What is the best open source Discord alternative?

Armada is a free, open source Discord alternative built on Nostr. It has servers, channels, threads, voice chat, screen sharing, roles, and moderation, and every community is end-to-end encrypted by default using the Concord protocol.

Yes. Armada is free and open source under the AGPL-3.0 license. It has no ads and no paid tier. Use it at armada.buzz or install the Android app from Zap Store.

Does Armada have voice chat like Discord?

Yes. Armada communities support voice channels with video calls and screen sharing, along with threads, reactions, custom emoji, roles, events with RSVPs, and encrypted direct messages.

Can I self-host a Discord alternative with Armada?

Yes. Armada is AGPL-3.0 open source and communities live on relays you can run yourself. Even without self-hosting, your messages are end-to-end encrypted, so relay operators cannot read them.

Armada: The Open Source, Encrypted Discord Alternative

Q: Is Discord end-to-end encrypted?

Discord encrypts voice and video calls end to end, and made that the default for every call in March 2026. Text messages, DMs, and channel history are not end-to-end encrypted, and Discord has said it has no plans to encrypt them. Armada encrypts all community messages end to end, so relay operators see only sealed ciphertext.

Q: Do I need a phone number or email to use Armada?

No. An Armada account is a cryptographic key, so there is no email, phone number, face scan, or ID verification. You generate a key when you sign up and use it to log in anywhere.

Q: Can I be banned from Armada?

There is no Armada company account to ban. Community owners moderate their own spaces and can remove members, but no company can delete your identity or take your community down everywhere. Communities live on multiple relays at once, so losing one relay does not end the conversation.

People search for a Discord alternative for concrete reasons: surprise bans, face scans, leaked IDs, ads. Armada is our answer: a free, open source chat app with servers, channels, voice, and moderation, where every community is end-to-end encrypted and no company sits in the middle. It is in open beta ahead of v1.0, so releases land almost daily and early users steer the roadmap.

Try Armada on the Web

Get on Zap Store

Why People Are Looking for a Discord Alternative

Discord is where the communities are, and that is exactly the problem. One company holds every account and every message, so when that company makes a bad call, there is nothing you can do about it. The complaints below come up constantly, and they are the ones Armada was built to fix.

Banned From Discord With No Explanation

Search "banned from Discord for no reason" and you will find years of identical stories: an account disabled overnight, an appeal form that returns an automated denial or nothing at all, and no human to talk to. A Discord ban is platform-wide. You lose every server you belong to and every DM at once, even if the supposed violation happened in one server you barely used. Server owners have it worse: entire communities, some with years of accumulated knowledge, get deleted without warning, and there is no backup button.

On Armada, your identity is a cryptographic key that you hold. There is no company account to disable, so a platform-wide ban is technically impossible. Individual communities still moderate themselves, and owners can remove people from their own spaces, but nobody can erase you from every community at once or delete a community out from under its members.

Is Discord Encrypted? Your Messages Aren't

Discord started encrypting voice and video calls with its DAVE protocol in 2024 and made that the default for every call in March 2026. Text messages got nothing, and in May 2026 Discord confirmed it has no plans to change that. Your messages, DMs, and full channel history sit on Discord's servers, where the company can read and scan them, and where they can be produced in response to legal requests. If you have ever asked "can Discord read my messages," the answer is yes, all of them, going back years.

Armada encrypts everything in a community end to end using the open Concord protocol. Messages are locked on your device before they are sent, and the relays that carry them see only sealed ciphertext, with the sender and even the community's name hidden. We trust it enough that Team Soapbox shut down our company Signal and moved all internal chat to Armada, and we run a public bug bounty on the implementation. The first payout went out in June: $1,000 for a role-revocation flaw that was fixed the same day it was reported.

Armada desktop app, an open source encrypted Discord alternative, showing channels, threads, a voice message, bots, and member roles in dark theme — An encrypted community in Armada on desktop: channels, threads, voice messages, a GIF picker, and bots, with owner and admin roles in the member list.

