Open source alternatives to Discord

What Discord does

Discord is a hosted chat service organized into servers, each with text, voice and video channels. Server owners manage members with roles and permissions and extend their servers with bots. Discord is free to use, offers the optional Nitro subscription, and carries advertising through Quests and Ads Manager.

Why people look for an alternative

• Data held by a US company. Discord’s privacy policy says it processes and stores information on servers in the United States, and may also use servers in other countries.
• Text is not end-to-end encrypted. Messages are encrypted in transit and at rest, and voice and video calls are designed to be end-to-end encrypted, but text chat is not.
• Third-party breach. In October 2025 Discord disclosed that a customer service provider it used, 5CA, had been compromised. Names, contact details, limited billing data and support conversations of users who had contacted support were exposed, as were government-ID photos of about 70,000 users that had been submitted for age-related appeals.
• Age assurance. Discord is introducing global age assurance. After criticism, it said in February 2026 that most users would not need to verify, moved the global rollout to the second half of 2026 and kept going in countries with legal requirements such as the UK, Australia and Brazil. Unverified users cannot reach age-restricted content or change some teen safety settings.
• More advertising. On September 29, 2026 Discord launched Ads Manager and Video Quests, opening its advertising platform to businesses of all sizes.
• No control over the platform. The terms forbid copying, modifying or reverse engineering Discord’s software, and a community cannot move its server to its own infrastructure.

What to compare in an alternative

1. Hosted or self-hosted. Some projects run a public service you can join today and also let you host your own; others are self-host only.
2. Voice and video. Built-in voice channels, screen sharing and camera, and whether they are finished or experimental.
3. Client support. Whether the official desktop and mobile apps can connect to a self-hosted instance, or only the web client.
4. Moderation. Roles, permissions, bans, audit logs and bot support.
5. Federation. Whether separate instances can talk to each other, now or on the roadmap.
6. Resources. Memory and services needed to self-host, from a few gigabytes to larger stacks.

Which one to choose

Stoat, formerly Revolt, is the most established Discord-style project, with a free hosted service and a Docker Compose stack that starts at 2 GB of RAM; most official apps do not yet connect to self-hosted instances. Fluxer is newer, with polished voice, video and screen sharing, native apps and a free hosted service, but needs about 8 GB of RAM to self-host and has federation only on its roadmap. Spacebar reimplements the Discord API so existing bots and Discord-compatible clients can connect, but it is still in development and voice is experimental. Tailchat offers a Discord-like group and panel layout that you can extend with plugins. If end-to-end encryption and federation matter more than a Discord look, Element organizes Matrix rooms into spaces for communities.