In this essay, I will discuss the difference between WhatsApp groups and communities if you are curious about the new update.
Since WhatsApp has recently introduced new community features that are different from the normal WhatsApp group, you might be curious about the Difference Between WhatsApp groups and Communities.
For those who aren’t aware, WhatsApp Communities are a feature that enables users to gather relevant groups and organize them more efficiently.
This means that thousands of users can join a community of numerous sub-groups and yet receive the information they need promptly.
Several other differences between Whatsapp groups and communities, including variances in the number of users, administrative restrictions, privacy settings, and more, are features you will find.
Therefore, let’s go in and take a more in-depth look.
Design and User Interface Alterations
The difference between Whatsapp groups and communities can be visible in the design and user experience.
The variation in design may seem insignificant to some, but you can use it as a fast and easy way to distinguish between WhatsApp groups and communities.
A separate page within WhatsApp is dedicated to your communities, which you can access anytime.
On Android devices, the “community” symbol will be located underneath the “Chats” tab in the top navigation bar, while on iPhones, it will be located in the bottom bar.
The design of the profile symbol is the following and currently the essential differentiation between a WhatsApp group and a community.
Indeed, the profile pictures for WhatsApp communities are rounded rectangles, but the profile pictures for WhatsApp groups are circular.
Additionally, the groups you create for your community have a circular icon with a repeated pattern that distinguishes them from the normal groups you already have.
User Size Differences
The size of a community is the difference between Whatsapp groups and communities.
Communities will naturally have a larger population than groups because communities can contain many groups, whereas groups exist independently.
As of when I wrote this article, you can invite a maximum of 512 people to join a WhatsApp group.
However, this feature will be raised to 1,024 participants from its current level in the following weeks.
WhatsApp Communities, however, can house up to 21 separate groups under a single umbrella.
If you do the arithmetic, you’ll see that a community can have a maximum of 21,504 participants (21 times 1,024).
Consequently, you can simultaneously communicate with significantly more users by utilizing the Communities function.
The Admin is the Highest Power
In the same way as with groups, a WhatsApp community’s admin controls its contents.
Administrators of the community lend a hand in managing the members and ensuring that they behave appropriately, while the community’s founder maintains overall control of the situation.
Members of a WhatsApp community have limited influence because they cannot add new groups or invite new people to the community.
However, the administrators can expand or contract the community by including or excluding users or groups.
The administrators can send messages to the announcement group and delete other users’ messages.
Additionally, they can change the community’s name, description, and icon. These show the Difference Between Whatsapp Groups and Communities.
Announcement Group
Apart from the admin being supreme, the difference between Whatsapp groups and communities ushers us into our next topic of discussion.
When you create a WhatsApp Community, each member of the individual groups that join the community is instantly joined to an announcement group.
This keeps everyone up to date on the latest community happenings. It is a broadcast channel via which community administrators (as opposed to group administrators) can send important notifications or other messages pertinent to the community.
Because of this, you won’t have to worry about copying and pasting or forwarding messages to multiple groups to address everyone all at once.
In addition, being a part of a community brings advantages to an announcement group. Participants can leave the announcement group altogether so they are not inundated with text messages but continue to be a part of the community.
A strange inconsistency emerged while we researched the subject matter and experimented with the community function.
You can only invite a maximum of 21 groups to a community on WhatsApp, resulting in a total member count of 21,500 (as explained above).
According to the official help page for WhatsApp, the announcement group can have fewer than 5,000 users participating at any given time. How can we convey this information to the rest of the group members?
Not Possible to Transfer Ownership
Another Difference Between WhatsApp groups and Communities is that you cannot transfer ownership. Suppose you have been using WhatsApp groups for a significant amount of time and are an administrator in more than one of them.
In that case, you are probably aware that if you leave a group while you are the administrator, the group’s ownership and administrative role are passed on to another group member. Contrary to this, the situation is not the same with Communities.
The individual who initially established a WhatsApp Community can neither leave the group nor have their admin status revoked using the app’s newest functionality.
Easier to Banish Individual Users
This characteristic is necessary for companies, schools, and other communities, yet it has the potential that people will use it unethically.
During my research, I discovered that it is possible to simultaneously expel a member from not just the WhatsApp community as a whole but also from every single group that the individual belonged to inside that community.
If there is a shift in occupancy, society administrators can easily update the list of members using this function, which will be very helpful.
They can remove the previous residents of the community, along with all of the groups, and then add the new residents.
You may also utilize this function to eliminate the annoyance caused by other users by swiftly removing them from all shared groups with just one tap.
Video and Audio Calling
Another difference between WhatsApp groups and communities is the Video and audio features. WhatsApp Communities do not provide a video or voice calling option.
In addition, there is no reason to include the video or audio call buttons in the announcement groups because they can have up to 5,000 people from the smaller discussion groups that have been welcomed to the community.
You will have to rely on these smaller groups to have meetings or address issues amongst yourselves. To accommodate this, WhatsApp has lately raised the maximum number of people who can participate in an audio or video call to 32 people.
Conclusion
Suppose you were wondering whether to keep to your existing groups or add numerous groups under a community in WhatsApp.
In that case, this article helps clarify the difference between Whatsapp groups and communities. Following a brief period of testing.
I concluded that the WhatsApp Communities feature is a welcome enhancement for users, societies, and organizations that previously relied on several distinct groups for communication but can now organize and manage all those groups collectively in a single location.
