3/20/2026 at 12:47:58 AM
I was a little surprised to see a Telegram integration rather than Slack or Teams, given Anthropic's enterprise-first posture. But then I looked it up, and it turns out Telegram dwarfs both, at around 1bn MAUs, vs 50m and 300m respectively! I had no idea - reminds me of the time I found out Snapchat has 2x the userbase of Twitter.by ainch
3/20/2026 at 12:51:48 AM
Also, not a single one of those 300m Teams users wants to spend another minute there. Whereas people find Telegram useful and not odious.by jen729w
3/20/2026 at 2:00:51 AM
I’ve been using Telegram for about 10 years, and it’s one of the few products that has consistently felt great the entire time. It’s fast everywhere: backend, mobile app, desktop app, all of it. Everything just works. Its sync is out of this world—fluid, fast, and seamless across devices. You can use it on your phone, then move to your PC or laptop and continue instantly without friction. Unlimited message history and file storage are fantastic, and the bot platform is absurdly powerful. It’s boring in the best way, which is exactly what you want from a channel for interacting with your agents everywhere.by do_anh_tu
3/20/2026 at 5:22:03 PM
Telegram had always impressed me for the same reasons. They have constantly gotten worse since about 2022/2023 though. Dark patterns, pay gate, they lost chat history for some of my closest contacts including 15k+ lost photos, no support at all. Something changed in their product direction and I started moving all my chats to Signal.by ciex
3/20/2026 at 11:15:33 AM
Everything except privacy of communication. No?by mhitza
3/20/2026 at 12:34:30 PM
In what way is privacy in Telegram worse than in Teams or Slack?by MidnightRider39
3/20/2026 at 1:37:01 PM
I don't know and I don't care.The comment I replied to said all these great things about Telegram, as if it where a marketing copy, but none of the downsides.
by mhitza
3/20/2026 at 3:10:33 AM
Since we are apparently giving messaging platform reviews here, I feel exactly the same way about Microsoft Teams. It works great. It does everything I want. It doesn’t get in my way. 10 out of 10 keep up the great work guys!by hallway_monitor
3/20/2026 at 9:22:54 AM
> Since we are apparently giving messaging platform reviews here, I feel exactly the same way about Microsoft Teams. It works great. It does everything I want. It doesn’t get in my way. 10 out of 10 keep up the great work guys!It looks like we found a high executive using company money to buy a product no one wants to use.
It's easy to promote Teams if your secretary is handling it for you and you don't need to suffer yourself.
The other possibility: Microsoft started an astroturfing campaign on HN.
by miroljub
3/20/2026 at 6:02:51 AM
Then you must not be using it.Teams network connectivity is a plain joke. If you use suspend, or frequently change network, the thing will just never reconnect, even though you have VPN alive and all network applications perfectly running.
And the thing is just absurbdly sluggish, only display blurred grey lines instead of text in a meager attempt to look snappy.
by xeyownt
3/20/2026 at 4:11:37 AM
I don’t believe you.I would never accuse Teams of being fast.
Doesn’t seem to matter if I have an i9, a macbook m4 or a threadripper.
by dijit
3/20/2026 at 4:45:35 AM
satire is dead for when it comes home we look her in the face and cannot recognize her.by gostsamo
3/20/2026 at 4:32:16 AM
I only use Teams for meetings and the calendar, and the occasional chat during a meeting. I find it totally fine and I don't really think about it much one way or the other. For reference I have a 2021 M1 Max with 64 GB.by badc0ffee
3/20/2026 at 7:20:57 AM
Probably all managers and engineers working on Teams have similar copious amounts of memory and powerful CPUs on their devices and hardly use their own product. That would explain a lotby roywashere
3/20/2026 at 4:37:20 PM
It honestly wasn't much different on my 2018 i5 Mini with 32 GB.Maybe what sucks here is the experience of running it on Windows. Or maybe it sucks for large meetings? But I never have Teams meetings with > 40 people at this company.
by badc0ffee
3/20/2026 at 6:34:22 AM
I had a teams meeting yesterday and the entire UI disappeared so I couldn't unmute the mic. Shortcut didn't work either.Months back I was in a meeting and the dial tone just started sounding like someone was calling me.
