When comparing GitHub vs Telegram, the Slant community recommends GitHub for most people. In the question“What are the best file sharing services?” GitHub is ranked 4th while Telegram is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose GitHub is:
GitHub is the largest code host on the planet with over 21.4 million hosted repositories and many users. It's unarguably the largest VCS used by developers worldwide and as such, it has a vibrant community that follows it resulting in many guides and tutorials for new users. Even experienced developers can always find an answer to any question they may have.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Large community
GitHub is the largest code host on the planet with over 21.4 million hosted repositories and many users. It's unarguably the largest VCS used by developers worldwide and as such, it has a vibrant community that follows it resulting in many guides and tutorials for new users. Even experienced developers can always find an answer to any question they may have.
Pro Nice and usable UI
GitHub's UI is clean and intuitive. Each view is designed to not fill the screen with useless information.
For example, the repository view displays only the most crucial data about that repo - on the top it displays the number of commits, branches, releases and contributors. When clicked, each of them will take the user to a page that displays more detailed information.
Pro Integrated issue tracking
GitHub has integrated issue tracking that makes hunting and solving bugs easy. Each project's issues page can be filtered by closed issues, assignees, labels and milestones. Issues are also sortable by age, number of comments and update time.
Pro Provides free hosting for static websites
GitHub Pages is a feature that allows developers to create websites for their projects or anything they need a static website for, for free.
Pro Anyone can fork
Any user can fork a project and submit a pull request. If accepted by the owner, the fork will be merged with the master branch.
Pro GitHub makes it easy to find open source projects
GitHub is the largest host in the world for open source projects. Developers from all over the world fork and work on countless projects hosted on it.
GitHub's search box is a powerful tool that allows developers to find open source projects in areas they are interested in and where they can immediately start to contribute.
GitHub also has a page dedicated solely at exploring and finding open source projects, grouping them by each topic they cover. In the same view, GitHub displays trending repositories and sorting them by day, week or month.
Pro Gist (Snippets)
Gists is GitHub's way to easily share code, text snippets or any kind of information with the world. They are an easy way to share text and they work as Git repos, which means that they are forkable and versioned. They are also fully compatible with Git.
Pro Simplified team management tools
GitHub has easy and useful features to control teams, large and small alike. Team members can be given different powers on different projects, ranging from the ability to create them, to only being able to have read-only access.
Pro Convenient continuous integration with Travis CI
GitHub can be integrated with Travis CI for code testing and deployment, furthermore it is free of charge for free open-source projects.
Pro Supports Two-Factor authentication
GitHub has added another layer of security to their user accounts. This layer comes in the form of Two-Factor authentication. After it's enabled, GitHub delivers an authentication code by SMS, or by a free application for smartphones. After two-factor authentication is enabled, the authentication code is sent to the account owner's phone any time someone attempts to sign into their GitHub account. This means that only someone who has both the password and authentication code can sign into the account.
Pro Easy integration with cloud hosting services
Many widely used cloud hosting services are easily integrated with GitHub. Any project hosted on GitHub can be set up on these services in seconds. Some companies that offer this feature are:
- Amazon Web Services
- Google Cloud
- Heroku
- Windows Azure
Pro Support for mandatory code reviews
GitHub allows maintainers to make code reviews mandatory for any repository they choose.
Pro Code search functionality
GitHub supports searching code. Whether it's from a specific project or from the whole website. What's more, GitHub has excellent SEO and you can easily find any line of code hosted on public repos on GitHub even from Google.
Pro Student discounts
GitHub offers very good student discounts along with other things, such as AWS credits.
Pro Additional features for academics
For those with a valid .edu email or valid school ID there are additional benefits such as free private hosting. While it may take time for the account to be verified, it can easily be worth it.
Pro Project management tools available
GitHub has a tool called (quite intuitively) "Projects". It helps teams to organize and prioritize the work they are doing by creating roadmaps and release checklists.
Pro Free and convenient large file sharing
Copy/paste videos, gifs, images, geolocation, documents, and even executable files. Drag over files for practically any time up to 2GB in size. Images can be compressed, too.
Pro Free of cost
The application is available free of cost.
Pro Privacy focused
In addition to the end-to-end encryption [only in secret chats] that provides privacy to communications, the app also includes self destructing timers for chats, and the ability to permanently delete messages, yours and theirs, from your and their devices.
Pro Media messaging
Videos, gifs, images, geolocation, and documents.
Pro Channels for one way broadcasting
Broadcasting channels suitable for announcing things.
Pro Beautiful UI
Very customizable with a lot of clean looking options.
