The most popular WhatsApp alternative messaging apps in 2025
WhatsApp has established itself as the default messaging app around the world. Its large user base and simple interface make it the easy choice for people looking for a device and operating system agnostic application. While reviewing WhatsApp competitors here, we will keep in mind that you may be considering these alternative apps for either personal messaging needs with friends and family, or as a business messaging app for employees and teams to communicate company and customer related information.
WhatsApp is the world's most popular global mobile messenger app, with more than 2 billion monthly active users (MAU) in February 2025. WhatsApp has significantly more users than WeChat, who have 1.2 billion MAU of which around 1 billion are in China. This popularity and adoption, has resulted in WhatsApp becoming the messaging tool of choice for a large number of companies around the world, to communicate with their office based employees and frontline workers.
Weirdly, WhatsApp for Business is not designed as an internal communication channel for businesses. It is a suite of communication tools that leverage the popularity of the WhatsApp personal messaging app with consumers. This helps enable businesses to engage audiences and interact with their customers over WhatsApp, to improve customer support outcomes and accelerate sales, helping them engage new customers and increase revenue.
For-profit or not-for-profit, is another distinction that can be made between apps similar to WhatsApp. Believe it or not, not all free instant messaging apps are operated by companies with the sole aim of making a profit for their shareholders. Messaging apps Telegram and Signal are both non-profit organizations, which means that unlike for-profit companies, they don’t sell your data to other companies and serve you ads to make a profit and subsidise the operations of their services.
Let’s get into our reviews of instant messaging apps and help you find the most suitable solution for your needs.
Who is WhatsApp's biggest competitor?
There are now plenty of messaging apps like WhatsApp being used around the world, but we have managed to narrow this discussion down to WhatsApp’s two biggest competitors. In the interests of transparency, we’ve opted to view competitors through the lens of their number of Monthly Active Users (MAU). This is the number of users that send at least one message using the respective app in any given month.
The two biggest competitors that rank 2nd and 3rd behind WhatsApp are WeChat and Telegram. These two messaging apps could not have more different user bases, so let’s take a look.
WeChat boasts more than 1.2 billion MAU of which it’s believed more than 1 billion are located in China. This means that usage outside of China (largely Chinese people living abroad) is far less than other messaging apps like Telegram, Messenger and Signal. WeChat, while being an instant messaging app, is often referred to as a super-app. Super-apps consolidate multiple services including payment, instant messaging and even e-commerce and ride share, inside one mobile or web application.
Telegram, in comparison to WeChat, is a far more traditional instant messaging application like WhatsApp, focused on classic features including private and group chats, voice and video calls. Telegram reportedly has around 1 billion MAU with a far greater spread of users by country than WeChat. Telegram’s highest adoption is in India with 83 million users, followed by Russia 35.1, United States 29.9 million and a number of other countries with between 5 and 25 millions users.
Which app is safer than WhatsApp?
The term ‘safer’ can be subjective, however the most common interpretation of safer in relation to messaging apps is in relation to privacy and security. Recent revelations about the Signal group chat at The Whitehouse, are a fair indication that many well educated parties believe that Signal is the safest WhatsApp alternative app.
Signal uses end-to-end encrypted messaging by default, meaning that only you and the chat participants can read your messages. Signal does not backup messages in the cloud, your data is stored in encrypted form on your own device. This means that the only information that Signal maintains about a user is their phone number, the date they signed up and the last date on which the user was active. Signal is built on open source code and that code is available to anyone on the Github Signal app repository. This means that the code and the underlying technology, known as the Signal Protocol, have been interrogated by developers, hackers and researchers the world over for vulnerabilities.
As validation of the security of the Signal Protocol, many other messaging apps have implemented the protocol to their services in the last 10 years, either as a standard or as part of an optional layer that a user can enable. Messaging apps that have implemented Signal Protocol include WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google Messages and Skype. This means that Signals technology has been embraced by tech giants Meta, Google and Microsoft.
While Signal is a safer alternative to WhatsApp for personal messaging, it still doesn’t help businesses manage the risks of the message history being retained on an employee's personal device, or the company not having visibility over what chat groups employees are involved in and being able to remove them from company related chat groups when their employment ends. To overcome these risks, businesses must consider business messaging applications that have been designed and developed with an organization's needs in mind.
What WhatsApp alternative companies are there for business chat apps?
Messaging apps for businesses enable collaboration across employees of a company and even their contractors, inside a secure company managed workspace. Allowing real-time communication, no different to instant messaging applications like WhatsApp, but most importantly, the organization has visibility over who has access and control to add or remove users as needed.
Five key benefits of business messaging software include:
Protect company data, intellectual property (IP) and sensitive customer information including messages, documents and files from being shared in personal WhatsApp accounts and residing on employee personal devices.
