Discrio
Discrio and Signal
Written by the people who built Discrio, on Signal's own cryptographic library. Where Signal is the better choice, this page says so — partly because it is true, and partly because a comparison that never concedes anything is one nobody should believe.
The short version
Signal needs a phone number and keeps an account for you. Discrio keeps neither. That single difference produces every other one on this page, in both directions.
The cryptography is not a difference. Discrio uses libsignal, the same audited library Signal ships, pinned to an exact commit and unmodified. Nobody here invented a cipher, and an app that had would be the wrong one to trust.
Choose Signal if
- You want your conversations on a phone, a tablet and a desktop at once. Discrio has no account, so there is nothing to sync and no second device.
- You want group chats. Discrio is one-to-one only.
- You want your history to survive a lost phone. Discrio keeps nothing anywhere that could restore it, which is the point and also the cost.
- You are on Android, or the people you talk to are. Discrio ships on iPhone.
- You want the largest possible number of people to already have it. Signal has that and it matters: the safest app is the one the other person will actually install.
Choose Discrio if
- The phone itself may be taken. A second passphrase opens an app that looks identical, holding ordinary conversations. Nothing on screen says which passphrase was typed — no alarm, no notification, no delay. An optional third destroys everything first. How that works, and what it cannot do.
- You cannot give a phone number. There is no number, no email, no username and no directory. Two people connect by showing a code in person or sending a link that works once and expires in 24 hours. Nobody can search for you, because there is nothing to search.
- The server must have nothing to hand over. No user table and no contact graph were ever created. The relay holds fixed-size encrypted blocks at random addresses, deletes them on collection, and expires them after 21 days regardless. It can be self-hosted.
- There may be no internet at all. Two phones in the same room exchange messages directly over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, with nothing leaving the room.
- Somebody may photograph your screen. No software prevents that, and Discrio does not claim to. What it offers is a mode revealing about one word at a time under your finger, agreed words where one word stands for another and the meaning never renders, spelling bent on the way out so a picture cannot quote you, and a watermark identifying the device a leaked screenshot came from.
Side by side
| Discrio | Signal | |
|---|---|---|
| Account | None | Phone number |
| Findable by search | No directory exists | By phone number |
| Cryptography | libsignal | libsignal |
| Post-quantum | PQXDH, plus SPQR through the session | PQXDH, plus SPQR through the session |
| Message size on the wire | Always 8192 bytes | Varies with the message |
| Group chats | No | Yes |
| Multiple devices | No | Yes |
| Works with no internet | Yes, phone to phone | No |
| Second vault under duress | Yes | No |
| Self-hostable server | Yes | No |
| Platforms | iPhone | iPhone, Android, desktop |
| Independent audit | None published | Yes |
| Licence | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
What Discrio has not got
An independent security audit. None has been published, and until one is, no security claim about this app should be treated as established — including the ones on this page. Signal has been audited and has been examined by researchers for a decade. That is a real difference and it does not go away because the underlying library is shared.
A large user base. An app nobody you know will install protects nothing. This is the honest limit of any newer messenger.
Any way to hide that you use it. Every server sees the address a connection comes from. Discrio does not log it, but that is a policy rather than mathematics — anyone who needs to hide the fact of using it should use Tor or a VPN, and that is true of Signal too.
Both, probably
These are not competing answers to one question. Signal is the everyday messenger for people who want their conversations private and their lives ordinary. Discrio is for the narrower case where the phone may be handed over and looked through — and it is built on Signal's work rather than against it.
Questions: support@discrio.com · Discrio on the App Store · Last updated 15 September 2026