Best Discord Alternatives (2026): Compared & Rated | Siit

Doren Darmon, HR & Operations Editor · Last updated: August 2026 · Facts verified: August 2026

TL;DR: Communities are leaving Discord over policy and data control rather than over features, which changes what a good replacement looks like. Stoat is the closest open-source swap and keeps Discord's server-and-roles structure, while Element adds default end-to-end encryption for privacy-first groups. Dedicated voice servers and workplace chat platforms cover the rest, each trading something Discord does well for something it does not.

Why Communities Are Leaving Discord

Discord spent 2026 changing what it asks of the people running servers on it, and that is what put replacements on the table.

The trigger was age assurance. In February 2026 Discord announced teen-by-default settings and an age check that can fire when someone changes certain settings or opens sensitive content. It then pushed the global rollout back to the second half of 2026 to widen the verification options. Most people will never be asked, by Discord's own account. Owners of adult-oriented or loosely moderated servers still lost a decision they used to make.

What that check produces is the harder problem. In 2025 an attacker reached the systems of the third-party vendor running Discord's customer service and took names, emails, IP addresses, support conversations, and government-ID photos the vendor held for age-related appeals. Discord's own account is that its systems were not breached, which is true and beside the point for a moderator: the ID images existed in a ticketing system either way.

Advertising sits underneath both. Promotions now run inside the app itself, so a server owner who spent years building an audience is hosting ads sold against that audience.

Nobody has to leave over any of this. What moved is who carries the risk when the policy shifts again, and that is the question the servers now shopping for a replacement are asking.

How We Evaluated Discord Alternatives

Each platform was compared on best fit, starting price, and the amount of public Capterra review evidence available. A second test asked how well it covers the three jobs a Discord server does, which are community space, voice, and organized text. The category spans dozens of tools, and the shortlist covers community, voice-first, open-source, and team-chat needs. Guilded, once the closest Discord lookalike, shut down in December 2025, so it is no longer a live option.

Discord Alternatives at a Glance

Ten platforms split into three camps: community platforms built around servers or broadcast channels, dedicated voice servers, and employee messaging tools. Seven can be self-hosted, and six of those are open source.

TeamSpeak, Mumble, and Stoat have no Capterra listing, so their reputations rest on public community discussion rather than scored reviews.

Stoat

Stoat, formerly Revolt, mirrors Discord's server, channel, and role model in a community chat platform. Moderators moving a server across keep most of the structure they already run.

Stoat Key Features

Stoat's build sticks close to what a Discord moderator already knows.

• Discord-style servers and roles: Permissions map closely to Discord's own model, so moderators keep workflows they already know.
• Self-hosting via Docker Compose: Run your own instance and keep community data off anyone else's servers.
• Cross-platform clients: Web, Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS/iPadOS clients cover mixed-device communities, though the iOS app has been limited to a TestFlight beta.
• Voice channels: Voice ships in the current client, so a migrating server keeps its hangout space.

Stoat Pros and Cons

Stoat is a young project carrying a migration much larger than its team.

Pros:

• Familiar UX lowers the social friction of moving an existing Discord community.
• Public repositories under the AGPL, the GNU Affero General Public License, let admins inspect and fork the code.
• Sexually explicit content is permitted on Stoat when properly age-gated.

Cons:

• No end-to-end encryption for messages and no independent security audit.
• Users report missing video chat and screen sharing.
• A small, donation-funded team means slow development and infrastructure that strained under the 2026 influx.

What Users Say About Stoat

Reddit migrants and Hacker News commenters call Stoat a practical Discord exit.

• The UI is described as clean and close enough to Discord to cover most everyday community use.
• Friend groups report far lower onboarding friction than Matrix when moving non-technical members.
• During the February 2026 surge, sign-up verification faced long delays.
• Self-hosters describe the setup documentation as especially difficult to work with.

User sentiment sourced from Reddit and Hacker News as of August 2026.

