Meshtastic vs MeshCore vs Reticulum: off-grid messaging in 2026

On its "Join" page, the volunteer group that runs Austin's off-grid radio network puts its advice in bold: "We recommend MeshCore for all beginners." Austin Mesh still runs a Meshtastic network too, and still recommends it for weather stations and sensors. But for texting a friend across town, it says the Meshtastic network "is far less reliable for text messaging than MeshCore."

If your picture of this hobby is a year old, that's a strange thing to read. Meshtastic is the name everyone knows: more than 500,000 Android installs, a 53,000-member Discord, and cheap radios from half a dozen manufacturers that ship with it pre-installed. Over the past year, though, the field split. MeshCore, a younger project with a different routing design, grew city and national networks in Austin, Nashville, and the Netherlands. Meshtastic's 2.8 alpha started moving new US radios to a preset that can't hear the old one. MeshCore's own name became the subject of a trademark fight. And the developer behind Reticulum, the oldest of the alternatives, stepped away from public support while shipping faster than ever.

The hardware is the easy part of this decision. Most popular radios run either Meshtastic or MeshCore, and switching between them is a reflash in a browser. The software is where the real choice is, and where the sustainability questions sit.

The short answer: Meshtastic is still the most solid pick for most people. It's the most mature and most widely supported project, it's open source down to the apps, and it's the only one that works with no infrastructure at all. MeshCore is the strongest alternative where a city network already runs on it. Everything else is younger, narrower, or more experimental.

What these networks are

All of these projects do roughly the same job. A small LoRa radio, often the size of a credit card, pairs with your phone over Bluetooth. You type a message in an app, the radio sends it on unlicensed ISM frequencies (868 MHz in Europe, 915 MHz in the US), and other radios in range pass it along until it reaches the person you're writing to. No cell towers, no internet, no subscription. Range per hop depends mostly on terrain and antenna height. Seeed claims 5–8 km between two of its pocket devices; buildings and hills cut that down.

Bandwidth is tiny. Meshtastic's default preset moves about one kilobit per second, so these networks carry mostly text, positions, and sensor readings.

The thing to know before choosing anything: the networks don't talk to each other. Meshtastic and MeshCore use different packet formats. As the Australian retailer Little Bird Electronics put it, two nodes, one of each, side by side are "simply two devices that can't hear each other." A mesh is only useful if there are other nodes within range, so the first question isn't which design is best. It's which network the people around you already run. Third-party bridges exist, but they're projects, not a setting.

Meshtastic: the default, with growing pains

Meshtastic began in 2020 with founder Kevin Hester's first firmware commit and grew into the reference point for the whole category. Everything official is GPL-3.0: the firmware, the Android, Apple, and web apps, and the Python CLI. No official app is paid or closed. As of October 6, 2026, the firmware repository has 408 contributors all-time, the most of any project here, and 164 people committed to it in the past 12 months, with the top committer at about a quarter of those commits. The phone apps are smaller efforts, each led mostly by one developer.

How it routes. Meshtastic uses what it calls managed flooding. Every node that hears a message with hops remaining may rebroadcast it, after listening briefly to see whether a neighbor already did. Nodes farther from the sender wait less, so messages tend to jump outward. The default hop limit is 3 ("Really, 3 is fine," the docs say). Since version 2.6, direct messages remember which neighbor relayed successfully and send through it next time. Because ordinary handheld clients relay too, Meshtastic works with no infrastructure at all: two hikers, a festival crowd, or a family on a road trip form a mesh just by being near each other. Austin Mesh's comparison page makes the same point, calling Meshtastic best "when people/radios are moving."

Where it strains. Flooding costs airtime, and airtime is the scarce resource on a one-kilobit channel. Meshtastic's own blog advises moving off the default LongFast preset once a mesh has "more than 60 nodes." The Bay Area's network reports about 2,000 nodes observed, around 40% channel utilization all night, and only about 1% of traffic being text chat. Its operator summed it up in a write-up shared in September: "It works. Barely." The same document says people "largely stopped using DMs because they stopped trusting them," and that MeshCore "mostly started where we were trying to get." It also concedes that MeshCore benefits from hindsight and "hasn't yet been stress-tested the way Meshtastic has."

The 2.8 transition. The current alpha line, 2.8, is the biggest change in a while. Messages get signed, node IDs come from public keys, position and telemetry broadcasts become opt-in, and new US nodes default to a preset called LongTurbo instead of LongFast. The project's pull request gives FCC §15.247 compliance as the reason. LongTurbo and LongFast can't hear each other, and LongFast still accounts for about two-thirds of the nodes that report a preset on one large third-party map. Hackaday notes the FCC itself has said nothing publicly about LoRa meshes. Existing networks aren't forced to switch, but a US buyer next year may find a new radio and a neighbor's old one on different presets out of the box. For now, Beta is the channel to run (the latest is 2.7.26, from June 24), and 2.8 is still in alpha.

