HACKER Q&A
📣 gshdg

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


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?

  👤 buwka Accepted Answer ✓
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.
👤 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.

👤 catacombs
IRC. It's free, easy to set up and use and easy to maintain within a small organization.
👤 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.
👤 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.

👤 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?

👤 dementik
Rocket.Chat. Works flawlessly for us with 100 or so users. Has been working for several years.
👤 kkirsche
Mattermost
👤 TXV
Typetalk.

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

👤 davidwparker
Why beyond Discord? We use Discord extensively, have a lot of bots built for it. Works great!
👤 scared2
What is the reason behind not liking discord