26 Open-source Chat Servers For Building Real-time Chat Experiences for Games, and Social Apps
A chat server is a software application that enables real-time communication between users over a network, typically the internet. It allows users to exchange messages, files, and multimedia content in real-time, either one-on-one or in a group.
In today's fast-paced and global business environment, enterprises and agencies need to communicate quickly and efficiently. Traditional methods of communication like email and phone calls can be slow and cumbersome, especially when dealing with large teams or remote workers. A chat server provides a more streamlined and collaborative communication experience, allowing teams to work together more effectively.
Open-source chat servers offer several advantages over proprietary options. They are typically free to use and distribute, which can be a significant cost-saving for businesses. Open-source software is also often more flexible and customizable, allowing businesses to tailor the chat server to their specific needs. Additionally, open-source software often has an active community of developers contributing to its development and maintenance, which can result in more frequent updates and bug fixes.
Overall, a chat server can be a valuable tool for businesses and agencies looking to improve communication and collaboration among team members. Open-source options offer a cost-effective and flexible solution that can be tailored to meet the specific needs of any organization.
In this post, we offer you a list of the best open-source free chat servers that can be downloaded, installed, and used for free.
1- Nakama
Nakama is a free and open-source chat server for building mobile apps, games and social featured apps.
Hamza Mousa
heroiclabs2- Niltalk
Niltalk is a web based disposable chat server. It allows users to create password protected disposable, ephemeral chat rooms and invite peers to chat rooms. Rooms can be disposed of at any time.
Niltalk supports in-memory / file / Redis as the backend for persisting room and session states.
knadh3- Tinode Instant Messaging Server
Instant messaging server. Backend in pure Go (license GPL 3.0), client-side binding in Java, Javascript, and Swift, as well as gRPC client support for C++, C#, Go, Java, Node, PHP, Python, Ruby, Objective-C, etc. (license Apache 2.0). Wire transport is JSON over websocket (long polling is also available) for custom bindings, or protobuf with gRPC.
Tinode is not XMPP/Jabber. It is not compatible with XMPP. It's meant as a replacement for XMPP. On the surface, it's a lot like open source WhatsApp or Telegram.
tinodeHamza Mousa
4- Ezyfox Server
Ezyfox Server is an open-source secure chat server written with Java for building real-time apps, MMORPG games, and user-rich messaging apps. It supports SSL, TCP, UDP and Websocket.
Ezyfox Server's benchmark involved broadcasting messages to 1000 concurrent users in one hour on a VPS with 512MB of RAM and 1 CPU core.
Features
Ezyfox server features include:
- Core Container & Dependency Injection: Includes bean manipulation, auto-binding, auto-implementation, and more.
- Multiple Communication Protocols: Supports TCP, UDP, WebSocket, and HTTP.
- Traffic Encryption: Allows for traffic between clients and servers to be encrypted using SSL.
- Multiple Client SDKs: Includes Android, iOS, Unity, React, C++, Flutter, and more.
Ezyfox is released under the Apache-2.0 license.
youngmonkeys5- rabbitChat
rabbitChat is a free and open-source Chat-Server/Chat-System based on AMQP protocol (RabbitMQ Message Broker) written in python using Tornado and RabbitMQ.
rabbitChat is a very simple Chat Server which can be set up locally to chat in your LAN. It supports both Public Chat among all participants connected simultaneously at a particular time and also Private Chat between those individual participants.
It uses the AMQP protocol to implement the real time message passing system. AMQP is implemented in many languages and in many software programs, once of such is RabbitMQ , which is a message broker implementing the AMQP protocol.
The connection is created using the sockjs protocol. SockJS is implemented in many languages, primarily in JavaScript to talk to the servers in real time, which tries to create a duplex bidirectional connection between the Client(browser) and the Server. The server should also implement the sockjs protocol. Thus using the sockjs-tornado library which exposes the sockjs protocol in Tornado server.
Features highlight
- Public chat
- Shows who joined and who left
- Shows number of people online
- Shows who is typing and who is not
- Join/Leave chat room features
- Microservice
- Testing using Docker and Docker Compose
- CI servers like Jenkins, Travis-CI
anirbanroydas6- Silent Server
Silent is an extremely lightweight, high quality - low latency voice chat made for gaming. Runs on Windows and Linux.
Flone-dnb7- SAMA
SAMA - Simple but Advanced Messaging Alternative chat server, powered by uWebsockets.js under the hood.
SAMA-Communications8- Chat server and client with CLI using UNIX networking sockets
A Chat Application using Unix network sockets featuring user authentication, multiple chatrooms and private messaging & terminal based user interface (inspired by IRC).
sidvishnoi9- Melodious
Melodious is an open-source self-hosted Discord alternative written in Go. It is currently frozen.
melodious-chat10- CHATROOM - LiveChatServer
LiveChatServer is a Live CHATROOM which allows multiple users (Clients) to chat with each other.
Features
Included features:
- Multi User Live Chat
- Awesome GUI + Console mode option
- Password Encryption
- Error Tracking by writing them into a log file
iamrohitsuthar11- GoSSHa ssh-server based chat program
goSSHa is an open-source cross-platform ssh-server based chat program, with data persisted into relational databases of MySQL, PostgreSQL or Sqlite3. Public channel (with persisted messages) and private message (not stored) are supported.
vodolaz09512- crypto-chat
crypto-chat is an instant messaging websocket server with unique features. Backend in PHP with Swoole framework. Wire transport is JSON over websocket. Persistent storage is PostgreSQL.
SamLatsin13- SimpleChatServer
This is a simple chat server written in Julia. It uses TCP sockets to communicate messages between a server and multiple clients.
Sid-Bhatia-014- Schmooze
Schmooze is a free and open-source real time multi-platform, multichannel web app for online Discussion and Learning. The project is aimed to conduct the online group sessions for students of the National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra.
abhishekg78515- Symfonia
Symfonia is a free/ open-source Discord-API/Spacebar.chat compatible server, written in Rust.
polyphony-chat16- wetalk
wetalk is a chatroom application for coders based on websockets.
chenjiandongx17- Chame!
Chame! is an open-source chatting platform with mini-games written in Java using Non-blocking IO, channels, selectors, connection pools, and JavaFX.
arashsm7918- GoChat
GoChat is an open-source chat server and client based on muduo network library, able to work on a cluster server. Using Nginx TCP module for load balancing and Redis as message queue middleware
navining19- Zochat
Zochat is a free/ open source Erlang/Elixir based chat backend server.
ksingh1120- TCP Chat System using Socket Programming
parthnan21- skillbox-chat-server
tinawebdev22- PubNub ChatEngine
PubNub ChatEngine is an object-oriented event emitter based framework for building chat applications in Javascript. It reduces the time to build chat applications drastically and provides essential components like typing indicators, online presence monitoring and message history out of the box.
The real-time server component is provided by PubNub. ChatEngine is designed to be extensible and includes a plugin framework to make adding new features simple.
pubnub23- MDChat
A simple chat server and client application.
dousamichal080724- rust-chat-server
This project is a proof of concept chat server in Rust.
doowonee25- Lunatic.chat
The server is written in Rust. The Rust code is then compiled to WebAssembly and runs on top of Lunatic. Each connection runs in a separate (lightweight) process, has its own state and sends just a diff of esc-sequences back to the terminal to bring it up to date with the current render buffer.
lunatic-solutions26- Asynchronous chat client and server from Programming Rust
This repository contains the source code for the chat client and server written using the Rust language's asynchronous programming features. It is described in Chapter 20 of the book Programming Rust, by Blandy, Orendorff, and Tindall (ISBN 978-1-492-05259-3).
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