Discord Alternatives

Plenty of companies started on Discord because it was free and familiar, then found it awkward for work. Slack is the obvious landing spot: channels, threads, group meetings and messaging with people outside your company. The Free plan connects up to 10 apps, and paid plans unlock unlimited app integrations, so your CRM, code host and docs can post where the team already talks.

Read the price carefully. The Free plan keeps 90 days of message history, and upgrading later brings back only the previous 12 months, so anything older stays out of reach. Pro costs $8.75 per user a month when paying monthly and keeps unlimited message history; Business+ costs $18 per user a month on monthly billing. Watch the launch offer: the 50% off for the first 3 months only applies if you buy Pro or Business+ online within 7 days of creating your workspace, on monthly billing, and the Pro price goes back to $8.75 in month four. A team of 10 pays $87.50 a month on Pro, every month, which is the real difference from Discord, where everyone uses the same free server.

The limit: Slack is built for colleagues, not communities. Per-user pricing gets expensive fast for an open community of hundreds of members, and Slack is designed around workspaces you are invited into. If your company is weighing Microsoft Teams instead, read our Microsoft Teams alternatives first.

Stoat is the app most people mean when they ask for "Discord, but not Discord". It used to be called Revolt, and the layout will look familiar on day one: servers, channels, roles, voice chat, file sharing and markdown. It runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS and the web, so nobody in your group is left out.

The pitch is that the basics are not paywalled. Custom emojis, a 20MB file upload limit, a server-specific profile picture and animated avatars come with no subscription, and group DMs hold up to 50 members. On Discord, the free upload cap is also 20MB, and larger files need Nitro. The code is public, the backend is licensed under the AGPL v3.0, and you can host your own instance for free if you would rather not trust anyone's servers.

The limit is maturity. In a 2026 thread on Discord alternatives, a user who moved over said sign-up verification took more than 10 hours during the rush of new accounts, called the iOS beta rough, and noted there was no video or screen share at the time. Another user in the same thread pointed out that Stoat, built in Europe, may face the same age-check laws as Discord, so read its policy before you move a large server.

Element is the best-known app for Matrix, an open standard for chat. Matrix works like email: each community can run its own server, called a homeserver, and people on different servers can still talk to each other. That federation is the main reason privacy-minded communities pick it: no single company owns the network, and you can leave a server without leaving the conversation.

For a Discord group, Element gives you rooms grouped into spaces, voice and video through Element Call, and end-to-end encryption for messages. The app is free. To run your own server, Element Server Suite Community is open source under the AGPL and free of charge, frontend and backend. The Community edition is meant for non-professional deployments and evaluations of 1 to 100 users. Past that, organizations move to Element Server Suite Pro, priced per seat and per month from 100 users; Element publishes no seat price, so Pro is a sales conversation.

The limit is the learning curve. In a 2026 thread on Discord alternatives, one user said Matrix would be a fuller replacement for them once spaces came out of beta. And Element itself labels the community Synapse homeserver not for use in production environments, so a serious self-hosted setup takes real admin work.

Zulip fixes the thing Discord power users complain about most: busy channels where every conversation runs into the next. In Zulip, each message belongs to a topic inside a channel, a bit like an email subject line. You can catch up topic by topic, and a question asked on Monday is still easy to find on Friday. It is 100% open-source software, and you can move between Zulip Cloud and your own server with its export and import tools.

The pricing is friendlier to communities than it looks. The Free plan keeps 10,000 messages of search history. Cloud Standard costs $8 per user a month billed monthly, or $6.67 billed annually; the 10-user minimum applies to the Plus plan ($12 monthly), not Standard. But Zulip's plans page says many organizations are eligible for a free Standard plan, including open-source projects and most communities when the Free plan is not an option.

The limit: Zulip is a text-first tool. Calls are not built in: Zulip drops a "Join video call" or "Join voice call" link to a provider your admins pick, such as Jitsi Meet, Zoom or BigBlueButton, so there is no always-on voice room like Discord's. The topic model also takes a week to get used to. To pipe alerts or forms into topics, see our Zulip and n8n integration.

Discourse is a modern forum, and that is exactly why it belongs on this list. On Discord, a great answer disappears up the scroll within an hour and lives behind a login. On Discourse, every discussion is a page with a title, which members can find again and which people outside the community can reach from a search engine. It also has chat, so quick conversations do not need a new topic.

Hosted Discourse starts with a Free plan, capped at 2 staff seats, 10 categories and 5GB of uploads. Pro costs $100 a month with unlimited members and chat, unlimited categories, a custom domain, API access and 5 staff seats. Business costs $500 a month and adds automation, events, gamification and SSO with 15 staff seats. Prices are in US dollars, and paid plans start with a free trial, usually with no credit card up front, though Discourse sometimes asks for one to fight spam. If you want Discourse's team to migrate an old forum for you, migrations require one year of hosting paid in advance. Discourse is also open source, so you can host it yourself.

The limit: it is a forum, not a hangout. Members who want voice need a separate app, and those who expect instant replies will find it slow. To post new topics to your chat or CRM, our Discourse and n8n integration shows the setup. For support-heavy communities, compare it with live chat for customer support.

If your Discord server was really a group chat with voice calls, Signal is the cleanest way out. Everything is end-to-end encrypted by default with the open source Signal Protocol, and Signal says it cannot read your messages or listen to your calls. Groups hold up to 1,000 members, and the Signal service keeps no record of group memberships, titles or avatars.

Signal is free for everyone. Group admins can approve new members joining by link, decide who can edit group info, who can send messages and who can start calls, and set disappearing messages. Text, voice notes, photos, videos and files all go through the same encrypted channel.

The limit is the format. Signal has groups, not servers: one conversation per group, with admins and members as the only roles. It suits a circle of friends; a community of strangers that needs moderation and separate topics is better served by Stoat or Element.

Mumble is a free, open source voice chat application built for low latency and high audio quality. It has been around for years in gaming circles, and its official site mentions Eve Online communities running over 100 simultaneous voice participants. You can join a public server or host your own, and the server software is free to run.

What it does better than Discord is control. Server admins get an extensive permission system (ACL), positional audio for games and a multi-channel recorder that podcasters use. Communication is always encrypted, and you decide where the server lives. For a guild that already pays for a game server, adding Mumble costs nothing but setup time.

The limit is that Mumble is a voice app first: for threads, media sharing and community servers, you need a second tool. The official iOS app is unmaintained, with a last update in 2017, so iPhone users need a third-party client.