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One automation can run on WhatsApp, Instagram and the website widget. This page covers what that means in practice: how scoping works, which steps each channel can actually do, and what a long wait does to a WhatsApp follow-up.

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Scoping to a channel

The trigger panel has a Channels setting: WhatsApp, Instagram, Web. It only ever narrows.
  • None selected means every channel. That is the default, and what an automation that never touched the setting means.
  • Selecting one or two means the automation only runs when the event came from those.
Two triggers lock it: Instagram comment and Instagram story reply lock to Instagram, Web chat started locks to Website. The picker shows the lock instead of a choice.
Twelve triggers carry no channel at all — the form, appointment, payment and store triggers. A form is submitted on a public page and a payment is made on Razorpay’s, so there is no channel to compare against. For those the picker is hidden, any scope left over from a previous trigger is cleared, and the engine ignores channel scoping. See Triggers.

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What each channel can do

Instagram has no template mechanism at all, and no list message. The website widget is rendered by us, so there is nothing to pre-approve. Every other kind of step — tags, segments, deals, notes, notifications, HTTP requests, Google actions, variables — sends nothing through a channel, so no channel can fail to support it. A Google Sheets row is appended identically whether the run started on WhatsApp, on Instagram or from a form.

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How the editor reports it

The settings panel’s Runs on line and the card on the canvas give one of three answers. An unscoped automation is not warned about partial support. Strictly, a template step in one is skipped on Instagram and the web — but saying so would put a warning on essentially every template step in the product. A step that works nowhere is still reported.

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Steps that need somebody to talk to

Some steps need a conversation, and some need a contact at all.
  • A hosted form submission, a booking, a payment or a store order can come from somebody who has never messaged you. There is no thread, so the sending steps are skipped — and the tag, segment, deal and notify steps beside them still run. The run ends partial and the log says which step was skipped and why.
  • A scheduled automation runs for the workspace, not for one person. There is no contact at all, so every contact-shaped step in it can never run.
Send an invoice is the exception among the sending steps: it creates the invoice anyway and records that it could not deliver it.

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The 24-hour window

WhatsApp lets you reply freely for 24 hours after the customer’s last message. After that, only an approved template will send — see The 24-hour window. A parked run does not stop that clock. The checks panel adds up every Wait along each path (counting a Wait until as up to 24 hours, since its real length depends on when the run started) and warns on the first sending step that lands past the limit:
About 2 days of waiting happens before this step, and WhatsApp only allows a free-form message within 24 hours of the contact’s last one. Use a Send template step here, or shorten the wait.
Two ways to fix it: shorten the wait, or make that step a Send template.
The same applies to a Request a payment step. Inside the window it sends the link as an ordinary message; outside it, the link is carried by an approved template, and the step’s own Message sent with the link is not used — a template’s copy is fixed at approval. Configure the template on the step, or leave it to the workspace default.

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Branching per channel

One automation can behave differently per channel rather than being duplicated. Add a Condition with the Channel subject, and put the template send in one branch and the plain-text send in the other. See Conditions and branching.