Kakao

Kakao is the South Korean internet and platform company most people meet through KakaoTalk, which has become the default chat layer for a lot of everyday life there. By our assessment, its main strength is how much it bundles around one core messenger: chat, stickers, payments, delivery, transport and other services all hang off the same ecosystem. The downside is familiar to anyone who has lived inside a super-app: it can feel crowded, commercial and hard to treat as just one thing. In practice Kakao is less a single product than a network of linked products, so using it often means living in the app rather than merely opening it. It sits near the top of the Korean digital scene because KakaoTalk is so central, and that scale is what makes it powerful. People who want one app to do many daily jobs will find a lot here; people who want a quiet messenger will not.