(Quiet founder here) Prior work like TorChat and Ricochet was actually a huge inspiration for Quiet. We build on their insight that if you use Tor onion services as your addresses in a peer-to-peer network, a lot of things get simpler.
Where Quiet goes farther is that Richochet (and I believe TorChat) offered 1:1 synchronous message delivery where each user sends directly to another user's onion address. Group chats were not possible, and messages were delivered only when both users were online. In Quiet, having a gossip network (libp2p) and a CRDT (OrbitDB) lets us do group chats with the "eventual consistency" property that messages sent while you were offline can be synced from other peers when you return. This also allows for asynchronous message delivery of DMs in most cases: you can gossip your (encrypted) DMs to all peers, and as long as there is a continuity of syncing between peers, the recipient will be able to retrieve them even if you are no longer online. So yes, there are some more moving parts, but they let Quiet be a lot more like Slack, Discord, Signal, Messenger, and most modern messaging apps than TorChat or Ricochet were, which means Quiet can be more functional and familiar to new users looking for alternatives.
I remember Tox from back in the day, but to my chagrin I have not assessed it since I started work on Quiet (I try to keep up on these things but there is so much prior work that didn't catch on for one reason or another!)
At a glance, it looks like Tox supports groups, which goes beyond Ricochet.
The most obvious single difference I see between Tox and Quiet right now is that Quiet is available for iOS (Testflight, for now) and Tox is not. iOS support has been a brutal slog (and the slog is not over) but it is a deal-breaker feature for every real-world team or community we have been able to talk to, so we are committed to making it work well.
Where Quiet goes farther is that Richochet (and I believe TorChat) offered 1:1 synchronous message delivery where each user sends directly to another user's onion address. Group chats were not possible, and messages were delivered only when both users were online. In Quiet, having a gossip network (libp2p) and a CRDT (OrbitDB) lets us do group chats with the "eventual consistency" property that messages sent while you were offline can be synced from other peers when you return. This also allows for asynchronous message delivery of DMs in most cases: you can gossip your (encrypted) DMs to all peers, and as long as there is a continuity of syncing between peers, the recipient will be able to retrieve them even if you are no longer online. So yes, there are some more moving parts, but they let Quiet be a lot more like Slack, Discord, Signal, Messenger, and most modern messaging apps than TorChat or Ricochet were, which means Quiet can be more functional and familiar to new users looking for alternatives.
I remember Tox from back in the day, but to my chagrin I have not assessed it since I started work on Quiet (I try to keep up on these things but there is so much prior work that didn't catch on for one reason or another!)
At a glance, it looks like Tox supports groups, which goes beyond Ricochet.
The most obvious single difference I see between Tox and Quiet right now is that Quiet is available for iOS (Testflight, for now) and Tox is not. iOS support has been a brutal slog (and the slog is not over) but it is a deal-breaker feature for every real-world team or community we have been able to talk to, so we are committed to making it work well.