Anywhere 
10/05/2018 Telegram, is the world’s 9th topmost instant messaging app. While it can not match the Facebook-acquired messaging giant WhatsApp, Telegram has a lot of tricks up its sleeve which make it stand out.
These tricks, rather, features, give Telegram an edge over the other thousands of IM apps available on the play store and other app stores. Out of these features, many advanced ones such as the end-to-end encryption of chats, secret chats, and others, have ended up making us falling in love with the app.
Even though Telegram recently ran into trouble with the Russian government when it didn’t help them in a case (helping them in the case, required Telegram to ruin the chat privacy of one of their users), they are working hard on making the app even better. It was only a few months ago that it was found out that the Durov brothers, the original founders of VK, Russia’s Facebook and current owners of Telegram, were working on a cryptocurrency called “grams”.
Coming to our topic for today, while Telegram groups, at the surface, look pretty much the same as WhatsApp groups, again, some of the features of Telegram groups, make them stand apart.
Telegram groups
A group on Telegram can have a maximum of 1,00,000 members. These groups can be used by companies and teams to coordinate work, families and friends to communicate, and ICOs to communicate effectively with their investors.
At times, you might end up not seeing the messages in which you were mentioned because other messages were sent in the group. To make sure that you don’t miss the message in which you were mentioned, a @ icon is shown at the chat. When you tap at the icon, you will directly be taken to the message in which you were mentioned.
Basic groups consist of 200 members while supergroups consist of 1,00,000 members and are optimized by the app developers to host large communities. This makes the supergroups load quickly, even if there are too many messages not seen by you.
Any important information that should be seen by all the members of the supergroup, can be pinned by the admin. A notification for this pinned message will be sent to all the members of the group, even if they have muted the notifications for ordinary messages. You can send invite links for the groups, join public groups through their links (to meet people with the same interests as yours), and much more, with groups.
Telegram Channels
Coming to Telegram channels, while on the surface, they sound similar to Telegram groups, it’s not really the same thing.
The channel feature is similar to the broadcasting feature of WhatsApp but is more powerful.
Channels can be used to broadcast your messages to large audiences. A channel can have unlimited subscribers. Each post on a channel, has its own dedicated view counter, and the channels themselves have permanent URLs. Even a new subscriber can see all the messages ever shared on the channel, from day one.
Also, links for any message of the channel, can be shared with others, and once they open the link, they’ll be taken to the channel, and the message will be shown to them. On the plus side, if your channel is public, then the person who opens the link, doesn’t even need to have a Telegram account.
For the non-urgent and late-night messages, you can send silent messages, which will show notifications but not produce any sound.
Telegram groups vs Telegram channels
That’s all about channels. Now, time for a comparison between Telegram channels and Telegram groups.
Kicking off with the simplest difference, it is that groups consist of participation of all the members while in a channel, only the admin can send messages, which are received by all the members. These messages cannot be replied directly to in the channel.
A regular group can have 200 members, a supergroup can have 1,00,000 members while a channel can have unlimited subscribers.
A channel doesn’t have members and a group doesn’t have subscribers. Groups are used for making effective communication between members possible, while channels are used to share a message with a lot of subscribers.
Also, while groups do not have the silent message feature, channels have silent message feature.
Groups can be used for multiple reasons, as we have mentioned before, such as coordination among members of a team, interaction between a family.
On the other hand, channels can be used to share information with people who share the same interest. For example, a local celebrity can use his Telegram channel to wish merry Christmas to his channel’s subscribers.
That is all for now. According to us, it is best to first know for what purpose you need to share the messages, to get response (in that case, you need a group), or if you only need to share a message (channel).
