Chat vs Discord
Chat and Discord are both team chat software. Chat is open source under GPL-3.0, with 14k GitHub stars. Discord is a commercial product from Discord Inc.
Which to pick
- Pick Chat when
- You want to embed or run your own messaging service with ready clients.
- Pick Discord when
- You run a public or semi-public community, such as gamers, an open-source project or a creator audience.
Side by side
An instant messaging server in Go with web, Android and iOS clients, group chats and a chatbot API.
Voice, video and text chat organised into servers and channels, built for gaming groups and online communities.
Still pre-1.0 after many years, with a small team.
Not built for business use: no proper data retention or compliance controls, and content is hard to search from outside.
Usable
Production-ready
Self-hosted server and mobile app
Cloud service, desktop app and mobile app
Go, PostgreSQL, MySQL and MongoDB
Not published
Open source, GPL-3.0 (strong copyleft)
Closed source, sold by Discord Inc.
Use inside your business is unrestricted, but anything you distribute that includes it must be released under the same license.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
14k GitHub stars
42k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Established: started 12 years ago, latest release v0.25.3.
Not known
Other comparisons
More team chat apps
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.