Security. Meshtastic publishes security advisories, which is good practice: 12 for the firmware in 2025–2026. The most notable found that some vendors' factory flashing had cloned encryption keypairs across devices, which 2.6.11 and 2.6.12 addressed. Channel messages use a shared key with no sender authentication, while direct messages have used public-key encryption since 2.5, and the signing in 2.8 closes part of the remaining gap.

Who pays for it. The project says Meshtastic LLC holds the trademark. A separate for-profit company, Meshtastic Solutions Inc., created by core contributors in 2024, runs paid partner, backer, and certification programs for hardware makers. Seeed, Heltec, LilyGO, RAK, and Elecrow are the five partners. Since mid-2025, "officially supported" status in the flasher and apps has been reserved for devices from vendors in those programs; other boards still get builds but not direct support. The project's Open Collective took in about $27,000 in the year to October 2026. What vendors pay Meshtastic Solutions isn't public. Meshtastic's web flasher also notes that its product links may earn the project a commission.

Sustainability read: the most mature, most widely supported, and best-funded project here, with real money from hardware vendors and a GPL codebase nobody can close. Its risks are operational ones: release quality and the US preset split.

MeshCore: built for cities, with a contested name

MeshCore is the work of Scott Powell, an Australian developer who had been building LoRa routing since his earlier Ripple projects and published MeshCore on GitHub in January 2025. The firmware is MIT-licensed. As of October 6, 2026, it has 170 contributors on GitHub, 165 people committed to it in the past 12 months, and the project's blog says nearly all five members of its core team work on it part time.

How it routes. MeshCore splits the network into roles. Your pocket radio is a companion: it talks to your phone and, by default, doesn't relay anyone else's traffic. Fixed repeaters do the relaying, and room servers act like small bulletin boards that hold messages for people who log in later. The first message to a contact floods. The delivery receipt records which repeaters it crossed, and after that messages carry the path inside the packet, so only repeaters on that path retransmit. Group channels still flood. The hop limit is 64.

That design is why city networks moved. A Nashville user whose group switched most of its infrastructure wrote in June that "Meshtastic was always dropping packets and you couldn't really have any sort of conversation on it," while on MeshCore "we can now have numerous different simultaneous conversations happening across multiple different channels with hundreds of users on the mesh at the same time." The Dutch community site meshcore.nl claims more than 2,000 repeaters in the Netherlands. As of October 6, MeshCore's official map counted 34,173 nodes active in the past 30 days, about 91% of them repeaters. The map is opt-in, so pocket devices are heavily undercounted.

Where it's weaker. No repeaters, no mesh. MeshCore's own FAQ says it isn't the best fit for field use like ATAK because "clients do not repeat and therefore you would need a network of repeaters in place." A rural user put the trade-off more bluntly: "With Meshcore, it can be nearly impossible, because you are completely dependent on infrastructure, which doesn't really exist." Version 1.13 added an opt-in off-grid repeat mode for companions, which helps small groups but isn't the default.

Encryption is the other gap worth knowing about. Every node has an Ed25519 identity and its adverts are signed, but the current protocol encrypts direct messages with AES-128 in ECB mode and a two-byte authentication tag, according to the source code. Cryptographers generally avoid ECB because identical blocks of plaintext produce identical ciphertext, and two bytes is a short tag. The README lists "new encryption specs" as part of a V2 protocol that isn't finished. That may not matter for chatting with neighbors, but it should matter for anything sensitive.

The paid and closed parts. The firmware is open, but the official phone app, built by core developer Liam Cottle, is closed source. Cottle has said he chose "a freemium, closed source approach (for now)" to move faster, and might open it later. The app is free with one in-app purchase, Remote Management ($7.99 in the US as of October 6, no subscription), which removes a wait timer when you administer repeaters over the radio. The desktop and web versions are fully unlocked for free. Powell's standalone Ripple firmware for keyboard devices such as the LilyGO T-Deck is also closed, with a $10-per-device unlock for admin and mapping features; basic messaging is free. Open-source alternatives exist: MeshCore Open (MIT, 41 contributors, still labeled pre-beta) and MeshCore One for Apple devices (GPL-3.0, in the App Store, with 97% of the past year's commits by one developer).

The split. In March 2026, Andy Kirby, who runs meshcore.co.uk and the server that was the project's original Discord, filed a UK trademark application for "MeshCore," followed by an EU application in April. The core team says he never contributed code, and he isn't in the repository's contributor list. Kirby told LWN that "the intention behind the application is to provide clarity and consistency around the platform and the supported ecosystem as it grows." Powell and Cottle say they formed a New Zealand company and filed their own trademark applications in several countries. They also raised $41,992 on the New Zealand platform Givealittle against a $25,000 goal for legal costs. By late July, the team reported that the UK application was in opposed status.

