A Free ManyChat Alternative for Instagram Creators? We Built It Open Source + FREE!

Anish — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 14:50:31 +0000

There’s a feature I kept seeing everywhere in creator marketing: “Comment LINK and I’ll DM it to you.”

It’s a genuinely useful workflow. A creator posts a Reel, someone comments a keyword, and they automatically receive a private message with a link, resource, product page, newsletter, or anything else the creator wants to share.

The interesting part is that this simple workflow usually lives inside a paid marketing platform. ManyChat is probably the most recognizable example, but if all you need is Instagram comment-to-DM automation, paying for an entire SaaS platform can feel excessive.

So we decided to build a free opensource alternative!

It’s called OpenInstaDM — an open-source, self-hosted Instagram automation tool for turning comments into DMs.

What does it actually do?

The core workflow is intentionally simple.

You create a campaign and choose a keyword, for example LINK. Someone comments that keyword on an Instagram post or Reel, Meta sends the event to OpenInstaDM, and the person gets a private reply with your message and link.

You can also send a public reply under the comment at the same time.

That means a campaign can look like this:

User comments "LINK" → OpenInstaDM detects it → keyword matches → DM is sent

There’s no complicated funnel builder required for the basic use case.

Why build another ManyChat alternative?

Honestly, because we wanted something we could own.

For creators, agencies and small businesses, comment-to-DM automation is often used for very specific things: sending a downloadable resource, sharing a product link, collecting interest, distributing a guide, or moving someone from a public comment into a private conversation.

The bigger reason was technical. We wanted to see whether we could build the entire workflow around the official Meta Instagram API, without relying on scraping or browser automation.

That distinction matters.

OpenInstaDM does not ask for an Instagram password, does not simulate a browser, and does not scrape Instagram pages. It works through Meta's supported API and webhook flow.

What can OpenInstaDM do?

The project has grown quite a bit beyond the original comment-to-DM idea.

You can create keyword-based Instagram campaigns, send personalized messages using {username}, optionally publish a public reply, and attach tracked links so you can see clicks and CTR for a campaign.
A campaign can also contain multiple link buttons instead of just one URL.

There’s a follow gate for cases where a creator wants someone to follow the account before receiving the resource. OpenInstaDM can check the available follow status through Meta and continue the flow once the requirement is met.

For people managing more than one account, OpenInstaDM supports multiple Instagram accounts, workspaces and team permissions, which also makes it more practical for agencies managing campaigns for clients.

There’s also an Instagram inbox, delivery logs, retries, rate limiting and campaign templates.

The point isn't to compete with every feature of a large marketing platform. The point is to cover the comment-to-DM workflow well enough that you can run it yourself.

The part that wasn't as simple as it looked

The first prototype was basically “receive webhook, find keyword, send message.”

That sounds easy until you start dealing with the real system around it.

Webhooks need verification. Events can be duplicated. API calls can fail. Message delivery has platform rules and rate limits. Some operations need retries, while others should be skipped. You also don't want your webhook request sitting there waiting for multiple external API calls to finish.

So the final version became a small distributed system rather than a single API route.

The web application receives the Instagram webhook, validates the event and creates a background job. Redis and BullMQ handle the queue, and a separate worker performs the actual message delivery and retry logic.

The stack is Next.js 16, React 19, TypeScript, Prisma 7, PostgreSQL, Redis, BullMQ, Auth.js, Tailwind CSS and the Meta Graph API.

That architecture also makes the project easier to self-host because the web application and worker can run independently.

Why open source?

Because this felt like a good candidate for it.

There are already plenty of hosted tools for Instagram automation. What we wanted to provide was the other option: something you can inspect, modify and run yourself.

OpenInstaDM is MIT licensed, so you can use the code, adapt it to your own workflow and contribute improvements back to the project.

It also means the implementation isn't hidden behind a SaaS dashboard. You can actually see how the webhook handling, campaign matching, queues, delivery logic and integrations work. That was one of the main reasons for building it in public.

Who is this for?

The obvious audience is creators who regularly use Instagram as a distribution channel.

For example, imagine a fitness creator posting a free workout plan, a developer sharing a template, an agency distributing a case study, or a business sharing a product catalogue.

Instead of telling everyone to “check the link in bio,” the creator can ask people to comment a keyword and automatically deliver the resource through Instagram DM.

Agencies can also run separate workspaces and accounts instead of building the entire automation flow from scratch for every client.

And for developers, it’s simply an interesting project to experiment with if you're working with the Meta API, webhooks, queues, Redis or background workers.

The bigger idea

The part I find most interesting isn't actually the Instagram automation. It's how many SaaS products package a relatively small technical workflow into a recurring product. Sometimes that makes complete sense. Hosting, support, analytics and a polished UI are valuable. But sometimes you just want the underlying capability.

That's the idea behind OpenInstaDM: take one useful automation — Instagram comment-to-DM — and make the implementation available as an open-source, self-hosted project.

No need to rebuild the workflow from scratch, and no need to treat the automation itself as a black box.

Try it

The project is available on GitHub: https://github.com/Xeven777/openinstadm

If you're searching for a free ManyChat alternative, an open-source Instagram automation tool, or specifically an Instagram comment-to-DM automation solution, that's exactly what we’re building. We built OpenInstaDM with the intention of keeping it useful, understandable and easy to extend.

If you work with the Instagram API and notice something we could handle better, contributions and technical feedback are welcome!!

DEV Community: Anish