Discord Alternatives

Earth Walker 2026

I’m only going to consider FOSS options because a proprietary solution could end up having similar problems to what’s plagueing Discord today. Pretty much all of these are self-hostable, and most of them have a free flagship instance as well.

Essential Discord Features

• Realtime text chat
  • Inline images/files
  • Reactions
  • Replies
  • Threads
• Spaces/“servers”
  • Chat rooms
  • Voice chat rooms
  • Moderation tools
• Direct/private messages and group chats
• Streaming/screen share

Partial Drop-In Replacements

These apps cover a lot of Discord’s feature set. No alternative covers all of it. In particular, don’t expect low-latency screen sharing with audio from any of these.

Matrix + Element, Etc.

Matrix is a decentralized realtime chat and video chat server that you can plug different clients into, such as Element or FluffyChat (if you want calls, stick with Element on desktop and Element X on mobile). It has a lot of the same features as Discord, but also allows for E2EE, though this can be confusing. The decentralization aspect can be confusing as well, but it enables communication between Matrix servers which is a very powerful feature. In terms of features, this seems like one of the best options, but the UX could be a problem for some people.

Stoat (Formerly Revolt)

A Discord clone that has pretty much the same feature set but just not as advanced at this point. Voice and video works in self-hosted instances but the flagship instance is still working on it. I guess they are getting flooded with Discord refugees right now which is a blessing and a curse. This project has been around for a while so I do have some confidence that it will improve over time.

Fluxer

A Discord clone that launched a couple months ago. Seems fine but longevity is unproven. They don’t have any mobile apps yet, but the website works well on mobile and has notifications.

Rocket.Chat

Slack clone with a free option. Used by big companies and governments. Seems like a better choice for big orgs, there’s no obvious way to sign up for free without self-hosting.

Zulip

Slack clone with a free option, used by many FOSS projects. Probably better than Discord for tech projects, but the interface is more forum-like than chat-like which could be off-putting to casual users.

Feature Subset Replacements

These apps focus on subsets of Discord’s features.

Mumble

Really good voice chat (with minimal text chat features) suitable for gaming with an ugly ass interface. Low latency and positional audio are key features.

Signal

Very good, secure text, voice and video chat with support for groups. Has screen sharing without audio. Does not support spaces.

Jitsi

Easy to use video calling software that actually powers the video calling features in some of the other entries on this list. Can be used without an account.

Peertube

YouTube alternative that supports streaming. You could use something like OBS with this. I use PeerTube a lot and I really like it. You can sign up with an existing instance.

Owncast

Self-hosted streaming server. You can use OBS to stream to it.