unrealircd vs InspIRCd

Our great sponsors

InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale

WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS

SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews

Our great sponsors

unrealircd		InspIRCd
	Project
4	Mentions	5
401	Stars	1,125
1.7%	Growth	1.8%
9.3	Activity	9.3
4 days ago	Latest Commit	8 days ago
C	Language	C++
GNU General Public License v3.0 only	License	-

The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

unrealircd

Posts with mentions or reviews of unrealircd. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-11-12.

Ask HN: Private group chat with no registration
4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Nov 2022

UnrealIRCD front-ended by TheLounge web interface that has history would fit what you described, but the setup is not super quick. No registration would be required, TheLounge provides chat persistence. Both are open source. Visitors would not need to be technical and would not need to know IRC commands. Rooms can be deleted by the channel operator. TheLounge is browser based and does not require any additional software.
[1] - https://www.unrealircd.org/ https://github.com/unrealircd/unrealircd/
[2] - https://thelounge.chat/ https://github.com/thelounge
Darknet exploration group?
1 project | /r/TOR | 16 Jun 2022

Trivial. Set up your favorite IRC server, UnrealIRCd would be fine, then create a tor onion service, but instead of forwarding port 80 (HTTP), you'd forward 6667 (IRC). Done.
Ask HN: What is your recommended stack for real time chat?
7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Mar 2022

InspIRCd

Posts with mentions or reviews of InspIRCd. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-04-30.

Looking for: Chat service that isn't web server based
3 projects | /r/selfhosted | 30 Apr 2023

Looks fine for me. Note - you can download DEB file from https://github.com/inspircd/inspircd/releases for Ubuntu and install it .. no point going over compilation stuff or via docker https://hub.docker.com/r/inspircd/inspircd-docker/
Over the internet messages/connection API or service for python
1 project | /r/learnprogramming | 21 Jan 2023

Once you've spun up a server, you'll need some sort of software to relay messages between the clients. In my opinion it's hard to go wrong with IRC here. Inspircd is pretty painless to install and configure.
Create an irc server
2 projects | /r/irc | 21 Jan 2022

If you want a highly customizable ircd to setup https://www.inspircd.org/
Cant get InspIRCd to work
2 projects | /r/irc | 23 Dec 2021
how can I set up my own private hexchat network?
2 projects | /r/irc | 3 May 2021

The most popular are UnrealIRCd and InspIRCd and it looks like they will both run on Windows. (I assume you are using Windows)

What are some alternatives?

When comparing unrealircd and InspIRCd you can also consider the following projects:

solanum - An IRCd for unified networks

ngircd - Free, portable and lightweight Internet Relay Chat server

anope - Anope IRC Services

Kiwi IRC - 🥝 Next generation of the Kiwi IRC web client

The Lounge - 💬 ‎ Modern, responsive, cross-platform, self-hosted web IRC client

Converse.js - Web-based XMPP/Jabber chat client written in JavaScript

Oragono - A modern IRC server (daemon/ircd) written in Go.

nchan - Fast, horizontally scalable, multiprocess pub/sub queuing server and proxy for HTTP, long-polling, Websockets and EventSource (SSE), powered by Nginx.

Convos - Convos :busts_in_silhouette: is the simplest way to use IRC in your browser [Moved to: https://github.com/convos-chat/convos]

Movim - Movim - Decentralized social platform

ZNC - Official repository for the ZNC IRC bouncer