Nakama alternative

What Nakama is

Nakama (Heroic Labs) is an open-source game server written in Go, backed by a database, with accounts, social features, matchmaking, leaderboards, storage and server-side runtime code in Go, Lua or TypeScript. You self-host it or use Heroic Cloud.

Side by side

Checked September 2026 against public documentation. Tell us if something changed: contact@lannetech.ae.

Choose Nakama if…

• You need guilds, chat channels, tournaments, notifications and custom server runtime logic in one system.
• You have the ops capacity to run and scale it.

Choose Multiplayer API if…

• You want the core — accounts, matchmaking, rooms, validated state, leaderboards, inventory — without any infrastructure.
• You ship small or medium games and prefer one flat subscription.

Moving from Nakama: what maps to what

• Device / custom auth → guest accounts with mp.login(), upgradable to username + password with upgrade().
• Matchmaker tickets → mp.quickmatch({ mode, meta }) with filterable metadata such as meta.rank.
• Authoritative match handlers → declarative rules for most cases; for high-stakes results, your own server with the secret key and signed webhooks (match.ended, cheat.flagged).
• Storage objects → per-player versioned save data (/v1/me/data) with conflict detection across devices.
• Leaderboards → mp.submitScore() with best, last, sum or min aggregation.

The concepts are covered in full in the documentation and in llms-full.txt, which a coding agent can use to do the port for you.

Try it in one call

curl -X POST https://multiplayerapi.com/v1/games \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"name":"My Game","preset":"realtime_arena"}'

Returns a public key, a secret key and a sandbox with 2 live rooms for 24 hours. No account, no card.