Bundeling vs. WhatsApp: the key differences

A quick message to the team, a WhatsApp group for the members’ meeting and another one for this Friday’s farewell drinks. In many organisations, WhatsApp has become the go-to channel for sharing information and making arrangements.

But is WhatsApp also suitable for organising communication within an organisation or community in a structured way?

That depends on what you want to achieve. WhatsApp and Bundeling start from different principles. While WhatsApp mainly focuses on exchanging messages, Bundeling offers a complete platform that brings communication, information, activities and interaction together.

In this article, Bundeling vs. WhatsApp, we outline the key differences.

WhatsApp solutions

Before we make the comparison, it’s important to distinguish between the different WhatsApp solutions.

• Regular WhatsApp groups: designed for communication within a group of people. Participants can share messages, photos, videos and documents.
• WhatsApp Communities: offer more structure by bringing multiple groups together under one community. Admins can send announcements and members can join smaller groups. Events, polls and file sharing are also possible.
• WhatsApp Business: focused on business customer contact. The Business app offers features such as business profiles and tools for customer communication. For larger organisations, there is also the WhatsApp Business Platform API, which allows business communication to be automated and integrated.

So WhatsApp offers various ways to organise groups and communication.

How does Bundeling differ from WhatsApp?

The difference isn’t in one single feature. WhatsApp is a communication tool. Bundeling is a platform to inform, connect and activate your employees, members or partners. We’ll take you through those differences in six points.

1. User management and access

With WhatsApp, phone numbers form the basis of the user account. Users are added to groups or communities, and admins decide who gets access.

In Bundeling, you manage users from one central dashboard. You invite people based on their account details, such as their email address, and decide who gets access to the platform. This means you don’t need to exchange personal phone numbers to add someone to your business community.

With Bundeling, this process is automated if you have an integration with your HRM or CRM system, such as HubSpot or Salesforce. Add someone to the system? They’re automatically added to Bundeling. The same applies the other way around: remove someone from the system and they’re automatically removed from Bundeling too.

Users don’t need to share contact details with each other either. In Bundeling, email addresses can be hidden, so people within your community can chat without sharing their (personal) contact details. In a WhatsApp group, your phone number is visible to the other members by default. WhatsApp is now rolling out usernames that let you shield your number, but each user has to set these up themselves.

1.1 What happens when someone leaves the organisation?

This difference becomes especially clear when managing former members or employees.

When an admin removes someone from a WhatsApp group, the messages they’ve already received don’t automatically disappear from their phone. They no longer receive new group messages, but their existing chat history can remain. This is also worth noting for WhatsApp Communities: when leaving a community, a user can choose to keep their chat history.

In Bundeling, you manage access through user accounts. When you delete an account, you revoke that person’s access to the platform. This way, your organisation stays in control of who still has access to current information and communication within your community.

1.2 Invite-only platform

Bundeling is an invite-only platform. Only invited users get access. As an admin, you decide who is part of the community and which permissions come with that.

You can also set up contact between users the way you want. For example, you can require users to first invite each other as a business connection before they can chat directly.

2. Targeted communication

In a WhatsApp group, everyone basically receives the same messages. Within WhatsApp Communities, you can structure this further with different groups and announcements.

Bundeling goes a step further with labels. These let you share information with specific user groups, for example based on department, role, location, organisation or interest.

This way, an employee only receives the information that’s relevant to them. The same goes for members of an association or business partners of a business club.

WhatsApp now also lets you assign group members a role or position through member tags. However, member tags only show what role someone has within a group. With Bundeling’s labels, you share communication and content with specific target groups. This prevents people from disengaging because they receive too many irrelevant notifications.

3. Insight into reach and engagement

In WhatsApp, you can see who has read your own messages. But you don’t get an overview of how many people you reach or how engaged your community is.

Bundeling does give you that insight, through the dashboard: the back end of the platform, where admins can see everything that happens in the app in one overview. For example, you can see how many users have read a news item, who has registered for an activity and how active your community is.

This way, you know whether your message is getting through and can adjust your communication accordingly. For HR and communications teams, that’s valuable information: you no longer communicate based on gut feeling, but on insight.

4. More than just exchanging messages

Besides chat, WhatsApp also offers options for events, polls and file sharing. This makes it possible to organise different forms of communication within groups.

Bundeling combines these options with additional features for organising a community day to day. Think of:

• News and updates: share important information with your employees, members or partners in a targeted way.
• Activities and events: organise meetings, manage registrations, set participant limits and send automatic reminders.
• Ticketing and hospitality: ensure consistent and structured communication with your guests before, during and after every match day or event.
• Documents and knowledge sharing: bundle important files, videos, protocols and other information.
• Forms and polls: collect feedback, send surveys and involve your community in decisions.
• Networking and connections: let users discover each other and each other’s organisations.
• Integrations: connect your existing systems to Bundeling via an API or Datalink. This keeps users, departments and organisations up to date automatically. Our project team helps you set it up.

4.1 A complete environment in your own branding

With Bundeling, you fully customise the platform with your own branding and choose which features and integrations are relevant. This way, you bundle not only communication, but also information, activities and interaction, recognisable as your organisation.

5. Keeping work and private life separate

If you also use WhatsApp for business communication, work and private conversations often get mixed up.

With Bundeling, business communication has its own separate app. This keeps private conversations and business communication apart. What’s more, you decide whether to share your private number with colleagues, members or partners. You’re still reachable within Bundeling, even if you don’t share your personal contact details.

Going on holiday or temporarily unavailable? You can update your status in Bundeling, so other users know you’re away. You can also turn off all Bundeling push notifications at once in the app settings.

Because you bundle business communication, information and activities in one platform, you don’t have to mute different business groups and apps separately. This way, you decide when you receive business information and keep more distance from work communication outside working hours.

6. Data and security

Privacy and data management play an important role in business communication. Especially when you communicate with employees, members or business contacts, or about internal company information.

That doesn’t mean WhatsApp is unsafe to use. But it’s good to know that, besides messages, WhatsApp also processes other data, such as account information, technical information and information about groups and communities. According to its own privacy policy, this data is also transferred and stored outside the European Economic Area, including in the United States. (Source: WhatsApp Privacy Policy – EEA, section on transferring information outside the EEA)

Bundeling takes a different approach to data storage. Data is hosted in the Netherlands and falls under European legislation, including the GDPR. In addition, the organisation remains the owner of its data, even if the collaboration ends. And as an admin, you decide who has access to which information and communication.

The differences at a glance

Bundeling, WhatsApp or both?

WhatsApp has one big advantage: almost everyone already has it on their phone. You can get started right away, and for short, informal messages or quick coordination, it works perfectly well. That’s why it often feels like the easiest solution at first.

As your organisation or community grows, that often changes. Conversations, arrangements and files become scattered across groups, and it gets harder to keep track. That's why our advise is to centralise business communication, so you can manage users and share information in a targeted way. Bundeling offers this complete solution. And the sooner you lay that foundation, the easier the switch.

Does that automatically mean you have to replace WhatsApp completely? Not necessarily. Precisely because everyone already uses WhatsApp, the two tools can complement each other well: WhatsApp for quick, informal coordination and Bundeling for structured communication, information and activities within your organisation or community.

After all, the main goal isn’t necessarily for everything to run through one communication channel. It’s about consciously deciding where communication takes place and how you clearly bundle information, activities and interaction for your employees, members or partners.

Curious how Bundeling can work for your organisation? We’d be happy to show you how to bundle communication, information and activities in one platform.

This item is written by Ward Gugelot Head of Marketing