Meshtastic vs Meshcore for Off-Grid Messaging

Being able to message without cell services for hiking, camping, and overlanding is great.  Meshtastic is great for this, or is it?

I have recently started investigating and using Meshcore because it deals with congestion much easier and it as a more robust networking, as well as the popularity is gaining as more and more Meshtastic users are migrating over to Meshcore. Both of these platform can support truly off-grid messaging. But which one is right for you?

Here is the comparison between the two:

I have some devices still running Meshtastic, but similar devices can run Meshcore so I moved some devices over.  Why would I want one or the other?  For Ad Hoc mobile groups, Meshtastic has been great.  For congested areas like major metropolitan areas, Meshcore just works.  

I have taken the Lilygo T-Deck Plus (looks like an old Blackberry device) to the Meshcore environment as it has a better interface, it works well, and it truly takes advantage of the T-Deck technology. It supports GPS, messaging, and has all the alerts I need (other than a vibrating notification) to send and receive messages.

I love the T-Echo for Meshtastic and it is a great way for my friends and I to communicate even at distance (with the right antenna).

Here are some use cases I found for both.

Meshtastic

Meshtastic is fairly easy to setup and use for Ad hoc mobile groups. For example, when I am hiking or even bike riding, I can send a quick message (distance not being very far but potentially your riding buddy is no longer in sight) saying that you are taking a break. I can setup Meshtastic repeaters running on Solar and battery at a campsite and use that to communicate to a group of campers that sometimes like to go and do things separately. There is a small community of Meshtastic users in my area so I can connect with them as well using a large external antenna and the fortune of reaching a device that can receive my message. I have been successful but it has been hit or miss. I know there are other use cases than what I described, but I use those use cases the most with Meshtastic.

Meshcore

Meshtastic is fairly easy to setup and use for local area messaging (when I mean local area, I am talking about county wide or greater). I am part of a county wide Meshcore group and I can send messages to many people to just chat or in case of emergency, provide GPS coordinates and ask for assistance. The distance between two points have been further than 100 miles. I also use it for Ad hoc mobile groups, almost similar to Meshtastic. One difference is if there is a near enough Meshcore repeater that my Ad hoc repeater can reach, we can get emergency signals to other people than people at my camp group. Yes, you can do something similar using Meshtastic using repeaters and routers, but there may be a limit to 7 hops where the Meshcore network can be up to 64 hops. I have easily connected well over 100 miles across remote areas out to metro areas using Mesh core (all without cell service or Internet). I have not been as successful using Meshtastic. Don’t read this as Meshtastic is less capable. It is a different technology that does things differently to achieve similar results. The community for Meshcore users is significantly higher than Meshtastic in my areas where I roam so I have been slowly moving completely over to Meshcore (though I will maintain a couple of Meshtastic devices just in case there is some drastic change and improvement along with a shift of new users on it.)

So, in the end, depending on your use case, you can use one or the other. I will add an article on the site of how to setup a Meshcore device and how to start sending messages to people in minutes.

Hopefully, this will provide some additional insight as to which direction to go.