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How Nymchat compares

Nymchat measured against thirteen other messengers, on the things that actually differ between them. Where a competitor is better, this page says so — a comparison that has its author winning every row is not a comparison.

At a glance

Encryption is table stakes on this page: nearly everything here does it by default, and Nymchat goes further than most — no phone number, no account, and gift-wrapped messages that the relays carrying them can neither read nor attribute. Where the field actually splits is what happens when the infrastructure goes away. Almost every well-known encrypted messenger stops dead without the internet, because its security model assumes a server it can reach. The handful that keep working without one have historically paid for it by being extremely sparse on features.

Plotting the field against those two questions — how much of a messenger you get, and whether it survives the network going down — leaves one corner nearly empty:

That is the entire pitch, and the rest of this page is the evidence for it. Nymchat is not the most private messenger ever built — SimpleX has a stronger claim to that, White Noise has better group cryptography, and Signal has years of audits Nymchat does not. The claim is narrower: it is the only one of these that clears that bar and still works when the network is gone.

The identity is the other half of it. Nymchat's default is a nym minted when you open the app and thrown away when you are done, with Ghost Mode rotating the keys and the Bluetooth name together and messages that delete themselves behind you. Most of this list gives you one account that follows you between rooms and between years. Nymchat lets you say something in a crowd without it following you home.

The messengers in this comparison

Thirteen competitors, picked because each one is genuinely good at something Nymchat has to answer for. Popularity alone was not the criterion — if it had been, this list would be three apps long and far less useful.

The app on this list closest to Nymchat is Bitchat, and it is not close between the runners-up. The two share the Bluetooth mesh, they share the geohash channels, and they are bridged at the protocol level — a Bitchat user and a Nymchat user in the same geohash are in the same room, reading each other's messages, with neither app doing anything special. Nothing else here has that relationship with Nymchat. The Nostr messengers — XChat, Vector, Armada, White Noise — share the network and the private-message format, which makes them the nearest comparison for encrypted DMs and zaps, but none of them meshes and none has place-based rooms.

Feature by feature

Five tables, grouped by the question each one answers. Every column is worded so that Yes is the good answer — there are no rows where a green cell is bad news. The tables scroll sideways on a narrow screen, and the app name stays put while they do.

Getting in

Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp all bind your account to a phone number, which in most countries means binding it to government ID. Signal has done more than anyone to limit the damage — usernames mean you never hand the number to a contact, and it is hidden by default — but registration still needs a working number, and that number is the account.

"Open to strangers" is the row that separates a public network from an address book. Briar, SimpleX and Delta Chat all require you to exchange something first — a QR code, a link, an address — which is excellent for privacy and useless for walking into a room and finding out what is happening. Nymchat's ephemeral nym is a keypair generated the moment you open the app; see Ephemeral identities, and Ghost Mode for the rotating version that also changes what your Bluetooth radio advertises.

Staying up

This is the table Nymchat exists for, and three other apps answer it. Briar carries messages over Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and USB sticks. Bitchat is a Bluetooth mesh first and everything else second. Armada ships Bitchat's Android mesh stack inside its own app, on Android.

Nymchat shares its mesh format with Bitchat on purpose: the two apps join the same rooms and relay for each other, which makes the offline network larger for both. It runs on Android and iOS as a full peer, and in Chromium browsers as a leaf that can receive and send but not advertise itself. See Sharing a mesh with Bitchat and What runs where.

The last column is worth reading carefully. Signal is a nonprofit with a good record and no intention of going anywhere, but Signal without Signal's servers is nothing at all. Nostr relays, Matrix homeservers, SimpleX relays and ordinary mail servers are all software anyone can run, so "the organization shuts down" and "the network dies" are separate events. Delta Chat has the strongest version of this argument on the list: it rides on email, which is not going anywhere.

What the network can see

The post-quantum column is about one specific threat: an adversary recording encrypted traffic today in order to decrypt it years from now, once a quantum computer can break the classical key agreement every app here relies on. Nothing about it protects a message from someone who can read it now, and it does nothing for signatures — only for confidentiality. Three apps on this list have shipped a defense, and all three add a post-quantum key encapsulation to the classical exchange so that reading a message means breaking both. They do not build it the same way. Signal — first, with PQXDH, and since joined by a post-quantum ratchet — and SimpleX, with sntrup761 in its double ratchet, combine the two shared secrets into a single key. Nymchat layers instead: the NIP-44 message is left exactly as it is and sealed a second time inside ChaCha20-Poly1305, keyed from an ML-KEM-768 encapsulation — the NIST standard, FIPS 203. Combining needs the raw output of the classical exchange, which a browser extension or remote signer will never hand back, so layering is what lets those logins take part at all. See Post-quantum encryption. This is a column that will age quickly, and a "No" here means "not shipped as of this writing", not "never".

