alt Hacker NewsDiscord Alternatives, Ranked
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Everyone talking about this seems to completely forget WHY everyone's using Discord: It's fun.
Discord has animated (custom) emoji, loops videos properly, silly bots, and fantastic voice chat with screen/game streaming to a HUGE amount of simultaneous users. The end user can pick and choose who they want to watch on-the-fly while remaining in the same voice channel.
The entire concept of a business using Discord for anything other than customer engagement is completely orthogonal to the very basis of the platform. It was built for gamers! It caters to GAMERS.
Repeat after me: DISCORD IS FOR GAMERS! People who want to have fun playing games with their friends. Any other use of Discord is secondary.
If you want to replace Discord with an alternative you must target gamers. What do gamers want? They want to have fun! They want a frictionless voice chat and super easy screen streaming. They want silly emoji and looping gifs in chat.
They don't care that much that the search doesn't work well. They don't care that it's centralized. They don't even really care much about this age verification check!
I swear, more teenagers (and younger) will scam the age verification system to see adult content than actual adults using Discord. Because the adults aren't there to see "adult content".
Ironically, Signal actually ranks a -1 for privacy in this use. Presumably you're already using Signal and getting mainstream contacts to start using it too. You probably have a basic profile that at least includes your real name, and might also have your picture. Maybe you're even one of the 7 people in the world that use the Stories feature in it. Well good news, now all of that is also unconditionally available to anyone in any group you ever join, including any future changes you ever make to that info, unrevocably forever into the future.
Signal has a fun dark pattern where it unrevocably grants permissions for anyone you allow to contact you to see everything in your profile for the rest of time. It has only a single trust level with contacts effectively: full trust. This is unacceptable in any tool you use for online community, unless you exclusively use it for online community and can decline to provide any info in this full-trust level. Unfortunately Signal also makes very sure you can't have a second account, by tying your account to a phone number, and only allowing one Signal instance per mobile device.
Is Signal good? Yes, but only exclusively for communication with people you already trust.
EDIT: typos
Discord became popular because it was free group/team voice chat. Mumble, Ventrilo, Teamspeak all needed servers/clients, paid hosting etc.
Discord is text chat (with history) + voice chat in one place. If you want an alternative it needs to do this both first and foremost.
People saying IRC are trolling or never used Discord.
As someone who has been on Discord since the beginning, runs Discord communities and writes Discord bots, here's my list of three things that I believe would make a viable Discord competitor:
- Free without requiring self-hosting;
- Absolutely frictionless community access - here's an invite link, you can start chatting immediately;
- High quality voice calls with screen sharing.
I don't think there is a competitor that hits all three points right now. Screen sharing in particular is often disregarded by developers who have limited interaction with Discord and don't truly understand the platform. It was not an original feature, but it is Discord's killer feature. Because screen sharing is also impromptu videogame streaming.
One of the main problems in suggesting Discord alternatives is that Discord itself is an amalgamation of several apps.
For some a Discord alternative needs to be a voicecall, for others it‘s game streaming, and for others it‘s just a chat, a bulletinboard or newsgroup, while they never used the Voice features.
I'm a little surprised nobody has mentioned Campfire [1].
It's open source, trivial to self-host, and can support an arbitrary number of rooms and users.
Sure, it doesn't have all of Discord's bells and whistles (for better or worse), but then neither do some of the alternatives mentioned in the article.
I'm sad to see XMPP missing from this list. I wonder if the author was simply unaware of it or simply ignored it.
IMO XMPP is technically superior to Matrix. It "only" needs a cross-platform high-quality, branded app àla Element. There's underlying protocol support for all the features: video/audio calls, group calls, threads and reactions. Maybe missing are custom emoji (I think?) and channel grouping (which is still in the works). And of course all these protocol features work fine with federation.
The thing is: None can compete with the Discord in its core features. They either have good chat or good voice, but not a combination of both.
Discord replaced Ventrilo, TeampSpeak and Mumble simply because it merged Slack/IRC-style chatting with an easy to use voice chat that took less resources than skype and less setup than any of the self-hosted version or cheaper than a hosted version.
Low-latency voice chats combined with Slack, I don't know why no one has an alternative for that.
Most Discord alternatives fail not on tech, but on polish.
Signal → private but bad for communities
Matrix → flexible but rough UX
XMPP → powerful but fragmented
Discord → centralized but frictionless
Users pick frictionless every time. We probably don’t need new apps or protocols we need a client that works well.
Can't take the list seriously when functionality is just 1 of the 5 weights. Like I don't care how good or bad the other weights are but if search and UI is broken, I won't be using it unless I'm forced to.
The title is about "Discord alternatives", the major core metric is:
> Functionality: can it do everything required of a platform for building, organizing, and sustaining a community?
Feels like these are two different things.
