A free alternative to Minecraft Realms
Minecraft Realms is Mojang’s own hosting, sold as a monthly subscription. JetRift does the same job for Java Edition free: a world your friends connect to at a permanent address, whitelisted by Minecraft username, with no card collected. The differences worth knowing are that worlds here sleep when empty, and that you choose from game modes we run rather than uploading your own world.
Where JetRift is better
- It is free, and no card is collected, so nothing can start charging you.
- Game modes come built. Lifesteal, One Block, Manhunt and the rest are running plugins rather than something you install.
- Whitelisting is by Minecraft username rather than by invitation to an account, so nobody has to accept anything.
- No advertising, no queue, and nothing on the site reporting your activity anywhere else.
Where Realms is better, plainly
It is worth saying rather than leaving you to find out. Realms lets you upload a world you already have, and switch between several of them. Here every world is generated fresh and there is no way to bring an existing one in.
Realms also runs continuously and is not metered. Here you get a hundred and fifty hours a month of a world being awake, which is roughly 5 hours a day, and a world nobody is on sleeps after ten minutes and stops counting. For a group that plays in the evening that is more than enough. For a world you want live around the clock it is not.
And Realms is Mojang. It will be there next year with the same support and the same guarantees. We are new, and you should weigh that.
What sleeping actually feels like
Ten minutes after the last person leaves, the world saves and the machine goes away. When somebody connects again it starts back up, which takes about a minute, and the page shows what it is doing and roughly how long is left.
So the honest version is: the first person to play each evening waits about a minute, and nobody else waits at all.
Moving over
You cannot import a Realms world, so the sensible route is to start something new here rather than to migrate. Going the other way is easy: every world has backups, and a backup is a standard world archive you can download and run anywhere.
Make one now. Free, no card, and about ninety seconds from here to an address you can send your friends.
Start a worldCommon questions
Is this made by Mojang?
No. JetRift is not an official Minecraft service and is not approved by or associated with Mojang or Microsoft.
Can I upload my Realms world?
No. Worlds here are generated fresh. Backups go out but no world comes in.
Does it work with Bedrock, like Realms does?
No. This is Java Edition only. Bedrock, which is the version on consoles and phones, cannot join a Java server.
What is the catch if it is free?
The allowance and the sleeping. A hundred and fifty hours a month across your worlds, and no uploading your own world or plugins. There is no paid tier waiting to bill you.