Conduit is a free, open-source Matrix homeserver written in Rust. It runs as a single binary with an embedded database, ideal for low-resource self-hosting.
Conduit is a free, open-source Matrix homeserver written in Rust, started by developer Timo Kösters in February 2020 with support from the Berlin-based secure-messaging company Famedly. It later received six months of funding from Germany's Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) to support its development as open digital infrastructure.
The project's core goal is simplicity: it ships as a single binary with an embedded database rather than requiring a separately managed database server, making it noticeably lighter to set up and run than Synapse, the reference Matrix homeserver implementation.
Conduit implements the Matrix federation protocol, so a self-hosted instance can communicate with users on any other compliant Matrix homeserver, and can bridge to external chat platforms like Discord through standard Matrix bridges. Being written in Rust, it aims for strong performance and memory safety with low resource requirements, explicitly targeting hardware as modest as a Raspberry Pi.
The project is licensed under Apache 2.0 and hosted on GitLab under the Famedly namespace. Its most active fork, 'Conduwuit,' added features and fixes at a faster pace and has since been succeeded by a project called 'Tuwunel,' so researchers evaluating Conduit today should check which codebase is most actively maintained for their needs.
Conduit is entirely free and open source with no commercial tier, subscription, or vendor behind it as a product. There is no cost to download, modify, or run it.
The only expense involved is the infrastructure an individual or organization chooses to run it on, which — thanks to its low resource footprint — can be inexpensive compared to hosting a full Synapse deployment.
Yes, Conduit is free and open source under the Apache 2.0 license; you only pay for the server it runs on.
It's written in Rust and uses an embedded database (RocksDB by default) instead of a separate database server.
It was created by Timo Kösters, with support from Famedly, a Berlin-based secure-messaging company.
The project describes itself as beta — usable today but still missing some smaller features found in more mature homeservers like Synapse.
Conduwuit is a community hard fork of Conduit that added features at a faster pace, and Tuwunel is described as its official successor.