Is Session safe to use?
Yes — Session is one of the more private mainstream messengers, with a credible safety story for most threat models, though with real caveats. Its standout strengths are genuinely no-phone-number, no-email anonymous sign-up and onion routing that is on by default, hiding your IP and minimizing metadata via a decentralized service-node network rather than a central server. It is open source and was independently audited by Quarkslab in 2021. The honest caveats: the protocol that ships today still lacks Perfect Forward Secrecy and deniability (so a compromised long-term key could, in principle, expose past messages), and the post-quantum (ML-KEM) and PFS upgrades announced in December 2025 as 'Protocol V2' are not yet deployed. Its IP-hiding network is Session's own onion network, not Tor. For users whose top priority is unlinkable identity and IP anonymity, Session is a strong, reasonable choice; users who specifically need forward secrecy today should weigh that gap.
Where Session is strongest: Independently audited and battle-tested: Session was reviewed by Quarkslab (2021) across all three clients and has years of production use by a large user base — RVNT is pre-release and has not yet been independently audited.. On metadata, Session relies on Strong: onion-routed by default through a decentralized service-node network (onion requests), hiding sender IP; no central account directory; project states it collects no metadata, geolocation, or device/network data., and it is independently audited. See the full Session vs RVNT comparison for the side-by-side.