Great apes deploy gestures as flexible communicative strategies in many social contexts. For decades, studies on chimpanzee gestures were biased towards captive settings. Despite well-documented intersite variation in chimpanzee behaviour, studies on their gestural communication in the wild have mainly focused on single communities. We investigated gestural usage and development in two chimpanzee communities and subspecies (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii at Kanyawara, Uganda; P.t. verus at Taï, Côte d’Ivoire). Studies focused on interactions between infants and their social partners in three contexts: joint travel, play solicitation and food sharing. Overall, gestural usage was strongly affected by infants’ age, kin relationship with recipients and previous interactions with non-maternal conspecifics. While repertoires largely overlapped, gesturing rates and intentional signal use seemed to differ between the communities. We speculate that variation in gregariousness and differentiated social relationships could be driving this difference. We discuss our results in light of the social negotiation hypothesis and the relevance of social exposure for communicative development.