When comparing Messenger vs Grove, the Slant community recommends Grove for most people. In the question“What is the best team chat software?” Grove is ranked 35th while Messenger is ranked 74th. The most important reason people chose Grove is:
Web client embeds posted images.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
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 Inline images
Web client embeds posted images.
Pro SSL for web & IRC clients
Pro Notifications
You can ping people separately, people online or everyone.
Pro You can use web or IRC clients
Pro Integrated services and workflow
Including GitHub, Bitbucket, Heroku and Pivotal Tracker. Also, supports webhooks.
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.