I love Slack but if you get a big enough team you start losing messages quickly on the free tier to the void and it's expensive to upgrade. Stuff like this and Mattermost/RocketChat could be handy. Fling on a VM/Container Host of your choice and job's a good'un.
Also probably good if your company has to adhere to certain data security legislations keeping the instance firewalled and not giving data to Slack.
I first want to say I think companies should be paid for their services.
Everybody's first complaint is that history isn't preserved with Slack's free tier, but in practice it tends to enforce that those things should be in something more permanent and organized than chat.
At my workplace the main Slack-objection is ideological, on the grounds that we shouldn't be supporting a closed-source project when open-source options exist. But we're an ideological non-profit, so we're unusually aligned in this direction...
We keep mostly everything in-house, but team communication was the hardest part, as we wanted something that defaulted to end-to-end encryption. Surprisingly hard to beat Wire.com.
Ended up going with an XMPP server with OMEMO for encryption, and Jitsi Meet for video.
Original author here. I started the project in my early 20s when I had lots of free time. Slack didn't really exist back then and the other web based chat offerings weren't great (our company used Campfire).
I gradually stopped working on it as I got busier in both work and life. Part of me regrets not spinning it off as a company, especially after seeing RocketChat take off over the last couple years (we inspired them!).
We use mattermost and are super happy. It's like a full version of Slack for only $5/mo + 4h/yr maintenance. Didn't even see this one when we were looking.
We use Mattermost and are quite happy with it. It's free for the vast majority of use cases and open source. Runs great, rock solid stable, and has decent usable mobile apps.
I was excited to roll it out at the Linux Foundation. We are no longer rolling out new instances and Hyperledger[0] is looking for a replacement due to an issue[1][2].
It has been fine for our use case. We have a few hundred users on it, but we only use it over our corporate network. We're running it in kubernetes and it scales up and down as needed.
Let's Chat was one of the first apps we packaged for Cloudron. We used to use it as our full time chat for our customers. A great feature is that it has XMPP support (can connect using any XMPP client).
We have since moved on to Rocket.Chat. The main reason was that development stopped 2-3 years ago. Atleast back then, there was no mobile app as well
A bit off-topic, but does anyone know of a good lightweight self-hosted CMS for small teams? Very basic spreadsheet/database, file hosting, shared document editing.
Privacy considerations mean cloud-hosted options are out. Open source or dirt cheap is better as it's for a non-profit with only a shoestring budget and voluntary contributors. Thanks.
I would echo the Nextcloud suggestion! Their latest "Nextcloud Hub" [1] setup seems to offer exactly what you are looking for (including shared document editing via OnlyOffice).
Rocket.chat, matrix/riot, mattermost, Zulip, and likely others were tried. Zulip's 'topics' (think threads) was the feature that put them ahead of every other system. Free push notifications were a plus as well.
If threading isn't important, check out Mattermost. If you're into federation, matrix is something to check out.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 87.4 ms ] threadHas any of the reasons for building it changed since you started the project in 2012?
Also probably good if your company has to adhere to certain data security legislations keeping the instance firewalled and not giving data to Slack.
Everybody's first complaint is that history isn't preserved with Slack's free tier, but in practice it tends to enforce that those things should be in something more permanent and organized than chat.
We keep mostly everything in-house, but team communication was the hardest part, as we wanted something that defaulted to end-to-end encryption. Surprisingly hard to beat Wire.com.
Ended up going with an XMPP server with OMEMO for encryption, and Jitsi Meet for video.
I gradually stopped working on it as I got busier in both work and life. Part of me regrets not spinning it off as a company, especially after seeing RocketChat take off over the last couple years (we inspired them!).
Has anyone tried this? From a cursory glance it seems to be superseded by Matrix/Riot (there's also Mattermost and RocketChat).
> Is this project still alive?
> Sadly no, we've all been very busy at our company and haven't had the bandwidth to work on this thing.
From https://github.com/sdelements/lets-chat/issues/781
For me, if I was part of a small team, I would choose a hosted service everytime so I don't need to do any ops work.
Slack has also been banned in China at times.
[0] https://rocket.chat/
[0] https://chat.hyperledger.org/
[1] https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/issues/15583
[2] https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/issues/15391
Source: helped write it
We have since moved on to Rocket.Chat. The main reason was that development stopped 2-3 years ago. Atleast back then, there was no mobile app as well
Privacy considerations mean cloud-hosted options are out. Open source or dirt cheap is better as it's for a non-profit with only a shoestring budget and voluntary contributors. Thanks.
1. https://nextcloud.com/hub/
[1] https://sandstorm.io/
https://www.seafile.com/en/home/
https://www.getfilecloud.com/filecloud-community-edition/
Rocket.chat, matrix/riot, mattermost, Zulip, and likely others were tried. Zulip's 'topics' (think threads) was the feature that put them ahead of every other system. Free push notifications were a plus as well.
If threading isn't important, check out Mattermost. If you're into federation, matrix is something to check out.