conduwuit vs Construct
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted matrix & xmpp options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
| Feature | conduwuit | Construct |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Under-an-hour setup | Read-the-docs project |
| Health score | 15 · At risk | 11 · At risk |
| Status | Archived | Actively maintained |
| Category | Matrix & XMPP | Matrix & XMPP |
| License | Apache-2.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Language | Rust | C++ |
| Setup difficulty | Easy | Hard |
| Min. RAM | 256 MB | 256 MB |
| Deployment | docker, binary, source | binary, source |
| GitHub stars | ★ 25 | ★ 394 |
| First released | 2024 | 2018 |
| Replaces | Slack, Discord | Slack, Discord |
What are conduwuit and Construct?
conduwuit
conduwuit is a community-maintained fork of Conduit, a Matrix homeserver written in Rust. It focuses on stability, performance, and adding features that upstream Conduit lacked.
- Faster than upstream Conduit
- Easy single-binary deploy
- Active maintenance
- Matrix federation
Construct
Construct is a Matrix homeserver implementation written in C++ focused on raw performance and efficiency. It is one of the original alternative homeserver projects in the Matrix ecosystem.
- Written in modern C++
- Designed for low overhead
- Matrix federation support
- Embedded database
conduwuit vs Construct: key differences
The biggest difference is maintenance: conduwuit's repository is archived and no longer developed, while Construct is actively maintained. Conduwuit is written in Rust, while Construct is built with C++. Licensing differs — Apache-2.0 for conduwuit versus BSD-3-Clause for Construct. Construct is the more established project (first released 2018), while conduwuit arrived in 2024. Construct has the considerably larger community, at 394 GitHub stars versus 25. Conduwuit lists first-class Docker deployment; Construct does not.
Why pick each one
Choose conduwuit if…
- More features than Conduit
- Good performance
Watch out for
- Relatively young project
- Smaller community
Choose Construct if…
- Released under the BSD-3-Clause license
- Written in C++
- Tiny footprint — runs in 256 MB RAM
Watch out for
- Complex to build
- Limited documentation
Frequently asked questions
Is conduwuit or Construct better?
Neither is universally better. Construct has the larger community, while conduwuit is simpler to set up (easy difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.
Are conduwuit and Construct free and open-source?
Yes. conduwuit is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Construct under BSD-3-Clause. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run conduwuit and Construct with Docker?
conduwuit: yes. Construct: check the project docs for container support.