Over the past few months, two prominent messaging services have been battling it out for a place in the heart of mobile communication. They are telegram and whatsapp. Both have offered a unique alternative to SMS and email when it comes to chatting and sharing photos, videos and music with friends and family. Now it is time to see which one has the upper hand in the fight for market share in the fast growing world of mobile communication.
There are several similarities between these two messaging services. Both are free and both have over 300 million users. The differences lie in the ease of use and ability to use them from almost any location. Let’s compare these two giants to see what you get for your money when you go to buy a messaging app for your smartphone.
Telegram by WhatsApp: While both companies have free messaging, their individual differences become clear when comparing the apps side-by-side. Telegram is the newer service that started offering free messaging last year. Their focus is on security more than user friendliness, which can be seen by the lack of user-friendly buttons, unclear settings and limited options for multimedia.
It is easy to use and has an intuitive interface that allows you to quickly get right into the conversation. Unlike Facebook, you will not be forced to accept new friends. Unlike whatsapp, you can continue where you left off from. Telegram does not limit your interactions and provides a platform where you can chat away without feeling pressured or talked down to.
Whatsapp on the other hand, has many user options and allows you to share your messages with anyone you’d like. You can create groups to share pictures, videos and messages with like minded people and can send each other customised apps and messages. Whatsapp also has a solid security platform, allowing you to browse through different profile settings to ensure you only allow people you trust to access your phone.
However, as a messenger, Telegram offers a much more polished experience. The interface looks and works a lot like the iPhone’s native messaging system. You can chat, make calls and send and receive files right from your phone. This is an incredibly powerful feature and one that will appeal to those who are more technically savvy. Those without much attention to detail or who use their smartphone more for receiving and sending messages may find Telegram much easier to use.
As a native app, Telegram is not cross-platform. Therefore, you must rely on your own device to use it. This means if you use a smartphone of any kind (and we recommend using a smartphone) to access Telegram, you must have an iPhone or an Android device to use the application. If you don’t, you won’t be able to use it.
Also Read: Frontend Vs Backend Developers: All You Need to Know
We would also like to take a look at the functionality of both messaging systems. Telegram offers the same basic functions as WhatsApp, with group chat, video chat and file sharing functionality. However, Telegram has a few extra features that WhatsApp doesn’t, such as voice and SMS texting. With Telegram, you can even see who is chatting from your phone. We feel that this extra functionality is more useful in some situations than in others, but it definitely adds a nice feature to this messaging app.
We also looked at the notification settings on each messaging app. With Telegram, you can set up which apps are visible on your phone’s lock screen. This is useful if you want to have multiple chat apps open at the same time. With most other apps, only certain apps are displayed on the lock screen, such as Skype or Google Talk.
As with most messaging systems, there isn’t much difference between Telegram and WhatsApp. The apps are almost identical, so we’ll focus our comparison on functionality. As with many messaging apps, you can customize your settings to make sure you get the experience you want. You can use a color theme or change it to something more exciting.
With Telegram and WhatsApp, there are a handful of different options that will appeal to you the most. For example, one of the best things about these two messaging systems is that they provide excellent phone and web browsing functionality, which means you can do all kinds of things on your phone while you chat. They both have excellent instant messenger functionality as well, which means you can use one application to communicate with your friends and one application to chat with them. If you’re looking for a messaging solution and one that’s easy to use, then these two phones are definitely worth checking out.
Image credit: megainteresting.com