Element: Encrypted Chat on Matrix

If you have ever wondered why every encrypted-messaging conversation seems to end up in WhatsApp or Signal, the answer is that those are the only two consumer apps where end-to-end encryption is on by default and the company has not muddied the picture with backdoors. Element is the third option, and the only one that comes with a key feature missing from the other two: federation. You can run your own server, or use someone else’s, and still talk to anyone on any other Matrix server in the world. This guide walks through what Element is, how Matrix works, what it costs, and where it falls short.

Matrix is to chat what email is to written messages: an open protocol where anyone can run a server, and servers talk to each other so users on different ones can communicate. Element is the most popular Matrix client, made by the same people who created the protocol.

What is Element, in plain English?

Element is a messaging app. You install it on your phone or computer, sign up for a free account on a Matrix server (the default is matrix.org, but you can pick any other), and start chatting one-to-one or in rooms with other Matrix users. Messages are encrypted from your device to the recipient’s device with the same kind of cryptography that secures Signal and WhatsApp. Voice calls and video calls work. Group rooms can scale to hundreds of thousands of users. Files, images, and voice notes all work. And if matrix.org disappeared tomorrow, your conversations would keep working with everyone on every other Matrix server.

Underneath the app, you are using Matrix, an open protocol stewarded by the non-profit Matrix.org Foundation. Element the company is the largest commercial contributor to Matrix, but it does not own the protocol. That distinction matters: with Signal, you depend on the Signal Foundation; with WhatsApp, you depend on Meta. With Matrix, you depend on a network that is fundamentally not owned by any single party.

What is Matrix, and how is it different from Signal or WhatsApp?

Signal and WhatsApp are centralized. Everyone uses the same servers run by one company. The company can be subpoenaed, acquired, or coerced into changes you might not like. Matrix is federated. Picture email: you have a Gmail address, your friend has an Outlook address, you can email each other because Gmail and Outlook speak the same protocol. Matrix works the same way for chat. Your address is @you:matrix.org or @you:university.edu or @you:your-own-server.com. You can message anyone whose address ends in any other Matrix server.

The protocol was started in 2014 by Matthew Hodgson and Amandine Le Pape inside the company Amdocs. When Amdocs pulled funding, the team founded New Vector (later renamed Element) and continued the work. The non-profit Matrix.org Foundation was formally established in 2018 to steward the protocol independently. The current spec is v1.18, with Matrix 2.0 effectively shipped in October 2024 across four upgrades: Sliding Sync (instant loading), native OpenID Connect login, Matrix RTC (encrypted group video calls), and Invisible Encryption (encryption with no UX friction).

How does federation actually work?

The mental model is exactly like email, just for chat. A Matrix server (called a homeserver) runs software like Synapse, Dendrite, or Conduit. The server hosts user accounts, stores message history, and gossips with other Matrix servers over the public internet. When you send a message in a room that includes users from three different servers, your message is replicated to all three servers, each of which delivers it to its local users.

• You can use a public homeserver. matrix.org is the largest and free. There are hundreds of others run by universities, communities, and privacy-focused providers.
• You can run your own. A Raspberry Pi at home is enough for a small family server. Synapse runs in Docker; the Element Server Suite Community edition is free for up to 100 users.
• You can run an air-gapped network. France and Germany’s defense departments run private Matrix federations that never touch the public internet.

The decentralization matters because no single party can take Matrix down. If matrix.org went offline tomorrow, every other Matrix server would keep running. If Element the company shut down, the protocol would survive because the Matrix.org Foundation owns the spec and dozens of independent server and client implementations exist.

Is Element really end-to-end encrypted?

Yes. Element uses end-to-end encryption by default for all direct messages, private rooms, and voice and video calls. The cryptographic stack is built on Olm and Megolm, the open-source ratchet protocols designed for Matrix that are functionally similar to the Signal Protocol’s Double Ratchet. The current implementation is a Rust library called vodozemac, which replaced the older libolm in 2022 and was independently audited.

• Olm handles one-to-one device sessions. Same Double Ratchet construction that Signal pioneered.
• Megolm handles group rooms. One outbound session per sender per room, distributed to recipients via Olm. This is the mechanism that lets Matrix scale encryption to rooms with hundreds of thousands of users.
• Cross-signing ties multiple devices to a single user identity. Verify one device, and you can verify the rest of your account at once.

