In most WhatsApp API dashboards, "Bulk Send" and "Broadcast" sit right next to each other in the menu — and it's not always obvious why there are two, or which one you actually need for a given task.
Bulk sending is for a specific, immediate list — upload a CSV, pick a template, send now. It's the tool for "I need to notify these 200 people about tomorrow's event" or "send this week's dispatch list an update." It's simple, fast, and doesn't need ongoing tracking beyond the immediate send. You paste or upload numbers, pick a template, fill in any variables, and it goes out.
A broadcast is built for repeatable, trackable campaigns. It has a name, a status that changes over time (draft, scheduled, running, completed, paused, or cancelled), and delivery/read counters that keep updating as responses come in — rather than a single fire-and-forget action. You can schedule it for a future date and time instead of sending immediately, come back later and check exactly how many of your recipients received it, and pause a campaign mid-send if something looks wrong with the message or the list.
Bulk sends are usually just a CSV — upload, dedupe, send. Broadcasts can be smarter about who's included: you can target by CSV upload the same way, or by a saved contact group you've already built, or by contact tags (send only to contacts tagged "vip" or "trial-expiring," for example). Whichever way you target a broadcast, contacts who've opted out are excluded automatically before anything goes out — you don't have to remember to scrub the list yourself.
Both bulk sends and broadcasts support template variables — {{1}}, {{2}}, and so on — filled in per recipient, so "Hi {{1}}, your order {{2}} has shipped" becomes a genuinely personal message to each person on the list, not a generic blast. Broadcasts additionally let you override a variable for a specific recipient if one person's message needs to differ slightly from the rest of the batch.
Because broadcasts persist as a record with counters, you can come back a week later and see exactly how many of your 5,000 recipients received and read the message, and how many failed with what error. A bulk send gives you that information at send time but doesn't maintain an ongoing dashboard view the way a broadcast campaign does — once it's sent, it's sent, with no lingering record to revisit.
When a broadcast recipient fails, the record keeps the specific reason — a bad phone number, a missing template variable, or the contact having opted out since the campaign was scheduled — rather than just marking it "failed" with no explanation. That level of detail is only available because a broadcast is a persistent record you can go back and inspect; a bulk send that's already gone out doesn't give you that same forensic view after the fact.
If a broadcast partially fails — say, 40 out of 5,000 recipients bounce because of an invalid variable — you can reset just those failed recipients back to pending and resend to that smaller group, instead of re-uploading and re-sending your entire list from scratch. That kind of targeted retry isn't something a one-shot bulk send is built to support, since it doesn't keep a per-recipient record once the send is done.
A broadcast can be set to send at a specific future date and time, which matters for anything tied to a launch moment — a sale that starts at 10am, a webinar reminder pegged to the event time, a festival promotion timed to go out the morning of. Bulk send is immediate only, so anything time-sensitive that isn't meant to go out the second you click send belongs in a broadcast, not a bulk send.
Q: Can I pause a broadcast partway through? A: Yes — broadcasts support pausing and resuming, which isn't possible with a bulk send once it's started.
Q: Do opted-out contacts get excluded automatically? A: Yes, for broadcasts targeted by group or tag, opted-out contacts are filtered out before sending, regardless of how the list was built.
Q: Which one is cheaper to run? A: Neither — cost comes from WhatsApp's own per-conversation pricing based on template category and recipient count, not from which sending tool you use.