XMPP Providers - Which XMPP provider suits you best?

Your European Union XMPP Chat Provider!

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

You can now easily find an XMPP provider based in the European Union (EU)! We have updated our filter options. Previously, you could filter for the server location of an XMPP provider. That filter now allows to select EU-only hosted services.

Try it out! Click the Filter list drop-down menu on the main page.

The location-based filter allows to select the server location.

There are many other properties you can filter for, too. In addition, there is an overview table of providers with column filters and sorting options.

Looking forward to more European Union XMPP chat providers and beyond!

Info: Meet us this week at FOSDEM!

Improve the XMPP experience

You can also consider to run your own XMPP server and become a public provider. With our automated XMPP server setup, you can operate a fully-featured XMPP server with minimal effort.

Feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions! If you like to support XMPP Providers, please consider making a donation. Follow us and spread the word!

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More Adoption of XMPP Providers in the XMPP Ecosystem & XMPP Providers Server Update

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Adoption of XMPP Providers

We are very pleased to see that the XMPP web client Converse 12.0.0 refers to XMPP Providers’ service. If users of Converse are looking for a way to register a new account, they are guided to providers.xmpp.net. Even if this is not a fully integrated solution as other apps provide, we are happy to see more general adoption of the XMPP Providers project.

Furthermore, the XMPP server software ejabberd has added a module for XMPP provider files in version 25.08. We were neither involved in its development nor reached out to its author in this regard, so this is great news and a helpful addition.

This circumstance, but also the level of acceptance and adoption motivates us even more to realize a long-standing thought: Publishing a new XEP to improve formalizing and accessing public XMPP server information.

XMPP Providers Server Update

To keep up with the latest changes, we updated the XMPP Providers Server to Debian Trixie (13) and ejabberd 24.12. Furthermore, a number of smaller improvements have been made to allow updating all software packages and to upgrade the system to new releases.

The XMPP Providers Server is the automated server setup used by XMPP Providers. It makes use of Ansible to set up a Debian-based server and contains playbooks for a simple all-in-one setup with a fully-featured XMPP server.

Help the Project, Improve XMPP

For a good user experience, apps integrating XMPP Providers are as important as the providers themselves. If you are an XMPP developer, please consider adding XMPP Providers support to your app. If you are an operator of a public XMPP service, provide the information XMPP Providers needs and add your service to the list. You can also consider to run our (automated) XMPP Providers Server setup yourself. It is easily configurable to be used as a public or private XMPP server.

Feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions! If you like to support XMPP Providers, please consider making a donation. Follow us and spread the word!

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A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats

Tue, 05 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Providers Survey

In May 2025, we ran a small survey to gather feedback from XMPP server operators. Our main concerns were XMPP Provider’s service and the project itself. First of all, we would like to thank almost 60 people who participated in this survey. While the XMPP Providers project currently lists a little more than 70 providers, this is a good turnout. At this point we can already tell that the general feedback is very positive!

Although we had quite a few participants, only about one third were actual server operators. Most of the responders were listed in category A or B or they were not listed yet.

Survey category result

Since we are curious about the general satisfaction with XMPP Provider’s service, we made these four aspects part of the survey: Service listing and its processes, transparency, documentation and communication. Across all these aspects, we see mostly satisfied to very satisfied participants. For the occasional question about project documentation, we recommend the FAQ as a starting point.

Survey general experience result

Since being listed as a provider may come with increased public visibility, we are interested in potential changes in registration count, usage activity, maintenance efforts or spam incidents. The results suggest that spam incidents, maintenance efforts and usage activity didn’t change much. However, registration count increased, which supports federation in the XMPP ecosystem.

