About Kismaro
Last updated 2026-09-26
Kismaro is a free random chat site. Press a button and you are talking to a stranger — by text, by voice or by video. No profile to build, nothing to install, and nobody to add.
That idea is not ours. Omegle had it in 2009 and ran it for fourteen years. This page is about why it is worth building again, and what we decided to do differently.
Why Kismaro exists
Omegle closed on 8 November 2023, after a lawsuit brought on behalf of a girl who had been randomly paired with a much older man when she was eleven. The detail that matters is why it lost: the court did not find that Omegle failed to remove something a user had posted. It found that pairing two strangers at random, with no check on who either of them was, was itself the problem — a product decision, not a moderation failure.
Most of the sites that replaced Omegle copied the product and skipped that finding. They ask you to click a button saying you are 18, and nothing sits behind it. Kismaro exists because we think the finding was right, and that you can build the same good thing without the part that ended it.
What we do differently
Age is confirmed once, on its own screen, and can never be edited. Not a checkbox. This is also why you cannot start without signing in — you cannot enforce a date of birth you never collected. It costs us visitors every day and we keep it anyway.
Your camera has to show you. In video chat your browser checks for a face every few seconds. A camera pointed at a ceiling, a photograph or a looping recording ends the conversation. Nobody else in this category does this.
Voice is a real mode, with its own queue and its own people — not a toggle inside video chat that leaves you matched with people expecting a camera.
Nothing is recorded. No video, no audio, no message text. There is no archive to leak because there is no archive. It also means that when you report someone we act on the account, not on a recording, because none exists.
What we are bad at
We would rather you heard this from us than found out.
Fewer people are online here than anywhere else in this category. We are new. OmeTV and Chatroulette have had a decade to build their crowds, and a narrow country filter here at a quiet hour can find nobody at all. No amount of engineering fixes that this year.
You cannot start without signing in. Most of our competitors let you press a button and go. We do not, for the reason above.
There is no mobile app. Kismaro runs in a phone browser, which works, but it is not an icon on a home screen.
If any of those matter more to you than the rest, one of the other sites is genuinely the better choice, and that page says so plainly.
How it is paid for
It is a fair question of anything free. Right now: it is not. Kismaro has no ads, no paid tier, no subscription, and nothing held back behind one. It is funded by the people who build it.
That is not a business model, and we are not going to pretend it is one forever. What we will say is what we will not do to change it: we will not sell your data, we will not run adverts inside a conversation, and we will not put the country filter or a faster queue behind a payment. If that ever changes, it will be written on this page before it is shipped.
What we will not build
No recording, ever. Not for safety, not for training, not for "quality".
No profiles, followers or feeds. The point of a random conversation is that it is over when it is over.
No dark patterns. No fake online counts, no invented "someone is waiting", no countdown to make you sign up. The number on the homepage is the real number.
No pretending to be Omegle. We are not affiliated with it, we say so in the footer of every page, and we are not squatting on its name.
Who we are
Kismaro is small and new. It is operated from the United States, and the company behind it, along with a postal address, is named in the terms and the privacy policy — not hidden behind a contact form.
The rules we enforce are on one page in plain language: the community rules. What we do when something goes wrong is on the safety page, including what we cannot do.
Tell us when we get it wrong
If something on this site does not work the way these pages say it does, that is a bug in the writing or in the product, and we want to know which. Write to [email protected].
Safety and anything involving a minor: [email protected].