Data Breaches and ID Verification

In a breach disclosed in October 2025, attackers compromised one of Discord's third-party customer support vendors and walked away with data belonging to users who had contacted support, including roughly 70,000 government ID photos that people had submitted for age verification appeals. Those IDs existed on a vendor's servers because Discord collected them in the first place.

And the collection is expanding. Under the UK's Online Safety Act, Discord began requiring UK users to verify their age with a face scan or an ID upload in 2025, with similar checks in Australia. In February 2026, Discord announced it would take age verification global, defaulting every account to a teen experience until the user proves they are an adult. The backlash was loud enough that Discord delayed the worldwide rollout to the second half of 2026, the window we are in now. A chat app wants your government ID or your biometrics, and the 2025 breach showed exactly what can happen to that data.

Armada's answer is to hold nothing worth stealing. It never asks for an email, a phone number, a face scan, or an ID upload, so there is no database of your documents waiting to leak. For the wider picture on opting out of age-check infrastructure, we wrote How to Disappear From the Surveillance Internet.

Ads, Upsells, and Monetization Pressure

Discord spent years promising it would never do ads, then shipped sponsored Quests in 2024 and video ads on mobile in 2025, with Nitro upsells layered on top of features that used to be free. With the company reportedly filing confidentially for an IPO in January 2026, that pressure only points one direction. Armada is AGPL-3.0 open source, has no ads and no paid tier, and holds no data worth selling, because encrypted messages are worthless to advertisers.

What Is Armada?

Armada is a Discord-style chat app built by Soapbox on Nostr, an open protocol that works like email: many independent servers, one identity you own, and no single company in control. You do not need to understand any of that to use it. If you have used Discord, the layout is instantly familiar: communities in a rail on the left, channels in a sidebar, chat in the middle, members on the right.

Create encrypted community screen in Armada, a decentralized encrypted chat app that signs you up without email or phone number — Armada on Android: start an encrypted community, see the relays it runs on, and invite your crew with a revocable link.

Armada community settings showing channels and the multiple independent relays an encrypted community runs on — Armada on Android: start an encrypted community, see the relays it runs on, and invite your crew with a revocable link.

Everything you would expect is here:

Text channels with threads, replies, reactions, markdown, and code blocks
Voice channels with video calls and screen sharing
Roles and moderation so owners and admins can run their communities
Encrypted direct messages with anyone on Nostr
Events with RSVPs for planning inside your community
Bots and slash commands, so the utilities your server relies on come along too
A GIF keyboard, custom emoji, and custom themes, because a community app should be fun

The difference is what happens underneath. Every community is end-to-end encrypted by default, and instead of one company server, your community lives on several independent relays at the same time.

Why You Can't Be Banned From Armada

Your Armada account is a key pair, the same kind of key used across Nostr. Signing up generates one, and logging in anywhere means proving you hold it. Since no company issued your account, no company can revoke it. Our guide to storing and managing your Nostr key covers how to back it up properly, because the flip side of an unbannable account is that you are the only one holding the key.

Communities get the same treatment. A Concord community publishes its encrypted messages to multiple relays at once, and members hold the key that decrypts them. If a relay goes down or kicks the community off, clients reroute to the remaining relays and the conversation continues with nothing lost. Anyone can add more relays, including one they run themselves. There is no server to seize and no headquarters to pressure.

Sign Up Without a Phone Number, Email, or ID

Signing up for Armada takes about a minute: open the app, tap Sign up, and a key is generated for you. That key is the whole account. Armada skips the email confirmation, the SMS code, and the age-verification selfie entirely. The same key logs you in on the web, on Android, and on desktop, and it works across other Nostr apps too, so the identity you create for Armada is yours everywhere. New to the protocol? Start with Nostr 101: A Beginner Guide to the Decentralized Social Network.

