What happens to your automations if you switch tools later?

Your contacts move, your flows do not, and the gap between those two is the thing to plan for.

What comes with you:

• Contacts, tags and custom fields. These are rows and they export as CSV. This is the asset that matters, because it is the audience you built.
• Conversation history, usually as an export rather than something the next tool can import into threads.
• Your channel connections, in the sense that you can revoke and reconnect them elsewhere. The connection belongs to your Meta account, not to the tool.

What does not come with you: the flows themselves. There is no standard format for an automation, so every tool rebuilds them. That sounds worse than it is. Rebuilding the five automations that matter takes a day, and most accounts only have five that matter even if they have thirty.

What actually hurts is what nobody thinks about: the links you put in captions and bio that point at a tool's domain, the QR codes in print, and anything a customer saved. Use your own domain for those from the start and switching is invisible to customers.

Two things to set up early so leaving is possible at all: check that contact export exists and works before you have twenty thousand rows, and use Personal access tokens if you want your own copy of the data on a schedule rather than a manual download.