Stoat Pricing

Stoat charges nothing on either path.

• Hosted service: Free; donation-funded, with no paid tier published.
• Self-hosted: Free under the AGPL license.

Product details from Stoat's about page. Verified August 2026.

Best fit: Communities that want to keep Discord's exact structure while moving to software they can eventually run themselves.

Look for Stoat alternatives if: You need polished voice, screen sharing, message encryption, or production-grade reliability today.

Element

Built on the Matrix protocol, Element is an open-source client for a federated network. No single company controls the network, which is why it draws privacy-first communities, public-sector deployments, and groups that refuse centralized platforms outright.

Element Key Features

The Matrix protocol underneath Element decides most of what it can do.

• Default end-to-end encryption: The Olm and Megolm protocols encrypt rooms without anyone opting in, so one careless member cannot leave a channel readable.
• Federation: Decentralized servers interoperate, and bridges connect Matrix rooms to other networks, including Discord, so communities can migrate gradually.
• Element Call: Voice and video keep end-to-end encryption through a selective forwarding unit (SFU) architecture.
• Enterprise controls: LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) directory, Active Directory, and OpenID Connect single sign-on plus auditing and retention support enterprise deployments.

Element Pros and Cons

Element's friction is a property of its architecture, and its advantages are too.

Pros:

• Chats receive message encryption without requiring members to opt in.
• Communities can move between interoperable servers without depending on one company.
• Bridges let a community run Matrix and Discord in parallel during a move.

Cons:

• Device-verification and key management failures produce decryption errors on otherwise readable rooms, and lost keys can mean permanently lost history.
• The Synapse homeserver requires more memory and disk capacity than the lighter voice-only servers, even for a modest community.
• Onboarding friction alienates casual, non-technical members.

What Users Say About Element

Reviewers on G2, Gartner Peer Insights, and self-hosting forums talk mostly about architecture and about the desktop client.

• Federation, data ownership, and full self-hosting control are the most praised qualities.
• Element X draws credit for performing well in rooms with 100+ active users.
• The desktop client is repeatedly called clunky, with reports of multi-gigabyte memory use and long load times.
• One large community rejected Matrix because no client supported emoji, GIFs, and calls together.

User sentiment sourced from G2 and Gartner Peer Insights as of August 2026.

Element Pricing

Element's published rates stop at the free tier.

• Community: Free, AGPL-licensed self-hosting for 1 to 100 users, stated as not for production environments.
• Enterprise: Priced per seat per month; no dollar figure is published, quote required.
• Sovereign: Priced per deployment for air-gapped operation, quote required.

Pricing from Element's pricing page. Verified August 2026.

Best fit: Organizations and communities that need sovereignty (self-hosted, federated, encrypted) and have a technical admin to run Synapse and shepherd members through key verification.

Look for Element alternatives if: Your members are casual users who will abandon the move at the first decryption error.

Telegram

With supergroups of up to 200,000 members and broadcast channels with unlimited subscribers, Telegram provides cloud messaging for large audiences. Communities whose Discord exit is driven by data control should account for Telegram's dependence on its own cloud infrastructure.

Telegram Key Features

Reach and automation come first in Telegram; structure comes second.

• Massive group scale: Supergroups absorb entire communities in one room, and channels broadcast to unlimited subscribers.
• Bot API: An extensive automation platform lets communities build custom moderation, payments, and workflows that native features lack.
• Cloud sync: Unlimited history syncs across every device, and file sharing avoids the heavy compression Discord applies.
• Channel monetization: Owners of qualifying public channels can take a share of the revenue from ads Telegram places in them.

Telegram Pros and Cons

Telegram hands communities reach and leaves them to build their own moderation.

Pros:

• In-conversation search that community managers rate well above Discord's.
• Channel owners run paid subscriptions in-app, which Capterra reviewers call easy to manage.
• The bot tools substitute for many missing native features.