Features Discord Doesn't Have

Bluetooth mesh chat. On Android, phones near each other relay messages over Bluetooth with no internet at all, at a festival, on a plane, or during a blackout. It is compatible with bitchat.
Notifications without Google. Pings on Android arrive directly from your community rather than through Google's push servers, so no third party learns who messages you.
Self-hosting. Run your own relay and your community's encrypted data sits on hardware you control. The entire app is AGPL-3.0, so you can audit or fork every line.
Buzz workspaces. Armada also connects to Buzz communities, Block's open source team chat, complete with forums, git Projects, and AI agents.
An identity that outlives the app. Your key works across the whole Nostr ecosystem, so your profile, your name, your contacts, and your DMs are yours even if you stop using Armada.

How to Switch From Discord to Armada

Armada light theme showing an encrypted community channel with custom emoji picker, GIFs, reactions, and threaded replies — The same community in light theme, with the custom emoji picker open. Armada ships more than a dozen theme presets.

Open Armada. Go to armada.buzz in your browser, or install it on Android from Zap Store. Desktop builds for Linux and Windows are also available.
Create your key. Tap Sign up and a Nostr key is generated for you. Armada never asks for an email, phone number, or ID. Back it up somewhere safe; it is your account.
Create an encrypted community. Add text and voice channels and set roles for your moderators. Everything inside is end-to-end encrypted by default.
Invite your members. Share an invite link or invite people directly by name. The unlock key travels inside the link itself and never reaches any server, and joining takes the same one-minute signup.

Armada Is in Open Beta

Armada is early software, version 0.x with releases landing almost daily on the road to v1.0. Everything above works today on the web, Android, Linux, and Windows. There is no iOS app yet, though the web app works fine on an iPhone in the meantime, and some Discord conveniences are still catching up, so expect occasional rough edges. Being this early has an upside: the changelog moves fast, and the people asking for features this month tend to see them ship the next. The full story of how we got here, including every protocol we tried and abandoned along the way, is in Building an Armada.

Voice chat and video calls in the Armada Android app, an encrypted Discord alternative — Armada on Android: a video call in a voice channel, the GIF keyboard, and slash commands with bots.

GIF keyboard and custom emoji in the Armada mobile app — Armada on Android: a video call in a voice channel, the GIF keyboard, and slash commands with bots.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Discord end-to-end encrypted?

Voice and video calls are, by default for every call since March 2026. Text messages, DMs, and channel history are not, and Discord has said it has no plans to encrypt them. Armada encrypts all community messages end to end.

Is Armada ready to use?

Armada is in open beta, still ahead of its v1.0 release. Communities, encrypted DMs, voice and video calls, and the Android app all work today, with new releases landing almost daily. Expect occasional rough edges while it matures.

Do I need a phone number or email to use Armada?

No. An Armada account is a cryptographic key. Armada never asks for an email, a phone number, a face scan, or an ID.

Can I be banned from Armada?

There is no company account to ban. Community owners can remove members from their own communities, but no one can delete your identity or take your community down across all of its relays.

Is Armada free?

Yes. Armada is free and open source under the AGPL-3.0 license. It has no ads and no paid tier.

Does Armada have voice chat?

Yes. Voice channels with video calls and screen sharing work in communities today, alongside threads, reactions, roles, and events.

Does Armada work on iPhone?

There is no iOS app yet. The web app at armada.buzz works on iPhone, and native apps exist for Android, Linux, and Windows.

Can I self-host it?

Yes. Communities live on relays you can run yourself, and the whole client is open source. Even on relays you don't control, your messages are sealed by end-to-end encryption.

Try It With Us

The easiest way to judge Armada is inside a live community. We run our public community on Armada, and anyone can join: open the invite, sign up in a minute, and say hi.

Join the Soapbox community on Armada

An end-to-end encrypted community with channels, voice, and the team that builds Armada. Signing up takes a minute, with a key you create on the spot.

Join the community