Guild.xyz alternatives for token-gated chat

You start looking for a Guild.xyz alternative when the gate works and the room still does not: a member verifies on a website, picks up a Discord role, and the chat underneath has no idea what that wallet holds today. This roundup covers six paths a community owner can take, as of 11 September 2026: what each one verifies, where the conversation lives, what it costs. Cherry (cherry.fun) is one of them and we build it: a wallet-to-wallet messenger and community app where you sign in with a wallet, DM any address, and join or create token-gated, NFT-gated, and paid group chats.

What Guild.xyz is

Guild.xyz defines an access requirement once and grants access in the places you already run. Its docs call it “a tool that helps you grow and reward the right community members by tracking onchain and social activity”. It “connects your community across 60+ EVM chains”, as its docs put it on 11 September 2026. The home page claims “Trusted by 1000+ teams organizing communities”. Requirements combine on-chain holdings with social connections (Discord, Telegram, X, GitHub, Farcaster), and Guild also ships quests, points, leaderboards and NFT rewards.

Pricing that day: Starter at $29 per month with unlimited members and roles, Discord and Telegram gating and one extra admin seat; Pro at $99 per month adding a member CRM, growth analytics and custom API requirements; Growth at $399 per month adding Guild Admin API access.

Guild is strong where a community is spread across several places at once and one requirement should drive roles in all of them. Two things it does not do: host the conversation, which stays on Discord or Telegram, and reach Solana, which Guild did not list as supported on 11 September 2026.

Is Guild.xyz safe to use

The verification step asks for a wallet connection and a signature on guild.xyz, and a signed message proves you control an address without moving tokens or paying gas. Guild publishes pricing, docs and a company presence, which puts it in a different category from an anonymous bot.

Two risks are worth naming, neither unique to Guild. The first is impersonation: every verify flow of this shape teaches members to click a link and connect a wallet, so a fake link posted under an announcement reads like the real one. The second is staleness: the gate hands Discord a role, and Discord keeps it until something re-checks the wallet. Guild published no re-verification schedule as of 11 September 2026, so ask for that number before you commit a paid tier to it.

How we picked

Six criteria, aimed at an owner who already has a token or an NFT and wants the room to reflect it: does the tool verify holdings itself, where the chat lives, how often access is re-checked, how paid access works and what share the owner keeps, whether it reaches Solana as well as EVM chains, and what it costs to run.

Collab.Land

Collab.Land is the incumbent gating bot and the closest like-for-like swap for Guild. On 11 September 2026 its home page read “Turning Tokens into Connections, One Community at a Time”, said it has been trusted by “tens of thousands of communities” for over four years, and advertised 40+ chains and 30+ wallet types on Discord and Telegram. On re-checking it is more explicit than most: the page promises “regular re-verifications to keep your community safe and accurate”.

Fit: pick it if your members will not leave Discord and you want the broadest chain coverage in a bot. You keep the verify link, the wallet-connect page and the scam DMs that follow an announcement. See Collab.Land alternatives .

Matrica

Matrica is the Solana-first answer to the same job. Its docs call it “The Community Layer of Web3” and, as of 11 September 2026, list eight chains: Solana, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polygon, Eclipse, Base, Monad and ApeChain. The role guides cover fungible token roles for “SPL, ERC-20, BRC-20 or Runes Tokens”, verified collection roles, amount and attribute roles, and AND/OR combinations, granted by a bot you invite to Discord or Telegram. Its pricing guide put Premium at $99 per month and Pro at $199 per month on 11 September 2026.

Fit: pick it if the community stays on Discord or Telegram and the holdings are on Solana. Same bolt-on shape as Guild and Collab.Land: a site, a signature, a role. See Matrica alternatives .

Zealy

If you mostly used Guild for quests, points and leaderboards, the gate is not what you are replacing. Zealy sells campaign tooling on its own. On 11 September 2026 its pricing page listed a free tier with 1,000 quest claims per month, quests, sprints and leaderboards; Standard from $149 per month billed annually with 10,000 claim credits; Plus from $359 per month with 50,000 credits and a CRM. It bills by consumption: “A claim credit is consumed each time a member completes a quest.”

Fit: pair it with whatever gates your chat. Zealy runs campaigns; it does not hold your members’ room.

Towns

Towns is a standalone chat app, which makes it the structural alternative to the whole Guild-plus-Discord stack. It runs on Base: every group is minted on-chain and every membership is an NFT, so the gate and the membership are the same object. Towns added recurring memberships in October 2025, then USDC pricing and Apple Pay deposits in January 2026. It reported 450,000+ groups and 1.7M memberships on February 13 2026, the same membership number it published in August 2025, and $46M raised with a16z crypto leading. In 2025 Towns said owners keep 90% of paid memberships. The rebuilt iOS app of February 27 2026 is a new app with a new account, and its App Store privacy details list a phone number as data linked to the account.

Fit: pick Towns if memberships should exist as tradeable assets on Base and you have no Solana holdings to check. Cherry vs Towns compares the two chat apps directly.

Cherry

Cherry moves the check inside the chat. There is no verification site and no bot: the room carries its own rules, and the app reads the chain. A group combines up to five requirements with all or any logic across seven rule types: a token balance, an NFT from a collection, a Metaplex Core collection, a domain by TLD such as .sol or .skr, a wallet balance or trading-volume threshold, the wallet app a member signed in with, and payment. In the web app’s group settings the section is headed “Access Requirements” and saved rules read back as “Token requirement”, “NFT requirement” and “Domain requirement”. Cherry started on Solana and supports Base, Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain and Robinhood Chain, so a room can gate on SPL and Token-2022 mints, Metaplex collections, ERC-20 and BEP-20 balances, or ERC-721 and ERC-1155 holdings. The token-gated chat and NFT-gated chat pages cover the rule types one by one, and multichain token-gated chat covers the chain side.

