Alternatives to WhatsApp logo

Alternatives to WhatsApp

Telegram , Skype, Hangouts, Slack, and HipChat are the most popular alternatives and competitors to WhatsApp.
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What is WhatsApp and what are its top alternatives?

It is a cross-platform mobile messaging app for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Phone and Nokia. It allows users to send text messages and voice messages, make voice and video calls, and share images, documents, user locations, and other media.
WhatsApp is a tool in the Phone category of a tech stack.

Top Alternatives to WhatsApp

  • Telegram
    Telegram

    Users can send messages and exchange photos, videos, stickers, audio and files of any type. It provides instant messaging, simple, fast, secure and synced across all your devices. ...

  • Skype
    Skype

    Skype’s text, voice and video make it simple to share experiences with the people that matter to you, wherever they are. ...

  • Hangouts
    Hangouts

    It is a communication platform which includes messaging, video chat, and VOIP features. ...

  • Slack
    Slack

    Imagine all your team communication in one place, instantly searchable, available wherever you go. That’s Slack. All your messages. All your files. And everything from Twitter, Dropbox, Google Docs, Asana, Trello, GitHub and dozens of other services. All together. ...

  • HipChat
    HipChat

    HipChat is a hosted private chat service for your company or team. Invite colleagues to share ideas and files in persistent group chat rooms. Get your team off AIM, Google Talk, and Skype — HipChat was built for business. ...

  • Viber
    Viber

    It is a cross-platform instant messaging and voice over IP application provided as freeware for the Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS platforms. ...

  • Zoom
    Zoom

    Zoom unifies cloud video conferencing, simple online meetings, and cross platform group chat into one easy-to-use platform. Our solution offers the best video, audio, and screen-sharing experience across Zoom Rooms, Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and H.323/SIP room systems. ...

  • Twilio
    Twilio

    Twilio offers developers a powerful API for phone services to make and receive phone calls, and send and receive text messages. Their product allows programmers to more easily integrate various communication methods into their software and programs. ...

WhatsApp alternatives & related posts

Telegram  logo

Telegram

739
626
51
A cloud-based instant messaging and voice over IP service
739
626
+ 1
51
PROS OF TELEGRAM
  • 16
    Lightweight
  • 8
    Free
  • 8
    Unlimited history
  • 8
    Great bot API
  • 4
    Can hide phone number
  • 3
    Media editor
  • 2
    Delete without a trace
  • 2
    Great bot
CONS OF TELEGRAM
  • 3
    Requires phone number
  • 3
    Notification customisation is limited
  • 2
    No video call

related Telegram posts

Skype logo

Skype

17K
13.3K
653
Voice calls, instant messaging, file transfer, and video conferencing
17K
13.3K
+ 1
653
PROS OF SKYPE
  • 258
    Free, widespread
  • 147
    Desktop and mobile apps
  • 110
    Because i have to :(
  • 57
    Low cost international calling
  • 56
    Good for international calls
  • 10
    Best call quality anywhere, generally
  • 5
    Beautiful emojis
  • 4
    Chat bots
  • 2
    Translator
  • 2
    Skype for business integration with Outlook
  • 1
    United kingdom
  • 1
    Not the Best, but get the job done
CONS OF SKYPE
  • 5
    Really high CPU utilization during video/screenshare
  • 3
    Not always reliable
  • 3
    Outdated UI
  • 3
    Birthday notifications are annoying
  • 3
    The worst indicator noises of any app ever
  • 2
    Finding/adding people isn't easy

related Skype posts

Dmitry Mukhin

Uploadcare is mostly remote team and we're using video conferencing all the time both for internal team meetings and for external sales, support, interview, etc. calls. I think we've tried every solution there is on the market before we've decided to stop with Zoom.

Tools just plainly don't work (Skype), are painful to install for external participants (Webex and other "enterprise" solutions) can't properly handle 10+ participants calls (Google Hangouts Chat).

Zoom just works. It has all required features and even handles bad connections very graciously. One of the best tool decisions we've ever made :)

See more
Mark Nelissen

I use Slack because it offers the best experience, even on the free tier (which we're still using). As a comparison, I have had in depth experience with HipChat, Stride, Skype, Google Chat (the new service), Google Hangouts (the old service). For self hosted, Mattermost is open source and claims to support most Slack integrations, but I have not extensively investigated this claim.

