What is the difference between a channel and a connection?
A connection is the account you link to NicoChat. A channel is the bot that handles conversations on it. Understanding the difference explains what your plan charges for and what you can swap without losing anything.
Connection is the asset on the external platform: the Facebook page, the Instagram account, the WhatsApp number, the NicoZap instance. It is what brings the message in.
Channel — also called a bot — is the NicoChat robot. It is where the flows, the triggers, the contacts, the Kanban and the Live Chat handling live. It is what decides what to do with the message that arrived.
A channel automates a single connection. If you want to automate five WhatsApp numbers, you need five channels — and that is what your plan counts.
You can authorise more accounts than you automate: when you connect Facebook, for example, all your pages appear listed in NicoChat. But only one of them is handled by the channel — the others just sit there, with no automation.
Omni-Channel is the only channel that handles several connections at once — as long as they are of different types: a single bot, with Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp together, and a single contact base. It is one connection of each type, and there is one Omni-Channel per workspace.
In other words, two WhatsApp numbers still need two channels, even in Omni-Channel. Outside of it, the rule is even simpler: one channel, one connection.
The connection is the plumbing — you can swap it while keeping the bot. The most common case is moving from one WhatsApp QR Code provider to another, for example from Z-API to NicoZap: you unlink the old provider, connect the new one, and the channel stays the same, with the flows, the contacts and the history in place.
The contacts that already existed stay on the channel — but each contact stores in its own record the connection it came through. After the switch, some of them may not behave as expected; the ones arriving through the new connection do not have this problem.
This is the rule that explains everything else:
- Swapped the connection, same channel — the base stays. Nothing is lost.
- Created a new channel — the base does not come along. The new channel starts empty.
That is why, when you separate a connection from Omni-Channel to give it an exclusive channel, the new channel starts from scratch: no flows and no contacts. To carry the automation over, use a template — it brings the flows, but not the contacts.
The interface uses the same word for both things, and that is where almost all the confusion comes from:
- On the connect a channel screen, "channel" is the connection — the account you are authorising.
- In the Channels menu, "channel" is the bot — with its flows and contacts.
If you use the NicoChat API or MCP: what the documentation calls a channel appears there as a bot or flow. Meanwhile "channel" in the APIs usually refers to the connection.