I face bugs like this often. It's a pos.
by tim-projects
3/20/2026 at 6:57:42 AM
Now try to be connected to 3 different Teams instances at the same time.by theshrike79
3/20/2026 at 7:01:53 AM
I thought this was sarcasticby dd_xplore
3/20/2026 at 7:33:17 AM
I was like are we using the same teams app?by ikt
3/20/2026 at 10:57:54 AM
> It does everything I want.Does it not start on your chosen platform or just not exist?
by tclancy
3/20/2026 at 3:34:00 AM
Username checks out?by ozozozd
3/20/2026 at 4:26:14 AM
>It works great.When it is online, I agree with things asides from the "fast" part, actually. But many companies have a secondary service for async comms/chat when being Teams cannot be online, and compared to Slack.
by DetroitThrow
3/20/2026 at 7:24:16 AM
Honestly can't tell if this is not sarcasm/rage bait.Teams that has 3 different UI frameworks on every platform (but your best bet is the web)? With the Microsoft login that tends to loop forever redirecting to God knows where?
It's incomparable to telegram.
by gf000
3/20/2026 at 1:37:22 AM
Back in the day, when I used to play pokemon go, there was a small local community and we would struggle to decide where to meet up for the daily raids because people would basically not respond (so as t not commit), or not know which gym each other meant exactly, nor give live updates when people moved around, etc. etc.Then I joined a group from a bigger city where I commuted for work. They had a telegram group chat with two "channels", one for talking, one for bot posts. The telegram bot could be sent a single screenshot of a raid, and it would use OCR to automatically generate an interactive UI for that raid for everyone to see, with all the relevant info, and it would also clear itself up when the raid is no longer relevant. You could press buttons to say you were going, that you MAYBE were going, if you were late, and if you already started/done it, all in single clicks. Tons of options, tons of information, all live updated.
I was bedazzled. That feature singlehandedly removed all attrition from urban social gaming. And it was entirely grassroots. It made me try out making my own telegram bots, and yeah, you basically have the power to make a little app in chat form, even some that feel like CLI commands.
It's been OVER HALF A DECADE and I have yet to see a single other chat application have that degree of freedom where it comes to applications and bots. Some like discord even did whole ass 100% reworks of their bot AP to support the likes of slash commands, and still fall short. And there's none worse than Teams. Teams hates you. Teams spent the prior 2 years before this one basically pointing a gun to our heads telling us they were removing webhooks and pushing back on it whenever they repeatedly get told that's the most insane and dogshit idea ever. And they still did it. There's just no spark in Teams UX. No self-respect. It's a soulless product made entirely as a dumping place of "synergy" with other M$ products. It's reciprocal, I hate it too.
Oh and my local group never go into telegram because they didn't want a new app. It died, but I still kept playing after work without problem. It makes me wonder how fast Teams would die if it wasn't proped up by 365 and Azure subscriptions.
by pokegobots
3/20/2026 at 2:01:17 AM
> we would struggle to decide where to meet up for the daily raids because people would basically not respond (so as t not commit), or not know which gym each other meant exactly, nor give live updates when people moved around, etc. etc.This kind of thing is so common in groups of people, it's one of my pet peeves. My own family does this in our group messages when trying to make big decisions like who should host thanksgiving or where we should go for a family vacation.
I make it a point to just take charge and tell people that we're doing XYZ now. It usually either results in a decision, or gets the discussion going enough that I can do it again with new information.
by nozzlegear
3/20/2026 at 6:01:17 AM
That has roughly been my MO as well and it works great for groups where identities have settled.But one has to keep in mind that, in our currwnt "more woke" times, if you go this way in a new group you run the risk of being labeled an array of things. So tread carefully there.
by theK
3/20/2026 at 1:49:21 AM
I wonder if Teams hates you, because they are doing the bidding of their actual customers (corporate decisions makers and purse holders), and those people's interests are not exactly aligned with the users'.by eru
3/20/2026 at 2:03:48 AM
The problem is that these people holding the actual purse don't care enough about their subordinates' experience. They care about the price tag, and about compliance. Apparently the makers of Teams think about the same. None of them thinks in terms of lost productivity.by nine_k
3/20/2026 at 2:39:20 AM
Yes, compliance is a big one. And it's not so much that they are actively hostile to user productivity (and quality of life), they just don't care enough.by eru
3/20/2026 at 5:58:08 AM
I feel the opposite. I'm on Teams all day at work and have reluctantly opened Telegram recently to try a Claw despite having an account for years.I've been surprised how little support there has been for Teams in the whole AI ecosystem. It seems all developers assume that the whole world is at startups working on Slack when most businesses are on Microsoft 365.