See more
Hangouts logo

Hangouts

84
120
4
A communication platform
84
120
+ 1
4
PROS OF HANGOUTS
  • 4
    Free
CONS OF HANGOUTS
    Be the first to leave a con

    related Hangouts posts

    Slack logo

    Slack

    119.4K
    95.9K
    6K
    Bring all your communication together in one place
    119.4K
    95.9K
    + 1
    6K
    PROS OF SLACK
    • 1.2K
      Easy to integrate with
    • 876
      Excellent interface on multiple platforms
    • 849
      Free
    • 694
      Mobile friendly
    • 690
      People really enjoy using it
    • 331
      Great integrations
    • 315
      Flexible notification preferences
    • 198
      Unlimited users
    • 184
      Strong search and data archiving
    • 155
      Multi domain switching support
    • 82
      Easy to use
    • 40
      Beautiful
    • 27
      Hubot support
    • 22
      Unread/read control
    • 21
      Slackbot
    • 19
      Permalink for each messages
    • 17
      Text snippet with highlighting
    • 15
      Quote message easily
    • 14
      Per-room notification
    • 13
      Awesome integration support
    • 12
      Star for each message / attached files
    • 12
      IRC gateway
    • 11
      Good communication within a team
    • 11
      Dropbox Integration
    • 10
      Slick, search is great
    • 10
      Jira Integration
    • 9
      New Relic Integration
    • 8
      Great communication tool
    • 8
      Combine All Services Quickly
    • 8
      Asana Integration
    • 7
      This tool understands developers
    • 7
      XMPP gateway
    • 7
      Google Drive Integration
    • 7
      Awesomeness
    • 6
      Replaces email
    • 6
      Twitter Integration
    • 6
      Google Docs Integration
    • 6
      BitBucket integration
    • 5
      Jenkins Integration
    • 5
      GREAT Customer Support / Quick Response to Feedback
    • 5
      Guest and Restricted user control
    • 4
      Clean UI
    • 4
      Excellent multi platform internal communication tool
    • 4
      GitHub integration
    • 4
      Mention list view
    • 4
      Gathers all my communications in one place
    • 3
      Perfect implementation of chat + integrations
    • 3
      Easy
    • 3
      Easy to add a reaction
    • 3
      Timely while non intrusive
    • 3
      Great on-boarding
    • 3
      Threaded chat
    • 3
      Visual Studio Integration
    • 3
      Easy to start working with
    • 3
      Android app
    • 2
      Simplicity
    • 2
      Message Actions
    • 2
      It's basically an improved (although closed) IRC
    • 2
      So much better than email
    • 2
      Eases collaboration for geographically dispersed teams
    • 2
      Great interface
    • 2
      Great Channel Customization
    • 2
      Markdown
    • 2
      Intuitive, easy to use, great integrations
    • 1
      Great Support Team
    • 1
      Watch
    • 1
      Multi work-space support
    • 1
      Flexible and Accessible
    • 1
      Better User Experience
    • 1
      Archive Importing
    • 1
      Travis CI integration
    • 1
      It's the coolest IM ever
    • 1
      Community
    • 1
      Great API
    • 1
      Easy remote communication
    • 1
      Get less busy
    • 1
      API
    • 1
      Zapier integration
    • 1
      Targetprocess integration
    • 1
      Finally with terrible "threading"—I miss Flowdock
    • 1
      Complete with plenty of Electron BLOAT
    • 1
      I was 666 star :D
    • 1
      Dev communication Made Easy
    • 1
      Integrates with just about everything
    • 1
      Very customizable
    • 0
      Platforms
    • 0
      Easy to useL
    CONS OF SLACK
    • 13
      Can be distracting depending on how you use it
    • 6
      Requires some management for large teams
    • 6
      Limit messages history
    • 5
      Too expensive
    • 5
      You don't really own your messages
    • 4
      Too many notifications by default

    related Slack posts

    Lucas Litton
    Founder & CEO at Macombey · | 24 upvotes · 312.8K views

    Sentry has been essential to our development approach. Nobody likes errors or apps that crash. We use Sentry heavily during Node.js and React development. Our developers are able to see error reports, crashes, user's browsers, and more, all in one place. Sentry also seamlessly integrates with Asana, Slack, and GitHub.

    See more
    Jakub Olan
    Node.js Software Engineer · | 17 upvotes · 435.5K views

    Last time we shared there information about our decision about using YouTrack over Jira actually we found much better solution that our team have loved. Linear is a minimalistic issue tracker that integrates well with Sentry, GitHub, Slack and Figma which are our basic tools. I would like to recommend checking out Linear as a potential alternative to "heavy" issue trackers, maybe at enterprises that may not work but when we're a startup that works awesome!

