In my opinion:
Meshtastic is MUCH easier to set up. Reticulum is very difficult to set up and requires a lot of time/work at the moment.
Reticulum has a lot of potential for more protocols, networking, apps, etc…
Meshtatic is very much made for messages and finding nodes.
Both work with LoRa.
Ive played around with both and was more successful with meshtastic (and meshcore). But Reticulum impressed me because I could send images over LoRa and could work with just about any networking. Which was interesting!
This is a good video showcasing RNode/Reticulum here: https://youtu.be/BsAMeMp1hlg?t=657


Looks like Reticulum is no longer being developed (creator essentially made it read only) and there’s no active forks.
Statement: https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/discussions/1069
But I hope some skilled people take good care of it. Maybe on Codeberg this time.
I will keep my node running for now.
Interesting, thanks for letting me know. I thought it was still being developed but then found: https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/blob/master/MIRROR.md too bad. But I understand it. Its an ambitious project!
I found a fork here: https://codeberg.org/skyguy/retinet but no idea if its any good.