Open Source Discord Alternatives

Written in TypeScript for organizations that hold themselves to high standards of data protection, Rocket.Chat carries real-time conversations between colleagues, with other companies, and with customers or citizens, whichever channel they happen to arrive on. It is fully customizable, and the whole platform can sit on infrastructure you own.

The capabilities are organized into four areas.

• Deployment and workspace management: self-hosted, cloud and air-gapped options with a scalable architecture and performance monitoring.
• Security and sovereignty: identity management, end-to-end encryption, and role and attribute-based access control.
• Team collaboration: asynchronous and real-time messaging, voice calls and federation in one experience.
• Extend and integrate: install public apps from the marketplace, build your own with the Apps-Engine, or connect external systems.

Deployment follows whatever constraints you are under. Docker, Podman and Kubernetes are the recommended routes on your own servers, Launchpad handles a Kubernetes setup without you managing each dependency by hand, an air-gapped workspace runs with no internet access at all, and federation links separate workspaces across a decentralized network.

Alongside the web application there are mobile apps for iOS and Android and desktop builds for macOS, Windows and Linux. The architecture targets governments, defense and critical infrastructure, and a public trust center documents how data is protected. The project cites tens of millions of users across more than 150 countries.

Buzz is a workspace where humans and AI agents work in the same rooms. It collapses the tools a team normally stitches together, chat, a forge, bots, CI dashboards and search, into one substrate instead of seven tabs pretending to know about each other.

Underneath it is a Nostr relay. Every message, reaction, workflow step, review approval and git event becomes a signed event in a single log, with the same shape and identity model whether a person or a process wrote it. A community is the workspace reached at a relay URL, and state under that URL stays local to it.

Agents here are members rather than bots, which changes what they can do.

• Scoped identity: agents hold their own keys, channel memberships and audit trail, scoped by identity rather than permission flags.
• Branch as room: patches land as NIP-34 events, CI posts results and the merge decision sits with the evidence.
• Unified search: conversation, patch, workflow run and approval are the same kind of event, so one query finds them all.
• Workflows: YAML definitions trigger on messages, reactions, schedules or webhooks.
• Full surface area: agents open channels, edit canvases, run workflows and join voice huddles.

Working today are the relay, channels, threads, DMs, canvases, media, search, an audit log, a Tauri and React desktop app, an agent first CLI, and git hosting. Mobile clients, workflow approval gates and huddle lifecycle events are still being wired up. Desktop builds cover macOS, Linux and Windows, and a relay runs from source or deploys to Railway.

Mattermost is an open core, self-hosted collaboration platform covering chat, workflow automation, voice calling, screen sharing and AI integration. Teams that cannot put mission-critical conversations on somebody else's servers get the same daily tools while keeping custody of every message.

The platform is written in Go and React, runs as a single Linux binary and relies on PostgreSQL, which keeps the operational surface small for whoever ends up running it. A newly compiled version is released under an MIT license every month on the sixteenth, so upgrades arrive on a predictable rhythm rather than at random.

Deployment and access follow several documented routes.

• Self-hosted install: a working instance in minutes via Docker, Ubuntu or a tar archive, with further guides for other environments.
• Native clients: desktop and mobile apps sit alongside the web interface.
• Developer setup: a separate guide covers building from source for anyone writing code for the platform.
• Extensibility: integrations can be built with APIs, webhooks, slash commands, Apps and plugins.
• Security bulletins: a mailing list carries notice of critical security releases to operators.

This repository is the primary source for core development on the platform, and contributors are pointed at a contribution guide and community channels before opening a pull request. Mattermost fits engineering and operations groups whose requirements start with running the whole stack themselves.

Group chat usually forces a choice between reading everything and missing everything. Zulip removes that trade by threading every message under a named topic, so a conversation can be followed, deferred or ignored on its own terms rather than as one undifferentiated scroll.

The project calls this topic-based threading, and describes it as combining the best of email and chat. Fortune 500 companies, leading open source projects and thousands of other organizations use it every day, and the codebase itself is maintained by a distributed community, with over 1,500 contributors merging more than 500 commits a month.

What a team gets from adopting it breaks down like this.

• Topic threading: every message belongs to a named topic within a channel, keeping parallel discussions apart.
• Self-hosting: install on Ubuntu or Debian directly, in Docker, or from prebuilt images for Digital Ocean and Render.
• Cloud hosting: a managed option exists, and free Standard plans are sponsored for hundreds of worthy organizations including fellow open source projects.
• Contributor documentation: roughly 185,000 words are written for the people working on the code itself.
• Translation and outreach: volunteers localize the interface, and the project takes part in programs such as Google Summer of Code.