Here is how Cherry re-verifies, as of 11 September 2026. The wallet is checked when someone joins, and members are re-checked in the background, so a wallet that sells loses access. The re-check is not instant: a seller can keep access for several days after the sale, and if the chain cannot be read when Cherry checks, nobody is removed. A member whose paid period ends without a renewal hits the paywall shortly after. Soulbound domains such as .skr are verified once and never re-checked, because a non-transferable name cannot be sold. A paywalled member keeps the room in their chat list and stops receiving message content until they qualify again.

Paid access sits in the same rule set: one-time entry from 0.0001 to 100 SOL, or a USDC subscription from 1 to 10,000 USDC per period, with 70% to the owner as of 10 September 2026. Every public group gets a storefront at chat.cherry.fun/@<handle> carrying its rules, member count and reviews for search engines to index, which a Discord invite link cannot do. Cherry hosts 200+ communities and 1M+ messages as of September 2026. Two rooms show the gating in production. Seeker Club, gated by a .skr domain, had 8,637 members and 58,206 messages on 11 September 2026, rated 4.9 stars from 41 reviews. SNS Club, gated by a .sol domain, had 1,455 members the same day.

Honest limits. Cherry grants no Discord roles and no Telegram access, so this is a move, not a bolt-on. Group chats are not end-to-end encrypted, by design, so moderators and bots can read what they moderate, while DMs are encrypted with keys derived from your wallet. The gating editor applies to public groups; flip a group private and its rules are saved and paused until it goes public again. Invited members are a staff vouch and skip holdings checks, though payment rules still apply to them. Creating a token-gated group chat walks through the setup.

Fit: pick Cherry if the room itself should hold the rule and you want paid access in the same rule set.

Your own gate with Discord Linked Roles

If you have a developer and want no third party in the middle, Discord supports this natively. Discord’s developer docs define linked roles as “a type of role in Discord that requires a user to connect to 3rd-party services and meet defined criteria”: your app registers the criteria with Discord, each member authorizes it once, and your app reports the values it verified. You own the wallet signature, the chain reads and the refresh schedule.

Fit: worth it when the requirement is specific to your product, such as a game rank or a staking position. Budget for the re-check job, because nothing refreshes those values but you.

Side by side

“Not stated” means no public statement either way on 11 September 2026.

Zealy and a self-built Discord gate are out of the table because neither hosts the room.

Which one to pick

• Stay on Guild.xyz if your members live on Discord and Telegram, your holdings are on EVM chains, and quests and analytics in one account are worth $29 to $399 a month.
• Choose Collab.Land for the same bolt-on shape with wider chain coverage and a stated re-verification promise.
• Choose Matrica if the community stays on Discord and the holdings are Solana-first.
• Choose Zealy if what you liked about Guild was the quests, not the gate.
• Choose Towns if memberships should be tradeable NFTs on Base and Solana is not part of the picture.
• Choose Cherry if the chat itself should read holdings from the chain, with paid entry and USDC subscriptions in the same rule set and a storefront search engines can index.
• Build your own with Discord Linked Roles if the requirement is unique to your product and you can staff the refresh job.

Create a group and set its access requirements at chat.cherry.fun .

FAQ

What is Guild.xyz?

Guild.xyz is a community management product that defines access requirements once and hands out access in the places you already run. Its docs say it “connects your community across 60+ EVM chains” and describe it as a tool for tracking onchain and social activity on 11 September 2026. It grants Discord roles and Telegram access, and it also runs quests, points and leaderboards.

Is Guild.xyz safe?

The verification step asks for a wallet connection and a signature on guild.xyz, and a signed message proves you control an address without moving tokens or paying gas. The risk in every verify flow of this shape is the copy of it: members learn to click a link and connect a wallet, so a fake link posted under an announcement reads like the real one. Ask any vendor how often access is re-checked, because a granted role outlives the holdings behind it.

Does Guild.xyz work with Solana?

Guild’s docs describe 60+ EVM chains and name no Solana support on 11 September 2026. For a Solana community the closer options are Matrica, which lists Solana first among eight chains it supports, and Cherry, which checks SPL, Token-2022, Metaplex and domain holdings inside the chat.

What is the cheapest Guild.xyz alternative?

Cherry is free: creating and running a group costs nothing, and an owner who charges for access keeps 70% of paid entry fees and subscriptions as of 10 September 2026. Zealy has a free tier of 1,000 quest claims per month. Guild starts at $29 per month and Zealy’s Standard tier starts at $149 per month billed annually as of 11 September 2026.

Can I gate a group chat without a verify bot?

Yes, if the chat app checks the chain itself. On Cherry the room carries the rule: up to five requirements per group combined with all or any logic, verified when a member joins and re-verified in the background afterwards. Nobody sends your members a verify link, because there is no verification site to send them to.

Do I have to move my community off Discord?

Not to keep a gate. Collab.Land and Matrica both gate Discord and Telegram the same way Guild does, and Discord’s own Linked Roles let your app push the criteria. You move only if you want the chat itself to know who holds what, which is what a wallet-native app buys you.

Sources

• Guild.xyz and Guild.xyz pricing
• What is Guild , Guild documentation
• Collab.Land and Collab.Land pricing
• Matrica documentation and Matrica pricing guide
• Zealy pricing
• Discord: configuring app metadata for linked roles
• Towns and Towns on the App Store
• Seeker Club on Cherry and SNS Club on Cherry