The trade-off compared to Signal is that Matrix’s encryption has more moving parts because the protocol federates. More moving parts means more failure modes. The most common failure mode for new users is the “Unable to decrypt” placeholder that appears when device verification was skipped. The fix is to verify your devices via emoji comparison, which is what the next section walks through.

What does Element cost?

Free for personal use. The Element client (mobile, desktop, web) is open-source under the AGPL license. You can sign up on any public Matrix homeserver, or use Element with a homeserver you self-host, without paying a cent. Element the company makes its money from Element Server Suite (ESS), which is the productized commercial offering sold to enterprises and governments.

Tier	Deployment	Price	Best for
Personal	Public homeserver	$0	Individual users, friends, hobby communities
ESS Community	Self-hosted, up to 100 users	$0	Small org or family Synapse + Element Call
ESS Enterprise	Self-hosted, 100+ users	Contact sales (per seat)	Companies, universities, larger orgs
ESS Sovereign	Air-gapped (no internet)	Contact sales (per deployment)	Defense, intelligence, classified networks

If you only care about chatting with friends, the free Personal tier on matrix.org is all you will ever need. Element Pro, launched in January 2026, is a workplace-focused fork of Element X with branding, SSO, content scanning, and audit logs.

Who actually uses Element today?

The verifiable list is long and serious. Element and Matrix are no longer fringe technology.

• Mozilla replaced its old IRC infrastructure with Matrix in March 2020 and runs the public mozilla.org homeserver.
• KDE, GNOME, Fedora, FOSDEM: open-source projects use Matrix as their primary community chat. Linux conferences run their event chat on it.
• France: the only authorized civil-service messenger is Tchap, a Matrix fork; the upcoming La Suite Visio runs on Matrix.
• Germany: BwMessenger for the Bundeswehr (classified networks), BundesMessenger for federal public sector, TI-Messenger for healthcare via Gematik, plus 2.5 million schoolchildren in North Rhine-Westphalia on LOGINEO and 1.8 million Bavarian students on SDUI, both Matrix-based.
• Sweden: Försäkringskassan and Trafikverket demoed Element interop with Rocket.Chat in May 2026; eSam is recommending Matrix as the public-sector standard.
• Defense and international: NATO, US Space Force, US Marines, US Navy, the International Criminal Court (which migrated off Microsoft Office in October 2025), Swiss Post, Polish Armed Forces, and the Ukraine government.

Matthew Hodgson told The Register in February 2026 that Element is “currently talking to circa 35 countries” about national-deployment contracts. The total Matrix user base is widely cited as 200+ million, though independently verifiable counts go up to tens of millions on the matrix.org homeserver alone, plus thousands of independent deployments.

How do I set up Element without losing my message history?

This is the part where Element confuses first-time users. The cryptographic backup model has three terms that are not synonyms:

• Security Key (also called Recovery Key in newer Element X branding). A long, randomly-generated string of about 48 characters. Without it, you cannot recover encrypted history if you lose all logged-in devices.
• Security Phrase. A passphrase you choose. Optional, makes the Security Key easier to re-enter from memory.
• Cross-signing. The mechanism that ties multiple devices to one user identity. When you sign in on a second device, the first device must verify it, usually by comparing seven emoji.

The walkthrough a new user actually goes through:

1. Download Element X from your app store, or open app.element.io in a browser.
2. Pick a homeserver. The default matrix.org is fine for trying Element out.
3. Sign up with a username and password. Element generates a Security Key automatically and asks you to save it. Save it somewhere offline. A password manager entry. A piece of paper. Without it, if you lose your devices, encrypted message history is gone forever. This is by design, not a bug.
4. Optionally add a Security Phrase so you can re-enter the key from memory.
5. Start a chat. By default, direct messages are end-to-end encrypted. Group rooms are encrypted by default if you create them, opt-in if you join existing ones.
6. When you sign in on a second device, the first device will ping you to verify. Compare the seven emoji on both screens. If they match, hit confirm. If they do not match, it could be a man-in-the-middle attempt; do not click confirm.

How does Element compare to Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Discord?

