Collab.Land alternatives: gating without a verify bot

If you are shopping for a Collab.Land alternative, you are picking between two different kinds of product: a bot that bolts gating onto a Discord or Telegram you already run, and a chat app that checks the chain itself because the wallet is already the account. This page covers both, with prices as of 11 September 2026. Cherry (cherry.fun) is one of the six listed: a wallet-to-wallet messenger and community app for crypto where you sign in with a wallet, DM any wallet address, and join or create token-gated, NFT-gated and paid group chats.

What Collab.Land is and what it costs

Collab.Land is a verification bot for Discord and Telegram. An admin adds it to the server, writes a token or NFT rule, and members connect a wallet on connect.collab.land, the site the bot’s “Let’s Go!” button opens, to receive a role. Its home page on 11 September 2026 says it supports “40+ chains, 30+ wallets, and the list is always growing” and that it has been “Safely serving tokenized communities since Spring 2020”.

Billing changed on 12 November 2025, when plans moved from counting token gated roles to counting verified members, defined in the announcement as “a unique person in your community who passes Collab.Land verification and holds at least one token gated role”. These were the published tiers on 11 September 2026:

Every tier, including the free one, gets balance checks every 24 hours and a real-time Ethereum event listener. The Solana event listener starts at $149, and admin-requested balance checks start there too: five a month on the $149 and $449 tiers, on request for Enterprise. A community with 3,000 verified members therefore sits on the $449 tier.

The safety question

Collab.Land has run since 2020, the verification signature does not move funds, and the company publishes a security page and a scam-reporting guide. What it cannot fix is the shape of the flow. Members are trained to click a link posted in a server and connect a wallet on a site they have never read, and a cloned version of that page looks the same to them. Collab.Land’s security page put it this way on 11 September 2026: “Scammers often impersonate trusted brands to deceive users”. It reports impersonation attempts to Discord and other services when it becomes aware of them.

So the honest answer to “is Collab.Land safe” is about the habit the flow builds. Every option below either keeps that habit and prices it differently, or removes the link entirely.

How we picked

Four criteria. A tool had to be usable by a community owner in September 2026 without writing code, verify real on-chain holdings, be publicly documented enough to quote a price, and serve a crypto community rather than a general membership site. Each entry covers the chains, the verification flow, the re-check cadence and the cost to the owner. Messaging protocols and SDKs are out, because an owner needs a running product. Fiat membership tools such as Whop are covered separately in Whop alternatives for crypto .

Guild.xyz

Guild is the broadest of the bots. It gates Discord and Telegram, and layers quests, points, leaderboards and roles on top, describing itself on 11 September 2026 as a way to “Grow, curate, and reward your community in a gamified way”. Its pricing page that day listed Starter at $29 a month, Pro at $99 and Growth at $399, with unlimited members and roles on every tier, requirement types spanning 60+ EVM chains, and social requirements that read Discord, Telegram, X, GitHub and Farcaster activity. The Admin API and detailed member CRM sit on the top tier.

Fit note: choose Guild if your gating is more than a balance, for example a role that needs a holding plus a quest plus a follow. Its published chain coverage is EVM, so a Solana-only collection is a poor match. We go deeper in Guild.xyz alternatives .

Matrica

Matrica is the Solana-first answer to Collab.Land: Discord holder verification, a sales bot, Telegram gating, roles by NFT attribute or token amount, compressed NFT support, wallet snapshots, and verification for Bitcoin Ordinals and Runes alongside SPL and ERC-20 balances. Its pricing guide on 11 September 2026 published two plans, $99 a month (or $899 a year) and $199 a month (or $1,750 a year), with API access, faster verification bots and co-marketing reserved for an enterprise plan booked by call.

Fit note: choose Matrica if you run a Solana NFT collection that lives on Discord and wants attribute-level roles and a sales feed from the same vendor. It is the most expensive entry price on this list. See Matrica alternatives for the Solana-specific comparison.

Vulcan

Vulcan takes the opposite pricing position. Its home page on 11 September 2026 reads “Your Discord, run like infrastructure. Not like a bot.” and advertises “$0 to start, every feature on every plan, setup in minutes”, with token and trait roles, captcha, a sales bot, giveaways and a member dashboard in one Discord app. It lists an hourly recheck cadence alongside real-time transfer monitoring, and manages roles from that. Its home page that day also said a holder is never asked to connect a wallet or sign a message: members are matched to wallets they proved on OpenSea, on PREMINT or in another Vulcan server, and holdings are read on-chain from there. The 27 chains Vulcan named that day are EVM networks, including Base, ApeChain, Monad and Robinhood Chain; Solana was not among them.

Fit note: choose Vulcan if your community is an EVM NFT project on Discord and the Collab.Land invoice is the reason you are reading this. Confirm current chain coverage before you migrate, since the list is the only public statement of it.

Towns

Towns is the first option here that is not a bot: an onchain group chat app on Base, described on towns.com on 11 September 2026 as “an open messaging protocol built on Base that powers private groups and decentralized finance”, with the headline “Discover the best money making group chats”. Every group is minted on-chain and every membership is an NFT, so gating and payment are the same object. Towns’ documentation says free Spaces pay no protocol fee while paid memberships do, and its pricing modules take payment in ETH, with prices set in US dollars. Towns reported 1.7M memberships in February 2026.

