Telegram vs WhatsApp comparison: Which app should you choose?

When it comes to cross-platform online messaging apps, it’s hard to ignore WhatsApp. With more than 2 billion users worldwide, it looks like WhatsApp doesn’t have a real competitor in this area.

However, the tech world has also seen a surge in privacy-focused cross-platform messaging apps over the past few months. Such is the case with Telegram.

With Facebook having been and continues to invest billions of dollars in WhatsApp, it is certain that the success of the application is guaranteed. However, if you are wondering whether to choose to use WhatsApp or the recently appreciated name Telegram, let’s take a look at some of the more prominent aspects of Telegram compared to WhatsApp.

Telegram PC works better than WhatsApp PC

While Telegram launched later than WhatsApp, surprisingly, Telegram’s desktop version performed somewhat better than its competition. Telegram supports Windows, Linux and Mac. Especially if you do not want to install any software, you can also use Telegram on a web browser extremely simply.

Anyone who has ever used WhatsApp’s web platform or desktop application knows all too well how difficult it is to make it work properly. You have to constantly open a website to keep it active. If not, you will have to sync again with your smartphone! This is quite inconvenient. In contrast, Telegram’s web platform works very well and it also gives you all the functions that you can find in the Android and iOS app versions.

Furthermore, the WhatsApp desktop application often experiences a complete shutdown, requiring a full reinstallation. This needs to be fixed soon.

Self-delete message feature

If you’re concerned about the privacy of your chats, Telegram offers end-to-end encryption. In other words, messages never pass through Telegram’s servers, but instead are encrypted and decoded in the user’s device.

With Telegram, you can also send self-deleting messages. In other words, you can set up chats to disappear completely after a certain amount of time. Telegram can also let you know if someone else has taken a screenshot of the conversation to further ensure privacy.

While WhatsApp also has a similar self-deletion feature, users will have to enable it for messages to be deleted automatically after seven days.

Flexible multimedia support

All popular online messaging platforms today support the feature of sending multimedia files via text messages. But Telegram does more than that. Along with allowing users to take a photo or select a photo from the gallery, the app also allows them to search for a photo directly from the Web or create their own stickers.

For videos, you can even see the exact dimensions of each video attached in the news before deciding whether to play it or not.

Telegram has a significantly larger file size limit

As of 2017, you still couldn’t send many types of files on WhatsApp, including Word, Excel, PDF files, and various video formats. Now you can share any type of file on WhatsApp. However, Facebook is still pretty stingy when it comes to the maximum file size you can share via text.

While Telegram allows file sizes up to 2GB, with WhatsApp you can only send a file up to 100MB, or just 16MB for videos shot on WhatsApp itself. This means that for files that are too large, you’ll have to take advantage of third-party cloud storage services, such as Google Drive or OneDrive, to then share the file as a link.

With Telegram, you can easily send and receive large files with ease. This is what WhatsApp is inferior to.

Username instead of phone number

On Telegram, if you don’t want to share your phone number when texting someone, no problem. You can give yourself a nickname and through it, anyone can add you to their contact list. This is a great way that Telegram respects your privacy.

Conversely, WhatsApp users have no choice but to add the person they want to talk to to their contacts, even if it’s just an online salesperson that you need to text for a moment.

Telegram supports group chats larger than WhatsApp

WhatsApp users can only create a chat group with up to 256 participants, while Telegram’s limit is 200,000. This is clearly a big difference.

Account deletion is easier

For example, you lose your phone and the crook has access to all apps and view everything, including your private chats. In this case, the user can delete his Telegram account from the web app and delete everything. With this small option, Telegram gives users peace of mind when it comes to personal information.

With WhatsApp, it can take up to 90 days for you to permanently delete your WhatsApp account. More importantly, in January, WhatsApp announced changes to its privacy policy for business accounts, integrating more closely with Facebook.

In addition, previous privacy scandals related to Facebook have also caused a massive “migration” of WhatsApp users to Telegram and other secure messaging applications.