    See more
    HipChat logo

    HipChat

    1.3K
    890
    684
    Supercharge team collaboration with group chat and IM
    1.3K
    890
    + 1
    684
    PROS OF HIPCHAT
    • 144
      Integrates well with a lot of developer tools
    • 96
      Developer-friendly
    • 85
      Clients for every major platform
    • 70
      Free unlimited users
    • 70
      Mobile-friendly
    • 40
      Extremely easy to use for non-tech guys
    • 39
      Good api integration
    • 38
      Irc-like
    • 28
      Reliable
    • 26
      Feature rich
    • 13
      Affordable at $2/user
    • 6
      Email notifications
    • 6
      Text Messages
    • 4
      More developer-friendly than Skype
    • 3
      Full text search
    • 3
      JIRA integration
    • 3
      Integrates with Atlassian products
    • 2
      Team Chat Rooms
    • 1
      Intergration with all the things
    • 1
      gitlab
    • 1
      tagia
    • 1
      256-bit SSL encryption to transmit your data
    • 1
      Fast
    • 1
      On-Premise deployment
    • 1
      Trello integration
    • 1
      salt
    CONS OF HIPCHAT
    • 1
      Purchased by and merged with Slack
    • 1
      Discontinued with the Atlassian Stack

    related HipChat posts

    Mark Nelissen

    I use Slack because it offers the best experience, even on the free tier (which we're still using). As a comparison, I have had in depth experience with HipChat, Stride, Skype, Google Chat (the new service), Google Hangouts (the old service). For self hosted, Mattermost is open source and claims to support most Slack integrations, but I have not extensively investigated this claim.

    See more
    Jack Graves

    We use Microsoft Teams as our primary workplace collaboration tool. It enables our team to work remotely and still collaborate on projects - with integration to JIRA and Confluence, the tool enables us to create War Rooms when problems occur and also provides information-sharing capabilities. Replaced HipChat.

    See more
    Viber logo

    Viber

    18
    19
    8
    Free and secure calls and messages
    18
    19
    + 1
    8
    PROS OF VIBER
    • 5
      Free
    • 2
      Easy to use
    • 1
      Free calls and chats
    CONS OF VIBER
    • 1
      Lack of interaction with new people
    • 1
      No servers, only group chats
    • 1
      Ad supported

    related Viber posts

    Zoom logo

    Zoom

    1.7K
    1.9K
    155
    Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing
    1.7K
    1.9K
    + 1
    155
    PROS OF ZOOM
    • 25
      Web conferencing made easy
    • 16
      Remote control option
    • 13
      Draw on screen
    • 12
      Very reliable
    • 11
      In-meeting chat is pretty good
    • 9
      Free
    • 9
      Pair programming sessions with shared controls
    • 8
      Easy to share meeting links/invites
    • 7
      Good Sound Quality
    • 6
      Cloud recordings for meetings
    • 5
      Great mobile app
    • 4
      Virtual backgrounds
    • 4
      Recording Feature
    • 4
      Other people use it
    • 4
      User Friendly actions
    • 2
      Reactions (emoticons)
    • 2
      Auto reconnecting
    • 2
      Chrome extension is great to easily create meetings
    • 2
      While sharing screen, you can still see your video
    • 2
      Mute all participants at once
    • 2
      When ending the videocall, everybody gets kicked
    • 2
      Different options for blocking chat
    • 1
      Easily share video with audio
    • 1
      /zoom on Slack
    • 1
      Registration form
    • 1
      Meant for business and education
    • 0
      Zoom
    CONS OF ZOOM
    • 20
      Limited time if you are a basic member
    • 14
      Limited Storage
    • 11
      Hate how sharing your screen defaults to Full Screen
    • 10
      Quality isn't great (Free)
    • 9
      No cursor highlight on screenshare.
    • 8
      Potential security flaws
    • 7
      Onboarding process for new users is not intuitive
    • 5
      Virtual background quality isn't good
    • 5
      Security
    • 4
      Editing can be improved
    • 4
      Doesn't handle switching audio sources well
    • 4
      The native calendar is buggy
    • 4
      Dashboard can be improved
    • 3
      Pornographic material displayed
    • 3
      Any body can get in it
    • 3
      Not many emojis
    • 3
      Past chat history is not saved
    • 3
      Recording Feature
    • 3
      En In reality,the chat in the meet not is excelent,noo
    • 3
      Zoom lags a lot

    related Zoom posts

    Yonas Beshawred

    Using Screenhero via Slack was getting to be pretty horrible. Video and sound quality was often times pretty bad and worst of all the service just wasn't reliable. We all had high hopes when the acquisition went through but ultimately, the product just didn't live up to expectations. We ended up trying Zoom after I had heard about it from some friends at other companies. We noticed the video/sound quality was better, and more importantly it was super reliable. The Slack integration was awesome (just type /zoom and it starts a call)

    You can schedule recurring calls which is helpful. There's a G Suite (Google Calendar) integration which lets you add a Zoom call (w/dial in info + link to web/mobile) with the click of a button.

    Meeting recordings (video and audio) are really nice, you get recordings stored in the cloud on the higher tier plans. One of our engineers, Jerome, actually built a cool little Slack integration using the Slack API and Zoom API so that every time a recording is processed, a link gets posted to the "event-recordings" channel. The iOS app is great too!

