If you are particularly concerned about privacy, it's worth noting that Telegram is not completely open source, and the service has access to the encryption keys you use.Īn extra feature offered by Telegram is secret chats. Only Secrets Chats – of which more in a moment – are securely encrypted on sender and recipients' devices to ensure complete privacy.

The bulk of messages are stored in Telegram's cloud servers and are encrypted on the server. The service uses the MTProto encryption protocol, but not everything is encrypted in the same way. There are clients available for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Windows, macOS and Linux (32- and 64-bit variants).

Image credit: Shutterstock (Image credit: Shutterstock) TelegramĪs with WhatsApp and Signal, Telegram is a cross-platform messaging tool. It has been rumoured for some time that ads are on their way, and it has recently been confirmed that ads will indeed start to appear in WhatsApp statuses in 2020. Unlike Facebook, WhatsApp is free from ads. In fact, up to 256 people can take part in a single chat, making it ideal for small to medium-sized businesses, particularly if security is a concern – as well as the fact that the app is free. While most WhatsApp users are interested in personal communication with friends and family on a relatively small scale, there is scope for large group chats. As well as text-based messaging, voice and video calls are also an option, and you can sent photos and files to the people you are chatting with.

Linux users are not officially supported, but there are unofficial desktop clients available for various distros. There's also a web-based version (opens in new tab), but this needs to be used in conjunction with your phone it just makes typing longer messages a little easier when you're at your computer. One of WhatsApp's big advantages is that it is available for a range of platforms – Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, even Windows Phone.

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