When comparing Messenger vs Material Messaging, the Slant community recommends Messenger for most people. In the question“What are the best messaging apps for Android?” Messenger is ranked 21st while Material Messaging is ranked 45th. 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 Dual SIM support
The app is designed from the ground up with support for 2 SIM cards in mind.
Pro Message scheduling
Allows the scheduling of messages in advance.
Pro Pushbullet integration
Pro Per-contact customization
Pro Very few bugs, good dev support
Pro Fast load times and transitions
Pro Great-looking material design
The app follows Material Design guidelines very closely.
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 Settings menu is barebones
In addition to visual customization the app allows turning sounds, notifications and vibrations on an off. That's about it.