Need	Best tool	Why
Self-hosting	Element	Only major messenger that lets you run your own server
Casual one-tap UX	Signal	Simplest setup, no Security-Key gotchas
Network effect (everyone you know)	WhatsApp	3 billion users; same Signal Protocol underneath
Large public communities	Telegram or Discord	200k-member channels work better than Matrix rooms at that scale
No phone number required	Element or Discord	Signal and WhatsApp require a phone number; Matrix does not
Bridges to other networks	Element	Matrix bridges to Signal, WhatsApp, Discord, Telegram, IRC, Slack
Government / classified networks	Element	Sovereign / air-gapped deployments are a real product

What works well and what frustrates new users?

Praise that comes up repeatedly

• Real decentralization. No single company can pull the plug.
• Bridges to everywhere. You can run a Matrix bridge that lets you read your Signal, WhatsApp, Discord, and Slack messages from the same Element interface.
• Spaces for organization. Group rooms into sub-spaces like Slack workspaces or Discord servers.
• Matrix RTC video calls. Encrypted group video that actually works as of Matrix 2.0.
• No phone number required. The privacy floor is lower than Signal’s.

Complaints that come up repeatedly

• Setup is more complicated than Signal. Security Key + Security Phrase + cross-signing is more cognitive load than typing in a phone number.
• “Unable to decrypt” messages when device verification was skipped, which still happens to first-time users.
• Element X is missing features that Element Classic still has: full message search, threads, voice notes, sub-spaces. Many users keep both apps installed.
• Sync can lag compared to WhatsApp on slow connections, especially in large federated rooms.
• The 200 million users claim from element.io is unverifiable; the matrix.org server alone has tens of millions, and the broader federation network is materially larger, but no single audited number exists.

Should I use Element X or Element Classic?

For new users, start with Element X. It is faster, ships Matrix 2.0 features (Sliding Sync, OIDC, RTC), and is on a one-release-per-week cadence. As of May 2026, Element X mobile is at version 26.05 on both iOS and Android. Element Web Classic is still on roughly the same release cadence (v1.12.18 stable as of mid-May 2026).

You will want Element Classic as a fallback if you need: full message search, threads, voice notes, advanced moderation, sub-spaces, or any of the workplace-style features Element X has not yet absorbed. The team has signaled that Element X will eventually replace Classic (“we will drop the X”), but no firm sunset date for Classic exists.

Frequently asked questions about Element

Is Element really free?

Yes. The client is open-source under the AGPL license. Public homeservers like matrix.org accept free accounts. The Element Server Suite Community edition is also free for up to 100 self-hosted users. You only pay if you need ESS Enterprise or Sovereign tiers for a serious organization.

Is Element as secure as Signal?

The cryptographic primitives are equally strong (both use Double Ratchet variants). Signal has a simpler attack surface because it is centralized; Matrix has a richer feature set because it is federated. For the average user, both are far more secure than any non-E2EE messenger. For a high-risk threat model, Signal’s minimalism is arguably easier to verify.

Can I use Element with AI assistants like Claude?

Indirectly. Matrix has bots and a public Application Service API, so you can build integrations that connect a Matrix room to Claude or another model. End-to-end encryption complicates this: if you want the AI to see your messages, you have to grant it explicit access, usually via a bridge that decrypts inside your trust boundary.

What happens if matrix.org disappears?

You lose your matrix.org account, but the wider Matrix network keeps running. Every other homeserver continues to operate. You can sign up on a different homeserver and rejoin rooms with the same federated identity. This is the practical benefit of federation: no single failure point.

Should I self-host a Matrix server?

For most individuals, no, just use matrix.org. For a small organization, family, or activist group that wants full data control, yes; Synapse on a $5/month VPS works fine for up to a few hundred users. The Element Server Suite Community installer makes setup easier than it used to be.

Sources and where to go deeper

• Element official site
• Element pricing (ESS Community / Enterprise / Sovereign)
• Matrix.org Foundation
• Matrix Client-Server specification v1.18
• Matrix 2.0 launch (Oct 2024)
• Element X launch announcement
• Element Pro for the workplace (Jan 2026)
• The Register: Matrix messaging gaining ground in government (Feb 2026)
• Matrix protocol (Grokipedia)
• Element GitHub organization (open-source repos)

You may also like

• Software Tools Hub, the parent category
• What Is End-to-End Encryption?, the privacy primitive every encrypted messenger uses
• Anytype: Private Second Brain, the encrypted notes companion to encrypted chat
• Brave Leo AI, the encrypted AI assistant in the same privacy cluster
• Venice AI, encrypted AI chat
• The FOSS Movement, the open-source background for everything in this cluster
• What Is Local-First Software?, the related architecture pattern