by snthpy
3/20/2026 at 11:11:49 AM
The main reason is just how hard it is to actually create anything that integrates with Teams. You have to jump through so meany hoops, wade through so many deprecated APIs, guess through so many half-way-wrong-by-now documentation pages.After building a proof of concept, we decided that we will only continue Teams integration if anyone is going to pay serious money for it.
by dot_treo
3/20/2026 at 6:10:29 AM
Compared to operating on text files (which is relatively very simple and something Claude Code is great for), I have a feeling it's kind of a disaster dealing with Microsoft integrations and the different file formatsby weird-eye-issue
3/20/2026 at 7:00:24 AM
Just the fact how much Microsoft lies when you click the "keep me logged in" button should tell you why nobody bothers with Teams integration with anything.by theshrike79
3/20/2026 at 6:07:39 AM
Looking forward to seeing AI ranting about pesky bullets in Word.by xeyownt
3/20/2026 at 2:29:18 AM
My employer keeps Slack so locked down it is not really possible to use anything useful with it anyway…by onair4you
3/20/2026 at 2:03:23 AM
Odious is one of the most reserved words you could use to describe Telegram, which is primarily a host for scams that the influencers and other bottom feeders aren't allowed to monetize on the big social networks.by almostdeadguy
3/20/2026 at 1:23:31 AM
Telegram's bot API is literally one of the friendliest APIs (of any kind) I've ever seen. It's the first thing I reach for when server-to-mobile notifications are concerned.It's just as easy to set up as ntfy.sh, except that it doesn't break every other week on iOS.
by miki123211
3/20/2026 at 7:29:20 PM
Unfortunately, Telegram is also a no-go from a security/data privacy perspective for many use cases.by lxgr
3/20/2026 at 2:29:45 AM
This is so true. I don’t like Telegram for a host of reasons, but the bot architecture is second to none. Try creating a bot in Slack. You’ll pull your hair out for hours. Same goes for Discord. Utter nightmare. Telegram? You send a DM and it is basically done.by ttul
3/20/2026 at 6:21:04 AM
Discord webhooks aren’t too bad… but the proper bot thing is ridiculous. They really lack a development mode server, having to know everything about oauth and token permissions before even starting is bonkers and why do I even need an app is beyond me. I’d probably have my bot completely implemented in telegram in the same time I figured out what an app is in discord and how to even add a new app to my server.by baq
3/20/2026 at 1:57:27 AM
Interesting. I set up a bunch of slack webhooks for server events that's been working decently well but maybe I'll look at telegram.by vrosas
3/20/2026 at 7:05:50 AM
Slack (and Discord) webhooks are good for just shooting one-sided data into channels, but for interactive bots Telegram is so far ahead of anyone else it's crazy.Signal specifically is missing any kind of official bot support, cutting off massive audiences from even considering it as an option.
by theshrike79
3/20/2026 at 4:10:33 AM
I think it might because telegram integration it's just easy to do, I don't use telegram for actually messaging, I use it just to deploy my bots, it's a simple way to build simple tools, in a few lines you can get something working, you can have commands that work like buttons, accept images, respond with images and don't need anything else than your telegram accountby kelvinjps10
3/20/2026 at 4:19:57 AM
Spend 5 minutes looking up how to make a chat bot and be amazed how Telegram is really the only option. I was dumbfounded when rolling my own agent.iMessage is proprietary. WhatsApp charges you. Unofficial APIs exist, sure, but not my cup of tea.
Then you have Discord or Slack, which are pretty heavyweight when all you want is a simple chat interface.
Telegram makes it SO easy. Bots are first class resources on Telegram and they make them so easy to use.
by beoberha
3/20/2026 at 4:49:11 AM
XMPP is working pretty well for meby sroerick
3/20/2026 at 9:04:24 AM
It's not even funny how a multibillion-dollar company with thousands of employees having unlimited access to the "world's best coding models" lags behind a small one-man [1] open source project that already had multiple plugins for the same feature [2] for months.Pi already has 700+ third-party packages [2] for various purposes of various quality. But it doesn't matter, since creating a new working Pi extension to suit your needs is just a prompt away, and you don't even have to restart your coding session.
