Novu vs Rocket.Chat

Both are self-hosted communication - custom communication systems projects. This page compares how well each one is actually maintained — the part you cannot see from a feature list.

Novu and Rocket.Chat are closely matched on maintenance health (92 vs 92). Neither is the safer bet on activity alone, so choose on features, licence and the stack you already run.
NovuRocket.Chat
Health score 92/100 92/100
Commits (11 mo) 2197 2097
Commits (last 3 mo) 797 630
Stars 40k 46k
Latest release 7 Sept 2026 23 Sept 2026
Licence MIT MIT
Built with Docker, Nodejs Nodejs, Docker, K8S
Typical RAM 2 GB 2 GB

Novu

Notification infrastructure for developers.

92/100
Thriving

High commit volume, frequent releases and growing activity.

Maintenance 36/40
Releases 25/25
Community 19/20
Momentum 12/15

Commit activity more than 90% of tracked projects; popularity more than 95%. How this is calculated.

Commits, last 11 months

2025-10: 115 commits 2025-11: 87 commits 2025-12: 105 commits 2026-01: 114 commits 2026-02: 104 commits 2026-03: 281 commits 2026-04: 239 commits 2026-05: 355 commits 2026-06: 288 commits 2026-07: 293 commits 2026-08: 216 commits

Rocket.Chat

Communications platform that puts data protection first (alternative to Gitter.im and Slack).

92/100
Thriving

High commit volume, frequent releases and growing activity.

Maintenance 36/40
Releases 25/25
Community 19/20
Momentum 12/15

Commit activity more than 90% of tracked projects; popularity more than 96%. How this is calculated.

Commits, last 11 months

2025-10: 168 commits 2025-11: 137 commits 2025-12: 303 commits 2026-01: 143 commits 2026-02: 203 commits 2026-03: 172 commits 2026-04: 167 commits 2026-05: 174 commits 2026-06: 199 commits 2026-07: 274 commits 2026-08: 157 commits

How to read this

Everything above is measured, not opinion: commit counts and release dates come from the public repositories, and the health score ranks each project against all 1352 projects we track. Read the full method.

What this comparison deliberately does not do is tell you which has the better feature set. Maintenance health tells you which project will still be receiving security fixes in two years. Decide that first, then compare features on the projects that survive the filter.

See every option in this category: self-hosted communication - custom communication systems.