Are there ressources that help you find the right Matrix server software in 2026?

There’s Conduit, continuwuity, Tuwunel and Synapse, but what are the differences between them? Which one should I choose when all I want is a homeserver that allows E2EE, federation (optional), voice calls, screen sharing, reliable mobile notifications and that ideally isn’t a ressource hog (aka what people say about Synapse)?

  • stratselfEnglish
    1·
    5 days ago
    • E2EE: all servers support it
    • Federation: this is where most of the resource hog is. If you disable it you can use anything. I enable it and use continuwuity.
    • Voice calls/screen shares: requires extra integration with Element Call + Livekit
    • Mobile notifs: requires integrating with ntfy or some other UnifiedPush service. Or download Element X from Play Store and use Google’s push services

    Edit: the main differences between these servers are that Synapse is written in Python/Twisted and is known to take up huge storage space. Meanwhile all other mentioned projects are Rust based, has a shared lineage, are usually more efficient with storage and ops, though are more focused on a smaller user size and doesn’t yet have advanced Synapse features

    • IronKrill@lemmy.ca
      1·
      5 hours ago

      Those “advanced Synapse features” are what the question is, IMO. I set up a server the other day and went with Tuwunel because I couldn’t figure out what the mysterious missing features actually were.

      • stratselfEnglish
        3·
        3 hours ago

        I’m using Continuwuity.org (also a Rust-based server and forked from the same former project as Tuwunel) so I’ll name a few that this one lacks:

        • Synapse Admin UI (helps a lot in large server setups)
        • Ability to purge rooms and some history (Rust servers use rocksdb with high compaction, so not a high priority for them)
        • Matrix Authentication Service (aka next-gen OIDC-based authn)
        • Ability to become a notary server (maintain other servers’ signing keys for faster retrieval by the public)
        • More niceties implemented for Element Call
        • More niceties implemented for encryption

        I don’t think anything except for maybe OIDC would be really needed for a small-scale homeserver, but they do lack them. For me the resource efficiency, storage savings, and ease of maintenance is definitely a larger factor in choosing the server implementation

        • IronKrill@lemmy.ca
          1·
          2 hours ago

          Thanks for that overview, I really couldn’t figure out what I was missing. I’ve got chat and voice working, for my tiny instance that should be enough.

  • degen@midwest.socialEnglish
    1·
    5 days ago

    I’m out here wondering if running my own server from home is worth it over an instance in the first place. I had no idea there were different servers to run lol

  • picnic@lemmy.world
    1·
    5 days ago

    Well dunno about any others but I’ve run synapse on a virtual machine on a thin client. In fact I thats how I currently run it, hypervisor on a hp t640 thin client and a ubuntu vm which is dedicated to matrix. Has served pretty me well since 2019. Same instance, been just relocating the vm to different hypervisors.

    Yeah you might not like the perf on a rasp 3