WhatsApp and Telegram have recently published new features into their platform. Though sound similar, WhatsApp introduced Communities recently, and Telegram introduced Topics in Groups as well!

Both might look similar, and suspiciously, both are released very close to each other, with WhatsApp on November 3 and Telegram on November 5.

Sure, WhatsApp have been teasing about this feature earlier this year. And we believe that with Group Topics, Telegram completely cloned this entire WhatsApp experience while offering the same price of free.

The catch? Telegram requires your group to be at least 200 members before you can activate the feature, while WhatsApp allows you to start with one or even zero members!

That's why we decided to use @TheForum to demonstrate this new Telegram feature, while we decided to create our own for WhatsApp Communities.

Impostors?

Communities and Topics are essentially a group of groups. They're just copying Discord for sure, but more lightweight and more familiar to those who are familiar already with WhatsApp and Telegram.

I originally thought that Telegram always allow anyone to create a new topic (akin to a new forum thread) in large groups, but @TheForum seems to disable that feature for non-moderator accounts.

And for some reasons both WhatsApp and Telegram adopt squircle avatars for Communities or Groups.

The rest of the feature is still the same thing as in regular WhatsApp and Telegram groups. Even more than that, WhatsApp is now catching up with Telegram by introducing Polls into their chat, which Telegram already have for years. And also the 2GB file upload limit which has become the default in Telegram since mid-2020 (and now even more with Telegram Premium).

The best part in WhatsApp is that there's already a default, "General" group for delivering announcements. No, not that "General" group I manually created, but the one with the megaphone icon for broadcast messages.

In conclusion, they are basically the same. No need to argue. They're minified impostors of Discord but well, it's good for people who aren't familiar with in Discord. And now both apps' file upload limits is way higher than in Discord for free accounts.