Discord vs Revolt vs Spacebar — Open Source Discord Alternatives Compared
Discord is everywhere. It’s the default home for gaming communities, open-source projects, crypto groups, and just about every fan community you can name. It’s slick, feature-rich, and free to use — but it’s also closed-source, centralised, and accountable only to its own investors. If you value privacy, self-sovereignty, or simply owning the platform your community lives on, three open-source alternatives now stand out: Revolt (recently rebranded as Stoat), and Spacebar.
Discord, Revolt, and Spacebar all give you the now-familiar shape of a modern chat app — servers, channels, roles, voice calls, and a thriving bot ecosystem — but they come from three very different places. Discord is the polished proprietary incumbent. Revolt (Stoat) is the privacy-first European rebuild. Spacebar is the closest thing to a drop-in Discord replacement you can run entirely on your own hardware. Let’s break them down side by side.
Discord — The Proprietary Incumbent
Discord needs little introduction. Launched in 2015, it grew from a gamer-focused voice app into the default social layer for online communities, with hundreds of millions of users. It handles text, voice, and video, offers granular server permissions, a vast bot ecosystem via its public API, and a genuinely polished cross-platform experience on desktop, web, and mobile.
What Discord does not offer is openness or control. Discord is proprietary, closed-source software. Your conversations flow through Discord’s servers, its content-moderation and data-collection decisions are made behind closed doors, and there is no way to self-host it or audit its code. Advanced features are gated behind the paid Nitro subscription — higher upload limits, animated emojis, server boosts, and profile customisation. None of that is a criticism of the product — Discord is excellent at what it does — but if self-hostability or transparency matters to you, you need to look elsewhere.
Revolt (Now Stoat) — The Privacy-First Rebuild
Revolt began in 2019 as an open-source chat platform built to be a more user-friendly and privacy-respecting Discord. It offers servers, channels, voice chat, file sharing, markdown support, granular role-based permissions, and a serious moderation toolkit. Crucially, it was designed so that communities never have to trade away privacy for features — no ads, no data mining, no shady partnerships.
In early 2026 the project rebranded to Stoat, a small weasel-like mammal — a fitting mascot for a small, fast, and independent chat app (the domain is now stoat.chat and the GitHub organisation is stoatchat). The code is public and open source, and the project is emphatic that it will stay “free and open source, now and forever.” Built in Europe under strict data-protection laws, Stoat keeps account data, conversations, and settings in sync across Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, and the web.
Notable details: custom emojis, a 20MB file upload limit, and server-specific profile pictures are all free with no subscription, and there’s even built-in theming that won’t get you banned (unlike some platforms). Group DMs scale to 50 members, bots work everywhere, and there is a public API strong enough that the official apps run on it. You can use the hosted service for free, or self-host it entirely — it’s yours to do with as you please.
Spacebar — The Drop-In Self-Hosted Discord
Spacebar takes a radically different approach: it reimplements the Discord client-server API in TypeScript so that existing Discord clients, bots, and applications can connect to your own self-hosted instance with minimal changes. It is fully open source (AGPL-3.0), decentralised, and lets you run the entire server stack — API, gateway, CDN, and WebRTC for voice and video — on infrastructure you control.
If your goal is feature parity with Discord plus configurability, privacy, and self-hosting, Spacebar is the closest match. It ships a cross-platform plugin system and theming system, has no single point of failure, and tunes every limit to fit your needs. The trade-off is that Spacebar is the least “batteries included” of the three — it’s a platform you run, with more setup involved than signing up for a hosted account.
Side-by-Side
- Licence: Discord is proprietary and closed-source; Revolt (Stoat) and Spacebar are both open source (AGPL-3.0).
- Self-hosting: Discord — not possible. Revolt (Stoat) — yes, fully self-hostable. Spacebar — yes, designed for it.
- Hosted option: Discord — the service itself. Revolt (Stoat) — free hosted service at stoat.chat plus self-hosting. Spacebar — self-hosted by design.
- Discord compatibility: Discord — native. Revolt (Stoat) — similar experience, but its own API. Spacebar — protocol-compatible with existing Discord clients and bots.
- Pricing: Discord — free tier with paid Nitro. Revolt (Stoat) — free, no paid tier for basics. Spacebar — free and open source.
- Data privacy: Discord — centralised, corporate. Revolt (Stoat) — privacy-first, built in the EU. Spacebar — you control all of it.
- Ease of setup: Discord — create an account, done. Revolt (Stoat) — sign up or self-host. Spacebar — moderate (you run the server).
Which Should You Choose?
If you just want a chat app that works and you don’t care who hosts your data, Discord remains the most polished option — its bot ecosystem, community features, and reliability are hard to beat. If you want a familiar, friendly, open-source app that respects your privacy and works everywhere, Revolt (Stoat) is the best choice — no ads, no tracking, and free custom emojis and larger uploads without a subscription. If you already run a Discord bot ecosystem or want the most faithful self-hosted drop-in replacement, Spacebar is the technical answer, giving you Discord-compatible infrastructure on hardware you own.
All three are worth a spin — and once you’re sold on self-hosted chat, explore the rest of the free and open source tools in our directory to see what else you can move onto your own infrastructure next. Know a great open-source tool we’re missing? Submit it here.