Gallabox vs Interakt vs Zoko: An Arabic-First Take

These are three solid products made for the Indian SMB market, yet Gulf businesses put them on their shortlists regardless. Gallabox has a genuine Dubai footprint, Interakt offers the lowest-priced route to unlimited agents, and Zoko serves Shopify stores. Not one of the three promotes an Arabic interface.

Pricing and product claims for all three competitors were verified on 6 September 2026 against gallabox.com/pricing, interakt.shop/pricing and zoko.io/pricing. All three revise their prices frequently, so confirm the numbers again before committing to anything. We have not operated these products ourselves; everything below is drawn from what each company publishes.

All three at a glance

For entry price, read the lowest paid tier each company publishes. Where Gulf-sized teams actually feel the cost gap is the seat column.

A single figure in that table needs a footnote. Gallabox puts out three distinct price lists that are not currency conversions of one another. Basic costs 2,999 rupees, or $150, or 549 dirhams. Measured at today's rates, the rupee list sits near a third of the other two. Gulf buyers fall under the dirham list, which means the real comparison for a Riyadh merchant runs $150 versus $55 versus $49.99, not the numbers quoted in Indian reviews of the same product.

Gallabox

Of the three, this is the only one with a genuine commercial presence in the Gulf. Dirham pricing is published, an office operates in Dubai, and a standing offer exists for UAE free-zone companies.

What it's good at

Coverage. The entry plan carries WhatsApp, Instagram and a web widget, plus a shared team inbox with collaboration tools. Their own count puts message templates above 500 and integrations beyond 30, and AI voice minutes arrive with the Advanced and Enterprise tiers, which outdoes anything either rival offers. For a reader in the UAE, the free-zone offer is the most compelling item on their site: twelve months of the entry plan costing only Meta's conversation charges, aimed at new customers holding a free-zone trade licence and an active website. Should you meet the conditions, you get a year of software at no cost, and you should claim it.

Arabic and RTL, in practice

In English, Gallabox pitches itself to Gulf businesses and describes chatbots able to hold conversations in Arabic. Yet as of the verification date at the top of this article, its public pages claim no Arabic dashboard and no right-to-left interface for the team operating it. Press that distinction hard in any demo, since the two are separate engineering problems: your agents can spend the whole day inside an English, left-to-right inbox even while the model answers in Arabic.

Verdict

For a UAE free-zone company that meets the conditions for the free year, this is the correct pick, as it is for bigger teams wanting voice plus numerous channels in one place. But $150 per month on the dirham list, capped at three users on the entry plan, is a steep bill for a clinic of five. Put the question directly: what language is the interface in?

Interakt

Pricing here is the most conventional of the three, and the page itself is the easiest to parse: $55 and $69 for the two paid tiers, with taxes added on top.

What it's good at

Every paid plan includes unlimited agents. That is genuinely uncommon, and it counts for a great deal when the team is large and the budget is not. Past that point you get a true commerce toolkit: catalog syncing from Shopify, WooCommerce or a spreadsheet, native payments, campaigns, and a standalone Sales CRM product for teams that prefer a pipeline over an inbox. With Advanced comes a branching chatbot able to call your APIs, which suits you when the logic is deterministic and every branch is known ahead of time.

Arabic and RTL, in practice

Nowhere on Interakt's own pages do Arabic, right-to-left support, or the Middle East as a market get a mention. The pricing gives the game away: rupees are the only currency quoted for the Sales CRM plan, and the message rate card shown on the pricing page is India's. What exists here is a product built for India that also sells abroad, with no pretense about it, and that honesty counts for something.

Verdict

With twelve agents and a support team that works in English, $55 for Interakt and unlimited seats produces arithmetic few would contest. Then attach the AI agents package at $74.99 per month and the situation shifts: about $130 now, before any message costs, for AI whose meter starts running after 100 messages.

Zoko

About its audience, Zoko hedges nothing. Its homepage states it is purpose built for growing Shopify brands, and the entire product derives from that one commitment.

What it's good at

The strengths are commerce mechanics and, at the upper tiers, volume economics. Automation arrives as flows: eleven come free, and each custom flow costs $5.99. The AI, meanwhile, is sold not as one general assistant but as agents scoped to individual jobs: product questions for one, where-is-my-order for another, selling for the third. Billing tracks the same logic, at $0.09 per resolution for the first two agents and 3 percent of order value for the third, the first hundred free every time. Payment lands when the work succeeds, which beats our meter on fairness for any store with quiet months. Elite folds 100,000 conversations into $139.99, a genuine volume price, and Starter comes with unlimited agents.

The weak spot sits at the low end. On top of Meta's own fee, Starter's $49.99 adds a $0.015 markup to every conversation, which makes the cheapest plan the one that bills you twice.

Arabic and RTL, in practice

Arabic, right-to-left layout, and any Gulf market go unmentioned across Zoko's homepage, its pricing page, and its integration marketing. Given a product bound this tightly to Shopify, that reads as consistency, not shock. A Shopify store selling in English is where its centre of gravity sits.

Verdict

For a Shopify store moving serious volume, Zoko ranks first among the three, and on pure commerce automation it likely edges us too. Off Shopify, though, the bulk of what you would pay for never touches your business. The platform-independent case for WhatsApp in an online store is covered in our guide to WhatsApp for e-commerce.

Shopify versus Salla

This is where the gap belongs to us. No Shopify integration exists on our side: not partial, not via a connector, not arriving soon. When your store runs on Shopify, Zoko and Interakt can read your catalog while we cannot, and that deserves heavy weight in your decision.

Salla is what we built instead, since that is the platform our customers sell on. A catalog import this is not. Shipping answers come from the store's actual shipping zones and carriers instead of the assistant asking customers which city they live in; stock is read per branch; and every product variant shown to a customer is one they can genuinely purchase. Refreshes run hourly on the connection, a store whose Salla authorisation is revoked disconnects on its own, and reinstalling reconnects it. Full details sit in the Salla WhatsApp assistant guide.

The commercial side carries two caveats. Salla begins at Starter and above, which leaves the free plan without it. And when your subscription runs through the Salla app marketplace instead of through us, billing comes from Salla and Starter becomes the entry plan on that path, since no free app is permitted in the marketplace.

What transfers from the Indian SMB market, and what doesn't

Plenty transfers, and that deserves stating before the exceptions. Years ahead of the Gulf, India ran the WhatsApp commerce experiment at a scale no other market has matched, and all three products carry that experience with them. Broadcast mechanics, template discipline, catalog flows, cart recovery, the very shape of a shared inbox: Indian volume taught every one of those lessons, and every one of them holds up here. Anyone building in this space who says otherwise has not looked closely.

Language and the price floor do not travel. The language gap is retrieval, not translation: when a customer typing وش سعر التوصيل meets a knowledge base written in formal Arabic, a search built for English will not match it, however strong the model drafting the reply may be. The price problem is that Indian tiers presume the rupee list while Gulf buyers receive the dollar one, and there a $150 entry plan begins looking like an odd fit for a business of three.

The honest shortlist, then. Zoko for anyone on Shopify at volume. Interakt for a large English-speaking team working to a tight budget. Gallabox's free year for a UAE free-zone company holding a valid licence. And for selling to Gulf customers in Arabic, on Salla or on no platform whatsoever, with a team too small for per-seat pricing: that is the case we built for, priced from nothing up to $9.