Different tools, often the same shortlist
Both live on WhatsApp, which is why they end up compared. Periskope is built for talking to customers at scale from a shared inbox. Bosun is built for running the people who work for you. If you need the first, we are the wrong purchase.
Periskope is a shared WhatsApp inbox and group-management platform: several agents handling customer conversations across numbers, with ticketing, labels and analytics, priced at $20 per user per month on Starter and $30 on Pro, with phones beyond the first licensed separately. Bosun is an internal assistant for your own staff: it turns their messages into a tracked job list, chases what is late, answers from your written procedures and reports weekly, bought once for $1,999 with no per-seat fee. If your problem is customer conversations, Periskope. If it is knowing what your team is actually doing, Bosun.
- Periskope is for
- Customer conversations, many agents
- Bosun is for
- Your own staff and their work
- Periskope price
- $20 - $30 per user, per month
- Bosun price
- $1,999 once
- Overlap
- Both use WhatsApp. That is it.
What each one actually does
| Bosun | Periskope | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | Your own staff | Your customers |
| Shared inbox with agents | No | Yes |
| Turns messages into tracked jobs | Yes | No |
| Chases overdue work automatically | Yes | No |
| Answers from your own documents | Yes, cited | No |
| Weekly performance review | Yes | Analytics dashboards |
| Multiple WhatsApp numbers | One | Many |
| Ticketing and labels | No | Yes |
| Runs on your own server | Yes | No - hosted |
| Your brand on it | Yes | No |
| Priced | $1,999 once | $20 - $30 a user, a month |
Periskope's features and prices as published on their pricing page on the date below. They are good at what they do - this table is about fit, not quality.
Bosun refuses
- Customer messages
- Refused
- Unknown numbers
- Refused
- Several numbers
- Not supported
- Agent inbox
- Not built
- Hosted for you
- Ask, priced separately
Buy Periskope if this is you
There is a clear answer to who should buy them instead, and it is not a grudging one. If customer conversations are the bottleneck, Bosun does not help you at all - it refuses messages from numbers that are not on your staff roster, by design.
They are also the right answer if you need several numbers in one place, if you want somebody else running the infrastructure, or if you need to be live this afternoon rather than next week.
- Several people answering customers from one WhatsApp number
- More than one business number to manage together
- You want ticketing, labels and conversation analytics
- You would rather not run a server at all
- You need it working today
15 people, 3 years
- Bosun
- ≈ $2,899
- Periskope Starter
- ≈ $10,800
- Periskope Pro
- ≈ $16,200
- Extra phones
- Licensed separately
- Adding five people
- Free vs +$1,200 a year
The work inside the business
A shared inbox makes conversations tidier. It does not tell you that the recon job on stock 4471 has been sitting for eleven days, that two people are waiting on the same part, or that nobody has written down what the approval limit is.
That is a different job, and it is the one Bosun does. It also costs nothing extra when the team grows, which matters more than any single feature in this comparison.
- A job list built from what staff already say, with an audit trail on every change
- Overdue work chased privately, then escalated - no manager spending a morning on it
- Staff questions answered from your own procedures, with the source named
- A weekly review of throughput and ageing, computed from the data
- No per-seat fee, so hiring five people costs nothing
They are not either-or
Nothing stops you running a shared inbox for customers and Bosun for your team - they touch different numbers and different people, and plenty of businesses genuinely need both.
If budget forces a choice, the question is simple: is more money lost to customer messages going unanswered, or to internal work going untracked? Whichever one you can describe with a specific recent example is the one to buy first.
- Different WhatsApp numbers, so there is no technical conflict
- Different people - your customers against your staff
- Start with whichever failure you can name an example of from last month
- Neither locks you out of adding the other later
How it stacks up elsewhere
On this page
Can Bosun handle customer messages too?
No, and it refuses them on purpose. A number that is not on your staff roster is rejected before anything is stored. Mixing staff task tracking with customer support in one assistant would make both worse.
Can Periskope track internal tasks?
It has ticketing and labels built around conversations, which some teams use as a loose task list. What it does not do is read a plain-language plan, create jobs from it, chase them and report on throughput - check their documentation rather than taking our word for it.
Which is cheaper?
Bosun, from about the eighth month onwards at fifteen seats - and the gap widens every month and every hire. Periskope is cheaper on day one, which is a real advantage if cash today matters more than cost over three years. Run your own figures in the <a href="/cost-calculator/">cost calculator</a>.
Sources
Checked on 26 September 2026. Prices and rules change - confirm on the source before relying on them.