When comparing Hike vs Pulse SMS, the Slant community recommends Pulse SMS for most people. In the question“What are the best messaging apps for Android?” Pulse SMS is ranked 16th while Hike is ranked 25th.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Lots of great features
It contains a wallet for money transfer, news update & sports update feature.
Pro Without data media sharing option within 100m
Pro Great sticker system
A very fast sticker suggestion based on key words typed. This helps to send relevant stickers quickly. Also when we press upon a sticker it opens a quick reply sticker option.
Pro Night-mode
Hike has an app theme & auto night mode(8pm-6am) inside to reduce strain on eye while texting at night.
Pro Has a timeline
It has a timeline(photo + text), which is similar to BBM.
Pro Photo editing feature
It has a selfie edit feature like Instagram, helps with editing selfies for profile photos & photo statuses.
Pro Multi-platform/Unified Messaging
Pro Open-source
Pro Per-Conversation Customization
Pro One-time fee
Pro Good Material Design UI
Pro Encrypted messaging content on devices
Pro You can use the iOS app as long as you know how to sideload it
It is on GitHub and there's a way to sideload it with Cydia impactor and appsigner.io
Cons
Con Security of user information
First of all, this is closed source software. It also lacks-end-to-end encryption. In today's time, irrespective of every other feature, encryption is the most important one. Because without it, rest of the features become risky to use and thus meaningless.
Con No RCS support
But only Messages has that.
Con Inconsistent and intermittently unreliable syncing with web app.
Forgets password periodically - dev insists that it doesn't do this - but it does.
Despite syncing via cloud there is no backup option.
Con The web and pc clients haven't been updated in almost a year. No support for gifs in the web or pc clients. Sometimes the web and pc clients are unable to login or do not sync messages.
Con Lacks support for UWP on Windows 10
UWP apps aren't hard to build - Luke K could bring his app to the Windows Store easily and make a TON of people happy at work.