Best alternatives to SimpleX Chat in 2026

Even privacy-focused messengers like Signal still need some identifier — usually your phone number — to connect you with contacts, which means the app (and anyone who compromises it) can at least see who's talking to whom, even if they can't read the messages. SimpleX Chat removes that identifier entirely: instead of a persistent account, every conversation gets its own private, disposable connection, so there's no central identity to track. SimpleX Chat is a free, open-source (AGPL-3.0, ~19,000 GitHub stars, launched 2019) messaging platform built in Haskell with native iOS (Swift) and Android (Kotlin) clients, plus desktop and CLI/terminal versions. It uses double-ratchet end-to-end encryption with post-quantum resistance, a decentralized relay network where messages are stored only temporarily, local database encryption with a passphrase, an invitation-link-only contact model to prevent spam, and (from version 6.0) private message routing by default for stronger metadata protection than most competitors, including Signal, Matrix and Session, according to the project's own claims.