When comparing Element vs Messenger, the Slant community recommends Element for most people. In the question“What are the best messaging apps for iOS?” Element is ranked 13th while Messenger is ranked 15th. The most important reason people chose Element is:
The web version can be used without the need to install anything.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Can be used in browser
The web version can be used without the need to install anything.
Pro Works out of the box
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.
Cons
Con Not a native desktop application
There are desktop apps for most OSes based on electron.
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.