An automation is a flow that starts with an event and runs its steps in order: every arrangement that sends a price list when someone writes "price", turns a comment into a DM, or reminds a customer of an appointment, is an automation. In the panel you give it a name, lay out its steps on the canvas, and press to make it live.
Publish
💡 An automation belongs to the account. A flow built in one account does not run in another by itself; if the same job has to happen on two channels, you build it separately in each account.
What an automation is made of
Every automation has three building blocks:
Trigger — What starts the flow. A keyword, a post comment, a story reply, an ad link, a given date… An automation can carry several triggers. See Trigger.
Condition — Splits the path in two. It asks questions like "does this person carry that tag", "are we inside business hours", "is the window open", and the flow continues down the "True" or the "False" branch. See Condition.
Action — Changes something about the contact or the conversation: adds a tag, writes to a field, assigns the conversation, hands it to a human. See Action.
Between these three sit the steps that send messages: text, card, gallery, media, list, template, information collection and more. The concept of a step is covered in Flows and steps.
Draft, publishing and versions
An automation has three states:
Draft — Never published. You can work on it and it messages nobody.
Live — Its triggers are working.
Off — Published, then switched off. Its triggers do not fire and running sessions stop.
Changes you make in the editor go into the draft; to take them live you press Publish. While unpublished changes exist, the list shows an Unpublished changes warning.
Every publish is an immutable version (v1, v2, v3…). The Versions tab shows how many steps each version has and what changed compared with the previous one; you can load a version into the draft or republish it with Return to this version. Reverting is published as a new version too, so history is never erased.
Before publishing, the Pre-publish check runs and splits what it finds into Errors and Warnings. Errors block publishing; warnings do not, but they are worth reading.
Runs: an automation executing for one person
An automation is not something that "runs once"; it opens a separate run for each person. A run is that person's journey through the flow: which step they are on, what is being waited for, which branch was taken.
A run finishes in the version it started in. Even if you publish a new version in the meantime, a running session continues with the graph of the version it began with. That way a customer never ends up with a half-finished sequence of messages while you edit the flow.
Every run has a status, visible with a step-by-step log in the Logs tab: Running, Awaiting reply, Waiting, Paused, Completed, Interrupted or Error. The log tells you, one entry at a time, that a message was sent or skipped, that the person tapped a button, which branch the condition took, and why things stopped.
An automation's settings
The Settings tab holds the automation's name, folder and behaviour:
Name — The name shown in the list and in logs.
Folder — For grouping automations.
Status — On or off. Switching it off stops running sessions.
Can the same person enter again? — Four options: Every time, Only once, Once a day, Once in a chosen period (you type the number of hours). If a person fails the re-entry rule, the automation is skipped and the next one is considered.
A new keyword can interrupt this automation — On by default. Switch it off and a keyword arriving while the person is answering this automation is ignored. Switching it off is recommended in flows that collect information; otherwise a customer answering a question may accidentally fall into another flow.
The same tab also holds Delete automation: the automation moves to the bin and can be restored within a limited period.
When several automations match at once
When a message arrives, the engine follows this order:
If the person tapped a button we sent, the run continues from that button's branch.
If an explicit trigger matches (keyword, comment, story, share, link), the person's running session is interrupted and the new flow starts. A non-interruptible session that is awaiting a reply is not interrupted; the text goes to that session.
If a session is awaiting a reply, the text is given to it.
The Any message trigger runs if the person has no open session.
If none of these applied, Default reply runs, and never more often than the frequency you configured for the same person.
When more than one trigger matches the same event, the narrower one wins: a trigger that names a specific post beats "all posts", and an exact keyword match beats "contains".
⚠️ Note: if an agent has taken a conversation over (handover to a human), no automation runs in that conversation. This stays the case until the conversation is explicitly handed back or the configured period expires.
Trying it before you publish
The Test tab offers two routes:
Simulator — You try the draft inside the panel. No message reaches the real channel and contact data changes only for this test. Wait steps are skipped, the branch each condition took is written out line by line, and a message that could not really be delivered is marked "would not have been sent".
Test on the real channel — The draft really is sent to the contact you pick. That person must have written to you in the last 24 hours; the run is marked as a test and does not enter your statistics.
Make testing a habit: the pre-publish check inspects the structure, while the simulator shows you that the texts and the branches really behave as you intended.
The tabs on the Automations screen
My automations — The list of the flows you built; folders, search, filtering by trigger and status, and the bin are here.
Basics — The flows that exist once per account. Today that is Default reply: the answer given to incoming messages when no other automation runs.
Rules — Event-to-action links that run outside any flow. See General rules.
Sequences — Follow-up steps spread over days. See Sequence.
Limits and common mistakes
A flow can carry at most 200 steps and 400 connections. If your plan does not cover some steps, the flow stays live but runs stop at that step; the editor says so both on the step and in the bar at the top.
Common mistakes:
Forgetting to publish. A change made in the draft does not go live. If the list says "Unpublished changes", your flow is still running its old version.
Trying to publish without a trigger. A flow with no trigger never starts; the pre-publish check reports this as an error.
Leaving re-entry on "Every time" for a campaign flow. The same person may receive the same message over and over.
Leaving interruption on in a flow that collects information. If the customer's answer happens to contain a keyword, the flow is cut short.
Treating "off" as deleted. An automation that is off stops but stays where it is; deleting is a separate operation that moves it to the bin.
Think of an automation not as "a box you set up and forget" but as "a versioned, logged arrangement that runs person by person", and both fixing and improving it become much easier.