5 Best Discord Alternatives (2024)

Discord is a free and user-friendly chat application that’s aimed at gamers and online communities. But it’s far from the only choice if you’re looking for a way to hang out online. Here are some alternatives to consider.

Why Ditch Discord?

Discord is a great fit for most people looking for a place to hang out online. It brings together text chat, voice chat, file sharing, and integrations with other online systems in a single place. To top it off, it’s completely free to create a server with and provides a powerful set of tools for securing your server.

But Discord isn’t perfect. Due to its growing popularity, it’s become a prime target for attack, with spammers and scammers. These range from unsolicited invites to play new games to attempts to steal login tokens. In many cases, servers are raided and nuked. But no such service is immune from attack on the internet, and Discord has responded by implementing better protections in recent years.

There are some real downsides to using Discord though, particularly if you’re privacy-conscious. Discord is proprietary software, which means that it’s closed source. Zero-day exploits can appear and take you by surprise, with no way for the community to stress-test the source code or spot problems beforehand.

This means you cannot self-host Discord and are instead bound to the company’s servers. If you fall afoul of Discord’s rules you may find that your server is shut down. If Discord suddenly changed its terms of use, you’d be expected to fall in line. Take a look at the changes that have happened to Twitter (now X) to see how game-changing a switch in ownership can be.

Discord founder Jason Citron was previously behind a similar social platform called OpenFeint, which was the subject of a class-action lawsuit alleging invasion of privacy and computer fraud (among other things). The company was accused of disclosing personal information to advertising networks without authorization. Discord’s privacy policy states that such data is not sold to other companies, though the existence of such data could be a privacy concern in case of any Discord acquisitions.

Lastly, on a basic level, some users complain about Discord’s stability, performance, and ability to consume a large amount of RAM. This can be problematic for gamers who are trying to squeeze as much performance out of their computers as possible.

Element (Matrix)

Element is a secure platform for communications that looks and operates a lot like an open-source Discord. It’s comparable to the way that Mastodon and X (Twitter) are difference, where Element refers to the application used to access the service while the data is separate and can be self-hosted or located on publicly accessible servers.

Element is a for-profit company that makes the open-source Element app, while Matrix is the underlying open-source project that powers communication. To use Element you’ll need to download the app for your platform of choice and then self-host your own server or pick from a public server at Matrix.org for free.

The end result is a product that’s a lot like Discord, except with better privacy and data ownership policies. Everything is encrypted end-to-end and there are no dodgy data-collection or terms to agree to. You get voice chat, text chat, emoji, video, and GIF sharing. Sound quality is good and the app has a clean and responsive interface.

If you’re willing to put a little time into setting up and convincing your friends that it’s the right choice over Discord, Element (and Matrix) is perhaps the best chat app for your community.

Also consider: Element is just one app, be sure to check out other Matrix clients like FluffyChat and Cinny.

Mumble

If all you’re looking for is a voice chat client, look no further than Mumble. A self-described open-source “low latency, high quality” voice chat platform, Mumble takes the premise of a Discord voice-only channel and elevates it. The VoIP platform has been around since 2005 and uses a client-server system that requires you to host a Mumble server to use it.

Despite its age, Mumble has some interesting perks like an in-game overlay and positional audio that can help you locate your friends based on their in-game location. Communication is encrypted and there’s a user permission system that gives admins power over their servers to maintain order.

You can host Mumble locally on your computer or put it on a web server. If you can’t be bothered with the hassle of figuring out hosting or doing it yourself, you can pay for a Mumble server to be hosted for you using a reseller like Mumble.com or TypeFrag.

Also consider: Other similar VoIP-based systems include Ventrilo and TeamSpeak.

Telegram

Telegram made its mark as a WhatsApp alternative, coming into its own as a fringe social media platform. Despite its primary use as a text messaging platform, Telegram can almost entirely replace Discord’s functionality. Unlike Discord, Telegram’s client-side apps are open source, but the server code is not. The app uses Telegram’s servers, though the company is considering changing the app direction to include self-hosted servers in future.

In addition to simple text-based chats between two users or groups of up to 200,000 members, Telegram also includes Channels for broadcasting messages. You can make basic VoIP calls between users on Telegram, or start voice chats within groups effectively turning the group into a Discord voice channel.

Telegram also includes more powerful functionality like moderation tools and the ability to assign administrators, the ability to share files, short links for creating publicly accessible groups, private invite-only groups, bots, emojis, and more. Best of all, your friends may already have or be familiar with the platform.

Learn more about Telegram and the optional Telegram Premium subscription.

Slack

At its core, Slack is a lot like Discord but the focus is on work rather than play. You can use Slack for free, with 90 days of message and file history, one-on-one voice chat, and up to 10 integrations with other apps. You also only get the ability to manage posting permission within a single channel, which is a big downgrade from the system of permissions and roles on offer at Discord.

Slack can get expensive quickly if you want to lift some of these restrictions, coming in at $7.25 per person, per month. On-boarding people is a little less smooth than it is at Discord, and there’s no emphasis on voice chat which made Discord such a hit with gamers to begin with. That said, you can overcome these limitations using some of Slack’s integrations with apps like Google Meet which offers one-click meetings.

Slack feels like Discord in a business suit, and the feature set and pricing certainly reflect this. That said it still makes a decent place to hang out on the internet if you’ve tried other platforms and become a little jaded. If you’re looking to graduate from a friend circle to a study group or even a company, it’s arguably a better choice than Discord.

Also consider:Microsoft Teams, it’s like Slack but Microsoft-flavored.

IRC

Internet relay chat, or IRC for short, has been connecting people around the world since the late '80s. IRC requires the use of a server, on which channels are created for chatting. These servers act as nodes, connecting users, but no chat history or files are stored on the servers. To know what happened while you were away from the server, you’ll need to “idle” which means leaving your computer on with your IRC client connected.

Despite the obvious drawbacks of this approach, IRC is still a powerful tool. Bots can be used to manage servers, remain connected at all times, and ensure that user permissions are managed accordingly. The platform has traditionally been a favorite of gamers, with IRC’s popularity peaking in the early 2000s as a place to hang out, organize clan matches, and make new friends.

Though modern solutions like Discord have since taken over and provided a more “permanent” and feature-rich solution, IRC is still a viable choice for text chat. It works well alongside systems like Mumble and other in-game VoIP solutions since voice chat is not possible in IRC. To get started you’ll need to pick a network on which to host, establish a channel, set up a bot (like Eggdrop) and get your friends to download a suitable IRC client.

IRC isn’t the most user-friendly system in the world, but it’s still charming and entirely usable all these years later. Learn more about getting started with IRC.

Or Stick with Discord

If you’re happy with Discord and it works well for you, there’s little reason to jump ship. You can make your Discord server more interesting by connecting apps, add and assign roles to users, add bots, and even use the chat application on consoles like the PS5.