Comparison between Tigase, Openfire and any other open-source XMPP servers

Question

I've been looking at these too, both seem to provide fully functional XMPP servers in Java. I know Tigase is designed in a very modular way, not looked at Openfire in as much detail yet.

My intended use would be to create a custom IM-based app, using XMPP for convenience rather than to open my server up to talk to other XMPP servers.

I'm trying to evaluate my needs based on the following, roughly in order of importance:

1. Documentation coverage & community
2. How easy to plug in own functionality
3. Licensing/cost - I don't plan to release my code
4. Maturity and stability

Pyrography

Answer 1

Do not use Openfire if you expect to scale beyond a couple of thousand concurrent connections.

Tigase is amazing at handling hundreds of thousands concurrent connections and is wonderfully architected for largely distributed platforms where XMPP is simply the external interface. It comes with a price of rather poor documentation. You often need to go and read the source code to understand what's going on.

Openfire is perfect for small setups and its API is simple and very well documented. Unfortunately, it's not architected to scale even nearly close to what tigase is capable of.

Urine

Tigase is GPL though, unfortunately. – Pyrography

Do you need to redistribute your code? Tigase is a typical backend system and as long as you do not redistribute it with some modifications under some other label, you shouldn't worry about GPL. Simply use it for your backend needs. – Urine

@Urine yes this loophole is OK if I run a hosted service, but many customers might want to install their own server on their network instead of trusting the cloud. – Pyrography

Also keep in mind that non GPL code can interact with GPL code via APIs without the non GPL code becoming subject to GPL. There's nothing stopping you from just telling the customers installing your software on their own servers that they need to also install Tigase and configure it per your specs. – Hawkshaw

You should also mention your hardware specs if you claim that openfire has certain concurrency. Things also depend on your hardware. – Incorporeal

Answer 2

Tigase is GPL(even version 3) licensed opposed to OpenFire being under Apache license ... for closed source application is OpenFire the go.

It is embaddable and proven to be reliable - 1000s of concurrent users. It even has gateways to communicate with legacy networks - like ICQ.

Only drawback I can se here is that it can handle only one domain per instance(port), however from your description that should not be a problem.

Bedder

Can you add any detail on "it is embeddable"? – Pyrography

Since it's the only answer I will give you the bounty, it's not as much information as I was after though so if you can expand, please do! – Pyrography

Tigase is not embeddable officially it seems, but i've seen few threads that people uses it in embedded manner. Apache Vysper is a really good embeddable xmpp server but development is not active at all. – Outpatient

Answer 3

I totally agree with @Yuriy in that Tigase is great for high scalability whereas Openfire is more suitable for small, novice IT running chat for a SMB. I have gone into more detail on this in my blog on Tigase vs Openfire.

Whirl

Answer 4

And Openfire 3.7.0.beta is out since some days now. Lots of bug fixes, now also support Solaris as host system.

Sain

Answer 5

Concerning openfire ... it seems to be more or less abandoned and certainly not because of lack bugs to fix ;)

Florettaflorette

2019, new commits and releases available: github.com/igniterealtime/Openfire/commits/master – Tailgate