Cons:

• Moderation depends on bots because Telegram lacks native roles and permissions.
• Standard chats use server-client encryption; Secret Chats provide opt-in, one-to-one, device-tied end-to-end encryption.
• Communities depend entirely on Telegram's cloud and policies.

What Users Say About Telegram

Capterra reviewers and community managers talk mostly about speed, search, and bots.

• Reviewers repeatedly describe messaging as fast and reliable across backend, mobile, and desktop.
• Community managers say search saves them hours versus Discord and that bots can be shaped to exactly what a client needs.
• Users in large groups report a steady stream of unsolicited scam-bot messages as a major nuisance.
• Voice and video are judged serviceable, and behind Discord on quality.

User sentiment sourced from Capterra as of August 2026.

Telegram Pricing

Telegram charges communities nothing and charges individuals inconsistently.

• Core product: Free, with no seat charges at any group size.
• Telegram Premium: Priced variably by country and payment method; Telegram publishes no fixed global price. Premium subscribers do not see the sponsored messages Telegram shows in large public channels.

Pricing from Telegram's Premium FAQ. Verified August 2026.

Best fit: Creators and broadcast-heavy communities that need one-to-many reach and bot automation more than structured servers and voice rooms.

Look for Telegram alternatives if: Default end-to-end encryption, native role hierarchies, or self-hosting are requirements.

TeamSpeak

TeamSpeak is a self-hosted voice communication platform for gaming communities: you run the server, players connect for low-latency audio under permissions you set channel by channel. TeamSpeak 3 (TS3) remains the stable release; TeamSpeak 6 (TS6) is in beta as of August 2026.

TeamSpeak Key Features

TeamSpeak's feature set is narrow and barely changes, which is the point for the clans running it.

• Self-hosted voice servers: TS3 runs without an account or phoning home, keeping community audio on hardware you control.
• Permission depth: Fine-grained roles and channel hierarchies suit large clans with strict structures.
• Lightweight client: Low resource use keeps it running on modest gaming rigs and cheap servers.
• Optional voice encryption: Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)-based encryption of voice packets can be set per server or channel; the server can decrypt this transport-encrypted traffic.

TeamSpeak Pros and Cons

Everything TeamSpeak is good at sits in the audio path.

Pros:

• Channel hierarchies survive years of clan reorganization without migrating servers.
• The company states it does not harvest and resell user data.
• Consistent, low-latency audio that competitive players still rate highly.

Cons:

• No video, and TS6 screen sharing is peer-to-peer only.
• Text chat requires switching channels rather than sitting persistently alongside voice.
• No TS6 mobile app exists as of August 2026.

What Users Say About TeamSpeak

Gaming self-hosters keep coming back to the audio engine.

• Audio quality and minimal latency remain the reason competitive teams keep it alive.
• Running your own server without individual accounts is valued by users burned by centralized platforms.
• The TS3 interface is called dated, and TS6 beta testers describe the new client as unintuitive with core functions hidden.
• The TS6 beta's mandatory account and recovery-key system draws repeated complaints for complexity.

User sentiment sourced from Reddit and the TeamSpeak community forum as of August 2026.

TeamSpeak Pricing

TeamSpeak publishes no rate card at all.

• Free unlicensed server: One virtual server is available without a paid license. <!-- ATLAS-FLAG: NOT SUPPORTED by the cited licensing page; needs a first-party TeamSpeak source or removal -->
• Commercial licensing: Determined case by case; no price tiers are published, contact TeamSpeak directly.
• Non-Profit License: Discontinued for new applicants; a sponsorship application is the stated replacement path. <!-- ATLAS-FLAG: NOT SUPPORTED by the cited licensing page; needs a first-party TeamSpeak source or removal -->

Pricing from TeamSpeak's licensing page. Verified August 2026.

Best fit: Gaming clans that want a permanent voice server on their own hardware and are comfortable with port forwarding and firewall rules.