Four cells deserve more than a cell, and the first of them is Nymchat's. Nymchat has no forward secrecy, and the column says so. NIP-44 derives its key from the two long-term identity keys, and the ML-KEM key the post-quantum layer encapsulates to is long-lived as well, so anyone who later obtains your nsec — plus your nympq1… code, for the post-quantum layer — can read every recorded message those keys ever protected, not just the recent ones. The setting named Disappearing PM (forward secrecy) in Privacy & Security is a NIP-40 expiration request asking relays to drop the message later; that is the disappearing-messages column, not this one. Telegram does not encrypt end to end unless you specifically start a Secret Chat, which is one-to-one only and does not sync between your devices — so in practice nearly every Telegram conversation, and every Telegram group, sits readable on Telegram's servers. Session deliberately dropped forward secrecy when it moved off the Signal protocol, meaning a stolen long-term key exposes the whole history rather than a few recent messages; the project has said a future protocol version will bring it back. Delta Chat inherits OpenPGP's lack of forward secrecy, and has said Autocrypt v2 will fix it.

The metadata column splits, for Nymchat, between its two kinds of conversation. Every gift wrap is signed by a throwaway key, so a relay can never tell who sent one. What differs is the recipient. A wrap carries one in a p tag, in the clear, because that tag is how the recipient finds the message at all — but in a group that tag holds a rotating per-member key rather than the member's real one, so the group's membership never appears as N wraps to N pubkeys at the same instant and a relay learns neither end. See How group encryption works. In a one-to-one conversation there is nothing to rotate: the wrap is addressed to the peer's real key, so relays see who is receiving and roughly when.

Every Nostr client here that delivers over NIP-17 gift wraps has that same one-to-one shape, which is why Armada, Vector and XChat read "sender only" too — the rotation in the group column is Nymchat's, not the protocol's. White Noise avoids it a different way: its MLS messages go to a per-group key rather than to each member. And it is the gap SimpleX does not have at all, in either kind of conversation, because it gives the network no identifier to correlate in the first place.

The last column is the one Nymchat loses, and it lost ground this year. Briar has been audited by Cure53, SimpleX by Trail of Bits, White Noise by Least Authority in April 2026, and Signal, Matrix and Delta Chat repeatedly by several firms. Nymchat has not yet undergone a third-party audit. What it offers instead is that the whole thing is open source and the shipped build is reproducible, so you can check the binary against the source yourself — see Reproducible builds. That is not a substitute for an audit, and this page is not going to pretend it is.

What you can actually do

Briar, Bitchat, Vector and White Noise are where the "focused" half of the plot comes from, and the line that puts them there is the calls column: none of the four will place a voice or video call. It is not a shortage of features elsewhere. Bitchat now carries encrypted photos and voice notes over the mesh itself — a harder problem than it sounds on a slow, shared, battery-powered radio, and a gap against Nymchat that has closed.

Live conversation is what is left. A call needs a duplex path with low latency, which a multi-hop Bluetooth mesh cannot give you, so Nymchat carries calls over the network and falls back to text and the mesh when there is none. That is the difference between an app that keeps working in a blackout and one you would also use on a Tuesday.

The assistant column needs a caveat pointing away from Nymchat. Meta AI is a real assistant built into WhatsApp, and Vector's runs on your own device — Whisper doing transcription and translation locally, which is a genuinely better privacy story than Nymbot's. What Nymbot gives you instead is an assistant you can use in a public channel without identifying yourself, in a private chat that is gift wrapped like any other conversation. See The private chat — and note that the bot operator can still read what you send it, which is true of every server-side assistant on this list.

Where it runs, and who runs it

Nymchat's iOS build is on TestFlight rather than the App Store, which is an honest "partly" — it installs on any iPhone, but through Apple's beta channel. Briar and Vector have no iOS build at all, and Briar says why plainly: iOS will not let a background process keep peer-to-peer connections alive the way its architecture needs. Nymchat runs into a milder version of the same wall, which is why iOS notifications arrive late while the app is suspended. See What runs where.