What I expect from a Discord alternative is text messaging, voice and video call with screensharing, both possible on community spaces and with personal contacts in a way that is extremely easy to setup.
Matrix is the only one that offers the killer feature of Discord, which is being able to join many communities from a single login.
Sadly Matrix has never had a good UX for me. IMO they spent too many complexity tokens on e2ee and there are simply not enough left.
> Anyway this thing [Revolt/Stoat] is so far from being ready for prime time, I only include it here to call out the project. I wish them the best and hope for good things, especially since you can self-host the server. But a lack of stability and features prevent this from being useful for anything beyond experimentation. Maybe someday.
Curious what prompted this verdict. My only experience with Revolt/Stoat has been with the Handmade Cities instance, but said experience hasn't been anywhere near as bad as this writeup seems to suggest.
Do any of these support migrating the content of a Discord server (from some 3p archive tool)?
Can anyone suggest a good archive tool? The open source project I help run has ~10 years of conversations, bug reports, feature requests, etc. sunk into Discord, and obviously I want to preserve all that (not sure we'll end up leaving the platform, but it's good to have backups anyhow).
Our bug reports / FRs are in forum channels, and I've written a script to extract those and potentially import them into some bug-tracker. But I'd like something good that can archive the entire thing in a reasonable format.
I'm quite surprised to not see teamspeak 6 on here. From what I've seen, it has all the features discord has now, including screen sharing, video calls, channels like discord, and it's also designed for gamers. It's been mentioned in some replies, but not any top-level comments yet. Is TS6 missing some discord features? (maybe calendar events, and their bot ecosystem is a lot smaller)
I think matrix / element are already working and very usable BUT what is needed is that big push to add the polish. I agree with others here, the matrix project would do well to realise that it’s a great contender for being a discord replacement and set about bulking up with some of the most loved features on discord.
A polished ui and a couple of fav discord features onto the product milestone plan and I think matrix adoption would start to really pick up.
Not to take away from the seriousness of the moment, but I feel compelled to share my feeling shere: My inner teenager was hoping to see TeamSpeak and Ventrilo listed just to honor the good old days. Between 2005-2008 it felt as if Ventrilo had about 90% of the market, with TeamSpeak having the rest. I guess the hopeful message is that nothing lasts forever and alternatives come and go.
I know I'm in the small minority of Discord users who mostly uses it as a voice chat room while gaming with my friends, but for that use case the best alternative I've found seems to be Mumble.
I recently set up a Mumble server on my home server and it seems great so far, was able to get my friends connected pretty easily. We'll see how the voice quality and latency compare to Discord.
If the age verification/mandatory ID is the result of new laws, how exactly would switching to an alternative server help? Wouldn't they be forced to implement the same measures as well sooner or later?
What most people here seem to forget, is once a social platform gains traction and especially attention from the main masses, it undoubtedly require checks and balances.
Predators, racism, gore, pedophilia, harassment, stalking and so on..
No matter how high you value security, these are matters that hurt real people today. If you attract the mainstream, you must deal with it.
For all people talk negatively about friction, honestly I see it in many cases as a feature, not a flaw.
Far too many flaws of discord, reddit, and other "socialmedia commons" come from an absolute lack of friction. People seeing it as almost a right to participate wherever, whenever, without ever lurking more and learning a community's culture, norms, or etiquette.
I know people frown upon it but I think XMPP is the way to go. It "just" require a good discord like client with voice and screen share.
Great writeup! Looks like this is going to be relevant very soon.
> Tools do not make a culture; the people engaging on it do
Absolutely, but it's also important to keep in mind that the tool has a big impact on culture by virtue of what behaviors it encourages and what limitations it has. "The medium is the message" is very true here, so think carefully about which tool you hop onto.
Best for: anything but real-time chat, really.
Maybe the best way to think of Discourse is as an anti-Discord. It's everything Discord isn't: asynchronous, open source, and self-hostable.
Then why is it the highest rated "Discord alternative"?
The best Discord alternative was probably Guilded. Which Roblox bought out, then shut down. Talk about really poor decision making. Our next best option after years of looking for alternatives will likely be XMPP.
IRC is the only alternative that runs on random potatos and survives lawfare.
My take: Discord will slowly enter the arena with the likes of Google, MS, Meta, Apple, Valve for their massive user network. The amount of resources needed to sustain free offerings for so long make it a nearly insurmountable moat for others to compete.
Even if one could reproduce their tech (which I doubt, they are top-tier), individuals would drown under hosting costs. They've positioned themselves incredibly well.
I'm looking at modern browser APIs and wondering why no one else is trying certain things.
getDeviceMedia and getUserMedia are very powerful these days. I haven't actually tested it but I believe a chromium browser would have no issue capturing the hw accelerated output from a game. You can pipe these media streams directly to WebRTC peers for playback on the other side. A server with a simple selective forwarding unit could enable larger scale meetings (100s of participants). All of this can happen in <1000 lines of JS and server code. Most of the heavy lifting happens in the browser engine. Concerns like automating browser permissions, global hot keys, etc. can be handled via electron or platform specific options like WebView2.
