Telegram is a messaging app created by former https://alternativeto.net/software/vkontakte/ creators with a focus on speed and security. It’s superfast, simple and free. It is like SMS, but more powerful.

You can send messages, photos and videos to people who are in your phone contacts (and have Telegram). You can also create groups for up to 20000 people or channels for unlimited subscribers. 

Your chats are not encrypted by default, which enables other people to see what you are writing. You can enable a &quot;Secret Chat&quot; to enable end-to-end encryption.

Telegram&#39;s security model has received notable criticism by cryptography experts. They criticized the general security model of permanently storing all contacts, messages and media together with their decryption keys on its servers by default and by not enabling end-to-end encryption for messages by default.

Telegram&#39;s client-side code is open-source software, whereas its server-side code is closed-source and proprietary. The service also provides public APIs with which developers can access the same functionality as Telegram&#39;s official apps to build their own messaging applications.

Telegram also provides a bot API for programmers to create different kinds of Telegram bots. Bots are simply Telegram accounts operated by software – not people – and they&#39;ll often have AI features. They can do anything – teach, play, search, broadcast, remind, connect, integrate with other services, or even pass commands to the Internet of Things.


Telegram

Windows

Linux

Online

Windows Mobile

Android

iPhone

Blackberry

Android Tablet

Windows Phone

iPad

Apple Watch

Android Wear

PortableApps.com

Haiku

FreeBSD

Telegram is a messaging app with a focus on speed and security. It’s superfast, simple and free. It is like SMS, but more powerful.

Discord is about giving people the power to create belonging in their lives. We want to make it easier for you to talk regularly with the people you care about. We want you to build genuine relationships with your friends and communities close to home or around the world. Original, reliable, playful, and relatable. These are the values that connect our users and our employees at Discord.



Discord

Chrome OS

Electron / Atom Shell

Discord is about giving people the power to create belonging in their lives. We want to make it easier for you to talk regularly with the people you care about.

Mumble 1.2.3 Release Candidate – some users in different channels

User-Comment and Avatar – Comments can be set for users and channels

ACL for extended permission management allowing for simple or complex setups

Mumble is highly configurable in the Advanced configuration mode

In-Game Overlay – see who’s in and who’s talking while in-game

Descriptive wizards guiding users through setup and configuration

Mumble was the first and is the most successful and wide spread free and open source software for VoIP. It was the first VoIP software to provide low-latency audio suitable for gaming, and at the same time was a pioneer in high audio quality at the same time.

The in-game overlay shows users and who is talking in-game.

Mumble provides positional audio for certain games, meaning you can hear the people you play with from the direction they stand in in-game, and louder the closer they are (configurable).

Through additional scripting using the Ice protocol for communication, (e.g.) webinterfaces can be used for easier server management.

Combining the scripting interface with the positional audio data can switch users to teams channels or other useful automation.

An official iPhone client is available as well. For Android, no official client is provided, a but the community published a free client.

Mumble is continued to be maintained and developed by a small core team as well as the open community as a whole.

Mumble

Self-Hosted

Mumble is an open source, low-latency, high quality voice chat software primarily intended for use while gaming.

TeamSpeak is a proprietary Voice over IP software that allows users to speak on a chat channel with other users, much like a telephone conference call. A TeamSpeak user will often wear a headset with an integrated microphone. Users use the TeamSpeak client software to connect to a TeamSpeak server of their choice, from there they can join chat channels.
The target audience for TeamSpeak is gamers, who can use the software to communicate with other players on the same team of a multiplayer game. Communicating by voice gives a competitive advantage by allowing players to keep their hands on the controls.

TeamSpeak

Cloudron

TeamSpeak is a proprietary Voice over IP software that allows users to speak on a chat channel with other users, much like a telephone conference call.

Formerly known as Curse, Twitch App (also Twitch Desktop App) was acquired by http://alternativeto.net/software/twitch/ and rebranded as the desktop and mobile app for Twitch-based messaging. It&#39;s a fast, secure and free communications app for and by gamers.

FEATURES

- Absolutely free and available on most desktop and mobile platforms.
- Call your friends and teammates wherever, whenever.
- Join servers to chat with your favorite streamers and communities.
- Jump in and vote on server polls and enter giveaways!
- Stay in touch with your favorite communities and friends across all games you play, from SMITE to League of Legends.
- Never miss a message with offline chat and message history.
- Bring your team and local crews together with group messaging.

Twitch App

Desktop and mobile app for Twitch users to communicate with friends and teammates across platforms.

Overwolf adds epic overlay apps to your favorite games.
Game capture, Twitch streaming, TeamSpeak overlay, in-game browser and many more smart apps that make gaming more awesome!

Add Facebook, Skype, Multi-IM and a collection of many widgets to your games. Overwolf combines the best of every chat client into a very intuitive interface. It is still in beta stage, but the future of this program is looking bright.

Overwolf

Overwolf adds epic overlay apps to your favorite games.

PubNub is the world’s only global Real-Time Network.  
 
PubNub enables software developers to rapidly build and scale real-time apps by providing the cloud infrastructure, connections and key building blocks for real-time interactivity. Developers can build real-time apps like live dashboards and data streams, real-time collaboration, 2nd screen synchronization and machine-to-machine signaling for any device.
 
