Discord Alternatives in 2026

Discord is a common voice chat / text chat and basically community building platform for mostly gamers these days. What started with TeamSpeak, Ventrilo and similar servers has mostly been replaced by Discord. For streamers and game studios alike, it's the platform of choice to stay in touch and foster collaboration.

Discords source of income is a subscription model that is applicable to users and servers to increase usage limits for uploads, screen sharing, cosmetics and other related features. At the time of writing, Discord has around 230 million monthly active users.

The convenience of their platform is, that you have 1 account, but you can join many different communities without further signups, sort of like reddit has many subreddits. The additional control for server admins is that they can set their own rules and put new users through their own sign-up flow and conditions or code of conduct.

The reason why I am looking for a Discord alternatives is, that I need a voice chat tool to talk to my friends or screen share, not to engage in vibrant discussions around different games or other topics. I need private channels for text, media sharing and voice chat, that don't really meaningfully belong to any community. I don't need people randomly joining my ongoing conversations. I've previously used Mumble for podcast recordings, because it offers a convenient way to split audio tracks between the speaking parties, but it's almost entirely focused on channel based voice chats.

Stoat

Stoat is a very promising candidate to replace Discord for my needs in the future. They have mobile clients and a promising featureset and a number of clients for web and mobile.

The biggest drawback, to me, so far is that there's no intutive way to have the mobile or desktop apps target a specific self-hosted server instead of the main network driven by the authors. This sort of defeats the purpose of having an independent solution because it's just a smaller, less well funded provider.

Stoat relies on redis and mongodb as a permanent data store, which has a slightly increased complexity for maintenance, but are well supported across different self hosting setups.

The stoat instances created on the official server are mainly populated by independent creator communities, anime, LGBTQ+ and various tech specific ones like Arch Linux.

Chatto

Chatto was released as open source under the AGPL recently and has a larger roadmap ahead to compete with Discord or Slack in a meaningful way. Luckily you can observe the development in the open with the github orgs roadmap: github.com/orgs/chattocorp/projects/1

LLMs were used generously during the development of chatto, as outlined on the blog of the author, interestingly enough there is also no traditional data store, but an event stream per server that is loaded into memory via NATS Jetstream.

So far Chatto is heavily focused on working inside the browser, with desktop and mobile clients in the discovery phase, which for my use case would not be the best fit, if I want my friends to receive notifications while they're not at their computer, but I'm excited to try it out regardless.

Common Drawbacks

• Nobody I know uses any of these, even though I know a lot of very nerdy and privacy focused people.
• There is no federation between "servers" hosted by different providers, like with the matrix protocol, which means users will require an account per self-hosting instance.
• Hosting will incur costs based on the size of your community and might require additional management in terms of bad actors trying to saturate storage space or network transfer bandwidth, leaving admins in a vulnerable financial position.
• Legal liability, in case users use your hosted instance outside of the compliance with the law of the country it is hosted in, you can be held liable if you either don't safeguard against mis-use or don't respond to reports in a reasonable timeframe.

Summary

I'm looking forward to self-hosting both stoat and chatto and give them a try to see how much I can slink away from Discord for weekly gaming sessions. Building a huge community isn't my goal and it would definitely be a small scale endeavour.

Another service running on my servers is not going to cost me anything but time and I'll report back with how it goes when I get there.

Let me know if I am unaware of other Discord alternatives, especially if you're running an instance yourself.