Team chat · Updated October 2026
Discord is a voice, video, and text chat app for communities and servers. If you would rather own your tools, here are 5 open source alternatives to Discord, ranked by GitHub stars. Each one is free to use under its license, and you can read, change, and often self-host the code.
Rocket.Chat is both the most popular, with 46.3k stars, and the most recently updated, with a commit on Oct 21, 2026.
| Project | Stars | License | Language | Last commit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 Rocket.Chat | 46.3k | Other | TypeScript | Oct 21, 2026 |
 Mattermost | 39.4k | Other | TypeScript | Oct 21, 2026 |
 Zulip | 26.1k | Apache-2.0 | Python | Oct 21, 2026 |
 Element | 13.6k | AGPL-3.0 | TypeScript | Oct 21, 2026 |
 Spacebar | 2.2k | AGPL-3.0 | TypeScript | Oct 19, 2026 |
by RocketChat
The Secure CommsOS™ for mission-critical operations
by mattermost
Mattermost is an open source platform for secure collaboration across the entire software development lifecycle..
by zulip
Zulip server and web application. Open-source team chat that helps teams stay productive and focused.
by element-hq
A glossy Matrix collaboration client for the web.
by spacebarchat
Spacebar server - A reimplementation of the Discord.com backend, built with Typescript and love
By GitHub stars, Rocket.Chat is the most popular open source alternative to Discord right now, with 46.3k stars, followed by Mattermost and Zulip. The best fit depends on your setup, so compare their licenses, languages, and recent activity in the table above.
Yes. All 5 projects on this page are open source, so the software itself is free to use, study, and change. Some of them also sell a hosted version or paid support.
Rocket.Chat (last commit Oct 21, 2026), Mattermost (last commit Oct 21, 2026), and Element (last commit Oct 21, 2026) have the most recent commits. Licenses on this list include Apache-2.0 and AGPL-3.0.