For users, the practical result is two parallel "MeshCore" brands. The developers run meshcore.io and a new Discord with 13,700 members. Kirby's meshcore.co.uk sells handsets with his own closed-source MeshOS software and kept the original Discord, now renamed MeshOS, with 10,200 members. One link to watch: flasher.meshcore.co.uk no longer belongs to the developers. The official flasher is flasher.meshcore.io.

The fight costs more than money. The team's July fundraising post says pull requests have been piling up while the legal work goes on; as of October 6 there were 471 open. The last tagged firmware release is v1.17.1, from August 14.

Sustainability read: an MIT-licensed firmware with a broad contributor base and fast-growing adoption. It's funded by a mix of app purchases, Buy Me a Coffee supporters, GitHub Sponsors, and hardware affiliate links. Nobody can take the firmware away; if the trademark fight went badly, the code would survive and the name would change. The real risks are a growing pull-request backlog, a closed official app, and a legal fight run by part-timers. It's also younger and still settling: the protocol's V2, with new encryption, isn't finished, and many regions changed their recommended radio settings as recently as October 2025.

Reticulum: a network stack, not a radio app

Reticulum is a different kind of thing, and a feature-by-feature comparison with the other two undersells and oversells it at once. It's a full networking stack, developed by Mark Qvist for more than a decade, that runs over "practically any medium" fast enough to carry 500 bits per second: LoRa, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, packet radio, I2P, or the internet. On LoRa, the radio runs RNode firmware and acts as a modem, while the real endpoint is a phone or computer running Reticulum. Messaging uses LXMF, which stores and forwards messages through propagation nodes, and encryption is mandatory. Apps include Sideband for Android and desktop, the terminal-based NomadNet, and third-party clients such as Columba for Android and MeshChatX for desktop.

Its strength is hybrid networks. "What Reticulum allows is to build insane (local) hybrid networks with fast backbones via Wifi, 60GHz links and Ethernet with secondary last-mile interfaces built over LoRa," one user wrote in August. The same post argued it's "even a bad idea to rely solely on RNodes because the protocol is less efficient over LoRa than e.g. Meshcore." Others find it heavy going: "far too complex and needs a higher power draw to run python code," as another user put it.

The maintainer question. Reticulum is close to a one-person system: Qvist wrote about 96% of the core's commits over the past 12 months. In May 2025 he wrote that recurring donations came to €96 a month and that "I'm exhausted, and I need to recover." In December 2025 he turned the GitHub repositories into mirrors and announced "no support, no responses to issues, no discussions, and no community management in this or any other public venue," adding: "This is not a temporary break."

Since then he has shipped more, not less: 41 releases of the core package on PyPI so far in 2026, against 13 in all of 2025. But development now happens over Reticulum itself, and the GitHub mirror trails PyPI. As of October 6, the project's Liberapay takes in about €146 a week from 48 patrons.

The license question. In April 2025 the core moved from MIT to the "Reticulum License," which is the MIT text plus two restrictions. The software may not be used in systems that can "purposefully do harm to human beings," and it may not be used in AI training datasets. Field-of-use restrictions like these fall outside the Open Source Definition, a point the project's manual takes up and disputes at length. The pieces around the core are more restrictive still. Sideband is CC BY-NC-SA, so forks can't be commercial. LXST, the voice layer, is CC BY-NC-ND, so a modified version can't legally be distributed at all. The protocol itself has been in the public domain since 2016, and the README recognizes two independent implementations, microReticulum in C++ and Reticulum-Go.

Sustainability read: the most technically ambitious option and the most frequently released one. It rests on one person who has said publicly that he won't support it, under licenses that limit who can carry its parts forward. It suits people who want to build their own network and can troubleshoot alone. As a family's emergency messenger, it's a hard sell.

The rest of the field

MeshCom is the ham-radio option. It's MIT-licensed firmware from ICSSW, an Austrian non-profit, that sends unencrypted, APRS-style messages on the 70 cm band (433 MHz in most places). Each node is identified by an amateur callsign, so in practice it needs a license, and it needs 433 MHz hardware rather than the 868/915 MHz boards everyone else uses. It's active (v4.40a shipped October 2) and is used mainly in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

Bitchat needs no radio at all. It's a phone-to-phone Bluetooth mesh, with Wi-Fi Aware on Android and internet relays when they're available. Press coverage ties it to Jack Dorsey; the iOS app is public domain and the Android app GPL-3.0. Range is Bluetooth range per hop, so it's a tool for a protest or a festival, not for reaching the next valley. Community bridges to Meshtastic exist, but LoRa isn't built in.

