Delta Chat
A chat app that runs on ordinary email, with no phone number needed.
Instead of WhatsApp, Telegram
Screenshot from delta.chat, taken 2026-10-23. The images belong to their makers and are shown to help you recognise the tool. Ask us to remove one.
Delta Chat borrows the oldest messaging network there is, email. It works with any email account, or with a simple chat relay, so there is no central company to close it down or sell your contact list, and messages are end-to-end encrypted. The developers are based in Germany and the apps are free and open source.
The catch is the one every chat app has: it only works if your friends are on it too, which is what keeps Delivery at 3. Privacy also depends on the mail server carrying the messages, so a modern relay is better than an old inbox.
For comparison, we also reviewed WhatsApp (14/30) and Gmail (16/30) as a benchmark.