Mobile clients are a bit cursed right now. The best solution is to maintain a standard client in the app stores. Forcing everyone to sign their own mobile apps is way too much friction. And you do need native for this on mobile. Browser only / PWA has no chance in hell of providing a smooth UX on iOS or Android.
Don’t see it mentioned here but I’m looking at Delta Chat as an option. It seems like a solid option if you want text only. Built on mail protocols, encrypted, allows for decentralization. Need to play with it more before I say I really like it but the first day of use it’s been better than Matrix. Would love to hear thoughts from anyone who’s used it.
Zulip actually looks pretty good if they made it a little sexier.
Tiny nitpick: you actually can pin messages in Signal group chats. It's a pretty recent addition though.
Apart from that, I would have been interested in more details about the author's experience with ~Revolt~ Stoat. To my naive eyes it looks pretty nice. I really like the nuanced takes about the other platforms in this article, so I'd guess the author has some good reasons to dismiss Stoat like that.
The most important colon is missing: user-adoption
One that didn't make the list that I'm excited for is Root. It's come a long way in a short time and already has quite a bit of the features Discord has. The apps and bots are also being set up to be way more powerful than Discord as well.
We are also currently working on a privacy-focused alternative called Kloak, which is in its very early alpha stage. We would greatly appreciate your feedback on areas for improvement and any expectations you may have for the platform.
Here is a quick promo video as well - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekOxAg7leXM
Maybe there's a niche for Valve/Steam to step into here. They already have your data, and many people use Discord for gaming related chat.
The Telegram drop off for doing something really bad recently? I have not seen a single person mention it as an alternative. I don't really use discord that much except for the few friends I have that are not on telegram. Actually all of my family and friends are on telegram, even my grandmother is on telegram. When playing games with friends we just do a group call in telegram. I don't even see it on this list though.
What's the best alternative for folks who just want to voice and text chat with a small circle of people? Say, less than 50.
What's the point of the licensing on these chat servers charging per-user when self hosting?
It already has quite big communities https://simplex.chat/directory/
The founder of it is on here https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=epoberezkin
I'm building an open-source, high-quality chat app called Inline. It aims to solve issues with Slack and Discord for work communication. Happy to answer any questions.
Has anyone tried https://pumble.com/
Honorable mentions worthy of your support:
https://wiki.bitmessage.org/index.php/Main_Page
https://vituperative.github.io/i2pchat/
Bring this back!, for sentimental reasons:
https://dcplusplus.sourceforge.io/webhelp/chat_commands.html
Email + IRC (there are daemons that support chat history). Bouncers exist. Logging. This should be standard for OSS projects, not some private, unsearchable, data-mining platform.
This is what happens when we reach for convenience over openness.
can someone please try running the experiment of "but what if just forking&spinning up an OSS clone, scaling up to take in the migrants, acquire network effects, collect roughly same subscription revenue, but run on just, like, 10 people?"
Discord has a financially and politically vulnerable posture that is downstream of having to operate a very large team, raise funding, be exposed to investor market pressure. However, it is also one of the rare instances of successful consumer freemium subscription monetization. A clone does not have to pay the tuition of "what makes this specific space compelling, and want-to-pay-for"; it just have to _exists_, passively soaking up migrants from each platform shift.
ITT WTB 3rd place for my frens.
I would love an updated KDX/Hotline server running an a RasPi or similar at home. This was a solved problem 20 years ago. The migration to online based platforms will always lead to network effects and enshittification, for very little gain.
There is zero chance that the target users for Discord is going to try anything more complicated than Discord, so basically all the entries in this list. I recoil in horror thinking about me explaining Matrix even to the most tech savvy friends I use Discord with and I really really hope people would stop recommending it.
I was considering making a similar list since I was very interested in checking out alternative chat programs, but I have to say this list isn't that good. A lot of the alternatives here aren't ACTUALLY Discord alternatives.
Most people use Discord for its community features and being able to join massive servers with 1+ million people, follow news, talk in forums, etc... It also has a lot of features people hand-waive like a really good roles system, moderation and server management tools, a bot ecosystem, etc.
Signal is a Whatsapp alternative for 1-on-1 chats with friends and small groups.
Rocket chat is a Slack alternative for people wanting to host a server for a community. It's not a platform, you need to register and login to each server manually.
I haven't used Zulip but AFAIK it's like Rocket Chat.
Ditto on Mattermost.
Discourse is a forum.
Stoat is basically the only thing here that actually competes on Discord and it's really barebones. There isn't a genuine Discord alternative because it turns out it's really hard (and expensive!) to do what it does, kind of like a Youtube alternatives scenario.