A pilot test is the first real-world trial of your SMS (or multi-channel) program before full deployment. After validating logic in the simulator, the pilot helps confirm that contacts, phones, carriers, channels, and flows all work together under real conditions.

In this guide, you’ll learn why pilots matter, what you need to run one, what to observe (clarity, timing, sorting into groups, “other” responses, opt-outs), and how to decide whether you’re ready to scale. Pilots also help your team practice facilitation and improve your evaluation approach before going bigger.

Once you’ve finalized a flow, a usability test helps confirm it delivers a clear, comfortable, and effective experience for your contacts. Unlike simulator or technical checks, usability testing focuses on how it feels to use the flow—ease of use, learnability, clarity, and satisfaction—before launching at scale.

In this guide, you’ll learn why usability testing matters, what you need to run it (representative test contacts, protocol, facilitator, observers), which metrics to collect (subjective + quantitative), and how to turn findings into improvements through prioritization, implementation, and retesting.

This guide helps you diagnose message delivery failures (especially on SMS) by checking message logs, confirming which channel was used, and reviewing provider-specific error details (e.g., Twilio error responses). It also shows where to find failed messages and how to share the right links with support for faster resolution.

A/B testing (also called split testing) helps you compare two or more versions of a message, flow, or campaign to see which performs better against a defined objective. In RapidPro, the Split Randomly action lets you route contacts evenly into different paths or versions of a flow. When combined with live testing on real channels, A/B testing supports data-driven decisions before scaling.

This article explains what A/B testing is, how to define objectives and hypotheses, how to structure tests so they remain reliable (test one variable at a time, use representative samples, run long enough), how to create flow versions, how to connect them using Split Randomly, and how to evaluate results using metrics like completion rate, opt-outs, and data quality.

The Flow Simulator is great for validating logic while you build, but it is not a final test. Before launching a flow to real contacts, you should always test in real conditions using live phone numbers or social channels.

This guide walks you through a simple pre-launch testing process: connect a real channel, create a small test group, run the flow end-to-end as a contact, review Results, and fix issues before going live. This helps you catch wording problems, logic mistakes, delivery failures, and channel configuration issues early.

Twilio trial numbers are useful for short-term exploration, but they cannot deliver real SMS reliably. Messages may appear to send while failing in delivery, and Twilio requires explicit contact verification on trial accounts. For proper SMS testing and production use, you must purchase and connect a Twilio phone number. If you want to test flow logic without SMS costs, use a non-SMS channel such as Telegram.

This guide shows how to check where a contact group is referenced across your workspace (flows, campaigns, broadcasts, and other logic). Reviewing usages helps you understand the impact before editing or deleting a group.

Opt-outs are a critical part of SMS compliance and customer trust. This guide explains how opt-outs work when you use an SMS gateway like Twilio (STOP/START keywords), how to identify opt-out blocks in logs (for example, error 21610), and how to track opt-outs inside RapidPro for reporting and automation.

You’ll also learn practical ways to inform contacts about opting out and opting back in, and how to prevent future delivery failures caused by provider-level unsubscribes.

Zapier lets you connect RapidPro with 1,000+ external apps (Google Sheets, Slack, Salesforce, Typeform, WordPress, and more) without writing code. With these connections, you can automatically move data between RapidPro and the tools your team already uses to build powerful workflows (“Zaps”).

Common examples include sending flow responses to Google Sheets, posting alerts to Slack when a contact replies, creating/updating CRM records from flow data, and triggering RapidPro flows when an event happens in another application.