When comparing Messenger vs Snapchat, the Slant community recommends Messenger for most people. In the question“What are the best messaging apps for Android?” Messenger is ranked 21st while Snapchat is ranked 42nd. The most important reason people chose Messenger is:
Allows communicating with anyone who's a friend on Facebook.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Uses Facebook friends to create a contacts list
Allows communicating with anyone who's a friend on Facebook.
Pro Read receipts
Can see who has seen each message in group messages.
Pro Easy to share posts from Facebook
Integration with Facebook makes it easy to share any interesting posts from the Facebook timeline.
Pro Great UI
User interface of the application is clean, intuitive and easy to overview.
Pro Allows sharing photos, videos and texts that self-destruct
All Snapchat communications disappear after they've been viewed. It creates more interesting conversation when you don't have to worry about consequences as much. Additionally you can doodle on photos.
Pro Includes news
Snapchat includes a Discover page (accessed by two swipes from the right side) where curated list of news and entertainment outlets can put up news from their sites.
Pro Does not get in the way of what it's designed to do
Snapchat is first and foremost a way to share photos so the first thing that the app presents the user with is the camera enabled and ready to take photos. Once photos or videos are taken, it's possible to caption them or draw on them.
Cons
Con Lack of privacy
Messenger is owned by Facebook. Based on their privacy policy, this means that any information you provide (including messages sent) are used by Facebook to profile you and sell access to your data to advertisers.
Con Lack of end-to-end encryption
Secret (end-to-end encrypted) chats are only supported in one-to-one messages, and are not enabled by default, and the encryption has not been verified independently.
Con Security concerns
In 2013, Snapchat was hacked. As a result phone numbers and usernames of 4.6 million users were published online. That happened after concerns were raised by a security firm weeks before that Snapchat dismissed. Other security concerns were pointed out to Snapchat throughout 2014 including ways that the service could be used for DDOS attacks and how their anti-robot measures can be circumvented.
Snapchat has since implemented two-factor authentication.
Con Non-intuitive UI
The UI space is well used but you'll likely miss a few messages until you understand of the UI works; it's not like the average mobile apps.