Google Chat Vs. Hangouts

 Aesthetics

Google Chat:

Hangouts: 

Hangouts easily claim victory in this category. Google Chat has a lot of blinding white space (No dark mode either) in it, but Hangouts has a large gallery of beautiful pictures it uses as the background. Contacts and conversations are easily accessible in the list next to it. 

Ease of Use

 Hangout's menus and options are easily understandable and navigatable. A little pop up appears in the left, which you can convert to a window if you want. In the window you can chat, video call, send pictures and emojis, access that conversation's settings, and change them if needed, as well as adding or removing people from the chat. Google Chat on the other hand is much more complicated. Its menus are not easily understandable. The text bar instead of saying "Type here to chat" or something like that says "History is on" which doesn't have anything to do with the text bar's function and doesn't make very much sense to my mind. The "Active" drop-down menu in the top left corner also lies in its function. Instead of letting you change your status to not active, this menu lets you mute notifications. The contacts menu is kind of weird too. It doesn't move active contacts to the top, it leaves them where they are. Also, only the first five or so contacts are shown, the rest you need to click a button to show. Hangouts allow you to see all your contacts at once, which I think is much nicer. Rooms are also the most complicated thing I've ever encountered on a chat system. It refuses to let you create a room (It imports your old rooms from Hangouts), and there is no way to add or remove people. Hangouts again claim victory. 

Features

Hangouts is relatively simple. It allows you to send emojis, images (No videos very frustratingly), and text. Google Chat lets you reply to messages, react with emojis, and the emoji menu is also much easier to use, with a quick pick selection and a searchable library. Hangouts has a vast library of stickers (Animated gifs basically) for pretty much every situation and some funny animations that play with certain commands (Try /pitchforks or /ponies). This makes it really fun to use when chatting with a group of friends. Google Chat has a bunch of boring features, but nice ones, like allowing you to mute notifications, a bunch of different settings, you can send videos and add files from Google Drive with just two clicks. I'd really say that his one is a tie, but since I don't like ties I'm going to give it to Google Chat. 

So there you have it, Hangouts wins 2/3. You have any thoughts? Tell me in the comments!