Spojiti vs WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Session, Threema and SimpleX

Against the apps everyone already uses

Where it counts	WhatsApp	Telegram	Signal	Spojiti
IDENTITY
Works without a phone number	No	No	No	Yes
No email or account to create	No	No	No	Yes
Never uploads your contact book	No	No	Partial	Yes
CONTENT & CRYPTOGRAPHY
End-to-end encrypted by default	Yes	No opt-in only	Yes	Yes
Forward secrecy — a stolen device cannot unlock your past	Yes	Partial	Yes	Yes
Encrypted group messaging	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Call setup itself is encrypted	No	No	Yes	Yes
WHAT THE OPERATOR KNOWS
Cannot build your social graph^†	No	No	Yes	No
Cannot tell a group exists	No	No	No	Yes
Cannot tell a call is happening^†	No	No	Partial	Partial
MONEY
Paying does not reveal who you are	—	No	—	Yes
No ads, ever, by design	No	No	Yes	Yes

^† Corrected 12 August 2026, against ourselves. Two rows here used to claim more than we can deliver. Our relay stores a sender and a recipient account id per envelope, so it can build a social graph — Signal cannot, and we said the opposite. And our push envelopes carry a coarse traffic class so a killed app wakes on the right channel, which reveals that call signalling is happening. We also under-marked Signal on call setup: their SDP rides inside end-to-end messages, exactly as ours does. If a comparison page is going to name competitors, the least it can do is get its own column right.

Against the privacy-native field

These are the projects a security researcher actually compares us to — and the table where we lose rows. We publish it anyway, because a comparison you only win is a comparison nobody believes.

The serious comparison	Session	Threema	SimpleX	Spojiti
IDENTITY
No phone number or email required	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
No persistent identifier of any kind	No	No	Yes the most radical design in the field	No
CRYPTOGRAPHY
Forward secrecy today	No V2 still in design	Yes	Yes	Yes
Post-quantum encryption shipped	No	Partial	Yes	Yes hybrid ML-KEM-768
OPENNESS — where we are behind
Fully open source	Yes	Yes	Yes	No no audit yet
USABLE AS A DAILY DRIVER
Usable free, without paying	Yes	No must buy to use	Yes	Yes
Voice & video calls out of beta	No beta; shares your IP	Yes	Yes	Yes
CAN IT PAY FOR ITSELF
Funded by customers, not donations, tokens or ads	No token	Yes	No free / investor	Yes
Paying cannot be linked to your account	—	Partial store purchase	—	Yes blind-signed

Post-quantum, verified rather than asserted. Several projects claim post-quantum encryption. Spojiti's ML-KEM-768 implementation is checked against NIST's own ACVP known-answer vectors on your device, at every launch, before it is allowed near a conversation — and if that check fails, post-quantum switches itself off rather than pretending. The classical encryption is extended, never replaced, so an attacker has to break both.

Compiled from each project's public documentation and verified on 12 August 2026. Where any of them improves, we update this page — including where it makes us look worse. Sources: Session · Threema · SimpleX. Think a cell is wrong? Tell us and we will correct it.

All seven, feature by feature

The two tables above pick the rows where we do well. This one does not pick. It is every axis we could source across all seven apps, including the four where we lose outright and the one where the honest answer is that we have not built it yet. A comparison you can only win is a comparison nobody believes.