Keep employee personal information including contact details safe from other employees and members of group chats.
Help employees manage their work-life balance and your potential obligations under the right to disconnect, by keeping their work messages separate from their personal messages.
Provide communication channels for individual teams or the entire business to share company announcements, celebrate successes, share documents or communicate policy changes.
Centrally manage employee access to the platform, integrate with payroll, HRIS or time and attendance systems to automate the process for large teams and organizations.
Here are three messaging platforms whose apps you can download from the App store and Google Play for free and get started right now.
8seats
If you are using WhatsApp in your business, then the best WhatsApp alternative is 8seats. 8seats is a business messaging app developed with frontline workers in mind. Its mobile-first design that uses a phone number for access rather than an email address, means that employees can be invited to join your 8seats Workspace via an SMS or QR code. 8seats offers a web app and desktop application for desk-based workers or those with access to a computer. Protect company data from being retained on personal devices or shared on social messaging platforms, maintain all chat history and files securely. The most similar app to WhatsApp, with an equally efficient user interface and no email address required, switching from WhatsApp to 8seats is a seamless transition.
While a great alternative for personal messaging (you can use 8seats without a company workspace), 8seats does not yet have 3 billion users with an 8seats account. That being said, getting set up on 8seats is quick, you can easily invite directory contacts to 8seats from an 8seats Table or Room. Your contact will receive an SMS message with a link to download the 8seats app and join the conversation with you.
Slack
Slack is the most popular communication and collaboration tool aside from Microsoft Teams. With a less corporate feel than Microsoft products, Slack is incredibly popular with startups, tech companies, marketing and creative agencies due to its ‘fun’ user interface and ability to create custom emojis and channel structure, helping organizations capture their own style and culture. Slack requires an email address for access and supports single sign-on (SSO) if enabled.
Slack offers one-to-one messaging, group chats for up to 8 people and public or private channels for communicating with larger groups. Slack huddles (voice calls with screen sharing), voice calls and video calls are supported, with an integration to Zoom or Microsoft Teams for video conferencing. File sharing and collaboration is easy with integrated apps that enable simple access to tools including Github, Salesforce, Zoom, Google Workspace, Notion, Trello, JIRA and thousands of others.
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams is a work focused collaboration tool that integrates chat, video, conferencing and file sharing into one business application, available free for organizations purchasing Microsoft 365. Requiring an email address for access, Microsoft Teams integrates with Microsoft Outlook calendar for seamless access to invites and meetings. Available on mobile, desktop and web, Microsoft Teams is suited to office-based and remote distributed teams.
It’s worth noting that Skype, one of the most popular messaging apps from years gone by, is retiring in May 2025 with all user accounts being migrated to Microsoft Teams. This means that Microsoft Teams will be available for both business messaging and personal messaging. Potentially removing the work-related separation for employees whose employers use Microsoft Teams for work.
How to chat with friends without WhatsApp?
Do we need to suggest an alternative mobile app for chatting with friends, what is wrong with an old fashion telephone call?
We have already discussed 8seats, Signal, Telegram, WeChat, Slack and Microsoft Teams as WhatsApp similar apps, now let’s look at three other messaging apps that you can use to communicate with friends and family.
Viber
Viber offers encrypted messages, group chats, voice and video calls and file sharing. While Viber to Viber communication is free, Viber also allows cheap international calls from the Viber app to non-Viber landlines and mobiles. This is popular with people that are travelling or want to stay in contact with friends and family overseas. Users can also create or join public groups similar to those on Discord or Telegram.
Threema
Threema is perfect for users that do not have, or do not want to use a phone number or email address for access to the platform. Threema generates a random Threema ID for user login so that users do not have to reveal their identity. Threema charges an upfront fee of USD $5.99 per user, ensuring that there are no ads or data mining of user information. End-to-end encryption is enabled for all messages, groups chats, voice calls and files by default.
Wire
Wire, like Signal, is completely open source, with the code available on the Wire Github. Messages, calls and files are all end-to-end encrypted with encryption keys stored on your personal device the same as Threema. Conversations are not stored on servers after delivery.
Why would you leave WhatsApp?
WhatsApp is the most widely used messaging app in the world and it is incredibly important to many individuals and businesses that rely on it for seamless communication across iOS and Android platforms. Why then, would you consider moving to other chatting apps like WhatsApp?
In 2021, WhatsApp implemented a new privacy policy that no longer allowed users to opt out of sharing their data with parent company Facebook. The policy updates meant that user data including phone numbers, address books, pictures and the contents of some messages would automatically be shared with Facebook.
Policy changes like these make users leave WhatsApp for alternative apps, or at least understand what similar apps are available, so that they can switch in the future when inevitable changes make WhatsApp an unsuitable messaging app.
