Tuwunel is a free, open-source Matrix homeserver in Rust, the official successor to conduwuit, built for scalable self-hosted chat deployments.
Tuwunel is a free, open-source Matrix protocol homeserver written entirely in Rust. It was created under the matrix-construct organization on GitHub, with development beginning in February 2025, and is explicitly positioned as the official successor to conduwuit, a well-regarded high-performance fork of the original Conduit Matrix homeserver that was later discontinued.
The project's goal is to provide a highly available, horizontally scalable, and fully specification-compliant Matrix homeserver capable of supporting large volumes of messaging traffic with minimal latency. According to its developers, migrating an existing conduwuit deployment to Tuwunel is effectively a binary swap, making adoption straightforward for operators already running conduwuit.
Tuwunel is developed by a small team of full-time contributors and has institutional backing that reportedly includes sponsorship from the government of Switzerland, where the homeserver is deployed for citizen-facing communication services. This level of institutional investment is relatively unusual among self-hosted Matrix homeserver projects.
Performance is a central focus for Tuwunel. Independent 2026 benchmark testing reportedly found it completing several standard Matrix workload scenarios faster than Synapse, the Matrix protocol's original reference server implementation, with some configurations reportedly achieving over nine times faster response times in an 18-worker Synapse comparison.
The homeserver supports modern authentication methods out of the box, including OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect (OIDC), LDAP, and JWT, giving organizations flexibility to integrate Tuwunel with existing identity providers. It also supports Matrix RTC, enabling compatibility with Element Call for voice and video conferencing over the Matrix protocol.
For operators migrating from other homeservers, Tuwunel provides compatibility with Synapse's admin API endpoints, easing the transition of existing administrative tooling. The project reports passing more than 80 percent of the official Matrix homeserver specification acceptance test suite, reflecting a strong focus on protocol compliance.
Tuwunel is released under the Apache License 2.0 and is entirely free to download, self-host, and modify, with no license fees or paid tiers. As with most self-hosted Matrix homeserver software, costs are limited to the infrastructure an organization chooses to run it on; there is no official managed hosting or SaaS pricing plan offered directly by the project, and support is provided through its open-source community and institutional sponsors.
Tuwunel is a free, open-source Matrix protocol homeserver written in Rust, built as the official successor to conduwuit.
Yes, Tuwunel is released under the Apache License 2.0 and is free to self-host with no license fees.
Tuwunel is the official successor to conduwuit after that project was discontinued; existing conduwuit deployments can migrate to Tuwunel via a straightforward binary swap.
Independent 2026 benchmarks reportedly showed Tuwunel outperforming Synapse in several test scenarios, in some cases by more than nine times.
Tuwunel supports OAuth 2.0, OIDC, LDAP, and JWT authentication out of the box.
Yes, through Matrix RTC support, which enables compatibility with Element Call.
Tuwunel is developed under the matrix-construct organization by a small team of full-time contributors with reported institutional sponsorship, including from the government of Switzerland.
Both are successor projects that emerged after conduwuit was discontinued; Tuwunel is described as the official successor, while Continuwuity is a separate community-driven fork focused on user experience and new features.