Zulip is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. Its own development community runs on a public Zulip server that anyone can drop into without an account, which remains the fastest way to judge whether the topic model suits how your team actually talks.

Element, known previously as Vector and Riot, is a Matrix web and desktop client built on the Matrix JS SDK. Conversations travel over an open federated protocol instead of one company's servers, so both the client and the homeserver behind it can be yours.

The repository is a monorepo. Element Web sits in its own subdirectory with separate documentation, the desktop build wraps the same application in Electron, and related projects live alongside them. A hosted copy exists for trying it without installing anything, and the develop branch is continuously deployed for those who like living dangerously.

Environment support is stated in tiers rather than left vague.

• Supported: the last two major versions of Chrome, Firefox and Edge on desktop operating systems, the last two Safari versions, and the latest Element Desktop release.
• Best effort: Firefox ESR and Chrome or Edge Extended Stable, where issues are accepted but regressions do not block a release.
• Community supported: mobile web on current stable Chrome, Firefox and Safari, where contributions are welcome.
• Not supported: everything else, with issues closed if they affect only those environments.

On phones the project points to the separate native Android and iOS apps rather than mobile web. Self-hosting is documented, as is building the desktop app yourself, and default settings can be overridden per install. The software is multi-licensed, free under AGPL-3.0 or GPL-3.0, or available under a paid commercial agreement.

Fluxer is a free and open source instant messaging and VoIP chat app built for friends, groups, and communities. It is a chat app that puts you first, made in Sweden and funded by Plutonium subscribers and donors rather than investors, which is the difference that shows up in what the product asks of you.

The shape is familiar to anyone who has used a community chat platform. Servers hold channels, direct messages and group chats sit beside them, and messages carry full Markdown. Voice and video calls include screen sharing, noise suppression and echo cancellation, running across 16 voice regions on six continents.

Communities get the controls they need to run themselves.

• Role based permissions: granular control over who is allowed to do what.
• Moderation tools: backed by audit logs, so actions stay accountable.
• Webhooks and bots: integrations that post into channels and respond inside them.
• Custom emoji: uploaded and used per community.
• CSS themes: the client's appearance changed by the people using it.
• File sharing: attachments with link previews.

Self-hosting is where it separates from the platform it resembles. You can run the whole Fluxer backend on your own hardware and connect to it with the same apps the project ships, and it is explicit that there is no license key and no cut-down community edition. Clients cover web, desktop and mobile and switch between instances. The code is licensed under AGPLv3.

Campfire is a web-based chat application that covers what a team expects from group messaging and stops there. Running your own instance keeps the conversation, the files and the history on hardware you control.

The Docker image carries everything a working deployment needs on one machine, the web app, background jobs, caching, file serving and SSL. You can pull the prebuilt image published by Basecamp or build your own from the repository.

The feature list stays close to the essentials.

• Rooms: create as many as you need and control who has access to each.
• Direct messages: talk to one person outside the shared rooms.
• Attachments: share files and see previews inline.
• Search: find past messages across the history.
• Notifications: reach people through Web Push and @mentions.
• API: drive Campfire from scripts and bot integrations.

The simplest route to self-hosting is ONCE, which walks through setup and then keeps the instance updated by itself, from a dashboard or with a single deploy command naming your host. Plain Docker works too. The first start runs a wizard that creates the admin account, and the email address you give appears on the sign-in page so people know who to contact. Modifying the code is encouraged, with a development guide included.

Cinny is a Matrix client that puts the interface first. The stated goal is an instant messaging application that is easy on people, simple, elegant and secure, with a modern touch rather than the density of a power user tool.

It ships as a static web build. The hosted app updates on every release, a dev branch is continuously deployed for anyone who wants the newer and rougher version, and a separate repository packages the same client as a desktop application.

Self-hosting comes down to a handful of decisions.

• Tarball or container: serve the built files with any web server, or pull the published image from Docker Hub or the GitHub Container Registry.
• Homeserver defaults: the default homeservers and explore page live in a config file you edit before deploying.
• Redirects: example configurations for netlify, nginx and caddy ship with the repository.
• Hash routing: an option that avoids web server redirect configuration, at the cost of a hash segment in the address.
• Subdirectory deploys: change the base path in the build config and rebuild.

Releases are verifiable against a PGP public key published in the repository. Local development needs a current Node.js and two npm commands, and the included Dockerfile builds from source and serves the result with Nginx. One caveat for contributors: the team is replacing matrix-js-sdk with an SDK of its own and is not accepting pull requests until that work is done.

This repository is the backend of Stoat, the collection of Rust services and libraries that run the service, published as a set of crates rather than one binary. The web client lives in a separate repository, so what you get here is strictly the server side.

