specialises in WhatsApp marketing for e-commerce, with native connections to Shopify, Klaviyo, JTL and Xentral.
Can I migrate from hellomateo to another tool?
Yes. Your WhatsApp number and your Meta Business Manager belong to you and can be migrated, although hellomateo's FAQ states a minimum term of 12 months.
Does hellomateo offer a Shopify integration?
Yes, though the depth is unclear. The Shopify page describes a Zapier route and the glossary describes direct sync, so ask which one applies to your shop.
What is hellomateo's full company name?
The operating company is MATEO Estate GmbH, based in Potsdam and registered at the Potsdam district court under HRB 39844. According to Investitionsbank des Landes Brandenburg, the company originally focused on the real estate sector.
