WhatsApp group statistics: a worked example you can check

To check who participates most, when a WhatsApp group is busiest and which emoji it uses, export the group and open it in the Tera Chat chat analyzer. It runs in a phone or desktop browser, needs no account and processes the selected file on your device. You do not need to install the Tera Chat Mac app or send private messages to an AI assistant.

Here is a small group with a known answer. It makes the counting rules visible before you choose your own chat.

Try the fictional garden club

Download the fictional WhatsApp group export, open the analyzer, and select Choose your chat export. The file contains invented messages from Mira, Noah, Zoe and Leo on 26–30 October 2026. No real conversation was used.

The result should contain 18 messages from four people. We checked these figures against the parser used by the live tool on 2 November 2026. The expected CSV lets you inspect all 18 message rows separately, including the message that spans two lines.

Sender	Messages	Share, rounded to a whole percent
Mira	8	44%
Noah	5	28%
Zoe	3	17%
Leo	2	11%

Mira’s exact share is 8 ÷ 18, or about 44.4%. It measures message frequency. It does not measure reading, useful contributions, voice-note duration or commitment to the group. Someone can send one long message while another sends five short ones.

Why 21 lines become 18 messages

This export has two system notices, 18 sender messages and one continuation line. The analyzer skips the system notices. The line Seeds, tools, water belongs to Mira’s preceding message, so it does not create another message.

Mira also has one media-omitted placeholder and one This message was deleted entry. Each remains a message for participation and activity counts. Neither supplies words or emoji for text statistics. The analyzer cannot recover the original photo or deleted text. Actual files may use different localized markers; this sample establishes the result for the markers shown here.

A message absent from the file cannot be counted at all. Check the displayed first and last dates before describing the result as your group’s entire history.

Read the activity grid correctly

The grid groups timestamps by weekday and hour. Monday at 18:00 means messages on Mondays from 18:00 through 18:59 across the selected file. It is not a read receipt or a measure of time spent online.

Populated cell in this example	Messages
Monday, 09:00–09:59	3
Monday, 18:00–18:59	4
Tuesday, 10:00–10:59	2
Tuesday, 18:00–18:59	2
Thursday, 18:00–18:59	4
Friday, 08:00–08:59	3

The busiest cells tie at four messages. Adding the evening cells gives 10 messages during the 18:00 hour, across different days. The tool shows the weekday/hour grid; that cross-day sum is our calculation from the table. The busiest individual date is 26 October, with seven messages.

WhatsApp’s text timestamps in this example have no time-zone offset. They are interpreted as local times. Telegram and Instagram exports may carry timestamp information differently, so do not assume the same clock-time behavior for every source.

Emoji, words and the quiet day

The emoji ranking is 🌿 five times, then 😂 three times. It counts occurrences in parsed message text, not reactions or sticker images. The leading word is garden, six times, after common filler words are removed.

There are four active days across five calendar dates. Nothing happens on 28 October. That changes a daily average:

• Per active day: 18 ÷ 4 = 4.5 messages.
• Across the full date span: 18 ÷ 5 = 3.6 messages.

Tera’s daily summary uses active days and displays a rounded whole number, 5 for this example. State the denominator when comparing tools. The longest streak is two days. Both 26–27 and 29–30 October qualify; the tool keeps the first tied run.

What group reply times cannot tell you

Tera counts a qualifying reply gap when consecutive messages have different senders and are less than 24 hours apart. In a group, the second person may be replying to someone else entirely. A fast gap does not prove an answer to the preceding message. The reply-time worked example explains the separate six-hour conversation-start rule and the median calculation.

The export cannot tell this analyzer which silent members read the discussion, who is online or how people feel. Use the leaderboard to describe this file, not to label someone a bad friend or an inactive reader.

Run it with your own group on a phone

In WhatsApp, open the group and use Export chat → Without media. On Android the export command is under the chat menu and More; on iPhone it is in the group’s information screen. Save the TXT or ZIP to your device, then select it in the analyzer. See WhatsApp’s export instructions for the phone workflow.

Choose a file whose dates cover your question. Very large exports may exceed a phone’s memory. If the group has disabled exporting through Advanced Chat Privacy, respect that setting; this tool does not bypass it.

For a single-year picture, open the export in WhatsApp Wrapped, select a year and save the image. Ask the group before sharing names and statistics. For alternative analyzers and different export needs, use our comparison of chat-analysis tools.