WorkBuddy ranks first on the leaderboard, but that's not why I keep it

Yesterday afternoon I was replying to customer service messages when a push notification popped up on my phone, saying Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance were going to war over AI office tools. I didn't open it. Later that night while packing, I thought of it again and searched it up, and saw a set of numbers: in June 2026, WorkBuddy's monthly visits were 20.97 million, taking roughly a third of the traffic among 17 products on its own, with the third-ranked QoderWork at 7.88 million. The three head products from Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance combined came to about 56.22 million, leaving only 4.4 million for the rest to split.

My first reaction after reading it wasn't happiness — it was doing the math. How much of those twenty-some million came from shop owners like me doing five people's work alone, I don't know. But I do know I've really moved a lot of work into it these past two months.

Let me be clear first: I didn't start out going for it. Two months ago I was forced into it by spreadsheets. Customer service records, order notes, inventory reconciliation — scattered across Excel, WeChat, and the Xianyu backend in three places, and just copying and pasting took over an hour a day. At the time I tried a few spreadsheet AI plugins, each one more boastful than the last — install it and it wants authorization for this and that, batch processing is billed by the row, and I got dizzy. Later I moved the work onto WorkBuddy and built a "spreadsheet work pipeline," breaking each month's fixed actions into repeatable flows, and only then did it smooth out. I wrote a post about this recently.

Looking back now, what really made me stay with WorkBuddy isn't how strong its model is — it's that it lives inside the WeChat ecosystem.

That sounds like a platitude, but let me do the math for you. I operate my computer from my phone to get work done, and when it's done I send it straight to the client or the girl who helps me part-time via WeChat, with no exporting files or switching apps in between. Before, after processing a reconciliation statement on the computer, I had to download it, transfer it to my phone, then dig it out of WeChat to send — one wrong step and I'd have to start over. Now when I go out to buy stock, I can run yesterday's customer service summary right from the car and send it off. The time saved in this chain, as I've measured it, is about twenty minutes a day. Twenty minutes isn't much, but I'm doing five people's work alone, so twenty minutes is twenty minutes.

But it's no fun just saying good things. In two months of use, I've stepped in plenty of pits.

Once I changed a scheduled task to run in the middle of the night, and the next morning when I opened it, the status showed success but the folder was empty. I asked on the forum and someone had run into the same thing. I later troubleshooted it myself — probably the path permissions weren't set up right; changing it to a fixed directory fixed it. WorkBuddy isn't free of these little quirks — it piles on features fast, so the corners get rough. If you're the kind of user who sets it up once and never wants to touch it again, be mentally prepared: the first few task runs must be checked manually. My habit now is that for the first three days any automation task is live, I go check the output directory every morning to confirm the files were actually generated, not just that I saw a green status light.

Speaking of which, I have to mention a comparison. I used Feishu Bitable for about a month — it's genuinely comfortable for multi-person collaborative tables, but my shop is just me, so the collaboration need is basically zero, and its strengths don't come into play for me. I looked at QoderWork — 7.88 million visits isn't bad, and Alibaba's integration capability is strong, but it leans more toward enterprise deployments, and I alone don't need that many layers and permissions. It's not that they're bad, it's that they don't fit the ailment.

WorkBuddy's position right now is quite delicate. The news says it cut in exactly at this time window, and the boost from the WeChat ecosystem makes it hard for other products to replicate. I buy half of that. WeChat's distribution and connection capability is indeed a card unique to Tencent — ByteDance's Doubao and Alibaba's Qianwen Office can't copy it even if they try. But the other half is: cutting in during the window doesn't mean you get to stay. The big players are all pouring resources in — Alibaba's QoderWork merged into Qianwen Office, ByteDance integrating Feishu, and Tencent itself is adjusting, concentrating its energy from multi-line exploration onto WorkBuddy. The standard for judging whether a product is good will shift from "does it exist" to "is it stable." The day my automation task produces another empty folder, my trust in it will have to be recalculated.

So my judgment is this. If you're a shop owner working alone, a freelancer, or the person in a small team who manages everything, WorkBuddy is worth picking up right now, especially if you already do business inside WeChat. Its value isn't in how long the feature list is — it's in stitching your work together with your communication channel. But if you're in a company of dozens or hundreds of people, needing a strict permission system, audit logs, and multi-person collaboration, then WorkBuddy may not be the optimal solution right now — Feishu or Alibaba's enterprise deployment might be more stable.

What I plan to do next is move the customer service side in too. Right now I'm still running back and forth between WeChat customer service and a customer service tool — after nearly a month of use, what can be automated is automated, but the summary and analysis are still manual. I want to try whether WorkBuddy can run the daily customer service records into a trend table, so I don't have to wait until the end of the month to discover which problem keeps recurring. If it works, I'll write another post.

Let the big players fight their fight and the rankings change as they will. I'm just a shop owner — all I care about is whether I can do one less person's work tomorrow.