Stoat (Formerly Revolt): An Open Source, Self-Hostable Discord Alternative
Stoat is an open source chat platform in the style of Discord: communities organised into servers and channels, with roles, voice chat, and bots. Until October 1, 2025 it was called Revolt; the developers renamed it after receiving a cease-and-desist letter over the “Revolt” trademark. Accounts, servers, and messages carried over unchanged, and old invite links redirect.
Features
- Servers, channels, and categories, like Discord
- Roles and permissions
- Voice chat, rebuilt alongside the rebrand
- Bots and an API
- Custom emoji, rich messages, and file sharing
- Privacy-focused design, with clients for the web, Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android, and iOS in development
The official instance grew quickly, passing half a million accounts after Discord was blocked in some countries in 2024.
Self-hosting
The backend is written in Rust, and the project supports self-hosting your own instance with Docker. A self-hosted instance runs separately from the official one: communities there are reachable by users with accounts on your instance. The code moved to the stoatchat organisation on GitHub with the rebrand, so update any old Revolt repository URLs in your deployment.
Stoat or the alternatives?
| Stoat | Matrix (Element) | Mattermost / Rocket.Chat | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Feels like | Discord | Slack/Discord mix | Slack |
| Federation | No | Yes | No |
| End-to-end encryption | No | Yes | Limited |
| Best for | Gaming and social communities | Federated, encrypted chat | Work teams |
License
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0.