Blackout Comms is closed-source LoRa firmware for the T-Deck and similar devices. It's free for up to three devices and costs $25, once, for a private cluster of up to 90. It's a small commercial option rather than a community network.

Graveyard. disaster.radio, an early open LoRa mesh, has been "paused" since its maintainer stepped back in 2021, and its own repository points users to Meshtastic. goTenna's consumer Mesh devices are gone. The security researchers who reported their flaws say goTenna discontinued its whole civilian line in 2024, further vulnerabilities in those devices were published in 2025, and goTenna was acquired by the defense company Forterra in October 2025. If you still have goTenna Mesh units, Meshtastic or MeshCore on a radio like the one below replaces them.

Side by side

Which one to pick

If your area already has a mesh, join it. Two maps show what's running near you. MeshMap is a nearly live, open-source map of Meshtastic nodes, and MeshCore has its own node map. Both undercount. MeshMap only shows nodes that report a position and are heard by an internet-connected node, and MeshCore's map is opt-in. The local groups list in Meshtastic's docs and community sites such as austinmesh.org or meshcore.nl fill in the rest. A technically better network with nobody on it is worse than a busy one. One Meshtastic user learned this the hard way when the local router everyone relied on switched to MeshCore: "Mesh activity in my area was decimated."

Otherwise, start with Meshtastic. It's the most solid pick here: the longest track record, formal backing from the hardware makers, open source down to the apps, and a design that works without anyone having put up a repeater. That makes it the right fit for groups on the move, such as hiking trips, events, or keeping track of a few family members, and for sensor and telemetry networks. The other projects are younger, narrower, or more experimental, and a radio bought for Meshtastic can move to MeshCore later if your area goes that way.

Pick MeshCore instead for messaging across a city or region where repeaters already exist or you're willing to put one up, and when you care more about messages arriving than about the app being open. Get it from meshcore.io and flash it from flasher.meshcore.io.

Pick Reticulum if you want to build a network that spans radio and IP, you're comfortable at a command line, and you don't need anyone to answer your questions.

Pick MeshCom if you're a licensed ham in central Europe. Pick Bitchat if you need something tonight with no hardware and short range is fine.

The lock-in is low. Your message history isn't the valuable part; the network is, and the same radio flashes between Meshtastic and MeshCore in a few minutes. The cost of switching is social, not technical.

What to buy

(Full disclosure: the Seeed links in this section are affiliate links, and the discount code is an affiliate code too. Buying through them is one of the ways this site is paid for.)

The simplest way to start is two SenseCAP Card Tracker T1000-E radios, $39.90 each from Seeed as of October 6, 2026, before shipping and tax. You need two because a single radio has nobody to talk to unless a mesh already covers you.

The T1000-E is credit-card size and IP65, with GPS, internal antennas, and a 700 mAh battery Seeed rates at about two days. It has no screen: you pair it with the phone app and type there. It comes with Meshtastic pre-installed, reflashes to MeshCore from the browser, and is on Meshtastic's own list of community-favorite boards. One model covers 862–930 MHz, so you pick your region in the app instead of buying a band-specific version.

It has three limits. Its LR1110 radio can't receive directly from older SX127x radios, found in boards such as early T-Beams, LilyGO T3 v1.6, and Heltec V2; Meshtastic's device page says fixing that needs a breaking change. It still hears them when any newer node relays their messages, and boards that might use those radios made up at most about 6% of the nodes on MeshMap on October 7. It can't run Reticulum, because RNode has no driver for the LR1110; the RNode README lists the boards that work. And buy the Meshtastic version, not the LoRaWAN one: MeshCore's flasher warns that flashing MeshCore onto the LoRaWAN version can brick it.

On October 6, the code PW93BZQ6 took 5% off at checkout, and Seeed's store was taking 10% off automatically for two or more of its T1000-E, Wio Tracker, or Solar Node devices. If you want a model with a screen (the Wio Tracker L1 Pro, for example), a solar repeater for the roof, or a bare board to tinker with, Seeed's Meshtastic range has them in one place.

When it arrives, set your region in the app first, because Meshtastic won't transmit until you do. If you later switch it to MeshCore, erasing it wipes its keys and contacts, so back them up first.

A year ago, the advice on off-grid messaging fit in one word: Meshtastic. For most people it still does, but it's no longer the only answer, and the choice is mostly about software, people, and money rather than radios. Meshtastic has the largest contributor base over its lifetime and formal vendor backing, and it's working through its growing pains in public. MeshCore has the better design for cities, but it's younger, its app is closed, and its name is in dispute. Reticulum has the most ambitious design and a maintainer who has stepped back from public support. Because the hardware is shared and switching costs a reflash, you don't have to get it right the first time. You have to get it right for the people within range.