this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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What I really need is realtime multi-party voice chat
Do any of these support that?
I mostly use discord for light coordination and online voice chat during games or activities.
Teamspeak, ventrilo, mumble - but discord replaced them all with being easy to use.
Sadly, there is no real alternative with all the discord features. I mean, you could create chats in Zoom and use their voice/video feature, but at least one person would need pro.
Installing Zoom on your machine is a mistake.
Their install process is indistinguishable from malware abdv they have a history of shitting on security for all growth possible.
And sadly governments abd corporations rewarded them for it.
I'm not a big fan of Zoom, but on Linux they have signed packages for most distros. Pretty standard install mechanism.
Source?
zoom.exe
In my world the biggest advantage of Discord is the Availability on consoles allowing voice chat for crossplay. For all I know none of the alternatives you mentioned is available for consoles. I know there are people connecting their PS/XBox audio output with a computer running TeamSpeak to receive VoiceChat and in Game Sound from the same system but this is not a usable solution for most people.
100 % agree. Somehow Discord found its niche and no one else challenged it.
Edit: Xfire might have, but they died a long time ago
And that took forever to release! For over half the time discord has been around they didn’t have console support
possible, but still it’s a problem for me. Never liked Discord and was always happy with TS. But when I started playing with a friend using XBox I was forced to use it
I don’t need all the features, just two.
everything else about discord I hate.
Check out teamspeak and mumble, maybe those fit
Teamspeak might be what I used 15 years ago
Look at Teamspeak 6. You're behind on the times
Technically, Signal, Rocket Chat, and Matrix all have multi-party voice chat built in. You probably won't have a great time with it, and if you want video or screen sharing, you'll have an even worse time.
Honestly just voice chat is all, I used to play SC2 with some sketchy apps that could do it... but 2026 feels like easy stuff got much harder.
Just tested out element and had no problem with screen sharing + video in a voice call. Haven't tried out the mobile app for that (but I haven't done that for discord either and on desktop, discord just doesn't screenshare like half the time for me)
I'm kind of shocked if you had a decent/superior time and Element vs Discord, especially if you're in Windows! This is a case where I hope I can be proven wrong.
Discord facilitates large audio and video calls, but if Element can manage even a handful of people at once, I would be impressed. In my experience, it hasn't, but such things are kind of hard to test.
Steam's built in voice chat replaced discord for my group of friends years ago. It was rough at first, but it has improved a lot and now we dont have issues anymore.
Except when steam itself craps out for a while and you can't even tell unless you keep the group chat/voice window open on 2nd screen.
Still better than discord tho
Jitsi Meet.
I think Matrix has one as well that's integrated nowadays.
I think that's the one the French government is moving to, I'll have to check it out.
Isn't that a multi-way call? Everything else is covered by forums (permanent) or IRC/Matrix/XMPP (quick)
Yeah, and for most of my friends I don't need/want forums. I just want "Hey, anyone online?" and voice calls.
That's what IRC/Matrix/XMPP/Signal (possibly) covers