The WhatsApp community is here. Here are the key features that set them apart.

Tired of having a zillion different WhatsApp groups all over the place? Say, for every generation of a family, every department of a company, and every bunch of people in a locality? The Meta-owned app has decided to make it a little less complicated for you with the newest 'Community' feature. You can now club up to 20 related WhatsApp groups to form a WhatsApp community.

Pretty much like a folder containing quite a number of subfolders, namely groups? Yes, kind of the same in principle.

You can create a new community simply by clicking on the 'new community' option in the recently introduced community tab. Once you're done, you can either add existing groups to it or create new ones. The new community thus created will have an announcement group with all its members. Yes, from all constituent groups. Meaning, you need not copy-paste or forward the same messages to all of those groups from now on. Simply putting a message in the announcement group of the community will be more than enough.
Whatsapp Community feature can make it a whole lot easier to organize and integrate multiple groups with similar interests. This can come in handy for large-scale institutions in their communications. It can be like the WhatsApp version of Slack or Discord.

Communities and groups, how are they different?

Apart from the functional differences mentioned, there are a few other features that set them apart. Namely,
Number of participants
As against the existing 512 participants allowed in a group, a WhatsApp community can have up to 5000 members. And with the limit all set to increase to 1024 for groups, there are chances for this to even reach 20,000.
Display

Contrary to the classic circular icons of WhatsApp, communities have their icons in the shape of a rounded rectangle. Announcement groups and other constituent groups of a community can also be identified easily with their discrete icons with repeated circles.

All powers vest with the admin

The participants in a WhatsApp community have very limited powers. It is the admins who can add or remove participants, messages, etc. in a community.

Privacy policy

One can't access the contact details of the members of a community as they can in a WhatsApp group. Communities will not have the entire participants and their details enlisted. Everyone except for the admins can only see the total number of participants in that community. Members can, of course, view the participant groups though. And if they want to join any of them they can send requests directly.

Removing participants

Participants once removed from a community will no longer be part of any of the groups coming under that community. Meaning, there's no need to remove them from every single group.

No community calls

Nobody can make a community video or audio call. The option to do so is hardly there in WhatsApp communities. And it makes perfect sense taking into consideration the large number of people a WhatsApp community will have as its members.