Wickr vs Wire

What Wickr is

AWS Wickr is the active enterprise successor in the Wickr product family, not the discontinued Wickr Me or Wickr Pro service. It provides end-to-end encrypted one-to-one and group messaging, rooms, voice/video calls, screen sharing and files across mobile and desktop clients. Standard and Premium are metered per user; Premium adds data retention, longer expiration controls and higher attachment limits, while a three-month Premium trial supports up to 30 AWS Wickr users. Enterprise self-hosting is quote-based. AWS published $5 Standard and $15 Premium launch prices in 2022, but the current readable comparison table does not expose base-plan amounts, so ToolCompare treats the current price as unverified rather than presenting the historical figure as a live quote.

What Wire is

Wire is a proprietary commercial service built on open-source clients and backend components for end-to-end encrypted messaging, calls, conferences and file sharing. Current pricing offers Wire for Free to teams of up to five, Wire for SMB at €7.45 per person per month billed annually (€8.94 monthly) for up to 100 people, and custom Enterprise/partner arrangements. SMB adds conferences up to 150 participants, SSO, SCIM, administrative policy and external/guest roles. Private-cloud and on-premises deployments add license, setup, implementation and customer-operated infrastructure; air-gapped use is available only through appropriately scoped deployments.

What Wickr is built to do

Encrypted workspace

Combines direct and group chat, rooms, calls, files and screen sharing under E2EE.

Managed identity

Includes SSO, federation, security groups and user/device administration.

Compliance retention

Premium can retain communications for audit, legal-hold and eDiscovery workflows.

APIs and bots

Supports regional administrative APIs and containerized bot-based workflows.

What Wire is built to do

Encrypted collaboration

Combines multi-device messaging, calls, conferences, screen sharing and files under E2EE.

Enterprise identity

Adds SSO, SCIM, member lifecycle and policy controls on paid team plans.

External collaboration

Supports marked external users and password-protected browser guest rooms.

Deployment choice

Runs in Wire Cloud, a private cloud, on-premises or selected offline environments.

Choose Wickr if

• Security-sensitive teams needing managed E2EE chat and calling
• Regulated organizations that explicitly require retention and eDiscovery
• AWS-centered deployments integrating identity, monitoring, APIs or bots

Skip Wickr if

• A permanent free personal messenger is required
• The buying decision assumes Wickr Me or Wickr Pro still exists
• Compliance officers cannot define who may decrypt retained records and how those records are protected

Choose Wire if

• Teams needing E2EE plus SSO and SCIM rather than a consumer messenger
• Organizations collaborating with controlled guests and external partners
• Sovereignty projects prepared to operate or fund private-cloud or on-premises infrastructure

Skip Wire if

• More than five users need a permanently free managed team
• The project assumes open source makes hosted operations free or automatically compliant
• On-premises patching, monitoring, capacity, backups, federation and incident response lack an owner

Wickr: pros & cons

• Messages, files, calls and screen sharing are positioned as end-to-end encrypted.
• Both current plans include SSO, federation, administrative controls and a financially backed 99.9% SLA.
• Premium supports compliance retention while Enterprise offers a customer-hosted deployment path.
• Administrative HTTP APIs and bot workflows allow controlled automation and AWS integration.
• Wickr Me and Wickr Pro are discontinued; consumer-era reviews and plan claims are no longer a reliable description of AWS Wickr.
• There is no always-free plan: the Premium trial lasts three months and is limited to 30 AWS Wickr users.
• Retention and eDiscovery deliberately create authorized plaintext access paths, so E2EE does not mean administrators can never preserve communications.
• The current public pricing table omits readable Standard and Premium base amounts; add-ons, AWS Support, tax and self-hosting can raise total cost.

Wire: pros & cons

• Messages, calls and files are end-to-end encrypted across supported multi-device clients.
• SMB includes SSO, SCIM, administration and guest/external controls at a public per-user price.
• Cloud, private-cloud and on-premises options address different sovereignty and operations needs.
• Open-source code and MLS-based group security provide inspectable protocol and implementation surfaces.
• The free plan is capped at five team members and excludes multi-party conference initiation, SSO and policy controls.
• Private-cloud and on-premises total cost includes licenses, setup, implementation, infrastructure and ongoing customer maintenance.
• Federation, ID Shield, multi-tenancy and certain sovereignty features are Enterprise rather than SMB entitlements.
• APIs and SDK custom functionality is not fully supported as a standard deployment path and requires vendor scoping.