Fluxer
Free, open-source, self-hostable chat platform with voice, video, and screen sharing — a privacy-focused Discord alternative.
🔗 Visit Fluxer
Description
Discord is free and popular, but it's a closed platform: a company you don't control decides what data it keeps, what features exist, and what happens if it changes its rules. Fluxer offers the same basic experience — text chat, voice channels, video calls, screen sharing — but as free, open-source software that a community or company can run on its own servers, so nobody outside the community controls the data or the rules.
Fluxer is fully open-source under AGPLv3, built with TypeScript and Rust, with no venture-capital backing — it's funded by an optional "Plutonium" subscription and donations instead. It supports self-hosting with multi-instance deployment across 16 voice regions, rich Markdown formatting, strong moderation and audit logging, and clients across web, desktop, and mobile. With over 1,125 commits and 30+ language translations, it's a maturing project, though its community and third-party integration ecosystem are still far smaller than Discord's.
💬 Our review
The short version: Fluxer is a credible, actively developed self-hosted alternative to Discord for communities that specifically want control over their own data and moderation, but its main cost isn't money — it's the smaller network effect of a platform your friends and community aren't already on.
Against Discord, Fluxer's whole reason to exist is self-hosting and privacy: no VC backing, an AGPLv3 license, and full control if you run your own instance. Core features are permanently free, funded by an optional Plutonium subscription rather than ads or data monetization, which is a healthier model for privacy-focused users. The real limitation is ecosystem: Discord's bot marketplace, integrations, and sheer number of existing communities are a network effect Fluxer can't match yet. Worth adopting for a privacy-conscious community willing to self-host and bring people over; not a drop-in replacement if your community's value depends on Discord's existing integrations and bots.
💰 Pricing
📊 Global score
🤖 AI-enriched data
Core free forever; optional Plutonium subscription
Pros
Open-source, no VC backing
Self-hostable, multi-region
Strong moderation/audit logging
Free core features
Cons
Small community vs Discord
Limited bot/integration ecosystem
Funding model still maturing