[1] Pi Coding Agent https://pi.dev [2] https://www.npmjs.com/package/@e9n/pi-channels [3] https://pi.dev/packages
by miroljub
3/20/2026 at 1:36:31 AM
Surprisingly large number of businesses run on whatsapp, as a consultant in Asia it's prob around half the businesses I've worked with prefer it over teams/slack. If Meta had been sensible about API access Telegram wouldn't have even got a foothold.by karlitooo
3/20/2026 at 1:40:31 AM
WhatsApp is actually more popular than Slack, isn’t it? In my country, almost everyone uses Slack, and I’ve hardly ever heard of any companies using WhatsApp, so that was surprising to me.by tmatsuzaki
3/20/2026 at 2:13:12 AM
WhatsApp is more popular than Slack, Teams and Telegram combined. WhatsApp has something like 2-3 billion users worldwideWhatsApp vs Slack + Teams is a bit of an apples to oranges comparison though.
by yen223
3/20/2026 at 3:48:57 AM
Living in Japan has made me realize how different cultures can be — even down to the apps and services people use. It honestly surprises me, and now I kind of want to try WhatsApp too.by tmatsuzaki
3/20/2026 at 9:01:11 AM
Honestly Whatsapp is nothing special. It works well, just like many other chat apps nowadays. The interest is that in some large parts of the world, everyone uses it already.by benhurmarcel
3/20/2026 at 4:14:47 AM
The only thing it's that creating bots for whatsapp it's not as easy as for telegram and it cost money. Actually that is the business plan for whatsapp making money from whatsapp businessby kelvinjps10
3/20/2026 at 10:58:20 AM
Interesting. I’m an engineer, so how easy it is to use and how much it costs both matter a lot to me.by tmatsuzaki
3/20/2026 at 7:19:43 AM
Getting an agent working via an existing Slack setup is fairly effortless and the control over output format is usefulI had a look at getting same agent up in WhatsApp but it seems to need FB business acc to even start process, to get FB business you need an FB personal etc. ... looked like too much effort
by mtkd
3/20/2026 at 4:54:10 AM
What country is it? Surprised someone on tech even asks this questionby ramraj07
3/20/2026 at 1:58:30 AM
south america and africa are both heavily invested in whatsapp in the business space.by senectus1
3/20/2026 at 2:58:28 AM
Telegram has the best programmatic integration. Trivial to get working. You can be up and running in minutes. I use it to talk to a claw-style agent and it's truly unbelievable what you get for free.by arjie
3/20/2026 at 9:21:14 AM
Apples and oranges comparison, one is a messaging app, the other two are used for communication and collaboration across teams in a workspace. I have worked in 5+ companies who used either Slack and Teams, none used Telegram for any comms.Telegram is 'bot friendly' since the beginning, gaining a lot of users with crypto boom a decade ago with coin drops and things like that, so it is very good to develop for, but I have your initial sentiment first - shame this hasn't launched with tools people actually use for work.
And no, Discord is not used for that either.
by elAhmo
3/20/2026 at 5:20:09 AM
Twitter is shockingly irrelevant given how much it gets mentioned.by moostee
3/20/2026 at 7:07:06 AM
Twitter put all normal fun bots out of business with their API changes, that's about it.by theshrike79
3/20/2026 at 3:01:23 AM
One issue is that 95% of the integrations will be fine with the default configuration. The others including some with high profit potential will have weird configs that will frustrate your customers the first time they try if not well tested/documented. It's better to take time and get it right. Enterprise customers love piloting and spending time, so best to approach that the right way too. Going with less complex options, that arguably have better APIs, makes it easier to develop your core product too and get real feedback from users.by zerkten
3/20/2026 at 1:13:51 AM
A lot of such cases. Claude itself had (has?) fewer users than Perplexity, let alone Meta AI, Gemini or ChatGPTby yen223
3/20/2026 at 1:16:42 AM
no they definitely did not have fewer users than Perplexity xDby Marciplan
3/20/2026 at 1:29:15 AM
I like Claude, but polling done on Americans late last year shows otherwise:Overseas numbers are likely worse for Claude.
Try and ask someone not in tech what they think of Claude or Anthropic. There's a high chance they've never heard of either.