Survey listing experience result

In addition to these survey results, we received a lot of written feedback. A good share of this feedback praises the project for empowering people to make a good and informed choice about their XMPP provider. We would like to address some of the points raised in the feedback separately:

Which kind of providers do we list? Our goal is to list all publicly visible XMPP providers. XMPP Providers gathers information about all listed providers automatically, which may be helpful for registration purposes, for getting an overview about providers, or for looking up information about a specific provider, even if registration is closed.
Why do you make in-band registration a requirement for a category A or B listing? XMPP Providers is a project made to simplify the users’ onboardings. Therefore, the criteria we use for the categorization are from a user’s perspective. This means users should be able to register directly from their XMPP client. Spam may be the most prominent reason to disable in-band registration, but that creates a barrier for newcomers.
Why do I need to provide an extra file for XMPP Providers? We try to gather data automatically, but not all data is available in a machine-readable format. To reduce manual efforts until more data is available for automatic processing, we opted for a provider file containing additional information, which is hosted by individual providers. In the meantime, we continue to work on automating as much as possible.
Why can I only get into category B and not into category A if my service is not free? We made this distinction to allow a completely automated registration without any user input. In the future, we would like to add payment and donation information.

Perspective

A year after introducing the provider file, more than 60% of the currently listed XMPP providers host such a file to offer additional information. We see this as a great success, since it helps to improve both transparency and quality of XMPP providers.

At the time of writing, about 60% of the 74 XMPP providers listed are category D providers. This is either due to closed registration, missing information, or both. We encourage all providers to offer a provider file to fill the missing information gap.

Furthermore, with the client monocles chat, now three active apps have integrated information from the XMPP Providers project.

Why Provider Categories?

The decentralized nature of the XMPP network allows for a wide variety of clients and servers. While the basic features might work in many cases, more advanced features might fail to work if a client or a server does not support the necessary feature set. On top of that, there can be servers configured with outdated settings or insufficient storage options, which may further degrade the experience.

Take for example file transfers: A provider offers file transfers via HTTP File Upload with up to 10 MB per file. Now there is a user trying to send a 12 MB file, but their client does not support alternative file transfer methods. In this case, the user cannot send their file via XMPP. While registering with their provider, the user might not be aware of potential limits or issues, which could be avoided otherwise.

To give newcomers the best possible experience, the XMPP Providers project groups providers into simple categories. Each category is based on a set of criteria a provider has to meet, and thus generalizes technical details into categories. This is the easiest way to offer newcomers a list of providers with little potential for frustration. Frustration during the first steps with a new service may turn users away from XMPP. That’s why frictionless onboarding and initial experience for first-time users is so important. But users don’t have to rely on categories alone. XMPP Providers offers plenty of details for tech-savvy users, which can be used to filter the list by further criteria.

Putting providers into categories may lead to conflicts, that’s true. Oftentimes providers can reach better categories by fixing configuration issues, and we are always glad to help where we can. There is an extensive FAQ with the most frequent configuration issues, and we offer a support chat for help with technical issues or related questions. Last but not least, categories give providers an incentive to improve their service for better first-time user experience.

Why Another Providers List?

There are many websites listing XMPP providers, ranging from wikis to user guides and personal websites. Many of them have a common problem: Information becomes stale. In order to have up-to-date information, they need a lot of manual maintenance. To avoid having to maintain a list manually, XMPP Providers builds on automation. As much of the data gathering and processing as possible has been automated. For data which cannot be gathered automatically, we are actively working on solutions.

Automating data processing and categorization needs transparency, accessibility, and good documentation to be sustainable. To reach these goals, and to improve the XMPP onboarding experience, we built the service around XMPP Providers with the following features in mind:

an open-source interface which can be hosted by every interested party
extensive service documentation
offering automated and up-to-date information for listed providers, including categorization with soft and hard quality criteria
helping to retrieve service information and support information beyond the registration process
giving opportunities for providers to check and improve their service quality
providing an API to include the list of providers in XMPP clients

While this project certainly leaves room for improvement, it’s a first step to make the registration process smoother and less error-prone. Providing a public service comes with great responsibility, and we would like to support service providers in that.

Remember: A rising tide lifts all boats!

The survey has been created with Formbricks.

Help the Project, Improve XMPP

If you like to support XMPP Providers, please consider making a donation.

Feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions!

Spread the Word

The XMPP Providers project lives from the community and we are happy to hear your feedback. Follow us and spread the word!

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XMPP Providers Server

Thu, 28 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Server Setup

We recently started to set up our own XMPP server to provide a support chat. Our goal was to automate as much as possible to reduce the maintenance effort to a minimum. While doing that, we also thought about how the experience is for XMPP newcomers to set up their own XMPP server.

