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An app for hanging out and gaming with friends, with voice channels, video, screen share, text chat and whole servers for your communities. There are no ID uploads, face scans, ads or tracking.

Yes, all of it, for everyone. That includes screen share at 1080p and 60 fps, any server's emoji in every server and DM, files up to 100 MB, messages up to 4,000 characters and the profile cosmetics. There's nothing to subscribe to, and under our pledge what's free today won't move behind a paywall later. See what's free

Windows 10 and 11, Linux, Android 7 or later, or any up-to-date browser. macOS is on the way, and iPhone is coming to the App Store. The apps from our site keep themselves up to date, apart from the Linux .deb. On a computer, a button appears in the title bar when an update is ready. On Android, tap Update when the app offers one. All downloads.

Pick a username and a password, and say which age group you're in. Your username is yours alone, like pug. It's how you log in and how friends add you.

You don't. There's no ID upload or face scan, so there's nothing of yours to leak. When you sign up you pick 13 to 15, 16 or 17, or 18 or over, and the protections the law sets for that age group apply to your account. (Picking under 13 ends sign-up, because Grumble is for 13 and over.) In Australia, the law also requires an email address at sign-up (see the next question).

Australian law requires chat apps to take a phone number, an email address or another identifier from everyone who signs up in Australia, and keep it for two years, so that people who were suspended can't simply sign up again. We ask for an email address, confirmed with a code, and only from people signing up from an Australian internet address. We use it only to stop suspended people signing up again with it and to answer lawful requests from police. The code is sent for us by our email company, Resend, in the United States, which keeps a copy of the email for 30 days. It's never used to log in or to send you anything else, it isn't on your account or shown to anyone, and it's deleted two years after you sign up. The details are in our Privacy Policy. We share the rule's aim. We believe tying every account to a person violates your right to privacy and to communicate freely. Complaints about this rule go to the eSafety Commissioner, who set it, and your federal MP.

Your username, what lets your app prove it knows your password (never the password itself, which never reaches us), a copy of your DM keys locked with that password, the age group you picked, the profile you choose to fill in, and the messages you send, kept only as scrambled data we can't read. We don't keep your phone number, birthday, location, IP address or device details, or your email unless you signed up in Australia (where the law requires it, for two years). Visits to this website are counted only as daily totals. The full list is in our Privacy Policy.

No. To stop floods of requests we briefly use a scrambled, one-way version of the address in memory. When you connect, our server also checks it against its own list of the places whose laws change something in Grumble (Australia, where we have to ask for an email address at sign-up, or the places Grumble isn't offered), then forgets it. It's never written down, logged or shared.

Never. We keep as little as we can, we never sell or share any of it for profit, and there will never be ads. It's in the pledge.

With protections that don't need it. Grumble is for people 13 and over, and teen accounts start with DMs from friends only and limits on who can contact them. There's no random matching with strangers, so you talk to friends you add and servers you join. Anyone can report a message, a person or a server. Your app sends our safety team your own copy, so even encrypted messages can be checked, and a reported message is kept even if the sender deletes it or their account. Child abuse material is removed, the accounts closed, and it's reported to police. How we keep Grumble safe

Not if it was reported. Reporting sends our safety team your own copy of the messages, and a reported message is kept even if the sender deletes it or their account. You keep your copy too, and we answer lawful requests from police.

The same way good communities always have, with moderators and tools. Roles and permissions, slowmode, timeouts, kicks and bans are all there, and server owners decide who can do what.

No. No cookies, and nothing is loaded from anywhere else. Even the font is served from here. We count visits as daily totals, like how many people came and from which countries, and keep nothing about you (how). The home page asks Grumble's own server which country's rules apply to you, so it can open the right tab. The server checks your address against its own list and forgets it.

Almost. It isn't offered in the UK, Brazil, Turkey, Mississippi or Tennessee, because their laws would require checking everyone's ID, keeping a log of every login's internet address, or a way into private messages, which we can't do. Connecting from there, you can't sign up or log in, and you're told exactly why. In Nebraska Grumble is for adults, and in Ohio for people 16 and over, because of their laws on young people. In South Korea adult content is closed. What the law asks where you are.

Yes, from 13. Australian law sets protections for younger people, and Grumble follows them. Teen accounts start with DMs from friends only and age-restricted channels closed. Under-16 accounts start private, with tighter limits on who can contact them. Which protections apply depends on the age group picked at sign-up.

