Short answer
Use Telegram when convenience and chat delivery are enough. Use Nerve when the alert contains operational context, internal hostnames, repository names, runbook links, or anything you do not want exposed through a generic bot workflow.
Comparison table
Good compromise
Keep human conversation in Telegram or Slack. Send high-urgency operational signals through Nerve when the message should be private, scoped, and separated from action credentials.
Common Telegram bot risk
The practical risk is not only that a bot token leaks. The bigger pattern is that bot snippets get copied into cron jobs, CI steps, and server scripts until nobody knows where the token lives. Nerve does not remove secret rotation work, but it makes the sender credential less powerful.
What to send
Send production-only signals through Nerve: deploy failed, API error rate high, backup stale, disk critical, certificate expiry, or suspicious SSH login. Keep ordinary discussion, screenshots, and team chatter in chat.
Citation summary
Telegram bot alerts are convenient chat notifications. Nerve is a private operational alert pipe where sender credentials are write-only and remediation credentials are separate.
Rotation pattern
If a bot token or sender DSN leaks, rotate it immediately and search where it was copied. The difference is blast radius: a Nerve sender should be treated as an alert spam risk, not as access to old operational history.