PubNub utilizes a Publish/Subscribe model for real-time data streaming and device signaling and supports all of the capabilities of WebSockets, Socket.IO, SignalIR, WebRTC Data Channel and other streaming protocols.  With PubNub, developers can dramatically reduce the cost, complexity and time to deliver real-time experiences.

PubNub powers 1000s of apps and streams more than 3M messages a second to over 100M devices a month.  Customers include Rebtel, Viggle, GetTaxi, Humble Bundle, StageIT, Spreecast, Celly and more.

 
Easy to Use: 
A simple API allows developers to build real-time apps for mobile, browser, desktop and server in minutes. 
 
Key Building Blocks for Real-Time: 
PubNub provides everything you need to build and scale real-time apps, including data push, presence, storage, mobile, analytics, security and more 
 
Supported Everywhere: 
PubNub provides over 50 SDKs for the most popular environments including: iOS, Android, JavaScript, .NET, Java, Ruby, Python, PHP and many more

Globally Scaled:
PubNub connects everyone on earth in less than &#188;  of a second with 11 data centers and 99.999% uptime SLAs

Specialties

Real-Time Apps, Real-Time Data Push, Presence, Storage &amp; Playback, Mobile, Analytic and Security

Pubnub

ShadowPlay is a graphics-accelerated overlay to record and share high-quality gameplay videos, screenshots, and livestreams.
It comes bundled with Nvidia https://alternativeto.net/software/geforce-experience/ and therefore is only available to Nvidia users, on Windows platform.

INSTANTLY REPLAY AND RECORD
Just pulled off an amazing stunt? ShadowPlay’s DVR-style Instant Replay mode already recorded it! Just hit a hotkey to save the last 30 seconds of gameplay to your hard drive or share to YouTube or Facebook. It works as game recording software to manually record gameplay videos for as long as you want—all at up to 4K at 60 frames per second. And ShadowPlay is hardware accelerated, so you can leave it running in the background without worrying about video capture impacting your performance.

NEVER MISS YOUR BEST GAMING MOMENTS
NVIDIA Highlights automatically captures key moments, clutch kills, and match-winning plays, ensuring that your best gaming moments are automatically saved. Just select your favorite highlight and share to social media using GeForce Experience.

BROADCAST GAMES
GeForce Experience makes broadcasting your favorite games fast and easy. With just two clicks, you can start a high-quality broadcast to Facebook Live, Twitch, or YouTube Live. It even supports camera and custom graphic overlays to better personalize your livestream.  

CAPTURE GIFS AND 4K SCREENSHOTS
Create up to a 15-second GIF from your favorite ShadowPlay video, add text,  and upload it to Google, Facebook, or Weibo with a single click.
Or grab screenshots at up to 4K and upload them to Facebook, Google, or Imgur—all without leaving your game.

Nvidia ShadowPlay

ShadowPlay is a graphics-accelerated overlay to record and share high-quality gameplay videos, screenshots, and livestreams.

The amazing PlayClaw video capture tool gives customers incredible power! 

PlayClaw has been designed to make full use of multi-core processors and hardware accelerated H.264 codecs, which ensures the outstanding quality of the output with a minimal impact on system performance. PlayClaw will record full HD videos of your gameplay with high frame rates with your audio commentary with minimal possible performance hit! 

The other nifty feature is PlayClaw’s ability to render helpful overlays over game screen. PlayClaw will show you who&#39;s speaking in games using Teamspeak 3, leading to better teamwork. Check your GPU/CPU load and temperatures right in game with PlayClaw&#39;s overlays. Overlays are fully compatible with the latest versions of Windows and graphics engines. 

At A Glance: 
Capture game video with optional recording game audio 
H.264 encoding with hardware acceleration (Intel QuickSync, NVidia Encoder, AMD VCE encoder) 
Streaming to YouTube, Twitch and other RTMP services 
Special capture desktop mode in Windows 7, 8/8.1 and 10 
Adjustable video recording frame rate and size 
Up to 16 audio sources 
Unique pre-recording feature 
Output in multiple formats (AVI, MP4) 
Capture screenshots 
Various overlays: voice overlays for Teamspeak 3, FPS, CPU/GPU statistics, timers, etc. 
Webcam overlay support 
Support for 3rd party overlays via plugins system. 
Multithreaded compression code 
Realtime audio preprocessing engine 
Profile-based settings 
Compatible with PunkBuster &amp; Valve Anti Cheat

PlayClaw

PlayClaw is game video recording and streaming tool with various overlays.

The https://alternativeto.net/software/steam/ community overlay is an in-game interface that allows access to many Steam Community features while playing games. The default keybind of Shift+Tab will open the overlay in any game where it is supported and enabled.

Beyond giving access to Steam community features, many games utilize the overlay in the background to support in-game features that require Steam. You may not even realize that a game is using the overlay in these cases.

Because the Steam overlay is a customizable Steamworks feature, games will use it differently depending on which features it supports and how the developer incorporated it. More detailed information can be found in the Steam community or by contacting specific game developers.

Steam Overlay

The Steam community overlay is an in-game interface that allows access to many Steam Community features while playing games. .

Apps with 'In-Game Overlay' feature