Legal adult content is fine between adults who want it, in age-restricted channels and private conversations. It's never allowed in a way that reaches anyone under 18 or anyone who didn't agree to it, and nothing illegal is ever allowed. On iPhone, Apple's rules mean adults switch age-restricted channels on in Grumble on the web or a computer instead (Safety Centre → Allow age-restricted content on iPhone). Connecting from South Korea, adult content is closed, because Korean law wants real-name checks for it. The details are in the Community Rules.

Right-click (or long-press) a message, a person or a server and choose Report. The person you report is never told who reported them. We'll tell you what we decide in the app's Safety Centre, and you can ask us to look again within a month. More on the safety page. We acknowledge complaints within 24 hours and resolve them within 7 days.

Report the message in the app (Report → Intimate images shared without consent), or, with or without an account, use our contact page and link to it. Either way the image is hidden from everyone straight away while our safety team looks, and we remove it within 48 hours of a valid request, with any copies we can find. In Australia you can also go to eSafety, which helps with image-based abuse.

Direct messages, servers, and all voice and video calls, including screen share. They're encrypted on your device and only the people in the conversation can read or hear them. In a server, that's its messages, files and polls, and the names of its channels, roles, events and nicknames. Only the server's members hold the keys, and their apps hand them to newcomers, who can read the history their role allows. An invite still shows anyone the server's name, icon, banner, description and member count. Search happens on your device.

When you sign up, Grumble gives you 12 words. If you ever forget your password, they let you set a new one, and your encrypted DMs come with you. (Logging in with your password on a new device unlocks your DMs by itself. The words are your spare key.) Write them down somewhere safe. We can't recover them for you, because the copy kept with your account is locked with your password, which we never see.

If you can still log in, Settings → Encrypted DMs shows them again once you enter your password. If they're gone for good, you can set up new words and keep messaging, but DMs from before can't be decrypted on new devices. That's the trade-off with real end-to-end encryption. Nobody, including us, has a spare key.

A set of numbers you and the other person can compare, in person or over a call. If they match, nobody is sitting in the middle of your conversation. Calls show a security code you can compare the same way.

Yes, as many as you like. Add text and voice channels, categories, roles and permissions, threads, custom emoji and events, then invite your friends with a link.

Join a voice channel and you're in, with no calling anyone. Noise suppression runs on your own device and keeps out keyboards, fans and barking pugs. You can share your screen or turn on your camera at any time.

Yes. Grumble for OBS makes each friend in your call a source of their own in OBS, with their camera and voice or their screen and its sound. It's free, and on macOS and Linux a browser source does the same. Each friend is asked first and shows up only once they say yes, and everyone in the call sees who's going out on a stream.

Yes. Use exact "phrases", filter by person, date, channel or what a message has, and sort by newest, oldest or best match. Encrypted servers and DMs are searched on your own device, since our servers can't read them. That covers a DM's whole history and the newest 20,000 messages in each server channel.

Mostly. Your profile and settings come from Discord's data download, your emoji as image files or their links, and a server's channels, categories, roles and settings from a Discord server template link, from Settings → Import from Discord or Add a server → Import from Discord. Message history isn't copied, so once the server's set up, send everyone an invite link. Nobody ever asks for your Discord password. How moving works.

Send them your Grumble username, like pug. Once your server's set up, an invite link brings everyone across.

Yes. Bots, slash commands, buttons, forms and webhooks all work. Start at Build on Grumble.

Its code can stay as it is. Grumble speaks the same API as Discord, so a bot only has to change where it sends requests and where it connects. Grumble's servers are end-to-end encrypted, though, so reading and sending messages in them takes the Grumble bridge, a small program that runs next to your bot. Get it with npx grumble-bridge. See how.

Choose “Forgot your password?” on the login screen and enter your 12 recovery words to set a new password. Your encrypted DMs come with you. There's no reset link, because we don't use email to log in (and outside Australia we don't have it at all), and we never see your password, so without it or your words nobody can get the account back, us included. Keep them somewhere safe, like a password manager.

Yes. Turn on an authenticator app in your account settings, and save the backup codes it gives you.

Yes, from your account settings. Your account and everything you wrote, messages included, is deleted for good. The one thing Australian law requires us to keep is a note of the username you signed up with and when (and, if you signed up in Australia, the email address you confirmed), until two years after you signed up. Then that goes too.