Fluxer is an open source chat app for friends, groups and communities, with text chat, voice and video calls and screen sharing. The biggest differences from Discord are that its server and apps are open source, that anyone can run their own instance without paying Fluxer anything and that Fluxer shows no ads or sponsored content.
Nothing on Fluxer is end-to-end encrypted yet. We plan it with no setting to turn it off, for calls in 2026 and for DMs and group DMs with a stable release in 2027. Discord is much older and larger, and it's ahead of Fluxer in some ways today.
How do Fluxer and Discord compare at a glance?
This table compares fluxer.com with Discord as of November 2026.
| Fluxer | Discord | |
|---|---|---|
| Open source | Yes, AGPL | Some libraries |
| Host it yourself | Free | |
| Ads | None | Yes, including Quests and Video Quests |
| Paid plans | Plutonium, US$4.99 a month | Nitro Basic US$2.99 a month, Nitro US$9.99 a month (US prices) |
| Free upload size | 25 MB | 20 MB since August 2026 |
| People in a group DM | 50 | 10 |
| End-to-end encrypted calls | Not yet, planned for 2026 with no setting to turn it off | Yes, except Stage channels |
| End-to-end encrypted text in DMs | Planned, with a stable release in 2027 and no setting to turn it off | No current plans |
| Custom emoji and stickers in each community | 500 emoji and 500 stickers | 50 emoji and 5 stickers, up to 250 and 60 with 14 Server Boosts |
| iOS and Android apps | Android on Google Play, iOS coming to the App Store in early November 2026 (TestFlight on hold for now) | App Store and Google Play |
| Open to everyone since | January 2026 | May 2015 |
Where is Discord ahead of Fluxer?
Discord has been around since 2015 and is much bigger, with more than 90 million daily active users as of mid-2026, and many of your friends may already be there.
- Discord calls outside Stage channels are end-to-end encrypted today, and nothing on Fluxer is end-to-end encrypted yet. Fluxer's encrypted calls are planned for 2026.
- Discord's mobile apps are already in the App Store and Google Play today. Fluxer's Android app is on Google Play, and we expect its iOS app to be on the App Store in early November 2026, with the TestFlight beta on hold until then.
- Discord bots can use slash commands, buttons and modals today. On Fluxer, support for these features is planned for 2026 as item 6 on our roadmap.
- Discord has AutoMod, onboarding, polls, scheduled events, a soundboard, Stage channels and Activities built in. On Fluxer, communities use bots for automated moderation and onboarding, and scheduled events and a soundboard are planned.
- Discord's threads and forums are fully released, and Fluxer's are in early beta.
- Message history and members can't come over from Discord, but a Discord server template can bring over your channels, roles and permissions.
- Discord is a large company, and Fluxer is made by a small team. Hampus Kraft leads development and builds the backend, web app and desktop app, and another developer works on the iOS and Android apps, and contributors help too.
Is Fluxer a Discord clone?
Fluxer starts from a chat layout that many people already know, and people and whole communities can switch to it without learning a new app. Its code, its privacy rules and many of its features are Fluxer's own, and it's made by a small independent company in Sweden whose founder, Hampus Kraft, leads its development.
Fluxer isn't owned by Discord or affiliated with it in any way. The company behind it, Fluxer Platform AB, has no venture capital or other outside investors.
Why does Fluxer look like Discord?
Many people come to Fluxer from Discord with their friends and communities, and a layout they already know helps them find their channels, DMs and settings from day one. While building Fluxer, Hampus tried many different layouts, and people in the private test group found that the unfamiliar ones made the app harder to use for anyone coming from Discord, because common things took more steps than they were used to.
That layout is older than any one app. Chat channels that you join by name go back to IRC, which RFC 1459 described in 1993, and forum software, gaming voice apps and workplace chat apps each built on the ideas that came before them.
Fluxer's code was written for Fluxer, apart from open source libraries that many apps use, and anyone can check that in its open source code. The logo and artwork were made for Fluxer and are under Fluxer's own artwork licence, and the list of third-party files says where each of the icons, emoji and fonts in the app comes from.
Copyright protects specific creative work, such as code, artwork, icons and sounds, and it doesn't protect ideas, methods of operation or what a programme does. A US appeals court held in Lotus v. Borland (1995) that a menu command hierarchy is a method of operation that copyright doesn't protect, and the EU Court of Justice held in SAS Institute (2012) that copyright doesn't protect a programme's functionality or its programming language.
