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It’s very important to call out this dude either doesn’t understand what a community is or comes from this new generation that thinks docs should be on Discord and not easily accessible.
Functionality: can it do everything required of a platform for building, organizing, and sustaining a community?
Somehow Discord gets a 4 there. A chat server is a community of a kind but it will never rise the level of a platform’s community because it is, by definition, somewhat ephemeral and just a bunch of chat logs. There’s a big difference for example between IRC and bash.org for things like AzureDiamond.
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
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.
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.
It seems there’s also Spacebar.
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 🤷
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.
I mean, it certainly is an alternative to all three morons using discord as some sort of forum for an app or similar. The same way discord is the worst for easily searchable info like a forum is basically the converse for discourse. And exactly the opposite for real time chat obviously.
He at least mentions outright it’s a forum tool. The real problem is having to include it because people misuse discord.
Kind of like anyone using SharePoint for anything. It’s not meant for it.
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.
I mean, for at least the first five letters, I can’t even tell the difference.
looking to ditch Discord want live chat, audio/video calls, and screen sharing… Or am I just in the minority here?
I’ll keep you company in the minority, since that’s what I want too
Lots of communities use discord as a replacement for a forum despite it not being fit for it at all
So much so I fucking hate this phenomenon
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.
Although there is some kind of fun with “real time chatting” on a forum. Back then, It kind of became that way when it got heated. It’s like a turn based game where all the players take their moves and execute at the same time lol
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
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.
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?
I used to use to for audio calls now I use it more for a forum.
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).
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.
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 👍️
Made by the same team that did s3nd.pics (the imgur alternative. Under heavy Dev at the moment but has promise.
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.
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.
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
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
If they enable that and iron out the iOS app, it’d be a surefire migration for my whole crew.
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!
Isn’t that closed source tho?
I mean, mumble has gotten super good at audio, but I don’t know about other features
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.
I mean the issue at hand is discord enshittifying, TeamSpeak has been around for a lot longer and didn’t do that (even when they were in discords position market wise) which also mlght be because their funding model is actually sustainable.
Sure they might enshittify later down the line anway but it’s an alternative that’s here now and solves the ossue at hand
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?
TeamSpeak is basically what Discord replaced in many gaming communities/servers/groups. Before discord, most gaming groups would have a TeamSpeak, Ventrillo or Mumble server. These were self hosted (or hosted in a VPS) and generally worked better than Skype. TeamSpeak was the most polished, Ventrillo was kinda dated looking but worked well and Mumble was the free software that was getting started and is now pretty good
I personally treated Discord as a replacement for Skype, I used to chat with close friends on there for years before Microsoft purchased it.
I think TS3 is bundled with Overwolf, but not TS6. I can be wrong.
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
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.
So, if it was like Signal and didn’t let you self host at all it would have ranked on this list?
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.
I can’t imagine “Discourse”'s branding will survive for long.
