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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.
Made by the same team that did s3nd.pics (the imgur alternative. Under heavy Dev at the moment but has promise.
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.
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
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
Discourse isnt free
And its been described as more of a forum than a chat service
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.
I used to use to for audio calls now I use it more for a forum.
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
A lot of people don’t seem to realize that Discord has a variety of features, and each feature can be more or less useful for different types of communities. There’s almost no platform that has all of them so you have to zoom out and look at more of the general purpose. The Discord “servers” I’ve used NEVER used anything but text chat.
I understand that but even the text chat is a different experience than what Discourse offers. Even people who only used Discord for text chat and want a replacement for that would be better on IRC.
It’s not the text chat they’re referring to. An annoying amount of open so it be projects use Discord as a replacement for forums specifically.
I’m aware but I don’t think this was the issue Ulrich was speaking of. If they were, I don’t think it was well conveyed.
Yeah, clearly everyone loves IRC, that’s why no one uses Discord /s
I honestly think the vast majority of people on Discord don’t know what IRC is, and therefore don’t have an opinion of it. However, I didn’t mean to suggest IRC as the best alternative anyway.
Okay so they know what Discord is, but they don’t know what IRC is, despite it being 20 years older. What does that tell you?
By reducing a complex topic down to one score that has “features” as only one of many factors, so that “openness” and “safety” push it to the top.
Live chat is all I ever use but you never know
I thought Discourse was bought by Roblox, merged into Roblox, and then discontinued outside of Roblox?I’m thinking of something else, I think.
You’re thinking of Guilded.
Looks like Roblox forced everyone using Guilded to suddenly have a Roblox account in 2024, and then Guilder officially shut down about 2 months ago (end of 2025).
I love that Discourse is open. I hate that it’s just horrendous from a usability perspective. Flarum is much better than that, in my opinion, while being way more flexible. Examples:
I find discourse perfectly usable.
Cool 👍️
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.
You didn’t provide any evidence that it wasn’t intentionally misleading. Discord was clearly intended to replace communities like IRC, Ventrilo and TeamSpeak so they used language that was familiar to them, even though it was completely incorrect.
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.
I’m not going to be able to get anyone else to use an alternative, so what’s it matter?
I mean back when Skype was still in use my Friends convinced me to use dc (and I hated it)
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.
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.
Isn’t that closed source tho?
Maybe, but let’s deal with one crisis at a time
But isn’t that the wrong approach?
If you want to choose something better, shouldn’t be ‘enshittificationability’ be the main point you want to address? That is the reason discord is doing most of the bad stuff. Proprietary software is about enshittification.
No.
The main point that needs to be addressed is the requirement to upload your face or government ID. This exodus has nothing to do with Discord not being Open Source.
If you’d rather stay on Discord and give them your face while you await the “perfect” solution to materialize you are free to do so. But I think everyone else just needs something purpose ready that doesn’t ask for their face. Then when a fully functional, self hosted, open source solution appears they can reasses.
True. At least it’s self-hosted. I just hope some real alternative to Discord comes soon.
Should still be a massive upgrade to discord in terms of how much you’re getting shafted
Teamspeak sounds familiar, I think I had issues with them once before. Is it the one bundled with that OverWolf malware?
did he not try stoat? he just put a bunch of question marks there.
I’d have thought if that was the case it’d be left out of the rankings.
I did. It isn’t a viable selfhosted alternative atm unless you want to do actual dev work
So, if it was like Signal and didn’t let you self host at all it would have ranked on this list?
If we’re referring to the article in the link, being self-hosted didn’t seem to be a hard requirement, merely that the app is a potential alternative.
You’re correct. I think a lot of folks are looking for something decentralized/self-hostable to avoid the lock-in disaster that Discord has created, at least, I am. And I have found a dearth of alternatives! Good article, though.
How many of these have moderation issues? Like, unwanted content uploads and stuff. How many expose you to accidentally hosting illicit content?
That’s their “safety” category in his rankings. They talk about moderation tools and risks like bad actors posting illicit content quite a bit, actually.
Wow, so signal ranks second worst in “safety” with a 2. While discord has a 4.
So it’s worse than discord at dealing with unwanted CSAM uploads? What a wild ranking system this guy has.
This reminds me that a saw someone like luisus rossman reccomend a discord like thing that worked as a better forum/wiki/discord for small developers that’s shows up on web searches, I think it had real time chat but I can’t remember
Found a new way to misspell his name
I can’t imagine “Discourse”'s branding will survive for long.
Tangential but figure eyes are probably on here:
Any good guides or discussions for setting up and running Matrix in a VPS? Been thinking on and off I should do that for a few months now (and lack of account migration means I either start with my own domain or forever use a generic).
should also look into conduit or one of its siblings, normal synapse is a dog to run
Matrix ansible deployment script
Just to emphasize, this is the correct answer
Revolt is good too
Looks like they changed their name to Stoat.