There are many XMPP servers available. But only few projects focus on quick and simple setups. Therefore, we started another small project called XMPP Providers Server. Its main purpose is to manage our XMPP server. And in the future, we will possibly run additional services on that server. But it also allows interested operators to have a smooth start with running their own XMPP server.

The XMPP Providers Server is an automated server setup. It makes use of Ansible to configure a Debian-based server. The Ansible playbooks as well as the guide we wrote are an all-in-one setup for fully-featured XMPP servers. By using sensible defaults, the project focuses on simplicity rather than on covering all possible use cases. With more experience, the setup can be expanded in order to use a more complex configuration.

There is no support for a regular web server yet. Thus, the setup cannot be used to serve a website. But since the Ansible setup is very modular, that functionality can be added as well as other functionality. If you do so, consider to contribute those improvements to the official project :) That way, everybody can benefit from your effort! We are happy to hear your feedback!

We encourage you to use XMPP and run your own server instance, maybe even by becoming a public provider. But keep in mind that providing a public service comes with great responsibility you should be aware of. Best practices can be discussed in the official XMPP operators chat. If your topic does not suit that chat, there are plenty of other public XMPP group chats in the XMPP network.

Help Us

For a good user experience, apps integrating XMPP Providers are as important as the providers themselves. If you are an XMPP developer, please consider adding XMPP Provider support to your app. If you are an operator of a public XMPP service, provide the information we need and add it to our list.

Feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions!

Spread the Word

The XMPP Providers project lives from the community. We are happy to hear your feedback! Follow us and spread the word!

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XMPP Providers Chat

Mon, 11 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Come Join Us

After automating almost all the work necessary for querying provider properties, we were able to start adding new providers! There are 59 providers on the list at this moment 🎉 which enables us to show some statistics as well.

For most of the questions regarding the project (how properties can be provided by server admins and so on), the FAQ section provides you with answers.

However, if your questions were not answered there, we invite you to join our new chat (join directly). Feel free to discuss XMPP Providers related topics!

Spread the Word

The project lives from the community and client implementations, so follow us and spread the word!

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XMPP Providers Fully Automated

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Automate all the Things

During the past year, the team behind the XMPP Providers project worked on automating the process of gathering data about XMPP providers. Automating this process reduces manual work significantly (for example, checking websites by hand, verifying information, listing sources, etc.) and helps to sustain the team’s efforts. Automation also enables the project to be up to date – every day!

Last month, the project reached a state that allowed the suite of tools to automatically query many provider properties via XMPP and HTTP. All of these tools are working together in a GitLab pipeline running daily to keep the data up to date.

API v2

Much of the work needed to be done manually previously. After automating it, some provider properties did not seem fitting anymore. Thus, we changed them. While automating the process, additional properties were added because they were available through the tools.

Changed Properties

lastCheck has been replaced by latestUpdate specifying when at least one provider property changed since checks now run daily.
company has been replaced by organization allowing for a finer distinction of an organization’s type.

New Properties

alternativeJids: A list of JIDs a provider offers for registration other than the main JID.
serverTesting: Whether tests against the provider’s server are allowed (e.g., certificate checks and uptime monitoring).
inBandRegistrationEmailAddressRequired: Whether an email address is required for registering an account.
inBandRegistrationCaptchaRequired: Whether a CAPTCHA is needed to be solved for registering an account.

The FAQ section explains how these properties can be provided by server admins.

Provider Files for More Automation

There are properties that should be provided by the XMPP server instead of retrieving them via other methods. To enable automatic collection of those properties via XMPP, the team works on extending existing standards and, if necessary, creating new ones.

Until standards have been extended or created, and until those changes have been implemented and deployed in the wild, a provider file shall fill the gap. A provider file is a JSON file containing only the provider properties that cannot be retrieved via other methods. Each provider can generate a provider file and supply it via its web server.

To make this as easy as possible, a Provider File Generator has been developed. It generates a provider file from the information you enter in the form.

As soon as a provider file is discovered by the tools, all properties listed in the provider file are automatically fetched and processed.