The column worth stopping on is the one about hosting your own copy, because it describes how a messenger actually dies in a country. Not cryptanalysis — delisting. Apple and Google are a single choke point, governments know it, and an app removed from both stores is gone for almost everyone who was using it.

Nymchat's web app is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript modules with no build step. Serve it from any static host, a USB stick or localhost and it is the entire app — same protocol, same relays, same network as the phone builds, installable to a home screen from the browser. There is nothing to approve and nothing to take down. A domain can be blocked; a file that thousands of people already have cannot be unpublished.

Two others can do this, and both deserve the credit. Element Web has always been self-hostable, and Armada goes furthest of anyone here — it documents how to run the web app, the community relay and the voice server yourself. The remaining eleven cannot: Signal, Session, SimpleX, Briar, Delta Chat, Vector, White Noise, Bitchat and XChat are native applications with no browser build, Telegram's web client speaks only to Telegram, and WhatsApp Web needs a phone to pair against.

What only Nymchat does

One thing nothing else here does, and four that a handful of other apps share.

• A mesh on every platform it ships on. Briar and Bitchat both relay without infrastructure, and Bitchat now carries photos over it too — but neither will place a call. Nymchat is the only app here where the offline mode is a fallback inside a complete messenger rather than the entire product, and it meshes as a full peer on Android and iOS and as a leaf in Chromium browsers. A blackout does not check which phone you bought.
• Public rooms addressed by place. A geohash channel turns any square on Earth into a chat room that needs no owner, no moderator and no invitation — everyone whose device resolves to that square is already in it. Bitchat has this too, and the two apps share the rooms. Nobody else has anything like it. See Geohash channels.
• Money that moves in the conversation. Lightning zaps on a message or a profile, settled peer to peer in seconds for a fraction of a cent. This is not a Nymchat exclusive on Nostr — XChat has zaps and Vector ships a wallet — but it is everywhere else on this list, and Nymchat is the only app that has it beside a mesh. See Sending a zap.
• Post-quantum encryption on Nostr. Nymchat's private messages and group chats seal the ordinary NIP-44 ciphertext inside a second, ML-KEM-768 layer, so traffic recorded today is not readable by a future quantum computer. This is not a Nymchat invention — Signal and SimpleX got there first, and said so loudly — but on Nostr it is Nymchat alone. XChat, Vector, Armada, White Noise and every other Nostr client here encrypt with secp256k1 and nothing else. It needs no setting and no key exchange you can see: two Nymchat users get it automatically, and a message to a Bitchat or plain-Nostr user falls back to standard NIP-17 so it still arrives. See Post-quantum encryption.
• Group chats that hide their own membership. Standard gift wrapping leaks a membership list — N wraps to N pubkeys at the same instant is a social graph even though nothing decrypts. Nymchat rotates recipient keys so that pattern does not form. White Noise and XChat reach the same property through MLS instead; the three of us are alone on this list in having it at all. See How group encryption works.

Where the others are stronger

Every one of these is a real reason to choose something else, and none of them is going to be argued away here.

Which one you should use

Honestly: more than one. These are free, and they cost nothing to keep installed against the day you need them.

• You need the strongest reviewed cryptography. Signal, and put Nymchat beside it for when the network goes away.
• You need the network not to know you exist. SimpleX.
• You are at a protest, a festival, a stadium, or somewhere the internet has been cut. Nymchat or Bitchat, or Armada if everyone there is on Android — and it matters less than you would think which, because they run the same mesh.
• You want one app for everyday conversation that also survives a blackout. Nymchat. That is the whole reason it exists.
• You want the best group encryption on Nostr. White Noise, which now has the audit to back it, or XChat if you would rather have zaps and calls in the same app.
• You need to run the infrastructure yourself, under your own policy. Element with your own homeserver, Armada with your own relay and voice server, or Delta Chat with your own mail server.
• You expect the app to be banned where you live. Nymchat. The web app is a folder of files with no build step, so it runs from a static host, a USB stick or localhost, and there is no store listing to remove.

If you found our honest comparison helpful and Nymchat is the one you want to try, Getting started takes about a minute and does not ask you for anything.