Top 10 Instagram Competitors (Updated in 2023)

The top Instagram competitors are Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, WhatsApp, Quora, Tiktok and others.
Instagram is a social networking service to share photo and video which is owned by Facebook. It was released during the year 2010 by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. The Android app was released a year later that was followed by website interface during the year 2012. Subsequently, apps for Windows 10 mobiles were also released.

Instagram allows users to upload videos and photos that can be edited using the various filter and can be ordered using tags and location information. The videos and photos can be shared as a public post or with pre-approved followers. Users can browse the tags and locations of other users and they also like photos.

Through this article, let us discuss the top Instagram competitors.

Top Instagram competitors

1) Facebook

• Product Type: Social networking website.
• Industry: Technology.
• Founded: February 4, 2004,
• Founders: Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes.
• Headquarters: Menlo Park, California, United States.
• Area Served: Worldwide.
• Current CEO: Mark Zuckerberg.

A top Instagram competitor, Facebook is an American online social media and networking Service Company. It was established during the year 2004 and is headquartered in California, United States. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow college students which was an extension of the college project.

Ever since its formation during the year 2004, it has managed to get about 600 million users and is still growing every day. Facebook’s popularity is backed by the Web2.0 boom. It has all the integrating features of the Web2.0 in one roof which is the main success of Facebook. Facebook has a huge fan list and many users migrate from other social networking sites that have proved Facebook is mostly required by the youth.

Facebook is a social media site with well over 3.03 billion monthly active users in April 2023, revenue worth 31,999 billion dollars and over 65,964 employees. More than 500 million people use Facebook Stories every day. In July 2023, Facebook reports that 2.23 billion people can be reached through ads. Reels hit 140 billion Plays per day across Facebook apps.

The Like feature of Facebook is a big hit among the users and the same with user comments and debate over status photos, messages, and videos. The integration of Facebook app with many websites and mobile applications makes it popular. Having a developer’s options and Facebook pages, it is a perfect platform for marketing for small and large business, due to which it is a top Instagram competitor.

2) Twitter

• Product Type: Microblogging service and Social networking website.
• Industry: Technology.
• Founded: March 21, 2006,
• Founders: Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams.
• Headquarters: San Francisco, California, United States.
• Area Served: Worldwide.
• Current CEO: Elon Musk.
• Revenue: $3bn (£2.29bn) (2023)
• Number of employees: 2,300 (2023)
• Market cap: $41.09 Billion (August 2023)

Also regarded as a top Instagram competitor, Twitter is an American social networking and online news service that was established during the year 2006 and is headquartered in California, United States. Using this platform, users post and interact with messages that are popularly called tweets.

Earlier tweets were restricted to about 140 characters but over the years, this limit was doubled except for few languages like Korean, Chinese, and Japanese. Users who are registered can post a tweet and those who are not registered can only read them. Users can access Twitter by means of website interface, mobile app, or through SMS. Twitter generated global revenue of $3 billion. By January 2023, Twitter only had around 2,300 employees left, according to Musk, with only 550 working full-time. By April, there were less than 1,500 active employees left with 80% of Twitter’s work force gone in a year.

Twitter has been fairly successful to maintain the authenticity of celebrity accounts that has made it become a popular social media channel. It makes the best use of technology that helps in the functioning of the platform. Twitter is the most preferred channel of communication for businesses and celebrities. It is also being used for customer service and also for any official announcements.

3) Snapchat

• Product Type: Instant messaging app.
• Industry: Technology.
• Founded: September 16, 2011,
• Founders: Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown.
• Headquarters: Santa Monica, California, United States.
• Area Served: Worldwide.
• Current CEO: Evan Spiegel.
• Market cap: $14.67B (August 17, 2023)
• Revenue: $1.068B (June 30, 2023)

A popular message app, Snapchat was established during the year 2011 by three students Bobby Murphy, Evan Spiegel, and Reggie Brown. It gradually emerged into a popular tool for instant messaging. It is a software-based instant messaging platform wherein the messages would appear only for a short duration and after which it would disappear.

This idea has received a lot of appreciation and the three students worked on it to get better scalability. It was then launched with the name Snapchat which generated huge revenue. As of the second quarter of 2023, Snapchat had 397 million daily active users worldwide, up from 383 million in the previous quarter.  Snapchat is ranked as the 2nd most popular social networking app in the US. Users created 5+ billion snaps every day.  The largest Snapchat user base in the world was recorded in India as of April 2022, with an audience of 144.35 million users.

The mobile interface of Snapchat is more user-friendly than the other app that attracts more customers. It also ensures more privacy to the users through its unique feature of self-deletion. This app makes use of more visual aids that other messaging app.

