from Hacker News

Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

by shea256 on 11/2/15, 6:27 PM with 172 comments

• by JoshMnem on 11/2/15, 7:33 PM

  I wish that someone would build an easy-to-use layer on top of an open protocol like IRC or XMPP. The tool could manage setup, configuration, archiving, and notifications.

  Instead of building a walled garden that is merely accessible via an open protocol, it would be more interesting to build a thin layer on top of an XMPP server that could even be removed or replaced later, if desired.

• by hrjet on 11/2/15, 7:38 PM

  Also, Matrix.org

  Open, federated protocol, multiple client and server implementations, integrated IRC bridge.

• by pnathan on 11/2/15, 7:07 PM

  Can someone explain the attraction that nerds have for Slack/Hipchat over a well-tended IRC server?

• by arca_vorago on 11/2/15, 11:37 PM

  Not a single one with end to end encrypted DM's...

  I use mumble for voice (encrypted to server, server is weakpoint), irc for chat on open networks (do it from a VPS, and use screen/tmux with irssi/emacs-erc for persistence), and am using bitmessage more and more. Haven't tried tor chat yet.

  Tried Slack, and even for business purposes, adoption was horrible and it ended up being a wasteland. Honestly, I think this statement from the Slack twitter sums it up: "The idea is to have a public-facing channel that a user can participate in without being a team member!"

  To me, webchat plugins for IRC accomplish this just fine, and to me, is more likely to get a user directly connected with a dev/engineer.

  Maybe I'm just a leftover of the 90's though... I mean usenet is disappearing so fast, even though I still love it... but as a FOSS proponent, I will use a GPL product over proprietary even if it's harder, unless absolutely necessary.

• by ex3ndr on 11/3/15, 12:50 AM

  Please, add ours: https://actor.im We also have Layer-like SDK for building your own mobile chat applications

• by seagreen on 11/2/15, 8:04 PM

  Well there's part of the problem. "Should I use Slack or this long list of open source options, all trickily alike?"

  The open source team (which I would prefer to win) would do much better if their message was "use this one, canonical, excellent option."

• by hoechst on 11/2/15, 7:03 PM

  for bunch of more alternatives, see https://github.com/cjbarber/hipchat-alternatives

• by hellbanner on 11/2/15, 7:12 PM

  I'm seeing "No e2e encrypted DMs" as one of the cons for most of these.. anyone have a solution?

• by fsiefken on 11/2/15, 9:07 PM

  Mattermost has the advantage of being bundled with GitLab, so organisations opting for GitLab might be tempted to use it as well.

• by lokedhs on 11/3/15, 7:24 AM

  Also Potato, which me and a few friends have been developing for our own use for a while. It will be released as open source soon.

  I will make a separate post once the source is released, but for now anyone that is interested can take a look at a small demo system I set up here: http://potato.dhsdevelopments.com/

  The server is written in Common Lisp, client in Clojurescript. Storage backend uses CouchDB, messaging using RabbitMQ and the search uses Solr. More technical details here: http://blog.potato.network/

• by godata1 on 11/2/15, 9:28 PM

  I wasn't sure when I read the headline if it referred to Slack Linux or Slack the music service. Apparently there is a communications client called Slack, just FYI.

• by tamebadger on 11/3/15, 5:37 AM

  Kudos to author for including sandstorm.io and docker in his pros and cons. I can see it becoming one of the first things we might wonder about in the future.

• by ixtli on 11/2/15, 9:48 PM

  Is it really open source in spirit if message auth relies on a hosted, closed source, proprietary application like github?

• by justinhj on 11/3/15, 2:54 AM

  I was recently at a small development studio that closed down. We used slack to communicate and liked it. I set up an alumni team and the whole team joined up to keep in touch and it's still active months later.

  Is anyone going to argue that if I'd sent out the irc channel that anyone would have tried to connect?

• by VoiceOfWisdom on 11/2/15, 9:20 PM

  The thing that keeps my company from switching to Slack or any of its alternatives is read notifications. Not having read notifications makes using the system a lot more painful. Any one know of a chat system (not Hangouts) that supports read notifications?

• by nikolay on 11/3/15, 5:41 AM

  Slack has some major design flaws. It's not developer-friendly either. I really don't get why hackers are not pushing for Gitter! It has SSO, it's developer-friendly, it's cheaper, it's embeddable, etc.

• by netheril96 on 11/2/15, 11:38 PM

  I find it curious that having a pure JavaScript implementation including the backend is listed as an advantage.

• by guylepage3 on 11/2/15, 10:06 PM

  rocket.chat seems pretty cool. Just signed up however so I will have to dig deeper. Nice.

• by foklepoint on 11/3/15, 4:40 AM

  Could give yammer a chance. Not open but their freemium model is much better than slacks

• by devit on 11/2/15, 7:51 PM

  Why not just use e-mail mailing lists instead?

  You get great apps for all devices (e-mail clients), notifications, encrypted direct messages, ability to send images/binaries/whatever, threaded communication, search, censorship resistance, filters, etc.

• by nodesocket on 11/2/15, 8:12 PM

  Why is this even an issue? Slack has nailed team chat. Slack is easy to use, they have a free plan. If you want the premium features, their pricing is very affordable. Can we stop re-inventing the wheel, just because engineers don't want to pay for software. This is the fundamental difference between founders+engineer/engineer.