- Category
- Messaging · SaaS alternative
- Cost
- Free
- Country
- Switzerland
- Licensing
- FOSS
- Platforms
- iOS · Android · Linux · macOS · Windows
Pros and cons
- +No phone number or email required to register
- +Onion-routed traffic via a decentralized service-node network
- +GPL-3.0 clients with reproducible builds
- +Swiss-based foundation after the 2024 move out of Australia
- −No perfect forward secrecy in the current protocol; V2 with PFS is still in development
- −Smaller user base than Signal, so reaching contacts is harder
- −Decentralized routing adds noticeable message latency
- −Account recovery depends on a 13-word seed; lose it and the identity is gone
Privacy notes
Session generates a random 66-character Account ID at signup; no phone number, email, or other identifier is collected. Messages route through the Session Network (a decentralized set of service nodes formerly known as Lokinet, run by Oxen) so no single operator sees both sender and recipient IPs. Stewardship moved in late 2024 from the Australian Oxen Privacy Tech Foundation to the Swiss-based Session Technology Foundation after Australian police pressure on local employees under the country's 2018 anti-encryption law. Session forked from Signal but dropped perfect forward secrecy and deniable authentication in 2021 for stability reasons; the foundation announced a V2 protocol in December 2025 that will reintroduce PFS and add post-quantum encryption, but V2 is not yet deployed.
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