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Ask HN: What real-time chat are you using in place of slack?

19 points by gshdg ↗ HN
We need chat. But Slack’s pricing can be prohibitive for an early stage startup. The lack of message retention on the free tier means that’s not an option for us.

What less expensive (or open source) alternatives (beyond Discord) are you finding effective?

What do you like or dislike about the tool you’re using?

32 comments

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s1t5
> We need chat. But Slack’s pricing can be prohibitive for an early stage startup.

It's hard to imagine a situation where a few dollars per user per month is genuinely prohibitive.

jrowley
If you have a thin budget and lots of part time employees or people just dipping their feet in the project/ trying things out, while you are bootstrapping, I could see it feeling expensive. But the cost is trivial compared to say US healthcare for a single employee for a month.
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gshdg
This, basically. We have a LOT of part-time contractors to coordinate with. And would ideally like to open it to our customers as well, with more limited permissions.
price
Speaking for Zulip, in this kind of situation we are happy to work out discounted Zulip Cloud pricing that makes economic sense for what you're using it for.

Our take is that the full price (which is similar to Slack's) is designed for when the users are full-time employees that you're paying a rich-world salary, and that in that situation it's very cheap.

Here's what we say on our pricing page: https://zulipchat.com/plans/

> Zulip Cloud Standard is free for open source projects. We also offer steep discounts (usually 85%-100%) to many non-profits, educational institutions, groups of friends, and in other scenarios where most of the users are not fulltime employees of the customer. Generally, only closed organizations that also pay their members' salaries pay full price.

catacombs
IRC. It's free, easy to set up and use and easy to maintain within a small organization.
PopeDotNinja
A lot of people like IRC. I am not one of them. I’ve never found it to be particularly pleasant to use, if it’s very feature limited.
catacombs
IRC is fully customizable with plugins written by hundreds of people. Sure, you won't get "threads" or emoji responses to individual responses, but it's possible to add a number of features.
PopeDotNinja
If I'm being honest, I don't want to do a lot of work customizing anything. I want pretty good out of the box.
catacombs
You could also try Mumble or Matrix. I'd stay away from Slack, Discord or other proprietary services.
hazz99
I think emoji responses are really valuable, and this is not sarcastic.
allarm
Is it still not possible to fetch the offline history in IRC?
catacombs
You can enable logging and write everything to the same system as the server. For individuals, the best thing is to set up an IRC bouncer that everyone can connect to and preserve messages.
buwka
In terms of open-source alternatives, there's Zulip [https://zulip.com]. It's very similar to Slack and fairly simple to set up. They do offer paid hosting at a subscription cost per user. However, if you install Zulip and host your own server you can run it completely for free. If you're still in the early stages of your startup you could also consider signing up for the free Zulip cloud tier to get a sense of the app.
kkirsche
Mattermost
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dementik
Rocket.Chat. Works flawlessly for us with 100 or so users. Has been working for several years.
Ascetik
Matrix.

You can run your own private server and private federation. You don't have to federate with Matrix.org, you can make your own company federation, or hobby or whatever and federate with others. It's fully encrypted and has web based, desktop client based and mobile app support from multiple different clients. Riot is the most popular and what we currently use. Has amazing VOIP integration. It'll run easily on a low-tier linode VPS.

It's about the closest thing to Discord we could find that, and it's way, way more secure.

_448
> Has amazing VOIP integration.

I was never able to get this working!

davidwparker
Why beyond Discord? We use Discord extensively, have a lot of bots built for it. Works great!
gshdg
Because Discord is such a reflexive answer and everyone piling onto it would interfere with surfacing a broader set of ideas. Discord is ok, but I find its ergonomics much poorer than Slack’s.
beagle3
Many of the options suggested (Rocket.Chat, Matrix, IRC, ...) work well, and some even have mobile notifications if you use the master server (e.g. matrix.org) - but not if you run your own server (which I want to do for privacy reasons)

Is there any solution for this that doesn't kill battery for Android, and one that works at all for iOS?

ralala
You will probably have to compile the mobile apps yourself. The Zulip docs explain this very detailed: https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/mobile-pus...

Another possibility is to not include content in the push messages and just send an "there is new content" using the official Zulip push service.

price
(I work on the Zulip mobile app.)

If you run a Zulip server, you can have it send mobile notifications without needing to compile the mobile apps yourself. Lots of people do that, though their motivations may be different from the grandparent's.

This does mean sending the notifications through a central notification "bouncer" service which we run, and that page of our docs explains why the way Google and Apple have designed their push-notification systems makes this necessary.

We're working on end-to-end encryption of the push notifications: https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues/6954 Once that's done, that will mean that the content can't be read by the bouncer service, nor by Google or Apple en route.

opan
What's stopping you getting mobile notifications from Matrix while not using the flagship server? Just in case you didn't know, I'll mention that you can sign into other home servers in the Riot app. It may not be obvious at first.
beagle3
The server needs to send a signed message to Apple for this to work on iOS; I would either have to register as a developer with Apple and get my own key, or have to route the message through the flagship someway.

(There may be a kludge like the one described above for Zulip, but last I checked about a year ago, there wasn't).

scared2
What is the reason behind not liking discord
gshdg
Because I’m already familiar with Discord.

Looking for more options and trying to avoid the reflexive “but discord” response or the discussion devolving into a debate about the pros and cons of Discord.

opan
IRC, XMPP, Matrix, Rocket.Chat. Maybe you'd want to skip IRC if message retention is an important detail. Although, I'd argue the local-logging method is more reliable and faster to search through than what most modern chats give you. If you're hosting on your own hardware locally, XMPP will be less straining on resources than Matrix, at least the last I heard. I haven't actually used Rocket.Chat, but I threw it on the list because I think it's aiming more for the Slack crowd than these other more general options.
TXV
Typetalk.

It also has a free tier up to 10 users, that retains the most recent 10k messages.