I’ve used Wire in the past and liked that it uses email addresses for registration (as pointed out in this article). Wire also had multi-device message sync long before Signal did.

But on a different point, Wire is inferior to Signal. Signal has a painfully slow data transfer when switching devices. But given some time, the data transfer does work completely.

On Wire, my experience has been that all media in chats are stored on the Wire servers and the backups don’t contain the media. They contain links to the media, while the media may be erased on the servers after sometime. I’ve lost a lot of media from chats on Wire when switching devices and restoring the backup from the original device. Only the text of the messages remain. At that time, Wire’s backups were also device/platform specific.

Since I place a very high level of importance on retaining and transferring data, I wouldn’t recommend Wire to anyone who wants to retain chats for longer durations.