Pro Possible to send photos and videos without compression
Pro Supergroups of up to 200,000 people
In Supergroups, anyone along with admins can delete their messages from all sides. A message can be pinned to the top. All of the user's messages can be deleted by an administrator, and they can be banned and reported as well. Supergroups can have a public link (outside of Asia, due to high spam volumes), which is also a username.
Pro Two-step verification
You can set up an additional password to your account, which can be reset by your email. You don't have to use an email if you do not want to. If you lose access to your email or forget your password, you will be able to reset it via text message if your account is over seven days old and will receive it within a week (in case you recover anything before then).
Pro Secure
Pro Saved messages
You can write messages to yourself. You can write some notes, add links, and see everything across all your devices.
Pro Cloud chat keys are kept in different jurisdiction
Even though encryption used for cloud-based storage (e.g. Gmail, Facebook, iCloud) may not be as secure as end-to-end encryption or zero-knowledge storage, Telegram does the most that it can by holding keys to chats in different jurisdictions, requiring intergovernmental cooperation to obtain the keys. This is aside from whatever other security measures have been taken, of course.
Pro Multiplatform native client apps
There are native desktop, mobile and web client apps, that are optimized for speed and are light on memory usage.
Pro Open source client apps
Client apps are open source, making whole service more trustworthy.
Pro Unlimited storage
Unlimited number of files can be stored forever on the cloud. You can upload files up to 1.5 GB each.
Pro Voice and video messages
You can post voice and video messages if you are too lazy to write text messages.
Pro Group Voice Chat
This Discord-like feature adds to the interactivity of the application.
Pro Pinned Messages
You can pin messages to the top of groups or supergroups so members will see them when opening the group.
Pro Self-destruct messages
Messages in individual chats can be set to self destruct on a timer. They will disappear after the timer expires.
Messages in all new chats can be set to self-destruct with a global auto-delete timer in Settings > Privacy and Security > Auto-Delete Messages.
Pro Edit or delete messages after sending them
Pro Banned in China
Pro Save time with inline bots and link previews
Unfortunately, on the desktop videos don't play, but images are viewable without visiting popular websites like imgur and Instagram.
You can play YouTube videos and others within the app, so you don't need to embed code or anything.
With inline bots, such as @gif, @pic/bing, @vid/YouTube, etc, you can look things up without leaving the client or chat that you're in. Simply type the name and some keywords and wait for the results to load.
Pro @mentions
You can ping people to get their attention by @mentioning them.
Pro Desktop app handles HiDPI
The desktop app has a built in setting to scale the UI of the app up to 200% which allows for those with 4k monitors/screens to use the app without scaling issues.
Pro High quality calls
Uses the latest GPL audio codecs, such as Opus, an adaptative high-quality codec that supersedes AAC at any bitrate.
Pro Customer support is within the app
Although it's volunteer based, but still pretty top-notch if available, which it tends to be.
Pro Large groups can have channels called 'Topics'
Topics are now available in groups of 100+ members and have a sleek two-column layout and new buttons to quickly navigate.
A default topic called General is now in every topic group, holding the group’s service messages and previous message history.
Pro Popular in the USA
On SimilarWeb you can see that Telegram is on the top 15 among all communication apps.
Cons
Con Rule of thumb: 1GB per repository, 100MB per file
For most repositories this is acceptable, but for already large repositories with a long history, this may be a limiting factor.
Con Proprietary
Con Steals and sells your privacy
Con Limited web browser support
Modern web browsers like Waterfox are no longer supported, breaking basic UI elements and making the site unusable.
Con No OAuth2 support
In order to sign in to GitHub, users have to sign up first with unique credentials for GitHub only, so no option to sign in with Google+ or Facebook.
Con Owned by Microsoft
Con Very inconvenient UI
Very hard to switch between projects.
Con Not fully open source
Telegram has an open API and protocol free for everyone, but the backend software is not open source. Therefore 100% privacy can not be evaluated.
Con Can only be used with a phone number
It is not possible to activate and use Telegram by mail etc. You need a phone number.
Con Only "Secret Chat" messages are encrypted end to end
The only way to get end-to-end encryption (client-client) using Telegram is to use the Secret Chat function, anything through the service is server-client encrypted. Also secret chat is only implemented in the mobile apps, meaning there is no way to encrypt messages end-to-end when using the desktop client or the web browser client.
Con "Secret Chat" feature is not available for desktop client
Secret chats with end to end encryption are only available on mobile apps.
Con No source code sintax highlighting
Telegram does not have source code syntax highlighting, making it difficult to share code snippets.
Con Does not work for visually impaired
Doesn't work for visually impaired.
Con Does not support spherical 360° photos
Spherical 360° photos becoming more popular these days, but Telegram does not support such format.
Con Does not support text messaging
You can NOT make it your default text messaging App.