We keep changing the interface so it becomes more our own, and new features bring their own design. The planned public web mode for forum channels will let anyone read a public forum without an account, and the new voice and video system adds verification codes you can compare with the other people in an encrypted call.
Is Fluxer free like Discord?
Yes. An account on fluxer.com is free, and so are communities, messages, voice and video calls and screen sharing. Plutonium is an optional subscription for US$4.99 a month or US$49.99 a year that raises your own account's limits, and it can't upgrade a community. Discord's Nitro page lists Nitro at US$9.99 a month and Nitro Basic at US$2.99 a month, and Discord also sells Server Boosts that unlock extra features for a whole community.
Every Fluxer community can have up to 500 custom emoji and 500 stickers for free. A Discord server starts with 50 emoji slots and 5 sticker slots, and Discord's Server Boosting FAQ says a server needs 14 Boosts from its members for 250 emoji and 60 stickers.
On the free plans, Fluxer allows files up to 25 MB, and Discord has allowed 20 MB since August 2026. Both apps allow messages of up to 2,000 characters and screen sharing in DMs at 720p and 30 fps on a free account. On Discord, free users can stream at higher quality in a server that has enough Server Boosts from its members.
With Plutonium you can share your screen at up to 4K and 60 fps. Peer-to-peer calls let everyone stream at that quality for free, but they're an early preview that fluxer.com is turning on country by country. The other people in the call can see your IP address, and on iOS you can't share your screen in a peer-to-peer call yet.
How is privacy on Fluxer different from Discord?
Fluxer shows no ads, has no advertising partnerships and doesn't sell, rent or license your messages or any other personal data or share it with anyone for their advertising. It uses no third-party analytics, cross-site tracking or browser fingerprinting and doesn't build behavioural profiles. Your content is never used to train AI models.
Discord's privacy policy, effective 29 September 2025, says "We don't make money from selling your personal information to third parties." It also says Discord may get information about you "from advertisers and third-party data providers" and uses your information "to help us surface sponsored content (like Quests and other sponsored formats)".
In 2023, Discord tested AI features built on OpenAI technology, including an AI version of its Clyde chatbot, which it stopped in December 2023. Its March 2023 post says OpenAI can't use Discord user data to train its general models, and its August 2025 policy update says Discord doesn't allow outside AI companies to train their models on your messages.
Starting 16 November 2026, Discord plans to show automated summaries of public channels on a public web page for each Discoverable Server, and the server's admins can pick other channels or turn the summaries off, as Discord's October 2026 post explains.
From mid-December 2026, Discord also plans to let messages from public channels in Discoverable Servers show up in web search. Its help article says server admins decide which channels take part, and each member's setting for it is on by default except in the EU and EEA, the UK, Canada, Brazil, Australia and South Korea.
On Fluxer, search engines can't find your messages, and messages in DMs, group DMs and regular chat channels will never be published on the web.
Fluxer never asks for ID, selfies or face scans. In the UK and Brazil, you can choose to unlock mature content with an 18+ result from Apple or Google. That sharing is always optional, and you can keep using the rest of Fluxer without doing it.
Since September 2026, Discord sorts accounts into adult, teen and unconfirmed age groups from signals such as account age and the servers and games an account is connected to. Discord says it doesn't look at your messages or calls to do this.
Discord also says that more than 90% of the people who use it won't be asked to confirm their age. Others may be asked to use a video selfie that's checked on their device, an ID, a card check or another method, as its age assurance page describes.
You never need a phone number to use Fluxer, and if our spam rules ask you to text a code, a person on our team can verify you without one. On Discord, a server set to the "Highest" verification level only lets members with a verified phone number send messages, and Discord's verification article says VoIP, burner and landline numbers can't be used.
Since 2 March 2026, audio and video in Discord DMs, group DMs, voice channels and Go Live streams are end-to-end encrypted, but Stage channels and stream previews aren't. Discord says it has no current plans to encrypt text messages end to end.
Fluxer's new voice and video system, planned for 2026, will encrypt every call end to end with no setting to turn it off and no unencrypted fallback. End-to-end encryption for DMs and group DMs follows as an experimental draft in 2026 and a stable release in 2027, and until encrypted calls are out, nothing on Fluxer is end-to-end encrypted.
