What are flows?
A flow is a guided, multi-screen experience your audience completes inside WhatsApp. Rather than a free-text conversation, a flow presents a clear sequence of screens — questions, choices, inputs, and confirmations — and returns structured data when the person finishes.
Think of it as a form that lives natively inside a chat: familiar to the person filling it in, and clean and predictable for the team collecting the responses.
Why flows instead of chat?
| Free-text conversation | Flow |
|---|---|
| Open-ended, hard to parse | Structured, predictable responses |
| Easy to miss or mistype answers | Validated inputs and clear choices |
| Manual data clean-up | Ready-to-use structured data |
| Inconsistent experience | Same guided experience every time |
Anatomy of a flow
- Screens — each step the person sees, in order.
- Components — the inputs on a screen: text fields, single/multi-select choices, dates, and so on.
- Routing — how one screen leads to the next, including conditional paths.
- Responses — the structured data produced when the flow completes.
Built on WhatsApp Flows
Hop's flows build on Meta's WhatsApp Flows — the native WhatsApp capability for rich, interactive, form-like experiences. Hop gives you the authoring tools, publishing, short codes, and response management on top of it.
:::tip Go deeper on the platform For the underlying platform reference — supported components, data model, and limits — see Meta's official documentation: WhatsApp Flows → :::
How you build a flow in Hop
You have two paths, and you can mix them:
- The Flow Builder — assemble screens and components visually.
- XLSForm — author the flow in a spreadsheet using the XLSForm standard, then bring it into the Flow Builder. This is ideal if you already work with XLSForms or want to manage larger flows as a file.
👉 Next: Authoring flows with XLSForm.