Best group chat app according to Reddit, and my take
What Reddit actually recommends when people ask for the best group chat app: WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Discord, and when a room app fits. Honest, no hype.
If you search "best group chat app reddit" you will find the same four names over and over: WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram and Discord. Reddit's consensus, as far as I can read it, is this. WhatsApp if the group already lives there. Signal if you care about privacy and can get everyone to install it. Telegram for big public groups. Discord for anything organized around a hobby or a community, with voice. That is a good answer and most of the time it is the right one. The gap is groups made of people you have not met yet. That is the case I built Hashti for, and I will tell you honestly where it fits and where it does not.
Why people ask Reddit instead of Google
I ask Reddit for this kind of thing too. A review site has to rank something first and usually gets paid when you click. A Reddit thread is a hundred people arguing, and the argument is the useful part. Someone says "Telegram," three people reply with why they left Telegram, and now you know the trade-off.
The catch is that the threads are old, the answers depend on who happened to be awake, and a lot of the comments are from people who only use one app and defend it. So I read these threads for the complaints, not the recommendations. The complaints are where the truth is.
Below is what I see when I read those threads, plus my own opinion after building a chat app and living in group chats in three languages.
WhatsApp: the default, and that is its strength
Reddit's most common answer, outside the United States, is WhatsApp. Not because it is the best designed app, but because everyone already has it. A group chat only works if the whole group shows up, and the app everyone already opens wins by default.
What people like: it just works, voice notes are good, calls are free, and your aunt already knows how to use it.
What people complain about: it is owned by Meta, it needs a phone number, and the groups get noisy. My Armenian-Iranian family chat has 40 people in it and I mute it for days at a time. That is not a WhatsApp problem, that is a family problem, but WhatsApp gives you few tools for it.
My take: if your group is family or close friends and most of them are already on WhatsApp, stop reading and use WhatsApp. Nothing I say below will move your uncle to a new app.
iMessage: fine until one person has an Android
In the United States a lot of Reddit threads turn into an iPhone versus Android argument. iMessage group chats are good when every single person has an iPhone. The moment one person is on Android the group falls back to a worse experience, and that one person gets blamed for it.
My take: if your group is all iPhone, iMessage is already your group chat and you did not need to search for this. If it is mixed, pick something cross-platform and spare that one friend the green bubble jokes.
Signal: the privacy answer
Signal is the app Reddit's privacy crowd recommends, and I agree with them on the substance. It is open source, run by a nonprofit, and messages are end to end encrypted by default. Group chats work well and the app is calm.
The complaint you will read in every thread: nobody else is on it. Signal groups fail for social reasons, not technical ones. You can make the group, but convincing eight people to install one more app for one chat is hard. I have tried and lost.
My take: Signal is the best choice when privacy is the point. It is the wrong choice when the point is getting everyone in the same place quickly.
Telegram: big groups and public channels
Telegram comes up on Reddit as the app for large groups, public groups and channels. It handles thousands of members, has good bots and admin tools, and works on every platform including desktop.
The complaints are consistent. Regular chats are not end to end encrypted by default, only secret one-to-one chats are. Public groups attract spam and scam accounts. And once a group gets big, it stops being a conversation and becomes a feed.
My take: Telegram is good when you want a big, open room around a topic and you are willing to moderate it. It is not a private app in the way Signal is, whatever the marketing says. That is my opinion, but it is also what the privacy threads on Reddit say.
Discord: the community answer
Reddit loves Discord, which makes sense because the two sites overlap a lot. Discord is built for communities: a server with many channels, voice rooms, roles, moderation bots. It started with gamers and now it hosts everything from study groups to local clubs.
The complaints: it is heavy for a simple friend group, it is confusing for anyone over a certain age, the notification settings are a maze, and a public server needs real moderation or it turns into a mess. Discord is also mostly text, with voice channels on the side. Meeting new people in a Discord server means finding the right server first, which is its own job.
My take: Discord is the best choice for an organized community that already exists. A gaming group, a class, a club, a fandom. It is overkill for six friends planning a trip.