Things might have changed with Anthropic showing up at the Superbowl, and in the news over their fight with the Pentagon.
by yen223
3/20/2026 at 1:39:22 AM
Late last year is not the timeline you want. Anthropic’s hockey stick happened earlier this year.by borski
3/20/2026 at 2:06:02 AM
Late last year was like 3 months ago.I'm bullish on Claude. It will see a surge in users, and will likely surpass Perplexity this year. However I don't think it will catch up to even Meta AI (which had 10x the number of users) this year.
by yen223
3/20/2026 at 3:11:56 AM
I use Claude. I use Codex. I've never heard of or used Meta AI. Nor do I have a Facebook account. Never have, never will.I am also a software developer. So while the numbers of "people" that use one AI or another may be higher than either of these, it's not a useful metric for myself.
by tharkun__
3/20/2026 at 3:47:51 AM
That's fine. I'm not making a value judgement about which LLMs you should use, if any.I'm only pushing back against someone thinking "oh HN talks about Claude a lot, therefore Claude must be extremely popular". The information bubble is a real problem.
by yen223
3/20/2026 at 2:10:29 AM
I’m aware of how long ago late 2025 was.Anthropic’s revenue in Q1 2026 has skyrocketed.
by borski
3/20/2026 at 3:39:02 AM
It's probably true that Anthropic's revenue is booming. But we need massive grains of salt:a) they are private and revenue numbers for private companies are hopelessly unreliable, and
b) they are planning an IPO, so there's an extra incentive to big up the numbers. Anthropic always brings up ARR, which is very gameable when the year hasn't ended yet
by yen223
3/20/2026 at 3:41:10 AM
You’re right that time will tell the end story.by borski
3/20/2026 at 7:26:56 AM
It's Android app is 18th place in Denmark right now. Someone must have heard about it.by Mashimo
3/20/2026 at 3:19:45 AM
Talk about a bubble. No one outside of programmers know what the heck is Claude. In Asia, ChatGPT and Gemini dominates LLM usage, followed by Perplexity.by magnio
3/20/2026 at 3:41:29 AM
I suspect we're underestimating the number of users Deepseek has in Asia.by yen223
3/20/2026 at 7:45:51 AM
Microsoft released a report with some numbers on Deepseek adoption globally. They say it's got ~90% market share in China, and is growing in popularity across Africa.https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/top...
by ainch
3/20/2026 at 6:56:35 AM
Telegram is more popular among "normal people", and it also has a laissez-faire attitude towards bots and bot development. Making a bot that you, or even other people, could add to their contact list and use is pretty easy.It's wild, but "people who want to build and run their own one-off bot for something like home automation" are almost treated by Telegram like first class citizens.
by ACCount37
3/20/2026 at 2:00:17 PM
Not really a meaningful comparison. Telegram is a personal messenger while Slack and Teams are for work. Telegram should be put alongside WhatsApp, iMessage, WeChat etc., which all have user bases in the billions.by paxys
3/20/2026 at 1:03:40 AM
Maybe most of users of anthropic are individual developers over employee in tech company.I'm really happy that they choose telegram and discord.
by informal007
3/20/2026 at 1:14:27 AM
You're telling me that Anthropic, one of the hottest companies on the planet right now couldn't field four teams of developers to integrate with Discord, Slack, Telegram, and Teams? AI being such a productivity multiplier, seems like they could just choose to do it all. I mean, mythical man month and all that, but do it three times and have a retrospective and use Claude to refactor the pain points and centralize the learnings.by fragmede
3/20/2026 at 4:03:58 AM
Boris casually implements features and closes tickets the same day they are opened.by whatever1
3/20/2026 at 1:15:26 AM
You'd be surprised....by airstrike
3/20/2026 at 1:40:08 AM
Turns out the companies making promises don’t exemplify the results of their promises lolby Forgeties79
3/20/2026 at 12:52:58 AM
Telegram has a major issue with bots and bad actors though. They paywalled privacy features making it truly a terrible experience for users. 3-10 per day random messaging you.by revlolz
3/20/2026 at 12:58:34 AM
Can't say I have had literally anyone ever message me on telegram. And I have been a daily user for years.by rowanG077
3/20/2026 at 1:02:40 AM
I get occasional spam - I'd guess it's because you've never joined a public group or shared your handle anywhere?by OJFord
3/20/2026 at 9:47:36 AM
I indeed never have joined a public group and never shared my handle with non-people I know.by rowanG077
3/20/2026 at 1:34:56 AM
If you join public groups with a lot of users you end up on a bunch of spam lists and get smashed by bots.by Gigachad