Feature by feature, 12 August 2026	WhatsApp	Telegram	Signal	Session	Threema	SimpleX	Spojiti
IDENTITY — what you must hand over to start
Works without a phone number¹	No	Partial	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
No account to create at all²	No	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Never uploads or hashes your contact book³	No	No	Partial	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
No persistent identifier held by the operator⁴	No	No	No	No	No	Partial	No
ENCRYPTION — what is actually protected
End-to-end encrypted by default, 1:1⁵	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
End-to-end encrypted group messaging⁶	Yes	No	Yes	Partial	Yes	Partial	Yes
Forward secrecy — a stolen key cannot open old messages⁷	Yes	Partial	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Post-quantum encryption shipped⁸	No	No	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes
Encrypted voice and video calls⁹	Yes	Yes	Yes	Partial	Yes	Yes	Yes
Call SETUP is encrypted too, not just the audio¹⁰	No	No	Yes	Partial	Yes	Yes	Yes
METADATA — what the operator can still see
Operator cannot see who talks to whom¹¹	No	No	Yes	Partial	No	Yes	No
Operator cannot tell a group exists¹²	No	No	Yes	Partial	Yes	Yes	Yes
Operator cannot see your IP address¹³	No	No	No	Partial	No	Yes	No
Operator cannot tell a call is happening¹⁴	No	No	Partial	Partial	Partial	Partial	Partial
Content-free push notifications¹⁵	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
WHAT THE APP CAN ACTUALLY DO
Disappearing messages¹⁶	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Partial	Yes	Yes
View-once messages	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	Yes
Stories / status	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	Yes
Peer-to-peer payments inside a chat¹⁷	Partial	Partial	Partial	No	No	No	Yes
Multi-device¹⁸	Yes	Yes	Yes	Partial	Partial	Partial	Yes
Sender-governed screenshot control¹⁹	Partial	Partial	Partial	—	Partial	—	Yes
On-device abuse guard, nothing sent to a server²⁰	No	No	No	No	No	No	Yes
THE BUSINESS BEHIND IT
Fully open source²¹	No	Partial	Yes	Yes	Partial	Yes	No
Published independent security audit²²	Partial	Partial	Partial	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Free to use²³	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
No advertising, ever²⁴	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Paying for it cannot be linked to your account²⁵	—	No	—	No	Partial	—	Yes
Paid for by its users, not ads, donations or a token²⁶	No	No	No	No	Yes	No	Yes

— means the vendor does not offer it, or does not document it. Every mark below is sourced to the vendor's own documentation where one exists; where their marketing and their whitepaper disagree, we followed the whitepaper.

The footnotes are the honest part

Works without a phone number. Telegram always needs a number; it can be an anonymous one bought with crypto via Fragment. WhatsApp usernames (2026) hide your number from other users — registration still requires it. Signal usernames do the same.
No account to create at all. For WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal the phone number IS the account.
Never uploads or hashes your contact book. Signal hashes contacts into an SGX enclave rather than uploading them in the clear. Threema's sync is optional and hashed.
No persistent identifier held by the operator. SimpleX is the only one that comes close: routing uses pairwise per-queue identifiers, so no single id spans your contacts. Session has an Account ID, Threema a Threema ID, and Spojiti a relay account id. We lose this row.
End-to-end encrypted by default, 1:1. Telegram's default cloud chats are readable by Telegram; Secret Chats are opt-in and mobile-only.
End-to-end encrypted group messaging. Telegram has no encrypted groups at all. Session's E2EE groups cap at 100 and its Communities are not E2EE; SimpleX groups are E2EE but its Channels are visible to relay operators.
Forward secrecy — a stolen key cannot open old messages. Telegram only in Secret Chats. Session dropped forward secrecy when it left the Signal Protocol; Protocol V2 will restore it but had not shipped as of August 2026.
Post-quantum encryption shipped. Signal ships ML-KEM-768 (PQXDH 2023, SPQR from Oct 2025, phased rollout). SimpleX ships sntrup761 at every ratchet step. Threema's February 2026 announcement is a research collaboration with IBM — its own June 2026 cryptography whitepaper contains no post-quantum content. Session's is specified for V2, not shipped.
Encrypted voice and video calls. Session's calls are plain peer-to-peer WebRTC and are not onion-routed, so they reveal your IP to the person you are calling.
Call SETUP is encrypted too, not just the audio. WhatsApp and Telegram encrypt the media but route signalling through their servers, which learn who called whom and when. Signal and Threema carry the SDP inside E2E messages, as we do. We previously marked Signal 'Partial' here — that was wrong and is corrected.
Operator cannot see who talks to whom. OUR WEAKEST ROW. Our relay stores a sender and a recipient account id per envelope, so it can build the graph. Signal has sealed sender; SimpleX has unidirectional queues. We have neither yet, and until we do this row belongs to them.
Operator cannot tell a group exists. Our relay has no group table — groups are fanned out client-side as ordinary pairwise envelopes.
Operator cannot see your IP address. SimpleX routes privately by default; Session onion-routes everything except calls. Signal, Threema and Spojiti all terminate your connection directly.
Operator cannot tell a call is happening. Also corrected against ourselves: our envelopes carry a coarse wake class ('call', 'message', 'none') so a killed app can be woken on the right push channel. It reveals no content and no identity, but it does reveal that call signalling is in flight. Every VoIP-push app makes this trade.
Content-free push notifications. The push payload carries no sender and no preview.
Disappearing messages. Threema offers local auto-delete on your own device rather than a negotiated two-sided timer.
Peer-to-peer payments inside a chat. WhatsApp Pay is India and Brazil only. Telegram Stars buy digital goods, not person-to-person money. Signal's MobileCoin is region-limited. Spojiti sends a UPI request your own bank app fulfils — we never touch, hold or see the money.
Multi-device. Threema's phone-free desktop is still beta and its multi-device protocol ships without forward secrecy. Session syncs only about 14 days of history. SimpleX's own FAQ calls multi-device 'a complex and unsolved problem'.
Sender-governed screenshot control. WhatsApp blocks screenshots of view-once media; Telegram notifies in Secret Chats; Signal's screen security is a manual per-device toggle; Threema offers it only to Work/OnPrem administrators. Ours is per-contact and sender-governed, with a master switch.
On-device abuse guard, nothing sent to a server. Content is classified on your device and the verdict never leaves it. We have not found this in any other messenger.
Fully open source. Telegram and Threema publish clients but never their server. WE ARE NOT OPEN SOURCE AND HAVE NOT BEEN AUDITED. That is the single biggest thing on this page we owe you, and it is on the roadmap rather than in the product.
Published independent security audit. Session: Quarkslab 2020, published 2021. Threema: Cure53, most recently January 2024. SimpleX: Trail of Bits 2022 and 2024. WhatsApp's public NCC Group reports cover components, not the messaging protocol; Signal publishes formal-verification work rather than full client pentests. Ours is none.
Free to use. Threema has no free tier — you buy the app to use it.
No advertising, ever. WhatsApp began showing ads in the Updates tab in 2025; Telegram runs sponsored messages in public channels.
Paying for it cannot be linked to your account. OURS ALONE. A blind signature means we sign your access code without ever seeing it, so after you redeem it we genuinely cannot connect your account to your payment. Threema gets close by letting you buy anonymously with cash or Bitcoin. Everyone else either takes donations, sells a token, or knows exactly who paid.
Paid for by its users, not ads, donations or a token. Signal runs on donations, Session on a crypto token, SimpleX on venture capital. Threema and Spojiti are paid for by the people who use them, which is the only model where you are the customer rather than the inventory.

