Recommended Clients

Matrix is a protocol, not an app — you pick a client, the way email lets you pick a mail app. That freedom is great and also a trap: there are dozens of clients, and honestly, most are abandoned, half-finished, or missing encryption features you need. We recommend three. All of them are free and open source, and you can switch (or run several at once) whenever — your account doesn’t care.

Status notes below are current as of October 2026.

Vommet — our pick

Vommet is what we recommend first and what the setup guide uses. It’s Nether’s own fork of the Commet client, with one job: removing the papercuts that keep people on Discord. Spaces, threads, encryption, stickers and multiple signed-in accounts all work, voice and video calls use Matrix’s native calling (the same calls Element joins), and it ships every Discord Nitro theme for free. Its biggest selling point is the maintainer: complain in #vommet:nether.im about anything that feels worse than Discord, and it gets fixed, often within days.

• Runs on: Windows, Linux, Android, macOS, and your browser at web.vommet.app with nothing to install (downloads). On Linux there’s a .deb (Ubuntu 24.04+, Debian 13+), an .rpm (Fedora, openSUSE), an AppImage, a Flatpak bundle and a plain tarball, plus a flake and channel for NixOS and Guix. iPhone builds exist only for sideloading (AltStore/SideStore), and notifications may not arrive there yet.
• Rough edges, honestly: every build is a testing pre-release. The Windows and macOS builds aren’t code-signed, so your OS warns before the first launch; Android installs are a direct APK (no Play Store or F-Droid yet; listings there and on Flathub are on the way). Most of Vommet’s code is written with an LLM’s help, and it says so up front. Bugs get fixed quickly, but there are more of them than in Element.
• Pick it if: you’re coming from Discord, you want the client the rest of Nether is using, or you’d like a client whose maintainer you can actually talk to. Want to try it before installing anything? Open the web version.

Element X — the safe default

Element is the flagship Matrix client, made by the company behind much of Matrix itself. It comes in two generations right now: Element X (Android/iOS) is the modern, fast mobile app and the one to install on a phone; Element (desktop and web) is the mature classic app, being modernized piece by piece. The old “Element Classic” mobile app is in maintenance mode — don’t start there.

• Runs on: everything. iPhone users: this is your client until Vommet gets there.
• Strengths: the most polished encryption and verification flows of any client, real app-store installs, dependable push notifications, mature voice/video. When another client misbehaves, Element is the reference you check against.
• Rough edges: Element X is still reaching feature parity with classic Element (widgets are missing, some spaces management is limited). The desktop app is heavier than Cinny.
• Pick it if: you’re on iOS/macOS, you want the most-trodden path, or you want a reliable second client alongside Vommet — which we genuinely recommend for phone notifications right now.

Cinny — the lightweight one

Cinny is a slick, minimal client focused on doing the basics beautifully. Use it at app.cinny.in with zero installation, or as a light desktop app for Windows/macOS/Linux.

• Strengths: clean Discord-ish interface, snappy, small; encryption, device verification, spaces, and threads are all solid, and it has calls these days too. Actively maintained with a steady release cadence.
• Rough edges: no native mobile app — on a phone it’s a browser PWA, which works poorly on iOS in particular (notifications, storage). Treat it as a desktop/web client.
• Pick it if: you live in a browser tab, you want the lightest decent desktop client, or Vommet feels heavy on your machine.

What about the others?

Asked and answered, so you don’t have to repeat our research:

• Commet — the upstream client Vommet is forked from, and a good one. Its v0.5 release (September 2026) added widgets, space folders and experimental encrypted Element Call. It runs on Windows, Linux, Android and the web (app.commet.chat). Pick it if you want the same app without our changes or without LLM-assisted code. Please report Vommet bugs to us, never to Commet.
• FluffyChat — friendly, genuinely fine, actively maintained; we just don’t need a fourth recommendation, and the three above cover its niches.
• SchildiChat — a respectable Element fork with a more traditional-IM feel; if you want that, you may as well run Element and stay closer to upstream.
• Nheko — nice lightweight native desktop client, but still officially beta and desktop-only.
• Cinny forks (Extera et al.) — the notable ones are dead. Use upstream Cinny.

If some new client catches your eye, the two questions that matter: does it do end-to-end encryption and cross-signed device verification properly, and has it had a release in the last few months? A client that fails either will eventually strand you staring at “unable to decrypt” — see encryption for why.