Now, this is supposed to be my personal opinion based on my usage of both the Instant Messaging applications.

The choice here is purely personal and according to what you think is the better choice for you.

So, I would just put forth a brief idea about the features of Telegram and how it stacks against WhatsApp, the most popular IM out there.

• User Base –

This is somewhere Telegram is far behind WhatsApp at the moment, but is growing steadily. WhatsApp has had far more years of experience and development than Telegram did. Telegram is new to the IM scene, and it entered the market at a time when WhatsApp was ruling the Instant Messaging game and brought about a revolution of free-of-cost text messaging. Another reason is that people resist change and see it as being negative. They only follow what their peers use and hence Telegram lacks the user base and market share WhatsApp currently enjoys.

• Availability-

Telegram is available over most of the operating platforms people use. You can use Telegram on Android, iOS and even on Windows Phones. It has dedicated applications for Windows OS, MacOS and Linux as well.

WhatsApp lacks behind in such wide range of availability on different platforms.

• Cross Platform Usage –

Now this has got to be the best feature about Telegram.

Telegram is totally cloud based IM application. They use a login based system to get into your account and everything syncs to your device including your chats, photos, videos and contacts as well.

Another great feature is that you can simultaneously login to your account over different devices all at the same time.

So you can leave a conversation on your phone and continue that on your work PC or laptop.

You have a dedicated menu option to view all your active Telegram sessions on different devices. This is to provide extra security and to be aware of the devices currently logged into your account. You can terminate any session from inside this menu.

This marvelous feature is something WhatsApp does not provide.

• Privacy –

Privacy settings on Telegram are some of the best ones I have seen around on IMs.

Furthermore, Telegram associates an account with a phone number as well as an username. So if you’re not sure about giving someone your personal phone number, you can just share your username to connect and stay in touch, while the other person would never get to know your cell number (unless you decide to tell them yourself)

Somewhat extra privacy, that is not available to WhatsApp users.

• Groups, Supergroups & Channels

WhatsApp does not even compare to the groups and channels that are provided by Telegram. You can join by an invite or a specified link. There are supergroups with max user limit of 5000 (WhatsApp doesn’t even compare). Then there are channels, which broadcasts content over to the members of the particular channel, the content varies from news, memes, videos, movies (HD), music, TV shows and much more. You can download any of the above content from a channel. (Admins of the channel take full advantage of the sweet file sharing capabilities on Telegram)

• File Sharing

Telegram has better file sharing capabilities than WhatsApp (by a huge margin). The photos you share are not highly compressed and pixelated (like WhatsApp does). There are no limits on video file sizes. Hence, channels broadcast movies in HD quality, which you can download.

Taking advantage of the cloud system Telegram is based on, you can download a particular file multiple times, on multiple platforms if you want.

WhatsApp doesn’t allow this – once you delete a photo or video, there is no way to re-download it.

• Secret Chats (end-to-end encryption)

Using a cloud based messaging service meant that Telegram could not offer end-to-end encryption, like WhatsApp does. They addressed this issue by introducing Secret Chats, which provide end-to-end encryption. These chats have self destructing messages and no content is saved on the cloud. So if you log out of a device, the chat would be lost forever.

• Artificial Intelligence based Bots

Telegram has bot-support. So, developers can publish their bots and people can use them for stuff like fetching weather info, news headlines and even play games.

Pretty cool feature (although, needs a lot of work and development right now)

However, there are certain features like Voice Calling and Video Calling on WhatsApp which trump out Telegram. The reason is simple, WhatsApp had enough time to develop and improve their application, Telegram is new and just launched it’s voice calling feature.

The thing to note is that, Telegram is growing at such an enormous pace even with such huge competition from world leading IM WhatsApp, recently acquired by a deep pocket MNC – Facebook.

In my opinion, Telegram is far better than any IM out there. I would place my bets on Telegram to put WhatsApp behind in a few years.

Telegram is going to leave WhatsApp in the dust.