Three things on this page are ours alone

Not "we do it better" — we could not find them in any of the other six.

Paying us cannot be linked to you. Your access code is blind-signed: we put our signature on it without ever seeing it. After you redeem it, connecting your account to your payment is not something we refuse to do — it is something we cannot do. Threema gets closest, by accepting cash and Bitcoin for the app itself. Everyone else runs on donations, a token, venture capital, or advertising.
Money moves without us in the middle. A payment request in a Spojiti chat is fulfilled by your own bank app over UPI. We never touch it, hold it, or see it. WhatsApp Pay exists in two countries; Telegram Stars buy stickers, not groceries.
Abuse is judged on your phone. The on-device guard classifies content locally and the verdict never leaves the device — safety that costs no surveillance. Every other approach we know of sends something somewhere.

And five where we lose. Today.

We are not open source and we have not been audited. Session, SimpleX and Signal are open source; Session, Threema and SimpleX all have published third-party audits. We have neither. For a product whose whole pitch is "trust the architecture, not the promise", that is the largest gap on this page — and pointing at a roadmap is not the same as closing it.
Our relay can see who talks to whom. Signal solved this with sealed sender; SimpleX solved it by never having an identifier at all. We store a sender and a recipient per envelope. The content is unreadable to us — the pattern is not.
Our relay sees your IP address. SimpleX routes privately by default and Session onion-routes everything except calls. We terminate your connection directly, exactly as Signal and Threema do.
You have a persistent account id. It is a random UUID tied to no name, number or email — but it is stable, and SimpleX's pairwise design is genuinely stronger than ours.
We are new, and small. WhatsApp has roughly three billion users. The best encryption in the world is worth nothing if the person you need to reach is not on it.

We publish this list because you will find it anyway, and because a comparison page that admits nothing tells you nothing. Every line is a thing to knock off — and we would rather you watch us do it than take our word for it.

The closest competitor: Session

Session is the one other mainstream messenger that refuses to ask for your phone number, and they got there before we did. They also do two things we do not: their code is fully open source, and they run on a decentralised network with onion routing rather than company infrastructure — so no single node learns both where a message came from and where it went. If your threat model is a company that can be compelled, Session answers it by having almost no company at all. Credit where it is due.

