In my day job I’m responsible of maintaining the VoIP and XMPP infrastructure. That’s about approx. 40.000 phones and several thousand users using Enterprise XMPP software. Namely it is Cisco CUCM and IM&P on the server side and Cisco Jabber on the client side. There is also Cisco Webex and Cisco Telepresence infrastructure to maintain.
On the other hand I’m running an XMPP server myself for a few users. It all started with ejabberd more than a decade ago or so. Then I moved to Openfire, because it was more modern and had a nice web GUI for administration. At some point there was Prosody as a new shiny star. This is now running for many users, mostly without any problems, but without much love and attention as well.
It all started as “Let’s see what this Jabber stuff is…” on a subdomain like jabber.domain.com – it was later that I discovered the benefits of SRV records and the possibility of having the same address for mail, XMPP and SIP. So I began to provide XMPP acounts as well for some of my mail domains.
A year ago I enabled XMPP for my Friendica node on Nerdica.net, the second largest Friendica node according to the-federation.info. Although there are hundreds of monthly active users on Friendica, only a handful of users are using XMPP. XMPP has a hard stand since Google and Facebook went from open federation to closing in their user base.
My personal impression is that there is a lot of development in the last years in regards of XMPP – thanks to the Conversations client on Android – and its Compliance Tester. With that tool it is quite easy to have a common ground for the most needed features of todays user expectation in a mobile world. There is also some news in regards to XMPP clients on Apple iOS, but that’s for another article.
This is about the server side, namely Prosody and Ejabberd. Of course there are already several excellent comparisons between these two server softwares. So, this is just my personal opinion and personal impressions about the two softwares I got in the past two weeks.
Prosody:
As I have the most experience with Prosody I’ll start with it. Prosody has the advantage of being actively maintained and having lots of community modules to extend its functionality. This is a big win – but there is also the other side of truth: you’ll need to install and configure many contrib modules to pass 100% in the Compliance Tester. Some modules might be not that well maintained. Another obstacle I faced with Prosody is the configuration style: usually you have the main config file where you can configure common settings, modules for all virtual hosts and components like PubSub, MUC, HTTP Upload and such. And then there are the config files for the virtual hosts, which feature the same kind of configuration. Important to all is (apparently): order does matter! This can get confusing: Components are similar to loading modules, using both for the same purpose can be, well, interesting. and configuration of modules and components can be challenging as well. When trying to get mod_http_upload working in the last days I experienced that a config on one virtual host was working, but the same config on a different host was not working. This was when I thought I might give Ejabberd a chance…
Ejabberd:
Contrary to Prosody there is a company behind Ejabberd. And this is often perceived as being good and bring some stability to Ejabberd. However, when I joined Ejabberd chat room, I learned in the first minutes by regarding the chat log that the main developer of that company left and the company itself seemed to have lost interest in Ejabberd. However the people in the chat room were relaxed: it’s not the end of the world and there are other developers working on the code. So, no issue in the end, but that’s not something you expect to read when you join a chat room for the first time. 😉
Contrary to Prosody Ejabberd seems to be well-prepared to pass the Compliance Tester without installing (too many) modules. Large sites such as conversations.im are running on Ejabberd. It is also said that Ejabberd doesn’t need restarts of the server for certain config changes as Prosody does. The config file itself appears to be more straightforward and doesn’t differentiate between modules and components which makes it a little more easy to understand.
Currently I haven’t been able to deal much with Ejabberd, but one other difference is: there is a Debian repository on Prosody.im, but for Ejabberd there is no such repository. You’ll have to use backports.debian.org for a newer version of Ejabberd on Debian Buster. It’s up to you to decide what is better for you.
I’m still somewhat undecided whether or not to proceed with Ejabberd and migrate from Prosody. The developer of Prosody is very helpful and responsive and I like that. On the other hand, the folks in the Ejabberd chat rooms are very supportive as well. I like the flexibility and the various number of contrib modules for Prosody, but then again it’s hard to find the correct/best one to load and to configure for a given task and to satisfy the Compliance Tester. Then again, both servers do feature a Web GUI for some basic tasks, but I like the one of Ejabberd more.
So, in the end, I’m also open for suggestions about either one. Some people will state of course that neither is the best way and I should consider Matrix, Briar or some other solutions, but that’s maybe another article comparing XMPP and other options. This one is about XMPP server options: Prosody or Ejabberd. What do you prefer and why?