Fit note: choose Towns if your community is Base-native and you want membership to be a transferable NFT with a secondary market. Accounts get an embedded wallet of their own. The iOS app, released in February 2026, lists a phone number as data linked to the account in its App Store privacy details, which matters if your members will not give one. Our head-to-head is Cherry vs Towns .

Cherry

Cherry removes the verification step by making the wallet the login. You sign in with Phantom, Solflare, Backpack or the Seed Vault Wallet on Seeker, and the app reads that wallet’s holdings when you try to join a room. There is no bot to add, no verification site, and no link for a member to click, which is the part a cloned page cannot copy.

In the web app the group editor calls the section Access requirements and offers a Token requirement, an NFT requirement, a Domain requirement and Paid entry. Up to five rules combine under a control labelled “To join, members need”, set to either “All of these” or “Any one”. A token rule reads SPL and Token-2022 balances, an NFT rule accepts standard and Metaplex Core collections, and a domain rule matches a TLD; rooms can also be gated on a wallet’s balance or trading volume, or on the wallet app a member signed in with. ERC-20, ERC-721, ERC-1155 and BEP-20 holdings are gated the same way for Base, Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain and Robinhood Chain. The domain rule is why a Solana name works as a pass: SNS Club is gated on holding a .sol domain and had 1,455 members and 3,872 messages on 11 September 2026.

After the join, enforcement stays in the app, with no bot and no role to strip. Cherry re-checks members in the background, so a wallet that sells loses access, though not instantly: a seller can keep access for several days after the sale, longer than Collab.Land’s 24-hour check. If Cherry cannot read the chain during a re-check, nobody is removed. A member whose subscription ends without renewal hits the paywall shortly after. Soulbound domains are checked once and never again, since they cannot be sold: that is what makes Seeker Club work, gated on a .skr domain, with 8,637 members and 58,206 messages on 11 September 2026.

A member who stops qualifying keeps the room in their chat list but stops receiving message content, so they can renew or buy back in without a re-invite. Paid access is one more rule in the same editor: one-time entry in SOL, or recurring USDC memberships from 1 to 10,000 USDC per period, with the owner keeping 70% and Cherry 30% as of 10 September 2026. Everything else on Cherry is free, including creating the community.

Fit note: choose Cherry if the wallet should be the identity, the community can live in a crypto-native app, and you would rather not pay per member to know who holds. The honest trade is that Cherry is the chat, not an add-on to your Discord: group messages are not end-to-end encrypted, by design, so moderation and bots can work, and moving means moving. Start with token-gated chat and paid communities and channels .

Side by side

Every figure below is current as of 11 September 2026.

Which one to pick

Keep the Discord and pay a bot when the server is the thing of value: years of channels, mods, roles and history that will not move with you. Between the bots, Vulcan is the cheapest way to keep EVM roles honest, Guild is the right answer when a role needs more than a balance, and Matrica is the Solana collection’s vendor. Collab.Land stays defensible if you are under 25 verified members or want the option that has run since Spring 2020.

Move the chat when the wallet is the point. If your members are Solana holders, Seeker owners or domain holders, Cherry checks them at the source and charges you nothing until you charge them. If your community is Base-native and you want memberships to trade as NFTs, Towns is built for exactly that. Either way, the verify link disappears, and with it the message everyone has learned to be scared of. For the wider category, see token-gated Discord alternatives and the step by step in create a token-gated group chat . To try Cherry, create a group at chat.cherry.fun and open Access requirements.

FAQ

What is Collab.Land?

Collab.Land is a verification bot for Discord and Telegram. You add it to your server, set a token or NFT rule, and members connect a wallet on connect.collab.land through the bot’s verify link to receive a role. Its home page on 11 September 2026 says it supports 40+ chains and 30+ wallets and that it has been serving tokenized communities since Spring 2020.

How much does Collab.Land cost?

As of 11 September 2026 its pricing page lists Starter free for up to 25 verified members, Basic at $17.99 a month for 100, Premium at $35 for 1,000, Exclusive at $149 for 2,500, Elite at $449 for 7,500, and Enterprise on request. Billing moved to verified members on 12 November 2025, where a verified member is one person who passes verification and holds at least one token gated role.

Is Collab.Land safe?

The bot has run since 2020 and the verification signature does not move funds. The risk is impersonation: Collab.Land’s security page says scammers often impersonate trusted brands and that it reports impersonation attempts to Discord and other services when it becomes aware of them. Because the flow asks members to click a link in a server and connect a wallet, a fake copy of that flow is hard for a member to tell apart from the real one.

Is there a free Collab.Land alternative?

Two on this list start at zero. Vulcan advertises $0 to start with every feature on every plan, and Cherry is free, taking 30% of paid entry fees and subscriptions only where an owner charges for access, as of 10 September 2026. Guild.xyz starts at $29 a month and Matrica’s plans start at $99 a month.

Can you token-gate a chat without Discord?

Yes. Towns and Cherry are chat apps where the wallet is the account, so membership is checked against the chain by the app itself and there is no bot, no server, and no verification link. The trade is that your community moves to a new app instead of keeping the Discord server it already has.

Sources

• Collab.Land and Collab.Land pricing
• Collab.Land blog: Introducing Verified Member Pricing , 11 November 2025
• Collab.Land bot subscription help
• Collab.Land wallet help: verify your wallet and disconnect your wallet
• Collab.Land security page
• Guild.xyz pricing
• Matrica pricing guide
• Vulcan
• Towns and the Towns documentation
• Towns pricing modules
• Towns on the App Store
• SNS Club on Cherry and Seeker Club on Cherry