Fluxer is a Swedish company, and we're moving fluxer.com's stored data from hosting in the US to our own hardware in Sweden, with a provider that Mullvad VPN also uses. A government outside the EU can't enforce an order for data against Fluxer Platform AB without going through Swedish authorities. Until the move, which has no date set yet, US authorities can also send orders directly to our US hosting provider.
Is Discord open source like Fluxer?
No. Discord's apps and server software are proprietary, and Discord doesn't offer a version you can host yourself. Its terms let you run its software "solely to access our services" and forbid modifying or reverse engineering it unless Discord agrees in writing or the law permits it. They also bar unauthorised software designed to modify the service.
Discord publishes some of its own work as open source. On GitHub it publishes libdave, the libraries for the end-to-end encryption of its calls, under the MIT licence, and its open source page lists more libraries such as Lilliput and Manifold. Discord also publishes the documentation for its API, which developers use to build bots and apps.
Fluxer itself is free and open source under the AGPL, including the server, the web and desktop apps and the iOS and Android apps. You can host your own instance for free with no licence key or paid tier, and Fluxer staff can't ban anyone from an instance they don't run. Third-party clients, themes and custom CSS are allowed too.
Fluxer also lets you automate your own account, for example with a script that tidies your DMs, as long as it isn't malicious. Discord's help centre says automating a normal user account is forbidden and can lead to the account being terminated.
How do Fluxer and Discord make money?
fluxer.com is paid for by optional Plutonium subscriptions, Operator Pass purchases and donations. It shows no ads and doesn't sell your personal data.
Discord's privacy policy says its business "is funded through subscriptions, paid products, and sponsored content (like Quests and other sponsored formats)". It sells Nitro subscriptions, and its Server Boosts unlock extra features for a whole community.
If you use both apps, you can turn off personalised sponsored content in Discord under "User Settings", "Data & Privacy" and "How Discord uses your data", and "Manage Sponsored Content" lets you hide some topics. Discord's help article on sponsored content says you may still see Quests after that, but they won't be personalised.
Who runs and funds Fluxer and Discord?
Fluxer is made by Fluxer Platform AB, a Swedish company that Hampus Kraft owns in full, and it has no venture capital or other outside investors of any kind.
Discord Inc. is a US company in San Francisco, founded by Jason Citron and Stanislav Vishnevskiy, and it has been backed by venture capital since a seed round in 2011.
Does Fluxer work with the Discord API and Discord bots?
Discord bots that use prefix commands and plain messages can often be ported to Fluxer with small changes. Bots built on slash commands, buttons or modals won't fully work until Fluxer supports them, which is planned for 2026 on our roadmap. The developer docs describe Fluxer's API and what bots on Fluxer can do today.
Fluxer webhooks take Discord-style messages and also accept Slack's incoming webhook format. You can import a Discord server template to bring over your channels, roles and permissions, and the Markdown and timestamps you're used to work the same way.
What makes Fluxer different from Discord?
You can host your own instance for free and connect to it with the official desktop app or the Android app, and on a self-hosted instance, Fluxer has none of its messages, files or accounts. Optional federation is planned with a stable release in 2027, and the protocol it builds on includes moving your account to another instance.
You can export your data at any time and delete your own messages in bulk with "Delete my messages" under "Privacy" in "User settings". Fluxer has no outside investors, shows no ads and never trains AI models on your content. Forum channels will get an optional public web mode with an experimental draft planned before the end of 2026.
You can also read and change the open source code of Fluxer's server and apps. Peer-to-peer calls are an early preview where fluxer.com has turned them on, and the other people in the call can see your IP address. Custom CSS is built into the web and desktop apps, and a group DM on Fluxer can have up to 50 people, compared with 10 on Discord.
Custom themes and role icons are free for everyone on Fluxer, and Discord's extra colour themes need Nitro. You'll find more in features Discord doesn't have.
Which apps does Fluxer have compared with Discord?
Fluxer works in the browser at fluxer.com and has a desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux. The iOS and Android apps are open source like the rest of Fluxer. The Android app is on Google Play, and we expect Fluxer to be on the App Store in early November 2026, with the iOS TestFlight beta on hold for now following a technical issue at Apple.
Until then, you can use Fluxer on an iPhone at fluxer.com in Safari. Discord's system requirements say running Discord in a mobile browser isn't supported.
Fluxer's Android download page also has a build for phones without Google Play services, which gets notifications through UnifiedPush. Discord's system requirements say it only supports Android devices that ship with Google Play Services.
