Fluxer and Stoat are both free and open source chat apps. Fluxer's official desktop and Android apps connect to self-hosted instances, and so does the iOS app, which we expect on the App Store in early November 2026. Neither app is end-to-end encrypted or federated today. Our roadmap plans end-to-end encrypted calls in 2026 with no setting to turn them off, and optional federation with a stable release in 2027.
Stoat, which was called Revolt until 2025, has been live since 2021 and stores its data mainly in the EU. fluxer.com opened to everyone in January 2026, and we're moving its stored data to our own hardware in Sweden, with no date set yet.
We compared the two apps by reading Stoat's source code on GitHub as of late October 2026, alongside our own. Each Stoat link goes to the exact code or comment we checked. Both let people who run their own instance change most limits. The numbers here are the defaults, and Stoat's match what its own API reported on November 2, 2026.
How do Fluxer and Stoat compare at a glance?
What makes Fluxer different from Stoat?
You can self-host Fluxer for free, and the official desktop, Android and iOS apps connect to your instance. Fluxer has none of its messages, files or accounts, and gets data from it only if the push relay or crash reports are turned on. Stoat's Android app connects only to Stoat's servers for now, and its iOS app lets you pick another server only in development builds.
A Stoat developer wrote in September 2026 that the Android app still doesn't work with self-hosted instances, and that work to change this is underway.
You can export your data at any time and delete your own messages in bulk with "Delete my messages" under "Privacy" in "User settings". Stoat has no self-serve export yet, though its privacy policy lets you ask for a copy of your data. Its only bulk delete is a moderator tool for up to 100 messages from the last 7 days in one channel.
End-to-end encryption is planned for Fluxer with no setting to turn it off, for calls in 2026 and for DMs and group DMs with a stable release in 2027. Forum channels will also get an optional public web mode, with an experimental draft planned before the end of 2026.
Is Fluxer free like Stoat?
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 an optional subscription for US$4.99 a month or US$49.99 a year that raises the limits on your own account, for example uploads up to 500 MB and messages up to 4,000 characters.
Stoat has no paid plan today, and its developer FAQ says it's funded entirely through donations and has plans to make money in the future. In October 2026, a Stoat developer wrote on GitHub that larger uploads "will be available as a subscription for our main platform." fluxer.com is funded by Plutonium, donations and the optional Operator Pass, a one-time purchase you never need to self-host, and Fluxer has no outside investors.
Who owns Stoat?
Stoat is run by Revolt Platforms Ltd in England.1 The project changed its name from Revolt in 2025 after a cease and desist about the old name, and the same team runs it.
Is Fluxer more private than Stoat?
Fluxer shows no ads, doesn't sell, rent or license your messages or any other personal data and doesn't share it with anyone for their advertising, as our tracking page says. Stoat's privacy policy says it will never sell your data, and its About page says it was started with no ads. Fluxer uses no third-party analytics and never trains AI models on your content.
Fluxer's captcha is ALTCHA, a small proof-of-work puzzle that our own servers create and check, while Stoat sends captcha answers to hCaptcha to check them. When someone posts a YouTube link, Fluxer shows a preview through our own proxy and loads YouTube only after you click play. Stoat's web app loads players from sites such as YouTube, Twitch, Spotify, SoundCloud and Bandcamp as soon as the message comes into view.
Fluxer's mobile apps send crash reports only if you turn on "Send crash and performance reports", which is off by default, and they go only to servers we run. Stoat's Android app starts its error reporting every time it opens, with no setting to turn it off, and its Google Play data safety page lists crash logs and diagnostics without marking them optional.
Stoat keeps its data mainly with EU cloud providers. 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 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 to our US hosting provider.
Fluxer's privacy policy says in section 7 how long we keep each kind of data, for example up to 30 days in encrypted backups after you delete a message and up to 90 days for security logs. Stoat's privacy policy describes your rights to get a copy of your data and to have it deleted, but it doesn't say how long Stoat keeps each kind of data.
Fluxer stores the IP address and device of each signed-in session on your account. This lets you see and sign out of your sessions, and it lets us ask for an email confirmation when an account without two-factor authentication signs in from a new IP address. Stoat keeps less here, because the session records in its code don't include an IP address.
