Fluxer and Root are both free chat apps for communities, with text channels, voice and video calls and screen sharing. Fluxer is open source, you can run it on your own machine for free, it works in the browser and you can export your data at any time. It's made by a small independent Swedish company with no venture capital or outside investors.
Root doesn't publish its source code, and it doesn't offer self-hosting or a web app yet, although Root says it wants to add both. Root is ahead with its hosted app platform, higher limits for message length and file size, and mobile apps released in both stores. We expect Fluxer's iOS app to be on the App Store in early November 2026.
How do Fluxer and Root compare at a glance?
The table below compares Fluxer with Root as of November 2026, and Root's details come from its own website, help center, terms and app store listings.
Is Fluxer free like Root?
Yes. An account on fluxer.com is free, and so are communities, messages, voice and video calls, screen sharing and running your own instance. Plutonium is optional and raises the limits on your own account, and its prices are published on the Plutonium page.
Root is free to download, and its Sudo subscription adds higher screen share quality, a badge and a "core" each month. Root's Sudo FAQ doesn't list a price, and it says the price is shown in the app before you confirm, with monthly and yearly billing. For now, the FAQ says you need Root on desktop to subscribe and to use Sudo features.
Adding a bot to a Fluxer community is free, and bots don't take up paid slots. On Root, communities get app or bot slots by leveling up with cores, which come with a Sudo subscription each month or can be bought for a community in the desktop app.
Root's Sudo FAQ says that when a core stops, an app that no longer fits is suspended and deleted after about three days unless someone restores the slot.
A community on fluxer.com with enough members can apply to be listed in Explore for free, and a person on our team reviews each application. On Root, a community needs at least 4 cores before its owner can list it in Community Discovery.
Who owns Fluxer and Root?
Fluxer is made by Fluxer Platform AB, a small independent Swedish company that its founder owns, with no venture capital or outside investors. Root is made by Root Communications, Inc.,1 a company in Los Angeles that raised a US$9 million seed round in June 2025, led by Headline Ventures and Konvoy Ventures.2
Fluxer's terms are governed by Swedish law, require no arbitration and keep your right to take part in a class action or other collective claim. Root's terms of use are governed by California law and send disputes to individual arbitration or small claims court, and they say users outside the US keep the mandatory protections of their own country.
Is Fluxer more private than Root?
Fluxer doesn't sell, rent or license your messages or any other personal data, and Root's privacy policy says Root doesn't sell personal data. Neither app uses your content to train AI models, according to Fluxer's tracking page and Root's privacy policy.
Fluxer uses no third-party analytics, cross-site tracking or browser fingerprinting. Root's policy says it uses Google Analytics on rootapp.com and collects feature usage metrics in the app, without message content or personally identifiable information.
Root's privacy policy says its data is stored in the United States. Fluxer is a Swedish company, and we're moving fluxer.com's stored data from US hosting to our own hardware in Sweden. A government outside the EU that wants data from Fluxer Platform AB has to go through Swedish authorities. Until the move, which has no date set yet, US authorities can also send orders to our US hosting provider, as our CLOUD Act article explains.
Fluxer plans end-to-end encryption with no setting to turn it off, for calls in 2026, and for notes, DMs and group DMs as an experimental draft in 2026 and a stable release in 2027. Nothing on Fluxer is end-to-end encrypted yet. Root's privacy policy describes TLS between your app and its servers and doesn't mention end-to-end encryption.
As a Swedish company, Fluxer is supervised by the Swedish privacy authority IMY under the GDPR. You can export your Fluxer account data yourself at any time. Root's terms of use say the service doesn't offer tools to export your content at this time, and its privacy policy asks you to contact support about other privacy rights under local laws.
Can you self-host Fluxer, unlike Root?
