Departures Checked 2026-11-03.
ELEMENT
The flagship client for the open, federated Matrix protocol, made by a VC-backed London company, with E2EE and group voice and video via Element Call.
- Open source
- Yes
- Hosting
- Cloud or self-hostFederated
- Encryption
- TLS + E2EE private rooms
- Voice
- Yes
- Threads
- Yes
- Phone apps
- iPhone, Android
- Members pay
- Nothing
- Status
- Stable
Before you move a community here
The mature, decentralised option: pick any homeserver (or run Synapse yourself), E2EE is on by default for private rooms and DMs but off for public rooms, and threads, power-level roles, bots, chat export and Element Call screen sharing all exist. Expect a Slack-like rather than Discord-like UX (Spaces instead of servers, no custom emoji), a learning curve around device verification and key backup, and no Discord importer (only bridges such as matrix-appservice-discord). Element the company monetises hosting and enterprise, so the consumer apps stay free.
Everything we checked
Where your members can run it
- ✓Windows
- ✓macOS
- ✓Linux
- ✓iPhone
- ✓Android
- ✓In a browser
What it does
- ✓Text channels
- ✓Voice channels
- ✓Video calls
- ✓Screen share
- ✓Threads
- ✓Roles and permissions
- ✓Bots or an API
- ✗Custom emoji
- ✓One account, many communities
- ✓Export your data
Who holds the data
- ✓Open source (AGPL-3.0)
- ✓Official cloud service
- ✓You can host it yourself
- Encryption: TLS in transit; private rooms and DMs are end-to-end encrypted by default, public rooms are not.
- ✓No ads
- Architecture: federated
Who makes it
- Statusstable
- Founded2017
- TeamElement (New Vector Ltd, London), ~$30M Series B in 2021; stewards Matrix alongside the Matrix.org Foundation
- Newest release we found2026-10
- Incidents on recordApril 2019 matrix.org production breach via outdated Jenkins exposed unencrypted messages, password hashes and access tokens; Feb 2026 Discord-exodus surge strained matrix.org registrations and a Rust crypto library issue was flagged
Cost
- Members payNothing
- PricingApps and matrix.org accounts free; Element Server Suite Community free to self-host; Enterprise priced per seat and Sovereign per deployment (quote only)
Moving your server over
- ✗Imports a Discord server
- ?Bridges with Discord while you run both
Side by side
Sources
- https://element.io/app
- https://element.io/pricing
- https://github.com/element-hq/element-web/releases
- https://matrix.org/blog/2021/07/27/element-raises-30m-to-boost-matrix/
- https://matrix.org/blog/2019/04/11/we-have-discovered-and-addressed-a-security-breach-updated-2019-04-12
- https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/issues/2648
I build Probed, one of the destinations here. It gets the same facts as the rest.