Messenger, GroupMe, Slack and the rest
A few others show up in these threads.
Facebook Messenger group chats are fine and a lot of older groups live there. If your group is on Facebook already, it works. Same ownership concerns as WhatsApp.
GroupMe gets mentioned for American college groups and sports teams. It is simple and works over SMS for people without the app. It is not where I would start a new group in 2026, but it still has its users.
Slack is for work. Reddit will tell you it is a bad idea to put friends in Slack and I agree.
What none of these apps do: groups of strangers
Here is the part of the Reddit threads that stays unanswered. Every app above assumes you already know the people. You make a group, you add contacts. That is great when you have the contacts.
A lot of people searching this are not in that position. They moved to a new city. They speak a language their neighbors do not. They want to talk to people who care about the same thing at two in the morning. For that, a contact list app is useless, and a Discord server requires you to find the server and get past the "introduce yourself" channel.
The old answer was chat rooms. Public rooms with a name and a topic, where you walk in and talk. Most of those died or became unsafe. Discord replaced some of them. Telegram public groups replaced some. Reddit itself, with community chats, replaced some.
That is the gap I built Hashti for. It is a free app for adults with public rooms organized by name and topic, plus private chats, calls and a walkie-talkie. The thing that makes it different from a Telegram public group is the identity check. Every account is verified once against a government document. The photo of the document is deleted and only a fingerprint of it is kept, so the same document cannot be used to open a second account. Accounts that have not been verified cannot host rooms, cannot speak in voice rooms and cannot message strangers. If an account gets twelve verified reports, it is closed for good. You can read the whole safety setup here.
The point is not that Hashti is the best group chat app. It is not, for most of the groups in this post. The point is that for a room of strangers, you want to know the other person is a real, verified adult, and most apps do not give you that.
Where Hashti is not the answer
I want to be straight about this because the whole post is about honest answers.
Hashti is iPhone only today. Android is in a closed test and not in the Play Store yet. If your group has Android users, you cannot use it for that group right now.
It is 18 and over. If you are looking for something for a school club or a family group with younger members, it is the wrong app and I will not pretend otherwise.
It is not end to end encrypted the way Signal is. If your private group needs that, use Signal.
It is new and small. A Reddit thread about group chat apps will not mention it, because nobody there has heard of it yet. The rooms are not as full as a big Discord server. That will change or it will not, but I am not going to tell you the rooms are packed when they are not.
The interface is in English today. A Farsi interface is being built. The rooms themselves are in whatever language the people in them speak, and live translation across 29 languages is there if you want it, but that part is paid, as part of Hashti Plus at $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year. Everything else in the app is free.
How I would decide, in order
Here is the decision tree I use when someone asks me this in person.
Does the group already exist, and is everyone on one app? Use that app. Done.
Is the group small and private, and does privacy actually matter to you? Signal, and accept that you will have to nag people to install it.
Is the group large, public or built around a topic? Discord if you want structure and voice, Telegram if you want a big simple room and can handle spam.
Is the group people you have not met yet? Then you want rooms, not contact lists. Try Reddit community chats, a Discord server in your interest, Telegram public groups, or a room app like Hashti where everyone is a verified adult.
Is it for work? Slack or whatever your company already pays for. Keep your friends out of it.
What Reddit gets right, and what it misses
Reddit gets the big picture right. The best group chat app is the one your group will actually use, and for most groups that is WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram or Discord. I would not argue with any of those threads.
What Reddit misses is that "group chat" means two very different things. One is a group of people you know, which is a messaging problem. The other is a group of people you want to know, which is a rooms problem. The threads mix them together and the second group gets the wrong advice.
If you are in the second group, look at rooms. Read the safety page of whatever app you try, because that is where the difference between a good room and a bad one lives. And if you try Hashti and the room you want is empty, start it. That is how every room on every app got full in the first place.
Hashti is free, and it is 18+. Hashti Plus — live translation, writing help and catch-ups — is $4.99 a month or $39.99 a year, and nothing else costs anything. How rooms work is on the rooms page, and how reports and the ID check work is on the safety page.