Spread the Word

The project lives from the community and client implementations, so follow us and spread the word!

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XMPP Providers Automation

Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Automating the Automatable

At the beginning of this year, work on automating the collection of several provider ‘properties’ (for example, available size for file uploads) started. An overview of all these provider properties gathered for each XMPP provider can be found on the overview page. Some of these properties were already available in a machine-readable format, making it easy to be collected.

A suite of tools has been developed since, providing the ability to query properties via XMPP and through the web. All of these tools are working together in a GitLab pipeline, which runs every night to keep the data up to date.

So far, the following properties are collected automatically:

Account Creation via XMPP Apps: For determining whether a server supports the creation of accounts via XMPP apps, XEP-0077: In-Band Registration is used.
Account Creation via Web Page: For retrieving a web page that can be used to create accounts, XEP-0077: In-Band Registration - Redirection is used.
Server Software: For determining which software (including its version) a server runs, XEP-0092: Software Version is used.
Support Addresses: For retrieving the support addresses of a provider,XEP-0157: Contact Addresses for XMPP Services is used. Support addresses will be available in version 2 (v2) of the API. Please note that due to limitations of the standard, only one language is supported for addresses.
Upload Limits and Storage Durations: For determining how much users can upload to a server and how long those files are stored, XEP-0363: HTTP File Upload - Discovering Support is used.

The FAQ section explains how these properties can be provided by server admins.

More Automation

Not all of the properties collected by the XMPP Providers project are machine-readable yet. To enable automatic collection of the missing properties, the team works on extending existing standards and, if necessary, creating new ones. Due to the amount of manual work for maintaining all the provider properties, no new providers have been included in the recent past. With increasing automation and thus reduced manual intervention, the XMPP Providers project will soon be open for including new providers again!

Spread the Word

The project lives from the community and client implementations, so follow us and spread the word!

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XMPP Providers and blabber.im

Wed, 17 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Easy Onboarding with Android Chat App

A new version of the Android XMPP chat app blabber.im has been released. It provides an easy onboarding. Passwords are generated automatically and XMPP providers are suggested. Those suggestions are based on our curated list of XMPP providers.

blabber.im registration integrating XMPP Providers

More Apps Supporting XMPP Providers

We created XMPP Providers in order to build a base usable by several XMPP apps. But that would have little impact if no app integrated it. Only with the help of app developers, it is possible to have that impact. Thus, we are glad to announce such a big step towards free and easy communication!

Install blabber.im via F-Droid and try it out now! There are even more apps integrating XMPP Providers already. Support by other apps is planned. If you are an XMPP developer and interested in integrating XMPP Providers, please get in touch with us. We will give our best to support you.

Start of XMPP Providers Website

Mon, 25 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

It’s Your Choice

Are you looking for an XMPP provider that suits you? There is this new website now based on the data of XMPP Providers. XMPP Providers has a curated list of providers and tools for filtering them, creating badges and more.

Each provider is categorized based on its properties to make decisions for users as easy as possible. All criteria for the categorization are carefully considered and clearly communicated. The source of each property is referenced for transparency and maintainability. In addition, the machine-readable list of providers can be integrated in XMPP apps to simplify the registration.

We started XMPP Providers in January 2021 with the focus on client developers. In order to target also users and providers and receive new contributions, we began to create this website in March 2022. It helps users to find suitable providers for their installed apps or even get an app that already integrates XMPP Providers. Providers can easily see how they can improve their service or website for a better category. Additionally, client developers should get a good understanding of what XMPP Providers is and how it can be used.

Before trying to reach a wider audience, we presented the website to the XMPP community on April 11, 2022. Since then, we have received many ideas for improvements. A main topic is automation.

A curated provider list cannot be completely automatically maintained. Several steps need to be reviewed before updating the list. But there are certain steps and recurring tasks that can be automated. We need to find ways to simplify the maintenance while still providing results that are transparent to average users.

We Need Your Help

If you are a developer, please help us with automating the tasks we currently have to do manually. If you are an operator of an already listed public provider, please update your website to improve your category. You can see what is needed on your details page after selecting a provider entry and clicking the Details button. If your provider is not listed yet, please contribute to the list.