The honest gap runs the other way on cryptography. Session does not currently have forward secrecy — by their own documentation every message is encrypted under one long-term key that never rotates unless you abandon the account, so a device compromised today can expose messages sent long ago. Their Protocol V2 adds forward secrecy and post-quantum protection, and as of late 2025 it was still in design. Spojiti ships the Double Ratchet today: keys move forward with every message, so past conversations stay sealed even if a device is later taken, and a compromise heals itself as the ratchet turns. Their documentation is equally candid that voice and video calls are beta and share your IP address with your call partner and with a foundation-operated relay server.

So the two of us made opposite bets. Session removed the company to protect metadata, and accepted weaker message cryptography and beta calls to do it. We kept infrastructure we own — which is what lets our calls, groups and media be production-grade with the strongest ratchet available — and removed identity instead, then funded it with subscriptions that cannot be traced back to the buyer. Both are honest answers. Ours is the one you can hand to someone who has to use it every day.

What we owe in return: our source is not open yet, and we have had no independent audit. One is budgeted for V1.0 and not yet commissioned — we would rather say that plainly than imply more than we have paid for. We will state where we stand on this page as it changes, including when it does not flatter us.

The honest comparison: Signal

Signal is excellent. Its cryptography is the reference the whole industry copies — ours included, openly and gratefully. We are not here to run it down.

The difference sits underneath the cryptography. Signal still binds your account to a phone number — a permanent, government-linked identifier — and it is funded by donations. Spojiti has no identifier to bind, because your account is a key your own device generates, and it is funded by subscriptions that cannot be traced to the account that redeemed them.

Put simply: Signal was to SMS what Spojiti is to Signal — the next step, in the same direction.

What that means in practice

Nothing to leak

Breaches expose what a company stored. We never stored a name, a number, an address book, or a message we could read. A breach of Spojiti yields random identifiers and ciphertext.

Nothing to hand over

When a lawful request arrives we comply — and what we can produce is what we hold. No content, no contacts, no identity. Not a policy. Architecture.

Nothing to sell

There is no advertising business here and no data to feed one. You pay a small amount once a year, and that is the entire relationship.

The existence proof: Threema

Threema has quietly done the thing everyone said was impossible: a Swiss messenger with no phone number, real forward secrecy, open source with reproducible builds, and a decade of profitability — funded entirely by a one-time purchase. If you want proof that people will pay for privacy rather than be paid for, Threema is it, and we admire them for it.

Two differences. Threema has no free tier — you buy before you can send a single message, which is a hard wall in a market like India where the person you need to reach has not heard of you. And because you buy through an app store, that purchase is tied to your store account, so the payment re-attaches an identity the app carefully avoided. Spojiti stays free for one-to-one messaging forever, prices a paid year below a couple of coffees, and severs the payment from the account by mathematics rather than policy.

The most radical of us all: SimpleX

SimpleX goes further on identity than we do, and we will not pretend otherwise. We give you an account identifier that is random and unlinked to your person; SimpleX gives you no identifier at all — each contact reaches you through its own one-off address. They are fully open source and have published independent audits, which we cannot yet say. We have since shipped post-quantum key agreement of our own, so that row is now even. On identity and openness they are still ahead.

The cost is everything around it. There is no way to look anyone up, backups are manual, there is no account recovery, groups are still maturing, and the project is free — funded by donations and investors rather than by the people using it. That is the same fragility that keeps every donation-funded messenger one bad year away from trouble. Spojiti aims at the harder target: privacy a person will actually keep using, on a business that pays for itself.

The pattern, stated against ourselves

Read those tables honestly and one shape appears. The mainstream apps keep your identity and monetise it. The privacy-native projects give up identity but are each missing a leg: Session has no forward secrecy yet, Threema has no free tier, SimpleX has no revenue model. And every single one of them is open source, while we are not — that is the one row where we lose to the entire field.

So here is our claim, narrowly: we are the only one attempting mainstream-grade usability, zero identity, strongest-available cryptography, and a business funded by customers who cannot be identified — all four at once. And here is our debt: publishing the source and commissioning a third-party audit. Neither has happened yet. The audit is budgeted for V1.0 and not yet booked, and until both land you should weigh our claims accordingly. We would rather you read that here than discover it later.

Move one conversation

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Everyone encrypts the message.Nobody else erases the person.