Reports have suggested that WhatsApp has a poor quality of encryption, as opposed to Telegram. There are also seemingly different features between the two platforms. However, WhatsApp is much more popular in the messaging app world. Why is that?
Here are some key ways in which the two messaging applications differ from each other.
1. Cloud Vs Phone:
Telegram is a cloud-based messenger platform, which makes it seamless to access the messages from several devices at once. These devices can include tablets, phones and computers. Another advantage that it provides is that it lets the user share an unlimited number of photos and videos and files in formats like docs, zip and mp3 of up to 1.5 GB each. It does not use up space in your device and lets you store everything in a large amount on the cloud. It has a multi-datacenter infrastructure.
WhatsApp, on the other hand, is not cloud-based and hence comes with a limitation of your phone memory to store media. It eats up the storage of your device and once deleted from the phone, the media is gone forever.
2. File sharing:
Whether it’s a video or an image, the maximum size that WhatsApp allows you to send the media is 15 MB.
Telegram allows heavy file sharing of up to 1.5 GB, making it a much better platform than WhatsApp. All Telegram media is saved to the cloud and so it becomes easy to send a media to multiple contacts without uploading if you have sent it to one person from your contacts once.
3. Encryption:
One of the very important and differences that Telegram makes with WhatsApp is its very strong encryption. WhatsApp works on two layers of encryption whereas Telegram works on three-layer encryption. Messages, media and files from secret chats, as well as the contents of calls and the data stored in the Telegram Passport, are processed only on your device and on the device of the recipient. Before this data reaches the servers of Telegram, it is encrypted with a key known only to the sender and the receiver. While Telegram servers will handle this end-to-end encrypted data to deliver it to the recipient – or store it in the case of Telegram Passport data, there is no way of deciphering the actual information. In this case, they neither store nor process your personal data, rather we store and process random sequences of symbols that have no meaning without the keys which Telegram doesn’t have. Telegram uses MTProto protocol to encrypt the user data, for access to a server API from applications running on mobile devices.
4. Groups:
Telegram definitely wins in this case. The number of members that can be added to Telegram is one lakh, whereas WhatsApp only has 256 people in a group. In addition to that, Telegram also has key features such as voting for a pole in a group, providing a lot of convenience in situations encountered in groups. Another unique feature Telegram offers is channels, which is a feed in which only a set group of users may post and the rest of them can only read. This is a good feature to avoid spam messages in the group.
5. Sharing pictures and videos:
The pictures shared on Telegram are of the original quality and not pixelated. The maximum size of the video that you can share on Telegram is 1.5GB, as opposed to 16 MB on WhatsApp. Telegram also gives an option to the user to save the picture or the video to the device photo gallery, whereas WhatsApp saves it automatically to the gallery, adding to the memory without the user’s permission. But this feature may or may not be a disadvantage to all depending on the user preference.
6. Drafts:
Telegram allows you to save drafts to a contact. If you have typed a message and due to some reason miss sending that message and check the message hours later, it will be saved as draft. Unlike WhatsApp, which doesn’t save drafts for long. Telegram also lets you save messages for yourself, like a ‘keep’, under a section called ‘ ‘Saved Messages’.
7. Switch numbers:
Telegram users can easily switch phone numbers on their account and once they do, all their contacts will automatically have that new number registered. WhatsApp only allows one app on one for one number.
8. Support to multilingual languages:
Telegram allows users to select the language that is different from their phone language. WhatsApp does not support multilingual languages.
9. Formatting:
WhatsApp has a number of formatting ways. It can format words and make them bold, italic or strikethrough. Such editing is not available on Telegram.
Conclusion
A lot of features on WhatsApp today have been adopted after they were introduced on Telegram. For example, the feature of deleting the message after it is sent, and replying to a particular message were available on Telegram way before they came to WhatsApp. There might be less key differences on both platforms today, but Telegram still wins in a number of features.