4) Pinterest

• Product Type: Social media platform.
• Industry: Technology.
• Founded: March 19, 2010.
• Founders: Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp.
• Headquarters: San Francisco, California, United States.
• Area Served: Worldwide.
• Current CEO: Ben Silbermann.
• Number of employees:3,987 (2022)
• Revenue: $0.708B (June 30, 2023)
• Market cap: $17.89B (August 18, 2023)

A web and mobile application company, Pinterest operates a software system that is designed to discover information on WWW mainly using GIFs, videos, and images. The site was established by Paul Sciarra, Ben Silbermann, and Evan Sharp.

Pinterest inspires users to discover and perform their likes. It also sparks their creativity and gets to try new things. The home feed is the place where the user can find Pins, people, and also brands based on the user’s recent activity. Pinterest had 463 million monthly active users in April 2023 placing it 14th in our ranking of the world’s most ‘active’ social media platforms. The total number of people that use Pinterest each month increased by roughly 13 million (+2.9%) in the three months leading up to April 2023.The United States of America has at least 90.1 million active Pinterest users.

It also displays Pins from the people, boards, and topics that the user chooses to follow. Home feed is considered as the center of Pinterest where the user gets new ideas or Pins and also allows you to see a world of creativity and possibility across. Pins are ideas of people and the saved pins on the boards.

5) WhatsApp (WhatsApp status)

• Product Type: Instant messaging app.
• Industry: Technology.
• Founded: February 24, 2009,
• Founders: Jan Koum and Brian Acton.
• Headquarters: Menlo Park, California, United States.
• Area Served: Worldwide.
• Current CEO: Will Cathcart.
• Net worth: 98.56 billion dollar

WhatsApp is a freeware and a cross-platform messaging platform and VoIP service that is owned by Facebook. WhatsApp allows the users to send text messages, voice and video calls, images, user location, and documents.

The application runs on a mobile device but can be accessed from desktop and laptops as well. A popular feature WhatsApp status, allows users to share photos, texts, animated GIFs, and videos that will automatically disappear after 24 hours. To send and receive status updates to and from the contacts, both the sender and receiver must have each other’s phone in the contact list. With 2.7 billion daily active users, 2 billion monthly active users and more than 100 billion messages sent per day. As of 2022, WhatsApp is available over 180 countries. WhatsApp is available in 40 languages on iOS and 70 languages on Android. In 2022, WhatsApp was the third most downloaded app worldwide, generating 424 million across the App Store and Google Play.

Due to this, WhatsApp has a huge customer base of more than 700 million users. The main strength of this platform is the use of superior technology and is completely free for users. This application is available for all platforms.

6) Quora

• Product Type: Social question-and-answer website.
• Industry: Technology.
• Founded: June 25, 2009,
• Founders: Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever.
• Headquarters: Mountain View, California, United States.
• Area Served: Worldwide.
• Current CEO: Adam D’Angelo.

Quora is a popular website where questions are asked, answered, and edited by a community of users in the form of opinions. The company was established during the year 2009 and is headquartered in California, United States.

Quora’s mission is to share the world’s knowledge. A huge amount of knowledge that is valuable to many people, who require it, is currently available to a few. This website connects people who have the knowledge, to the people who require it. This platform ensures that the knowledge is shared with people. The main strength of this platform is that it covers many topics across many domains.

As of April 2023, Quora has launched its website in 24 languages. Quora is valued at $2 billion US dollars as of 2023.

As of July 2023, Quora has 300 million monthly active users. The majority of Quora users are from the United States, with 140 million users, followed by India with 100 million users.

The interface it carries is also good and stable. Almost every topic is available to the audience. Any user can select some topics as per their interest in order to ask and send any questions. The various features of this platform are topics, add answers and activity feed.

7) Tiktok

• Product Type: Social networking service.
• Industry: Technology.
• Founded: September 16, 2016, by ByteDance.
• Founders: Zhang Yiming.
• Headquarters: Beijing, China.
• Area Served: Worldwide.
• Current CEO: Zhang Yiming.

A popular social media app, Tiktok is used to create and share videos and live to broadcast as well. It was launched during the year 2016 by ByteDance. It is an important short video platform in Asia and over the years it has extended to other parts of the world. It is one of the fastest growing apps that have a large community spanning across many countries for short videos.

TikTok is used for entertainment, comedy, infotainment, and increasingly for promoting and selling products. As of August 2023, TikTok has over 1.1 billion users worldwide and is available in over 160 countries.

