Building automated tools for WhatsApp often presents a difficult choice. Developers must choose between the official WhatsApp Business API—which comes with strict template approvals, conversation-based fees, and complex onboarding—and third-party libraries. Among the third-party options, many rely on browser automation frameworks like Puppeteer or Selenium to control an instance of WhatsApp Web. While functional, spinning up a headless web browser consumes significant memory and processing power, making it impractical for lightweight or multi-account deployments.

The Baileys library offers a different path. It is a TypeScript library designed for building WhatsApp