When comparing Messenger vs Swarm by Foursquare, the Slant community recommends Messenger for most people. In the question“What are the best Material Design apps?” Messenger is ranked 22nd while Swarm by Foursquare is ranked 77th. 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 Stickers
Formerly known as badges in the original app, you will be rewarded stickers whenever you check-in to a specific place or for the number of check-ins you have made.
Pro Mayorships
Mayorships is a feature where the person with the most check-ins in that particular place will be rewarded with a mayorship of that particular place.
Pro Leaderboard
Leaderboard is a features that ranks how frequent you and your friends gain points via check-ins, exploring new places and mayorships.
Pro Powered by Foursquare
All of the places data is obtained from Foursquare, as Swarm is part of Foursquare product.
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 Viewing a place requires main Foursquare app
Since there is a split between place discovery and the social check-in feature in main Foursquare app, anyone who wants to check out a place must install the main Foursquare app in order to view the places details, photos and contacts.