When comparing Allo vs Reach, the Slant community recommends Reach for most people. In the question“What are the best messaging apps for iOS?” Reach is ranked 29th while Allo is ranked 30th. The most important reason people chose Reach is:
Ability to send a single message to multiple people without exposing their contact information to each other. Reach sends individual messages to the group rather than starts a group chat.
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Pros
Pro Persists history
Your chat history is persisted by default (you can send incognito end-to-end encrypted self-destructing messages instead if you so desire).
Pro Allows self-destructing messages
You can send messages that will be removed from both parties after a defined period of time.
Pro Allows end-to-end encrypted incognito messages
Pro Assistant
The assistant is a bot that can help book, look up locations, restaurants, set up calendar events, etc.
Pro Full quality pictures
Pro Mass message multiple people at once
Ability to send a single message to multiple people without exposing their contact information to each other. Reach sends individual messages to the group rather than starts a group chat.
Pro Personalized and Individual conversations in "Group Mode"
When sending a message to a group of people, Reach starts a private conversation in your Messages, Mail or WhatsApp apps respectively for each recipient
Pro Reusable Recipient Groups
Improve workflow productivity by creating reusable recipient groups
Pro All platforms in one: iMessage, Text/SMS, E-mail, WhatsApp, and Google Voice
Reach does not require the recipient to have Reach installed on their device. Instead it uses the existing messaging apps on the device to send the message to the recipient.
Pro Message Templates Feature
Prepare message templates which can be reused. Message templates can have recipients name variable, for example the template "hey {first name}!" will be populated with the recipients first name when the message is sent out
Pro Free texting through Google Voice
Reach integrates with Google Voice and allows to send free text messages in the U.S.A and low rates across the globe
Pro Fully automated mass texting with free SMS
Using Google Voice integration, Reach is able to send mass texts in a fully automated mode (without the need to press "Send" button for each message)
Cons
Con Not yet released (should release in summer 2016)
Con Need to press "Send" button per each recipient
When sending a message to a group, the user must press "Send" button for each recipient. The only work around is to use Google Voice integration for fully automatic mass texting