Fluxer saves only a hash of each sign-in token, and a copy of our database can't be used to sign in as you, while Stoat stores the tokens themselves.
When Fluxer's current Android app gets a notification through Google, the notification is encrypted, and Google can't see what it says. Stoat's server puts the message text and the sender's name into the notifications it sends through Google's push service without encrypting them first, along with the channel and any image link.
End-to-end encryption for Fluxer calls is planned for 2026, and for DMs and group DMs with a stable release in 2027. Nothing on Fluxer is end-to-end encrypted yet. Stoat isn't end-to-end encrypted either, and in September 2026 its team opened an issue to plan encryption based on MLS, with key management and the API still to be worked out.
Is self-hosting easier with Fluxer or Stoat?
Both are free to self-host. Fluxer comes with an admin panel, where you manage users, communities, reports, bans, invites and the instance's settings and limits. You can give each admin only the permissions they need, and every action is recorded in an audit log.
Fluxer's setup tool rexctl also has commands for admins, users, invites and registration. It installs Fluxer with one command, backs it up by default before every upgrade, and can restore a backup or roll back an upgrade if something goes wrong.
Stoat has no admin panel or any admin commands for self-hosted instances. A Stoat developer wrote on GitHub in August 2026 that "we do not bundle administrative tools" and that any administration "must be done directly against the database."
Stoat's self-hosting guide uses Docker Compose and recommends starting with at least 2 vCPUs and 2 GB of memory, and you upgrade it by running git pull and then its config script again. Fluxer needs a machine with at least 2 CPU cores, 4 GB of memory, 20 GB of free disk space and a domain name, as our install guide says.
The official Fluxer desktop and Android apps connect to any instance, including your own, and so does the iOS app. Its TestFlight beta is on hold for now, following a technical issue at Apple, and we expect it to be on the App Store in early November 2026.
A self-hosted Fluxer instance can also send push notifications to the official iOS and Android apps through a push relay we run, if its operator and the person using the app both turn it on. A self-hosted Stoat instance needs its own Apple and Google keys to send push notifications, and only to mobile apps that its operator builds itself.
Neither app is federated today. Stoat's FAQ says federation isn't on its roadmap, while Fluxer plans optional federation with a stable release in 2027.
What features does Fluxer have compared with Stoat?
Both apps have communities with text and voice channels, roles and permissions, custom emoji, bots and voice and video calls with screen sharing. Fluxer has threads, forum channels and media channels in early beta for everyone. Stoat has one kind of channel in communities, a text channel that can also be used for voice, and its developers wrote in May 2026 that threads are planned for the long term with no date.
By default, a Fluxer community can have up to 500 custom emoji and 500 stickers, while a Stoat server can have 100 custom emoji and Stoat has no stickers.
Fluxer's message search can look through one channel, your DMs or all your communities at once, with filters for sender, mentions, channel, date, attachments and links. Stoat's search looks through one channel at a time, with a keyword query.
| Limit | Fluxer | Stoat |
|---|---|---|
| Message length | 2,000 characters, or 4,000 with Plutonium | 2,000 bytes, which is fewer characters in many languages |
| Files per message | 10 | 5 |
| Different reactions per message | 30 | 20 |
| Channels and roles per community | 500 channels and 250 roles | 200 channels and 200 roles |
Moderators on Fluxer can ban someone for a set time, from a minute to two years, and a ban also stops the person from coming back with the same email address or from the same IP address. On Stoat, bans have no end date and apply to the banned account. An IP address ban on Fluxer can also block other people who share that IP address.
Both apps have an audit log, timeouts and slowmode. Fluxer communities can also set a verification level for newcomers and make moderators use two-factor authentication.
