Matrix uses a similar end-to-end cryptography scheme to Signal. "Rooms" (chats, channels) are not encrypted by default, b
I don't think that's true anymore. it has been encrypted by default for quite a few years now
this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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Trash guide to be fair.
Discord has more functionality than all of these, that's why it's in the position it's in today, yet it gets ranked lower than... Rocket chat??
If we're objectively finding alternatives then we need to be objective, this guide seems sus AF.
i notice people not mentioning team speak 6. when our discord group were planning everything team speak 6 seemed to be the winner. it’s not free, but if i am hosting it with a license and have more control over the experience, then its not that big of a deal. from what i gather team speak 6 has better faster audio, and a better screen share for gaming. but we only just started poking around at options atm.
My friend group also jumped to that first, unless it's federated though it's not going to be "like discord" enough in the long run.
Part of what makes discord so good to many is that it's one app where you can connect to various different friend groups/modding groups/artists/etc...
Matrix does allow that with its federation model, ts6 does not 🤷
Matrix is probably the most well funded and supported open source platform that might be able to compete with Discord but even then it’s not a fair fight.
Sadly most people won’t leave discord. People will forget about this next week.
Made by the same team that did s3nd.pics (the imgur alternative. Under heavy Dev at the moment but has promise.
Not reviewed in this eval:
- DeltaChat (though would likely score similar to Signal with more points for decentralization)
- IRC
- XMPP
- Lemmy/PieFed/Nodebb (if he's going to include Discourse..)
Some other alternatives not reviewed:
- Spacebar
- TeamSpeak
- Root
Spacebar sounded really promising when I checked them out years ago.
The big Discord.com features currently left unimplemented or with partial implementations are: Voice/Video support (WebRTC protocol support implemented, but lacking UDP protocol implementation)
Unfortunately, seems like it’s still not at a point where it could cover basic Discord functionality.
Edit: I should be clear, I’m not trying to discourage it. I really hope it succeeds to the goal of parity with Discord! Love to hear from someone who has used it a bit.
Yeah, it was immediately clear based on the scoring that he was super biased toward Discourse. It's not a Discord alternative, and had no place in that list at all.
Top three are:
- Discourse
- Rocket.chat
- Matrix
I don't really see how someone can position Discourse as the number one Discord alternative. Surely most people looking to ditch Discord want live chat, audio/video calls, and screen sharing... Or am I just in the minority here?
For the record, I think Discourse looks awesome and even thinking about how I might use it for a project, but I do not see it as a Discord alternative.
Lots of communities use discord as a replacement for a forum despite it not being fit for it at all
Sure, but that’s not an argument for replacing Discord with forums. The two serve entirely different use cases, and should be treated like two entirely separate products.
Isn’t it though? A forum wouldn’t do all the things discord does, but the argument is that trying to use discord for a forum was a mistake in the first place. So replacing discord with a forum and then a dedicated chatting app makes sense, no?
I think we’re essentially saying the same thing in different ways. Yes, I 100% agree that forums should be separate from whatever the new Discord replacement ends up being.
I was more arguing that we can’t only use forums to replace Discord, because the realtime communication aspect would be a different use case. I’ve seen lots of “lol just use forums” types of posts, which completely ignore the realtime side of things. There would still need to be some service to replace the realtime aspects that Discord does serve.
Agreed. I think the fact that discord kind of does all the things is what made it attractive. But it’s not GOOD at the forum aspect, and it has its flaws for the other use cases as well.
I also want this suite of things. I stream movies to friends, share games I'm playing...
These are core features to me now in a robust chat client
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Discourse isnt free
And its been described as more of a forum than a chat service
This is misinformation.
You can self host it, for free.
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No, he hasn't been running a discord server. It's a channel. Discord is running the servers.
The older terminology, which is still used in the API, was a lot better.
It was Guild. It was a Discord Guild. Probably because Stanislav was working on it after he abandoned Guildwork.
Users (and I think Discord too) call the communities servers, and channels are the individual topics/threads in a community. It might not make sense from a hosting perspective but people do call it that
God, I hated that terminology when I needed to talk with people about discord.
I can only assume it's on purpose so average users really understand it wrong to avoid the associated negative view. Clever, really. But absolutely evil.
This wasn't intended to be misleading. The term "Server" as in a Discord Server is because, be fore Discord were the days of Ventrilo and TeamSpeak. For many of us gamers used to have to run or pay for their own actual server to have that kind of functionality. Then we'd combine direct calling with Skype for small groups and video. The term made sense at the time, but hasn't held up to the test of time. Basically Discord solved a problems of having to pay for those servers, and having to use two separate programs.
I'm a it professional (working in enterprise DCs) and have been running ts2 and murmur myself. It was misleading from the beginning and while I do understand your point I can not see a company doing this in good faith, I am too old for that.
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I highly doubt that when you start a “Discord server”, there’s any new machinery spun up. There is a near 100% chance it’s just an entry in a database. Nobody’s running a server just for him. So I don’t think there’s even reason to be charitable.
If Stoat (formerly Revolt) can integrate screen sharing capabilities soon enough, they will be the closest, user-friendly experience to Discord. Even the UI is familiar, if you come from Discord.
Apparently that's already in the backend since december, they're just getting their infrastructure up to snuff before they enable it
Switching to a self-hosted good old Teamspeak 6. Their screen sharing is very good, and audio quality is far above Discord. Overall it’s still need some polish but is okay.
Is screen sharing available for self hosting? Last I checked (6 months ago) the TS server version wasn’t publicly available yet.
If it is I’ll give it another go!
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