Chatroulette and Omegle Compared

September 20265 min read

Two sites invented this whole category within a year of each other. One is closed, one is still running, and neither does text properly.

Omegle launched in March 2009 and Chatroulette a few months later. Between them they created the idea of being paired with one random stranger and handed it to the rest of the internet. They are compared constantly, usually by someone trying to work out which to use now — so the first useful fact is that only one of them still exists, and the second is that neither was ever built around text.

Omegle, 2009 to 2023

Built by one person and run by one person for fourteen years:

Launched in March 2009 as a text-only site by Leif K-Brooks, then 18 years old.
Video chat was added in 2010, and the site's reputation changed with it.
No account, no profile. The other person was literally labelled "Stranger".
Interest tags arrived later, matching people who typed the same word.
It kept a moderated section and an unmoderated one to the end.
It closed on 8 November 2023, after lawsuits in United States courts and a public statement from its founder about the cost of moderation.

Chatroulette, 2009 to now

Built by a teenager in Moscow a few months after Omegle, and unlike Omegle it is still online:

Launched in late 2009 by Andrey Ternovskiy, then 17.
Video from the first day — there was never a text-first version.
It went viral in early 2010 and became a news story about the internet itself.
The exposure problem arrived immediately and shaped everything that followed.
It invested heavily in automatic detection of nudity and abuse, which is now part of how it runs.
It is still open and still video-first: the site asks for your camera before anything else.

The two, side by side

	Omegle	Chatroulette	SayHello
Launched	2009	2009	Running now
Status	Closed 2023	Open	Open
Started as	Text	Video	Text
Main format	Text and video	Video	Text only
Camera required	For video mode	Yes	No
Account to start	No	No	No
Interest tags	Yes	No	No
Separate adult room	Unmoderated section	Unknown	Yes
Retention published	No	Unknown	24 hours

What actually happened to them

One closed and one changed shape. The reason in both cases is the same reason:

Live video with no accounts is close to impossible to moderate, and both sites learned that in public rather than in private.
Omegle's founder said outright that the cost of moderation and the legal exposure had become more than he could carry alone.
Chatroulette survived by spending heavily on automatic detection of nudity and abuse, rather than by changing the format.
Both were text-capable from early on and neither ever treated text as the product worth building around.
So when Omegle closed in November 2023, the people who only ever used its text box were the group nobody was building for.

Why text is the part that lasted

Not a claim about quality. A claim about what survives contact with reality.

Text can be moderated after the fact, from a report. Video has to be watched while it happens, by someone, at scale.

Text works in a room with other people in it — an office, a bus, a shared flat. That covers most of the day for most people.

Text costs kilobytes, so it works on a weak connection, a metered data plan and a phone that is four years old.

Nothing about your face, your flat or the weather outside your window is ever on screen for a stranger to record.

You can reread a sentence before you send it, which matters most in a language you are still learning.

If you came here for the text half

SayHello is text-only matching between adults. It is not connected to either site and does not claim to be their successor. Here is what it is, limits first, so you can decide before you open it:

No video. If you want to see the other person, use Chatroulette or another video site. This one has no camera feature at all.
No account to start. A guest gets 5 conversations a day; a free account removes the limit.
Two rooms. Talk and 18+, with separate queues, so adult subjects never arrive in the wrong conversation.
No bots. That code was deleted from the project on 19 September 2026.
Messages are deleted 24 hours after the chat ends, and a reported chat is kept until a person reads it, never past 30 days.

Questions people ask

Which came first, Omegle or Chatroulette?

Omegle, by a few months. It launched in March 2009 as a text site; Chatroulette followed later the same year with video.

Is Chatroulette still working?

Yes. It is still online and still video-first, and it asks for camera access when you open it.

Is Omegle coming back?

There is no sign of it. It has been closed since 8 November 2023 and no relaunch has been announced.

Which is safer?

Chatroulette invested in automatic detection and is still running, which counts for something. But any video site exposes your face and your room, and a text site cannot.

Is there a text-only option?

SayHello is one: text matching between adults, no camera anywhere in the product, no account needed to start.

Articles

The text version

No camera, no account, adults only. Pick a room and press Search.