Top three are:
- Discourse
- Rocket.chat
- Matrix
this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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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.
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So much so I fucking hate this phenomenon
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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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:
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We need to bring back the forum platforms. That is how communities looked and it was great
Discord became big because of the seamless audio / video / screen sharing. Forums are not even in the same stratosphere.
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It was so great, people ditched it immediately the second any alternative arrived.
I mean the masses are pretty fucking stupid and I don't think following them is a good strategy for life.
Also, reddit was and somehow still is pretty popular and stack exchange is being killed by AI not discord, so that's not really accurate anyways.
Discord is just objectively terrible for knowledge. It's not search indexable or archivable. It's more or less a memory hole.
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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.
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No, he hasn't been running a discord server. It's a channel. Discord is running the servers.
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.
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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.
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.
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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
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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.
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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
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.
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.
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what are the best alternatives for non-tech folks to join and use?... because that's who I am going to have to convince
Spacebar.chat is a really easy one to join that I found. And it's really a straight clone of Discord but without all the crap. It's decentralized so you can self host or join and instance and start your own "server" on there.
You don't have to understand any of that to use. It just works and looks like Discord.
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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.
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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.
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I am getting flashbacks of the mid-2000's IM landscape. Soon we'll be using 10 services bundled into some hackjob app that doesn't support all of the features but keeps the chats in one place.
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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.
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Maybe we can use this as an opportunity to use different tools for different purposes. Text chat is the easy part, evidently. The issues seem to be around voice/video/group chat on one side, and forums/wikis on the other.
What we need to recognize for one thing is how Discord makes it easy to host info repositories, but sucks at making that stuff accessible. We need a decentralized platform that makes it easy for someone to sign up and create their own forums and wikis in a user-friendly point and click manner that Discord does, but makes those same hubs optionally public and viewable for users without having to join anything.
Then for more live-oriented stuff, Matrix is already the most mature, established, closest thing to Discord we have. We just need it to be better at voice, video, screen-sharing, etc. If I understand correctly, that's already being worked on.
Hell, maybe the former could very well be implemented on top of Matrix itself even.
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Made by the same team that did s3nd.pics (the imgur alternative. Under heavy Dev at the moment but has promise.
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