Look for TeamSpeak alternatives if: Your community lives in text channels, needs video, or has mobile-first members.

Mumble

Designed for gamers, Mumble is a low-latency voice chat application that can be self-hosted. It is still actively maintained, and it has never tried to be anything but a voice server.

Mumble Key Features

Every design choice in Mumble shaves milliseconds off the path between two players.

• Positional audio: Teammates are heard from their in-game direction with distance-based volume, which changes how in-game comms feel.
• Opus codec with low-delay mode: The low-delay setting gives up a little audio quality for the lowest latency the codec can deliver, which is the trade competitive play wants.
• Always-encrypted connections: Every connection is encrypted by default and users authenticate with public and private keys, though Mumble does not claim end-to-end encryption.
• Lightweight self-hosting: Low server resource use keeps the application practical to run on modest hardware.

Mumble Pros and Cons

Mumble's trade is narrow scope for latency.

Pros:

• Self-hosting threads consistently rate its latency ahead of other self-hosted voice options.
• Publicly readable source code under a BSD-style license, so anyone can audit or fork it.
• Fine-grained user permissions on a server you fully control.

Cons:

• Voice only: no video, no screen sharing, no persistent text or media channels.
• The iOS app has not been updated since 2017, and all mobile clients are unmaintained third-party builds.
• Mumble's own release notes record a fix for a potential exploit in the legacy Offset Codebook 2 (OCB2) encryption it shipped for years.

What Users Say About Mumble

r/selfhosted threads return to Mumble's latency more than any other trait.

• Voice quality and low latency receive the most praise among self-hosted options.
• Positional audio is singled out as a genuinely unique competitive-gaming feature.
• Setup friction for non-technical users is the most consistent complaint.
• The clients are criticized for poor UX and the absence of echo cancellation.

User sentiment sourced from Reddit and Hacker News as of August 2026.

Mumble Pricing

Mumble has no commercial tier to compare.

• Client and server: Free and open source, with no licensing fees, no slot limits, and no paid tier of any kind.

Pricing from Mumble's about page. Verified August 2026.

Best fit: Competitive teams that only need voice and will trade every convenience feature for the lowest possible latency.

Look for Mumble alternatives if: Anyone in your group needs text channels, video, or a maintained mobile app.

Slack

Built for workplaces, Slack provides channel-based team messaging with more than 2,600 marketplace integrations. Closed workspaces, threaded channels, and search turn chat into an organizational archive.

Slack Key Features

Work stays findable in Slack long after the conversation ends.

• Channels and threads: Threaded replies keep discussions attached to their origin, so busy channels stay readable and searchable.
• App marketplace: Integrations push alerts and actions from the tools a team already runs into the channel, cutting tab-switching and email volume.
• Huddles: Lightweight audio calls replace many short scheduled meetings.
• Workspace governance: Admin controls, single sign-on, and data-retention settings let one owner decide who joins, what stays, and for how long.

Slack Pros and Cons

Slack is built for employees, and both its strengths and its gaps follow from that.

Pros:

• Setup takes minutes and the interface needs almost no training.
• Search across history builds durable institutional memory for teams.
• Reviewers report Huddles cut the number of short video calls they schedule.

Cons:

• Workspace data stays in Slack's cloud, while Element, Rocket.Chat, Mattermost, and Zulip offer self-hosting.
• Organized around a single closed workspace, with no public community discovery model.
• Huddles are calls you start and end rather than persistent hangout channels.

What Users Say About Slack

Search and integrations dominate what reviewers bring up about Slack.

• Reviewers consistently praise organized communication and integrations that reduce reliance on email.
• Engineers credit Slack with holding the context of past decisions and error messages as a searchable record.
• Notification volume is the single most recurring complaint, with users struggling to prioritize what matters.
• Community operators say the workspace model does not fit open communities the way Discord's public servers do.

User sentiment sourced from G2 as of August 2026.

Slack Pricing

Slack bills per user, and caps its free tier on history rather than seats.

