Chatfertig / Guides / WhatsApp vs. Telegram vs. Discord

WhatsApp vs. Telegram vs. Discord: How AI Text Formatting Differs

WhatsApp, Telegram and Discord all support some form of text formatting — but not the same one, and not the same amount. Paste the same AI-generated Markdown into each and you'll get three different results.

WhatsApp: a small, fixed set of symbols

WhatsApp recognizes exactly four formatting symbols: a single asterisk for bold, a single underscore for italic, a single tilde for strikethrough, and triple backticks for a monospace block with no language tag. That's the whole list. There are no headings, no tables, no clickable Markdown links, and no single-backtick inline code — a lone backtick pair just shows up as literal backticks.

Telegram: the same symbols, plus two real extras

Telegram's composer understands the same four symbols as WhatsApp, so bold, italic and strikethrough behave identically. Where it pulls ahead: Telegram renders [text](url) as an actual clickable link, and its fenced code blocks keep the language tag (for syntax highlighting) while single-backtick inline code also renders correctly. Still no tables and no headings, though — those get flattened the same way as on WhatsApp.

Discord: closest to real Markdown, with one sharp edge

Discord is the outlier: it renders most of standard Markdown natively in ordinary chat messages. Double-asterisk bold, single-asterisk or underscore italic, double-tilde strikethrough, real headings, and fenced code blocks with syntax highlighting all work exactly as an AI assistant writes them — no conversion needed.

The one place Discord surprises people: [text](url) masked links do not render as clickable text in a normal, human-typed message — that only works inside embeds, webhook messages and bot content. Type a Markdown link yourself and Discord shows the raw [text](url) text, exactly like WhatsApp does. Discord also has no table rendering, so a Markdown table still needs to become a list.

Side-by-side comparison

FeatureWhatsAppTelegramDiscord
Bold*text**text***text**
Italic_text__text_*text* / _text_
Strikethrough~text~~text~~~text~~
Inline codeNot supportedSupportedSupported
Code block language tagStrippedKeptKept
HeadingsNot supportedNot supportedNative support
TablesNot supportedNot supportedNot supported
Markdown linksNot supportedClickableNot clickable in normal messages
Bulleted listsPlain text, needs a bullet characterPlain text, needs a bullet characterNative support

Why this matters

If you're pasting the same AI answer into different apps throughout the day, hand-editing it three different ways isn't realistic. Chatfertig knows all three rule sets — plus Messenger, WeChat, LINE and KakaoTalk, which have no formatting syntax at all — and converts your text correctly for whichever one you pick.

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