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Knit vs Bridgefy
Compare how Knit and Bridgefy get your group connected, from the first launch to a conversation across the crowd.
Last reviewed: August 2026
Bridgefy is the best-known phone mesh messenger going. It runs on iPhone and Android, it has been through protests in Hong Kong, Nigeria, Belarus and India, and it licenses the same mesh technology to other developers as an SDK.
Setup is one useful difference to consider. Bridgefy asks for an initial online sign-in with a Google or Apple account. Knit starts with nearby discovery and no account, so friends can join the phone mesh without that step.
Open Knit, find nearby people and start a conversation with no internet needed for the phone mesh. The app's GPLv3 source is available for anyone who wants to inspect how it works.
| Feature | Knit | Bridgefy |
|---|---|---|
| Works with no internet1 | Yes | Yes, after you sign in once |
| No account, no password | Yes | No, Google or Apple sign-in |
| Multi-hop mesh — messages relay beyond your own radio | Yes | Yes |
| Meshes over Wi-Fi as well as Bluetooth2 | Yes | No |
| Open room with everyone nearby3 | Yes | Yes |
| End-to-end encrypted direct & group chats | Yes | DMs only; public chat is open |
| Named group chats | Yes | No, public chat and 1:1 |
| Forward secrecy4 | Yes | Via the Signal protocol |
| Photos, GIFs & voice notes | Yes | Yes |
| Share where you are5 | Yes | Yes |
| Source code you can read | Yes, GPLv3 | No, closed source |
| On-device AI moderation | Yes | No |
| Works over the internet6 | Yes, via optional relays | Only to sign in |
| iPhone app | No, coming soon | Yes |
| Free, no ads, open source | Yes, GPLv3 | Free app; closed source |
- 1Bridgefy's own App Store listing describes signing in with a Google or Apple account on first launch, over the internet, after which offline messaging works. Users report being signed out again after a period of inactivity, which means re-authenticating — online — before it will work again.
- 2Wi-Fi Aware gives Knit's mesh the bandwidth for photos and GIFs, fetched on demand so large files never flood it. Bridgefy meshes over Bluetooth alone and quotes a range of about 100 metres per hop.
- 3Both open rooms are plaintext by design — an open broadcast, like talking out loud in a crowd. In Knit, the sealed part is direct and group chats.
- 4Knit rotates keys per block of messages, not per message, and a chat with someone on an older Knit build falls back to the previous static-key scheme, which has none. Spent keys are deleted, so mesh traffic recorded today can't be decrypted later. Bridgefy adopted the Signal protocol in October 2020; a 2022 paper found its use of that protocol was incorrectly implemented — see below.
- 5Knit reads your position only between the tap and the send, and the other phone gets a card that opens in any maps app.
- 6Knit's Internet relays are opt-in and off until you add one, and they carry only existing direct and group conversations, as sealed frames the relay can't read. No accounts, no discovery, and you can run your own. The Nearby room stays radio-only.
The sign-in, and why it matters here
Every messenger has to decide what it needs from you before it works. Bridgefy asks for a Google or Apple account and an internet connection, once, on first launch. After that the mesh runs offline as advertised.
Prepare any required sign-in before you need offline messaging. Knit can join the local phone mesh without an online sign-in, which makes sharing the app during an outage straightforward.
Install Knit and discover nearby phones without an email address, phone number or password. Setup is three pages, and only the nearby-devices permission is needed to get in; notifications and background battery use can wait. It also works on Android phones without a SIM.
Security history and independent inspection
Bridgefy's encryption has been publicly broken twice, and the dates matter. In August 2020, researchers at Royal Holloway published an analysis of Bridgefy and reported attacks that allowed de-anonymising users, building social graphs, reading direct messages, impersonating users and running man-in-the-middle attacks. Bridgefy's developers acknowledged at the time that no part of the app was encrypted, and adopted the Signal protocol by late October 2020.
In 2022, a second paper — "Breaking Bridgefy, again: Adopting libsignal is not enough", by Martin Albrecht, Raphael Eikenberg and Kenneth Paterson, presented at USENIX Security — found that adoption was incorrectly implemented, and reported further practically exploitable vulnerabilities in the messenger and the SDK. The researchers noted the state of remediation was still unclear when they asked in early 2022.
Those papers document the versions studied at the time and do not establish the security of today's Bridgefy release. Knit publishes its GPLv3 source for independent inspection. Open code makes that inspection possible; it is not an audit, and Knit has not had a third-party security review.
Where Bridgefy is ahead
Bridgefy supports iPhone as well as Android, making it an option for groups using both. Knit runs on Android today, and its iPhone version is still in development.
It has the numbers. Bridgefy has been downloaded by millions and has years of protest and disaster use behind it, which means the people near you are more likely to already have it.
The browser demo shows the hop-by-hop idea without installing anything: knock out a cell tower, then walk a message across a crowd.
Choose Bridgefy if…
- Anyone you need to reach is on an iPhone.
- You want the largest existing user base, so there are more phones nearby already running it.
- You are happy to sign in with a Google or Apple account, and to keep that sign-in fresh.
Choose Knit if…
- You want no account and no sign-in, so it works on a phone with no SIM and no history.
- You want it to keep working after months untouched, with no re-authentication in the way.
- You want named group chats, end-to-end encrypted, not just a public room and 1:1.
- You want the mesh to use Wi-Fi as well as Bluetooth, which is what makes photos and voice notes practical, and lets a file too big to attach go to a nearby contact phone to phone.
- You would rather read the source than take a security claim on trust.
Common questions
Does Bridgefy need an account?
Yes. Its own App Store listing describes signing in with a Google or Apple account on first launch, which needs an internet connection. Offline messaging works after that, though users report being signed out again after a stretch of inactivity.
Is Bridgefy end-to-end encrypted?
Bridgefy uses the Signal protocol for direct messages, and has done since October 2020. Its public chat is open, like any broadcast room. Whether the implementation holds up is a separate question — a 2022 USENIX paper found it did not at the time, and the app is closed source, so nobody outside the company can check the current build.
Is Bridgefy safe to use at a protest?
That is a decision to make with better information than a marketing page from a competitor. What we can tell you is the record: two published academic analyses, in 2020 and 2022, each found serious exploitable problems, and the code is closed, so the current state cannot be verified independently. If your threat model includes a determined adversary, weigh that carefully — and note that Knit's own Nearby room is plaintext by design, and Knit has had no third-party audit either.
Is Bridgefy open source?
No. The app and the SDK are proprietary, and the SDK is licensed commercially to other developers. Knit's app is GPLv3 with its source on GitHub.
Bridgefy facts here were checked in August 2026 against Bridgefy's own App Store listing and developer documentation, and the security history against the two published papers cited above. Spotted something wrong or out of date? Tell us and we’ll fix it.
Product names on these pages are the trademarks of their respective owners and are used only to identify the apps being compared. None of those projects is affiliated with, or has endorsed, Knit.
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