Instant messaging is an increasingly competitive market and despite your best efforts to keep it simple, it's hard to avoid keeping two or three apps around to keep in touch with different groups of people. If this sounds familiar there are a handful of all in one messaging clients that can make things more convenient by keeping all your chats under one roof.

Messaging is not only among the top activities on smartphones (if not THE top activity), messaging apps are increasingly seen as social networks. After all people use them to send each other texts, videos, photos and other content either one-on-one or as a group. Sounds familiar, right?

Feature-by-feature rundown, PLUS a look at the top contenders' data policies