Yes. Self-hosting Fluxer is free, with no license key, paid tier or reduced edition, and the setup tool rexctl installs it with one command and makes a backup before each upgrade by default. You need a 64-bit Linux, macOS or Windows machine with at least 4 GB of memory and a domain name, and the self-hosting guide has the details. Root says that "today you can't self-host" in its Ask Root post, and that it wants to allow it later.
What makes Fluxer different from Root?
Anyone can run their own Fluxer instance for free with the whole software, and the official desktop and Android apps connect to it. 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". Forum channels will get an optional public web mode with an experimental draft planned before the end of 2026.
Does Fluxer have the same features as Root?
Most of the basics match, with text and voice channels, roles and permissions, custom emoji and a Discord server template import on both, as Fluxer's guide and Root's guide show. Fluxer has threads and forums in early beta and message search with filters for sender, mentions, date, links and files. Root's search can be limited to channels and shows matching messages, files and members in separate tabs.
Fluxer's bots and webhooks use an API compatible with large parts of Discord's API, but bots on Fluxer can't use slash commands or buttons yet. Root has apps with their own interface that Root hosts for developers, and folders for files in a channel.
Does Fluxer have better apps than Root?
Fluxer works in your web browser at fluxer.com and has desktop apps for Windows, macOS and Linux. The Fluxer desktop app can share your screen's audio on all three systems. Root's help page says its desktop app shares screen audio on Windows and Linux, and its mobile apps share sound on iPhone and on Android 10 or later.
On Linux, Fluxer has AppImage, .deb, .rpm and tar.gz builds and its own apt, dnf, pacman and Flatpak repositories, and it's on Flathub. Root's install guide offers an AppImage.
Fluxer's TestFlight beta for iOS is on hold for now, and we expect Fluxer to be on the App Store in early November 2026, without TestFlight invites or limited slots. The Android app is in the Google Play beta. Root has desktop apps for Windows, macOS and Linux and mobile apps in both stores. It has no web app yet, and Root plans one.
Fluxer's apps are available in 34 languages and regional variants, and anyone can suggest better translations on Fluxer's Weblate. Root's language page lists 10 languages.
Is Fluxer as stable as Root?
Both apps are young. fluxer.com opened to everyone in January 2026 and had outages in February, when more than 100,000 accounts were created in 16 days. It has been stable for months, but short disruptions still happen sometimes during DDoS attacks on our network or problems with our hosting, and its status history is public at fluxerstatus.com.
Root started a closed beta in August 2025, and as of November 2026 its apps are public on the App Store and Google Play, where anyone can download them for free. Neither has an uptime guarantee, as Fluxer's stability page and Root's terms say.
Where is Root ahead of Fluxer?
Root's mobile apps are released on the App Store and Google Play. Fluxer's Android app is still in beta, and we expect Fluxer's iOS app to be on the App Store in early November 2026, with its TestFlight beta on hold for now following a technical issue at Apple.
Root's hosted app platform lets developers build apps with their own interface. Root also has an in-game overlay in its Windows app, and its mobile apps share sound when you share your screen. Fluxer doesn't have any of these features yet.
Root's published limits allow messages up to 10,000 characters and files other than images up to 100 MB, with images capped at 10 MB. Fluxer's free accounts get 2,000 characters and 25 MB files, and 4,000 characters and 500 MB with Plutonium.
Root has a Moderation app that checks messages against lists of slurs, profanity and custom words and looks for repeated messages, and new Root communities start with a join throttle turned on. Fluxer has no built-in AutoMod or word filter, and many communities use a moderation bot alongside the built-in moderation and anti-raid tools.
How do I try Fluxer?
You can download Fluxer or open fluxer.com in your browser and make a free account. If you want to run it yourself, start with self-hosting Fluxer. When your group is also on Discord, moving a community from Discord explains what comes over.
Sources
-
Root terms of use, Root Communications, Inc., accessed 2026-11-02.
-
Root Raises $9M in Funding to Build a Next Gen Discord, Root press release on Game Developer, 2025-06-17, accessed 2026-11-02.