Open-source alternatives to Discord

3 alternatives, ranked by a published maintenance score computed from live GitHub signals (fetched 2026-09-04). We flag unmaintained projects on both sides — including Discord itself when the data says so.

About Discord: Proprietary SaaS, no self-hosting, history lives on Discord's servers. It is closed-source, so the same public maintenance signals do not exist for it — we score only the alternatives below.

The alternatives

Element

87 /100 actively maintained

Matrix client covering communities, DMs, and encrypted voice/video.

13,426 stars · last commit 2026-09-04 · latest release v1.12.27 (2026-09-01) · 3,795 open issues/PRs · AGPL-3.0 · fetched 2026-09-04

How this 87/100 was computed
Last committoday40/40
Latest release3 days ago25/25
Community sizeGitHub stars12/15
Open-issue trendnot enough history yet — needs snapshots 21+ days apart; neutral 10/20 awarded meanwhile10/20
Total87/100

Stoat (formerly Revolt)

84 /100 actively maintained

Open-source Discord-style chat with servers and channels, self-hostable.

3,276 stars · last commit 2026-09-03 · latest release v0.15.4 (2026-09-01) · 132 open issues/PRs · custom license · fetched 2026-09-04

How this 84/100 was computed
Last commityesterday40/40
Latest release3 days ago25/25
Community sizeGitHub stars9/15
Open-issue trendnot enough history yet — needs snapshots 21+ days apart; neutral 10/20 awarded meanwhile10/20
Total84/100

Spacebar

59 /100 slowing down

Reimplementation of the Discord server API, compatible with Discord-style clients.

2,200 stars · last commit 2026-09-04 · no releases found · 196 open issues/PRs · AGPL-3.0 · fetched 2026-09-04

How this 59/100 was computed
Last committoday40/40
Latest releasenone found0/25
Community sizeGitHub stars9/15
Open-issue trendnot enough history yet — needs snapshots 21+ days apart; neutral 10/20 awarded meanwhile10/20
Total59/100