What I really need is realtime multi-party voice chat
Do any of these support that?
I mostly use discord for light coordination and online voice chat during games or activities.
Teamspeak, ventrilo, mumble - but discord replaced them all with being easy to use.
Sadly, there is no real alternative with all the discord features. I mean, you could create chats in Zoom and use their voice/video feature, but at least one person would need pro.
Installing Zoom on your machine is a mistake.
Their install process is indistinguishable from malware abdv they have a history of shitting on security for all growth possible.
And sadly governments abd corporations rewarded them for it.
I'm not a big fan of Zoom, but on Linux they have signed packages for most distros. Pretty standard install mechanism.
Their install process is indistinguishable from malware abdv they have a history of shitting on security for all growth possible.
Source?
those were mostly issues from around Covid when they suddenly exploded and hard to start caring about security
zoom.exe
I don’t need all the features, just two.
everything else about discord I hate.
Check out teamspeak and mumble, maybe those fit
Teamspeak might be what I used 15 years ago
In my world the biggest advantage of Discord is the Availability on consoles allowing voice chat for crossplay. For all I know none of the alternatives you mentioned is available for consoles. I know there are people connecting their PS/XBox audio output with a computer running TeamSpeak to receive VoiceChat and in Game Sound from the same system but this is not a usable solution for most people.
100 % agree. Somehow Discord found its niche and no one else challenged it.
Edit: Xfire might have, but they died a long time ago
And that took forever to release! For over half the time discord has been around they didn’t have console support
possible, but still it’s a problem for me. Never liked Discord and was always happy with TS. But when I started playing with a friend using XBox I was forced to use it
Look at Teamspeak 6. You're behind on the times
jitsi is free
Steam's built in voice chat replaced discord for my group of friends years ago. It was rough at first, but it has improved a lot and now we dont have issues anymore.
Except when steam itself craps out for a while and you can't even tell unless you keep the group chat/voice window open on 2nd screen.
Still better than discord tho
Technically, Signal, Rocket Chat, and Matrix all have multi-party voice chat built in. You probably won't have a great time with it, and if you want video or screen sharing, you'll have an even worse time.
Honestly just voice chat is all, I used to play SC2 with some sketchy apps that could do it... but 2026 feels like easy stuff got much harder.
Just tested out element and had no problem with screen sharing + video in a voice call. Haven't tried out the mobile app for that (but I haven't done that for discord either and on desktop, discord just doesn't screenshare like half the time for me)
I'm kind of shocked if you had a decent/superior time and Element vs Discord, especially if you're in Windows! This is a case where I hope I can be proven wrong.
Discord facilitates large audio and video calls, but if Element can manage even a handful of people at once, I would be impressed. In my experience, it hasn't, but such things are kind of hard to test.
Isn't that a multi-way call? Everything else is covered by forums (permanent) or IRC/Matrix/XMPP (quick)
Yeah, and for most of my friends I don't need/want forums. I just want "Hey, anyone online?" and voice calls.
That's what IRC/Matrix/XMPP/Signal (possibly) covers
Jitsi Meet.
I think Matrix has one as well that's integrated nowadays.
I think that's the one the French government is moving to, I'll have to check it out.
Some of these don't feel like real alternatives to me?
I want both the text chat parts of discord and the part where you can synchronously voice chat with screen share/camera share.
It seems like matrix is the closest thing, I hope it's better than when I tried it in 2021 or 2022
signal is the dumbest thing they couldve put in the list. its like "top 10 minecraft alternatives; number 1, microsoft Word"
Yeah, discord has so many features that not everyone uses them. Open source proponents seem to prefer text communication so they ignore most of the shortcomings
Matrix has a new spec coming that will fix everything (they say). But last I checked it's not finalised, and they have been working on it for years.
I've seen this article and I find it unhelpful.
Why it's signal on this list? Signal is a sms replacement, not a discord replacement.
My research has found... Root - rootapp.com Stoat - stoat.chat Matrix - matrix.org
Root and Stoat appear to be the closest to Discord.
Do note that Root seems to be VC funded just like discord so that might just be the same thing happening later down the line.
Stoat isn't federated so they also have the issue of running costs but they do seem to have that figured out already (currently donation funded, apparently some user friendly plans on how to deal with costs should they exceed the incoming donation)
Stoat doesn't have screensharing yet, which is a dealbreaker for me at least
What, no ranking for XMPP and IRC? They are by far the best alternatives in terms of openness, and have the advantage of being more focused on text-only and basic communication, securing the "do one thing and do it well" path. For things like voice chat there's Mumble, but tbh I don't know how is it doing.
Depending on the client, XMPP can even replicate most Discord functionality. The Movim XMPP client can do group chats, group video calls, and I think screen sharing too.
Oooh I did not know that! It's good to be able to catch up to the tech, thanks much!
Mumble still works but from what I can tell its software ecosystem seems to be decaying due to bots etc. not being updated and breaking changes in their dependencies, people can still get them to work if they really know what they're doing but it's difficult. It also has some quirks that make it confusing for people to use, I'm in a mumble server and any time anyone new joins someone has to explain to them that they need to go through the menus to "register" in order to join the main channel, even though this registration is entirely within the application and doesn't require email authentication or anything. There's also frequently SSL warnings and things like that.
I feel like XMPP is under rated, I used it in the past back when matrix was super new and not really production ready. I'm now revisiting them and matrix seems highly centralized in practice even if it was designed to be federated. There aren't that many implementations and so many people use matrix.org as their homeserver. Definitely still thinking XMPP is the best option.
One of the biggest reasons Discord took off for my group over mumble was the ease in inviting strangers on an MMO and they didn't even need the app. Getting strangers into voice comms is kind of non-negotiable for difficult raiding when you need a sub.
That said, my group is used to streaming for each other and quite a few have nitro for sound board, profile stuff, etc, so it'd be a hard sell unless a more feature rich option comes along. I have the power to persuade them to join me on another platform, but only once and I'm not about to waste that chance until I know their needs are met. Steam got close, but it failed us when we used it for the brief days that Discord was down.
I'll just be a teen account until there's a suitable alternative, or do the stupid fake image of a guy trick the Brits taught me, lol.
Has anyone tried space bar?
Thank you for sharing this!
I would like to throw Kiwi IRC into the mix, perhaps it would suffice for some people.
Alternatively, IRCCloud.
(That's the Discourse logo for anyone who's wondering as well. Which ... Yeah, FOSS devs definitely use that over Discord but most people chat on discord, right?)
if matrix can get some of the remaining issues fixed I think it has a decent shot at taking over, but people will probably pick another "federated" proprietary app like with bluesky
No it doesn't, matrix was designed by people with no concept of ux. It focuses on things that are technically correct but something average people won't put up with. Like the forced verification of devices, normal people don't care and don't understand what that even is and will be annoyed that every time they try to log in they are prompted to insert a stupid key just so that they can see their chat history.
Doesn't help that tons of the clients especially the web one can't be bothered to remember being authenticated and you have to do it literally every time but even with that fix just having to do that in general is going to put people off.
Then there's just a bunch of base protocol stuff that's dumb the way they finally implemented custom emoji is the stupidest thing I've ever seen and makes what should be a simple easy click to add a sticker and then use it turn into this complicated mess that nobody's going to bother with. On a technical level it made sense sure but on a user experience level it makes no sense at all.
And I say this is someone that self-hosts basically anything I can get my hands on, I've got Seafile, immich, piped, jellyfin, microbin, among various others. I keep trying matrix and keep finding myself getting annoyed enough to stop using it