    #WebAndVideoConferencing #videochat

    See more

    Server side

    We decided to use Python for our backend because it is one of the industry standard languages for data analysis and machine learning. It also has a lot of support due to its large user base.

    • Web Server: We chose Flask because we want to keep our machine learning / data analysis and the web server in the same language. Flask is easy to use and we all have experience with it. Postman will be used for creating and testing APIs due to its convenience.

    • Machine Learning: We decided to go with PyTorch for machine learning since it is one of the most popular libraries. It is also known to have an easier learning curve than other popular libraries such as Tensorflow. This is important because our team lacks ML experience and learning the tool as fast as possible would increase productivity.

    • Data Analysis: Some common Python libraries will be used to analyze our data. These include NumPy, Pandas , and matplotlib. These tools combined will help us learn the properties and characteristics of our data. Jupyter notebook will be used to help organize the data analysis process, and improve the code readability.

    Client side

    • UI: We decided to use React for the UI because it helps organize the data and variables of the application into components, making it very convenient to maintain our dashboard. Since React is one of the most popular front end frameworks right now, there will be a lot of support for it as well as a lot of potential new hires that are familiar with the framework. CSS 3 and HTML5 will be used for the basic styling and structure of the web app, as they are the most widely used front end languages.

    • State Management: We decided to use Redux to manage the state of the application since it works naturally to React. Our team also already has experience working with Redux which gave it a slight edge over the other state management libraries.

    • Data Visualization: We decided to use the React-based library Victory to visualize the data. They have very user friendly documentation on their official website which we find easy to learn from.

    Cache

    • Caching: We decided between Redis and memcached because they are two of the most popular open-source cache engines. We ultimately decided to use Redis to improve our web app performance mainly due to the extra functionalities it provides such as fine-tuning cache contents and durability.

    Database

    • Database: We decided to use a NoSQL database over a relational database because of its flexibility from not having a predefined schema. The user behavior analytics has to be flexible since the data we plan to store may change frequently. We decided on MongoDB because it is lightweight and we can easily host the database with MongoDB Atlas . Everyone on our team also has experience working with MongoDB.

    Infrastructure

    • Deployment: We decided to use Heroku over AWS, Azure, Google Cloud because it is free. Although there are advantages to the other cloud services, Heroku makes the most sense to our team because our primary goal is to build an MVP.

    Other Tools

    • Communication Slack will be used as the primary source of communication. It provides all the features needed for basic discussions. In terms of more interactive meetings, Zoom will be used for its video calls and screen sharing capabilities.

    • Source Control The project will be stored on GitHub and all code changes will be done though pull requests. This will help us keep the codebase clean and make it easy to revert changes when we need to.

    See more
    Twilio logo

    Twilio

    11.2K
    8.7K
    521
    Bring voice and messaging to your web and mobile applications.
    11.2K
    8.7K
    + 1
    521
    PROS OF TWILIO
    • 148
      Powerful, simple, and well documented api
    • 88
      RESTful API
    • 66
      Clear pricing
    • 61
      Great sms services
    • 58
      Low cost of entry
    • 29
      Global SMS Gateway
    • 14
      Good value
    • 12
      Cloud IVR
    • 11
      Simple
    • 11
      Extremely simple to integrate with rails
    • 6
      Great for startups
    • 5
      SMS
    • 3
      Great developer program
    • 3
      Hassle free
    • 2
      Text me the app pages
    • 1
      New Features constantly rolling out
    • 1
      Many deployment options, from build from scratch to buy
    • 1
      Easy integration
    • 1
      Two factor authentication
    CONS OF TWILIO
    • 4
      Predictable pricing
    • 2
      Expensive

    related Twilio posts

    Ravi Sathanapalli
    Director Product Management at Centime · | 7 upvotes · 121.3K views
    Shared insights
    on
    TwilioTwilioAmazon SNSAmazon SNS

    Hi, We are looking to implement 2FA - so that users would be sent a Verification code over their Email and SMS to their phone.

    We faced some limitations with Amazon SNS where we could either send the verification code to email OR to the phone number, while we want to send it to both.

    We also are looking to make the 2FA more flexible by adding any other options later on.

    What are the best alternatives to SNS for this use case and purpose? Looked at Twilio but want to explore other options before making a decision.

    Would be great to know what the experience with Twilio has been, especially the limitations/issues with Twilio...

    Appreciate any input from users of Twilio and others who have had similar use cases.

    See more
    Cheri Booth
    Vendor Relationship Manager at Storage Asset Management · | 6 upvotes · 60.5K views
    Shared insights
    on
    ClickatellClickatellTwilioTwilio

    Searching for options for SMS that integrates with SiteLink and will allow personalization of text and tracking of both incoming/outgoing messages with reporting (Time, date, call#, etc) Have been looking at Twilio, and seems most leaning toward this. Are there any other options known that integrate into SiteLink? Also looked at Clickatell.

    See more