The Fluxer desktop and mobile apps can be signed in to accounts on several instances at the same time. Discord has a web app and apps for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android, and you can also join Discord voice calls on PlayStation 5 and Xbox.
Is Discord rewriting its app in Rust?
Yes. Discord's co-founder and CTO, Stanislav Vishnevskiy, wrote on X on 4 November 2026 that Discord is moving its whole app to Rust. Electron goes away on desktop, and the mobile apps keep a native interface and share their app code with the desktop app.
The new desktop app uses GPUI, a Rust UI framework from the team behind the Zed code editor. For the web version, Vishnevskiy wrote "We will have an HTML renderer for it, but logic will be WASM instead of JS." Discord hasn't given a date for the new app.
A Discord staff member wrote on Reddit that the new app brings native support for Linux, and someone who works on video at Discord wrote on Hacker News that Discord will also ship an ARM64 build for Linux with the new app, which it doesn't have today.
In the screenshot Vishnevskiy posted, the new Windows app used 290 MB of memory, The Verge reported on 5 November 2026. He also replied to a question about the design that the new app "looks and works identically to the current one".
Discord's current app keeps getting faster too. In February 2026 it shipped "a dramatic improvement to render performance on desktop", its patch notes say, and in September 2026 it said upgrading to Electron 42 cut median CPU use by about 17%.
Vishnevskiy wrote that much of Discord's infrastructure and voice technology already runs on Rust, and we expect the new app to turn out well for the people who use Discord.
Client mods and CSS themes made for today's desktop app won't run in the new one. Discord hasn't said yet how the new app will work with screen readers.
Fluxer's desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux is built with Electron, stays fully supported and keeps getting updates, and we have no plans to rewrite it in Rust.
We've started work on a desktop version of Fluxer Oxygen, our native iOS and Android app, for people who want a desktop app that doesn't use Electron. Fluxer's apps are open source, and you're free to mod them and build your own versions.
Will Discord's new app be faster than Fluxer?
Nobody knows yet, because Discord hasn't released its new app.
A native app usually starts with less memory than an Electron app, which brings its own browser engine. After it starts, how fast an app feels depends on what it loads, what it does in the background and how well its developers tune it over time.
Our web and desktop apps already use Rust where it helps, and we keep working on their performance on every platform. You can also read how we expect Fluxer Oxygen to compare with Discord's new app for speed and memory.
When Discord's new app comes out, the fairest test is how both apps run on your own device with the communities you use every day. If Fluxer feels slow, please report it as a bug with your device and your Fluxer version, and we'll look into it.
Is Fluxer as stable as Discord?
fluxer.com opened to everyone in January 2026 and had more than 500,000 accounts on 19 October 2026, counting only accounts that still exist, and we don't publish how many people use it each day. In February 2026 more than 100,000 accounts were created in 16 days while it ran on a single server, and the service struggled until we fixed it.
fluxer.com has been stable for months, but short disruptions still happen sometimes during denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on our network or problems with our hosting, and fluxerstatus.com lists them. We don't offer an uptime guarantee. Discord runs at a much larger scale and also has outages, and it lists them on discordstatus.com.
What is Fluxer planning next?
These are some of the bigger items on our Roadmap 2026.
- A new voice and video system where every call is end-to-end encrypted and each stream can handle more viewers, planned for 2026 (roadmap #2).
- Optional federation, which lets people on different instances talk to each other, with an experimental draft in 2026 and a stable release in 2027 (roadmap #3).
- End-to-end encryption for personal notes, direct messages and group DMs, with an experimental draft in 2026 and a stable release in 2027 (roadmap #4).
- An optional public web mode for forum channels, planned as an experimental draft in 2026, which lets anyone read a public forum without an account. Threads and forums themselves are already in early beta for everyone (roadmap #5).
Until encrypted calls are out, nothing on Fluxer is end-to-end encrypted.
How does Fluxer compare with other chat apps?
We've also compared Fluxer with Stoat, Matrix and Element, TeamSpeak, Mumble, Root and GameVox on price, privacy, self-hosting, features, apps and stability. You can also see these Discord alternatives side by side in one table, with the licence of each one.
How do I switch from Discord to Fluxer?
You can download Fluxer or open fluxer.com and sign up for a free account. If you're bringing a whole community over, its channels and roles can come with it from Discord.
Discord is a trademark of Discord Inc., and Fluxer isn't affiliated with Discord.