In 2022, TikTok was the second-most downloaded app globally. The TikTok app has been downloaded over 2.6 billion times worldwide, with 500 million of those downloads coming from India, 180 million from China, and 130 million from the U.S. TikTok has an estimated 80 million monthly active users in the United States in August 2023. In the first quarter of 2023, TikTok generated almost 500 million U.S. dollars in revenues from users worldwide.

It allows users to watch musical clips, shoot short videos, lip-sync to songs, and also edit them by using filters, special effects, and stickers. Users can choose background music to create a music video from the many available music genres that include electronic, hip-hop, and pop. This app has many internet celebrities and viral trends worldwide and due to which it is a top Instagram competitor.

8) YouTube

• Product Type: Video-sharing platform.
• Industry: Technology.
• Founded: 2005.
• Founders: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim.
• Headquarters: San Bruno, California, United States.
• Area served: Worldwide.
• Current CEO: Susan Wojcicki.

YouTube is a video sharing platform that allows users to view, upload, share and download a variety of user-generated media and corporate content.  It is the leading website with unique visitors every month. It was founded in 2005 but has gradually grown to become a force to reckon with in the social media industry. It rivals Facebook particularly on video content sharing and viewing aspect with more than 167.4 million users in every month as of 2016.

YouTube has over 2 billion monthly active users. In the U.S., 62% of users access YouTube daily. YouTube is the world’s second-most visited website. 694,000 hours of video are streamed on YouTube each minute. YouTube Shorts receive 15 billion daily views. YouTube ads have the potential to reach 2.56 billion users. YouTube is available in over 100 countries and 80 languages.

Advertisers could reach 2.527 billion users on YouTube in April 2023 placing it 2nd in our ranking of the world’s most ‘active’ social media platforms. YouTube has at least 2.527 billion users around the world in April 2023. India has 467.0 million active YouTube users. The United States of America has 246.0 million active YouTube users.

Most of its revenue is generated through on-site advertising. YouTube is owned by Google. Facebook Videos & YouTube videos, are always in competition. The day Facebook starts video monetization, that day YouTube will start facing big problems because a lot of the traffic. Hence, YouTube is considered as one of the top Facebook Competitors.

9) Google

• Product Type: Technology company.
• Industry: Internet.
• Founded: 1998.
• Founders: Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
• Headquarters: Mountain View, California, United States.
• Area served: Worldwide.
• Current CEO: Sundar Pichai.
• Revenue: 74.3 billion U.S. dollars (second quarter of 2023)
• Number of employees: 190,234 (2022)
• Market cap: $1635.26B (August 23, 2023)

Google is a US-based global internet company that specializes in offering digital products and services including advertising, online search, software and cloud computing. It is arguably the leading multiplatform that receives the highest number of visitors. Given that it offers a variety of features, it makes it easy for the users to use it for different searching purposes.

It generates much of its revenue from advertising via Google sites and Google Network websites. As much as Facebook earns relatively more from advertising, Google remains the major competitor in advertising. It currently has more than 190,234 fulltime employees and 121,000 contractors and commands a search share of 91.88% of traffic in the world as of 2023.

Google’s net income for the quarter ending June 30, 2023 was $18.368B. Google’s gross profit for the quarter ending June 30, 2023 was $42.688B.

10) LinkedIn

• Product Type: Professional networking service.
• Industry: Technology.
• Founded: December 5, 2002
• Founders: Reid Hoffman, Konstantin Guericke, Allen Blue, Jean-Luc Vaillant, and Eric Ly.
• Headquarters: Sunnyvale, California, United States.
• Area served: Worldwide.
• Current CEO: Ryan Roslansky.
• Net income: over $159.2 million

LinkedIn is a social networking service that is employment and business-oriented. It operates mainly via websites and mobile apps. It provides a platform for professional networking where potential employers post job openings and potential employees post their curriculum vitae. LinkedIn users create profiles and then invite others to become their connections thereby creating an online professionals network. It is available in 26 languages and is a subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation since the completion of the acquisition for approximately 26.4 billion dollars in December of 2016.

The U.S. accounts for 202 million of LinkedIn’s users, nearly 23% of the platform. Marketers could reach 922.3 million users with LinkedIn ads in April 2023, making it one of the world’s largest social media platforms.

With a revenue of over 10 billion dollars, over 20,000 employees and 930 million users, LinkedIn is a giant in the internet industry and with the number of job seekers ever-increasing, the service is only destined for more growth. While it is on the professional side and a bit different network, it still has its fair share of serious individuals – something Twitter also has. Hence it is one of the strongest Twitter Competitors.

Conclusion

Instagram is an ideal social networking platform to share photos and videos. Instagram being a popular platform allows people to upload photos and videos. It makes use of their latest technology to stay ahead with its above-mentioned competitors.

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