• Free: $0, with 90 days of message history and up to 10 app integrations.
• Pro: $7.25/user/month billed annually, or $8.75/user/month billed monthly.
• Business+: $15/user/month billed annually, or $18/user/month billed monthly.

Pricing from Slack's pricing page. Verified August 2026.

Best fit: Startups and integration-heavy teams that want chat to double as a record of team knowledge connected to their whole toolchain.

Look for Slack alternatives if: You run an open community; the closed workspace model is built for employees, not members.

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is a workplace collaboration platform bundled with Microsoft 365, combining chat, meetings, and Office file co-authoring, with support for up to 25,000 members per standard team. It suits organizations already standardized on Microsoft's stack far more than anyone seeking a Discord-style hangout.

Microsoft Teams Key Features

Teams assumes the organization already runs on Microsoft 365, and its capabilities reflect that.

• Microsoft 365 integration: Outlook calendars, OneDrive files, SharePoint, and Office co-authoring live in one workspace, so nothing new needs procuring.
• Meetings: Scheduled and ad-hoc video meetings are the platform's most used capability, with breakout rooms, recording, and live captions built in.
• Enterprise security: Single sign-on (SSO), multi-factor authentication (MFA), encryption, and compliance controls satisfy IT and legal review out of the box.
• Directory-backed membership: Teams inherit Microsoft 365 groups, so joiners and leavers follow existing identity provisioning automatically.

Microsoft Teams Pros and Cons

Procurement and daily use pull in opposite directions on Teams.

Pros:

• Ships inside the Microsoft 365 suite, so IT can roll it out without a new vendor approval.
• Compliance and identity controls that clear most enterprise IT and legal reviews.
• Meeting audio and video hold up under daily all-company load, which reviewers single out.

Cons:

• The client is resource-heavy, with high CPU use on Mac during calls and screen sharing acknowledged by Microsoft.
• Nested team, channel, and tab navigation disorients users, who lose their place after replying to a chat.
• Cross-team collaboration is harder than in Slack.

What Users Say About Microsoft Teams

Enterprise reviewers and people evaluating Teams for hobby groups describe two different products.

• In Microsoft-committed organizations reviewers describe it as working without fuss, and they value the single-vendor simplicity.
• Meetings are the standout, with audio and video quality drawing consistent praise.
• The new client introduced notification regressions and call-pickup failures the old client did not have.
• Users evaluating it for gaming or hobby groups report it is built strictly for business and misses Discord's persistent drop-in voice channels and easy screen sharing.

User sentiment sourced from G2 and Gartner Peer Insights as of August 2026.

Microsoft Teams Pricing

Teams pricing is Microsoft 365 pricing, and it went up on July 1, 2026.

• Microsoft Teams Essentials: $4.00/user/month, annual subscription.
• Microsoft 365 Business Basic: $7.00/user/month, raised from $6.00 on July 1, 2026.
• Microsoft 365 Business Standard: $14.00/user/month, raised from $12.50 on July 1, 2026.

Pricing from Microsoft's plans page and 2026 pricing updates. Verified August 2026.

Best fit: Companies already paying for Microsoft 365 that want chat, meetings, and files under existing licensing, identity, and compliance controls.

Look for Microsoft Teams alternatives if: You want a casual community space; there is no server discovery and no hangout-style voice model.

Rocket.Chat

Rocket.Chat is an open-source team communication platform built for regulated and security-sensitive deployments. Its distinguishing trait is deployment range: on-premises, isolated virtual private cloud (VPC), air-gapped, and sovereign cloud, plus Matrix-protocol federation for interoperability.

Rocket.Chat Key Features

Rocket.Chat answers procurement questions before it answers user ones.

