4 Open source alternatives to Slack and company

[steven36]

Matrix

 

 

 

Within this segment, the strongest sound is Matrix, an interesting open and decentralized standard for communication designed for interoperability in a similar way to the interoperability existing in the e-mail segment, Enabling real-time communication between users regardless of the customers or servers they use.

 

Currently, the standard and all its development is maintained by Matrix.org Foundation, a non-profit organization based in the United Kingdom.

 

Matrix has been developed with privacy and security in mind, taking into account the federation between servers, so that a user can communicate in any existing room securely, with end-to-end encryption, regardless of the server Where you have registered your account, and using any client of your choice.

 

There are also gateways to participate through messaging programs such as Telegram, discord or Slack, among others.

 

Matrix allows communication between users basically via text chat, audio calls and video calls, along with other possibilities.

 

In addition, it aims to surpass the relative success achieved by the standards SIP, XMPP and RCS trying to circumvent the obstacles that have prevented that the standards now mentioned have not been able to go to more.

 

Among the customers, the best known is Riot, also open-source. Those who do not want to create their own self-hosted Matrix servers, have the possibility to hire some of Modular.im’s plans to create their servers with a few clicks away, depending on their needs.

 

All information is available on your official website

Rocket Chat

 

 

It is a robust open source solution that allows organizations to both install on their own servers and use the different payment plans, with different features, through the platform servers, avoiding the need of having technical knowledge, being able to take advantage of the test period that is also offered.

 

In either case, the users of the organizations can connect to the servers through the clients available for the desktop systems: Windows, Linux and Mac, as for the mobile systems: Android and IOS.

 

Once connected, you will find, according to the chosen plan, a multitude of possibilities, including real-time audio and video calls, file sharing, possibility of external guest collaboration, message translations, audio conversion to texts, etc., all of them safely.

 

In addition, thanks to plugins, themes and applications, organizations will be able to adapt their spaces to their needs, preferences and identities.

 

If organizations come from HipChat or Slack, they also have a message import tool. In this regard, Rocket Chat is sold as an alternative to these services.

 

With more than 600 collaborating developers worldwide, and with its source code available on GitHub, this is a powerful solution to consider.

Mattermost

 

This solution is designed to be self-hosted in both the cloud and the local infrastructure of the companies themselves.

 

It started as a chat tool under the proprietary code for SpinPunch, but later released its code, according to Wikipedia

 

It is currently maintained by Mattermost Inc, whose revenue source comes from support and additional features not available in the open source Team Edition (MIT License).

 

Users can interact with Mattermost servers through clients available for Windows, Linux, Mac, Android and IOS, all open source.

 

Mattermost yes usually referred to as an alternative to Slack.

 

Keybase

 

And finally, could not Miss Keybase, a well-known communications platform end-to-end and open source that counts among its services with a chat service and another for the creation of groups in the style Slack or discord, launched just over a year ago. 

The best of all is that it is available free of charge and without publicity, with applications for desktop systems: Windows, Linux and Mac, as well as applications for mobile devices: Android and iOS.

An interesting fact is that those who want it can also use it under the Tor network.

 

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