When you report something on Fluxer, we tell you what we decided about the content, and when we act on your account, we send you the reasons and how to appeal. Stoat's support site says it doesn't tell people the outcome of their reports.
fluxer.com runs voice servers in 16 regions on six continents. Each call uses the region closest to the first person who joins it, unless the voice channel is set to a specific region. Stoat's API listed one voice server, in Helsinki, Finland, on November 2, 2026, and calls on stoat.chat go through Finland wherever the people in them are.
| Voice region | Fluxer | Stoat |
|---|---|---|
| Atlanta, USA | ||
| Dallas, USA | ||
| Frankfurt, Germany | ||
| Helsinki, Finland | ||
| Johannesburg, South Africa | ||
| Los Angeles, USA | ||
| Madrid, Spain | ||
| Mumbai, India | ||
| Newark, USA | ||
| Santiago, Chile | ||
| São Paulo, Brazil | ||
| Seattle, USA | ||
| Seoul, South Korea | ||
| Singapore, Singapore | ||
| Stockholm, Sweden | ||
| Sydney, Australia | ||
| Warsaw, Poland |
Fluxer's peer-to-peer calls are an early preview that is turned on in some countries. In them, anyone can stream at up to 4K and 60 fps for free, and the other people in the call can see your IP address. On iOS, you can't share your screen in a peer-to-peer call yet.
Fluxer has push-to-talk, and in the desktop app it keeps working while you use another app. We found no push-to-talk in Stoat's web, desktop or Android code, and its keybind settings are turned off in its code as of late October 2026. Fluxer voice channels have a bitrate setting, and the desktop app can share the audio of a single app with your screen.
Fluxer's API is compatible with large parts of Discord's, and you can import a Discord server template to bring over your channels, your roles and the permissions of each role. A tool that posts to a Discord webhook often works on Fluxer as soon as you swap in the Fluxer webhook URL, and Fluxer webhooks also accept Slack's and GitHub's formats. Stoat webhooks take Stoat's own message format and GitHub's.
On Fluxer, a developer account can make up to 25 apps, and each can use OAuth2 sign-in. On Stoat, each account can have up to 5 bots, and there's no OAuth2 sign-in.
How do the Fluxer and Stoat apps compare?
Both have a web app and desktop apps for Windows, macOS and Linux, and we expect Fluxer's iOS app on the App Store in early November 2026. Its Android app is in the Google Play beta, with a UnifiedPush build for phones without Google Play services. You can also install Fluxer's Android app without Google Play, from our download page or with Obtainium. Stoat doesn't offer a UnifiedPush build of its Android app.
Stoat's download page offers its Android app only as early access on Google Play and tells people on an iPhone to add the web app to their home screen. Fluxer's Android and iOS apps are open source Flutter apps. Stoat's Android app is open source too, and its iOS download page says a native iOS app is in the works as of November 2026.
We sign the Fluxer app for macOS with our Apple Developer ID, and Apple notarizes it. Stoat's macOS app isn't notarized, and its download page explains how to open it anyway if macOS says the app is damaged, including a command to run in Terminal.
Is Fluxer as stable as Stoat?
Both struggled when many people joined. Stoat said in its 500,000 users post in October 2024 that things might be a little slow after a rush of new users. In February 2026, TechRadar reported that Stoat was struggling with traffic from people leaving Discord, and a Stoat developer wrote in April 2026 that video was turned off and disconnects happened because its infrastructure "hasn't been able to keep up with the surge in users."
fluxer.com had outages in February 2026, when more than 100,000 accounts were created in 16 days and it still ran on a single server. Our stability page says fluxer.com has been stable for months, and short disruptions still happen sometimes during denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on our network or problems with our hosting.
Fluxer has no uptime guarantee. You can check the current status of fluxer.com at fluxerstatus.com and the status of stoat.chat at stoatstatus.com.
Where is Stoat ahead of Fluxer?
Stoat has run a public service since 2021, about five years longer than fluxer.com, and its blog says it passed a million registered users in March 2026.
Stoat has no paid plan today, and its data is stored mainly in the EU, while fluxer.com's stays in the United States until our move to Sweden. Stoat needs less memory to self-host, with 2 GB to start, while Fluxer needs at least 4 GB. Stoat also keeps uploaded files until they're deleted, while fluxer.com removes large files sooner than small ones.
When you delete your Stoat account, Stoat also deletes your messages after a week. On Fluxer, your messages stay and show "Deleted User" as the author, unless you run "Delete my messages" before you delete your account. On Stoat, a message can also reply to up to 5 other messages at once, while a Fluxer message replies to one.
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 community is also on Discord, moving a community from Discord explains what comes over.
Sources
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Stoat imprint, Revolt Platforms Ltd, accessed 2026-11-02.