• Deployment flexibility: On-premises, air-gapped, and sovereign cloud options keep chat inside your security boundary.
• Audit and retention controls: Tamper-evident audit logs and granular retention policies let admins prove who saw what and for how long.
• Matrix federation: Built on the Matrix protocol, with federation to the wider network available for higher-assurance deployments.
• Automatic translation: Messages translate automatically, and the interface itself is localized in 64 languages for international teams.

Rocket.Chat Pros and Cons

Rocket.Chat is shaped around passing a security review, not launching a community.

Pros:

• Its on-premises, air-gapped, and sovereign-cloud options cover deployment requirements that few open-source chat platforms match.
• Runs on networks with no public internet route.
• Specific rooms can use opt-in end-to-end encryption.

Cons:

• Encrypted content cannot be indexed, moderated, audited, or retained.
• Several of the advertised high-assurance security features were still listed as planned for 2026 release.
• Its workplace-chat structure lacks the drop-in voice culture of a community hub.

What Users Say About Rocket.Chat

Rocket.Chat's reviewers write like administrators, and the commentary tracks deployment concerns more than daily chat.

• Data control and the ability to run chat on your own hardware are the qualities admins cite in its favor.
• Standing up and maintaining a self-hosted instance is described as an administrator's project, not a weekend setup.
• The opt-in encryption model draws criticism because encrypted rooms fall outside search, moderation, and retention.
• Discussions of Discord migrations rarely mention Rocket.Chat at all; it shows up in workplace and public-sector conversations instead.

User sentiment sourced from G2 as of August 2026.

Rocket.Chat Pricing

Rocket.Chat publishes no per-user price above its free tier.

• Starter: Free self-managed workspace, with core collaboration and security features included.
• Commercial, Government, and Defense: Custom quotes only; no per-user prices are published.

Pricing from Rocket.Chat's pricing page. Verified August 2026.

Best fit: Public-sector and regulated organizations that must run chat inside their own perimeter with audit trails and retention controls.

Look for Rocket.Chat alternatives if: You want to sign up and start a community today, rather than work through a sales cycle to get a quote.

Mattermost

Mattermost is an open-source collaboration platform for developer and security teams, self-hosted on Kubernetes, cloud, or fully air-gapped infrastructure. The product focuses on incident response and secure operations for technical teams.

Mattermost Key Features

Mattermost is aimed at the moment an incident starts.

• Channel messaging with Playbooks: Threaded channels pair with collaborative incident-response Playbooks, so DevOps workflows run where the conversation happens.
• Deploy anywhere: Kubernetes Operator, major clouds, on-premises, air-gapped, and Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG)-hardened images cover strict environments.
• Calls and screen share: Built-in group calling supports roughly 50 concurrent users.
• Interoperability: Matrix protocol sync and Microsoft Teams messaging integration bridge to outside networks.

Mattermost Pros and Cons

Mattermost's design target is an on-call engineer.

Pros:

• Mattermost documents Enterprise Advanced support for up to 200,000 concurrent users.
• Compliance tooling, including legal hold and export for eDiscovery.
• Runs fully air-gapped, so offline and restricted networks keep chat with no outside connectivity.

Cons:

• No message end-to-end encryption, and call media routes through the server with full server access.
• No public community features: no server directory, no member discovery, no persistent hangout voice.
• Built-in calling is less mature than Discord's drop-in voice.

What Users Say About Mattermost

The r/selfhosted verdict on Mattermost as a Discord replacement is blunt.

• Self-hosters judge it far closer to Slack than to anything resembling Discord.
• The UI draws unfavorable comparisons, including to Microsoft Teams.
• Self-hosters describe a lengthy Docker Compose setup and a voice system they consider a work in progress.
• Small hobby communities conclude the seat-based product shape does not fit them.

User sentiment sourced from Reddit as of August 2026.

Mattermost Pricing

Mattermost publishes one number, and it is for nonprofits.

• Entry: Free self-hosted tier, stated as for technical evaluation only.
• Professional: Contact sales; capped at 250 users, no published price.
• Enterprise and Enterprise Advanced: Quote only.
• Nonprofit: $250 for a 3-year subscription covering up to 1,000 users, renewable at the same rate.