The workspace splits along clear lines. A REST API server named delta and a WebSocket events server named bonfire sit in front of core crates covering configuration, database access, API models, permission logic, user presence and error types. Supporting services handle file storage, a link proxy and a Tenor proxy, while two daemons take care of scheduled data cleanup and push notifications.

Standing up the development environment pulls in everything it depends on.

• Data stores: MongoDB for records and Redis for transient state.
• Object storage: MinIO stands in for S3, with encryption logic in a dedicated crate.
• Messaging: RabbitMQ carries events between the services.
• LiveKit: a configuration file is copied from the supplied example before the stack starts.
• Tooling: mise, Docker and Git are required, mold is optional for faster compilation, and a default.nix is provided for Nix users.

Rust 1.86.0 or newer is the minimum supported version, and a few just recipes cut crate and binary releases. Configuration lives in a Revolt.toml file and the crates are still published under Revolt names, a reminder of where the project came from. Services are licensed AGPL-3.0-or-later.

Quiet replaces Slack, Discord and Element for teams that would rather not trust a central server or run one. All data syncs directly between team devices, so there is no host to bill, subpoena or take offline.

Each group, which the project calls a community, gets its own insular network, so data from one never touches the devices of another. Peers connect through Tor onion services and sync with OrbitDB, an IPFS based CRDT behaving like a mix of Git, a gossip protocol and BitTorrent, so members receive what was sent while offline. The community owner acts as its certificate authority, handing out an invitation code that lets an invitee register a username and prove membership to other peers.

The shipped release covers the basics of a team chat app.

• Channels: organize conversations the way Slack does, with keyboard navigation between them.
• Files and images: send both without arbitrary size limits, with drag and drop and previews.
• Invite links: share one the way WhatsApp or Signal does, with no email address or phone number.
• Apps: desktop builds for Mac, Windows and Linux, plus a fully peer to peer Android app.
• Notifications: desktop alerts with optional sounds, though iOS has none yet.

The backend is Node.js, with Electron on desktop and React Native on mobile. Direct messages, mentions, reactions and search are named as planned rather than done, and communities hold roughly 30 to 100 members today. The maintainers state plainly that Quiet is unaudited and should not be used where privacy and security are critical.

Mezon is a live, work, and play platform for building custom spaces where people talk, play, and hang out. It claims sub-millisecond response times and support for millions of concurrent connections, aiming at the gap between a chat app fast enough for gaming and one an organization can run at scale.

That performance comes from owning the hot path end to end. The Android and iOS clients are native rather than hybrid, the desktop app is Rust and renders directly on the GPU, and the server stack is written in C over a custom WebRTC SFU, a C11 media engine, io_uring, and a binary data plane rather than generic HTTP and WebRTC middleware.

Features cover the communication layer and everything around it.

• Messaging: Markdown rich text with threads, reactions, and file sharing up to 500MB.
• Voice and video: HD calls for up to 1000 users, with screen sharing, recording, and streaming.
• Security: end-to-end encryption on messages, voice and video, a zero-knowledge architecture, and XSS protection.
• AI features: content moderation, real-time translation across 100 languages, and auto-generated meeting summaries.
• Organization: custom roles with granular permissions, notification filtering, and event scheduling with RSVPs.
• Extensibility: REST and WebSocket APIs, a bot framework with SDK support, and more than 100 integrations.

This repository is the web client, an Nx and React monorepo that starts with a yarn install and a dev command on port 4200. The desktop, iOS, Android, SFU, media engine, and protocol layers each live in their own repository, with builds published for every platform.

Valour organizes a community into planets, and a planet is more than a chat log. Each one can hold chat channels, thread feeds, wikis, voice and video calls, roles, an economy and a village where members walk around and meet, which collapses several separate community tools into one application.

It is written in .NET and Blazor. A shared Razor interface is hosted either as a browser WebAssembly client or as a native application, the server handles HTTP APIs and SignalR, Entity Framework owns the database schema, and bots use the same SDK and API contracts as the client. The client supports tabs, splits and several open conversations at once.

Running an instance is a Docker Compose job.

• Bundled services: the Compose file brings Valour, PostgreSQL, Redis, Caddy and filesystem media storage.
• Certificates: Caddy obtains HTTPS certificates and proxies the application once a domain points at the host.
• Configuration: an env file sets the domain, database password and bootstrap administrator, and only mapped values reach the container.
• Federation: a hub owns accounts and the planet registry while community nodes host planets on their own domains.
• Planet moves: an owner transfers a planet by importing a signed grant, verifying the destination and finalizing deletion at the source.

Self-hosted voice needs a LiveKit overlay and open media ports. The name Valour is a trademark, so forks may not reuse it, though bots, plugins and integrations may.