XMPP (also known as Jabber) is an open and free alternative to commercial messaging and chat providers. Set it up for your company, organisation, or just your family and friends. You are in control, and your communication is private to you. Supporting a wide range of client software for desktop and mobile platforms, you can chat from any device.
You can set up your own XMPP service on your server (dedicated, VPS, etc.) or on a box on your local network, to serve your home or office. Either way you can use it to converse with anyone else on the Jabber network, including people using Google Talk, probably the largest Jabber service on the network.
XMPP was designed for real-time communication, which powers a wide range of applications including instant messaging, presence, media negotiation, whiteboarding, collaboration, lightweight middleware, content syndication, EDI, RPC and more.
Here’s our recommendations. All of the software is free and open source.
Let’s explore the 6 XMPP servers at hand. We’ve devoted a page for each program, with a full description of the software, an in-depth analysis of its features, together with links to relevant resources.
| XMPP Servers | |
|---|---|
| Openfire | Real time collaboration (RTC) server |
| jabberD | Next generation of the jabberd project |
| Prosody | Modern XMPP server that's easy to set up |
| ejabberd | XMPP application server and an MQTT broker |
| MongooseIM | Mobile messaging platform with focus on performance and scalability |
| Metronome IM | Lightweight XMPP server with advanced microblogging features |
 Read our complete collection of recommended free and open source software. Our curated compilation covers all categories of software. The software collection forms part of our series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. There are hundreds of in-depth reviews, open source alternatives to proprietary software from large corporations like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. There are also fun things to try, hardware, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. |