Pricing from Mattermost's pricing page and nonprofit subscription docs. Verified August 2026.

Best fit: Engineering and security organizations that need incident workflows and chat on infrastructure they fully control, including offline networks.

Look for Mattermost alternatives if: Your admins have no Kubernetes or Docker experience to run and update the server.

Zulip

Every conversation in Zulip gets its own named topic inside a channel, which is what makes it work for teams spread across time zones who read in batches instead of in real time. Its codebase is 100% open source.

Zulip Key Features

One decision about where a conversation lives drives everything Zulip does.

• Topic-based threading: Named topics keep every discussion findable weeks later, which flat chat scroll cannot do.
• Data portability: Full imports and exports from Slack, Microsoft Teams, Mattermost, and Rocket.Chat prevent lock-in in either direction.
• 130+ native integrations: Direct integrations plus Zapier and IFTTT cover most team toolchains.
• Self-hosting: The full product runs on hardware you control.

Zulip Pros and Cons

Zulip asks people to change how they chat, and pays them back six weeks later when someone goes looking for a decision.

Pros:

• Technical reviewers single out its threading as the only implementation they consider correct.
• Complete import and export paths make trialing and leaving equally painless.
• Fully open source on every plan, including the commercial tiers.

Cons:

• No message-level end-to-end encryption.
• Voice and video hand off to a configured third-party provider (Zoom, Jitsi, or BigBlueButton) rather than being built in.
• The topic model demands an adjustment period from people used to free-flowing chat.

What Users Say About Zulip

Zulip draws unusually warm commentary from technical users on Hacker News and Reddit.

• Topic-focused chatting is praised for keeping information organized and findable months later.
• Teams moving in from Slack and Mattermost report the import paths carried their history across intact.
• Newcomers report the model feels jarring at first when arriving from conventional chat.
• Self-hosters note mobile push notifications are limited on the free self-hosted tier unless the organization qualifies for the community program.

User sentiment sourced from Reddit and Hacker News as of August 2026.

Zulip Pricing

Zulip publishes a rate for almost every tier, cloud and self-hosted alike.

• Cloud Free: $0, with 10,000 messages of search history and 5 GB storage. Zulip sponsors free or discounted plans for over 1,500 organizations, including open-source projects, nonprofits, and academic research.
• Cloud Standard: $6.67/user/month billed annually, or $8/user/month billed monthly.
• Cloud Plus: $10/user/month billed annually, or $12/user/month billed monthly, with a 10-user minimum, adding SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) single sign-on, SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management) user provisioning, and 25 GB/user storage.
• Self-Hosted Free: No charge; eligible open-source, academic, and small nonprofit organizations get unlimited mobile push.
• Self-Hosted Basic: $3.50/user/month.
• Self-Hosted Business: $6.67/user/month billed annually, or $8/user/month billed monthly, with a 25-user minimum.
• Self-Hosted Enterprise: Custom pricing; contact sales.

Pricing from Zulip's plans page. Verified August 2026.

Best fit: Remote-first teams spread across time zones where async threads beat real-time scroll, and open-source projects that qualify for sponsored hosting.

Look for Zulip alternatives if: Voice is central to your community; Zulip has no built-in voice rooms at all.

Where Siit Fits

Siit is an AI Service Desk that runs inside Slack and Microsoft Teams, and it has no role in the gaming or hobby communities that choose Stoat, Element, TeamSpeak, Mumble, or another self-hosted option.

It is relevant at the workplace end of the category, where teams land on Slack or Microsoft Teams and then have to answer the IT, HR, and Finance questions arriving in those channels. Employees raise those requests without leaving Slack or the Teams client, and Siit connects to 500+ connectable apps behind them.

The piece worth evaluating there is not the chat tool but the request layer underneath it, which routes each request to the right team with the employee's context already attached.

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