
Ask HN: What real-time chat are you using in place of slack? - gshdg
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.<p>What less expensive (or open source) alternatives (beyond Discord) are you finding effective?<p>What do you like or dislike about the tool you’re using?
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buwka
In terms of open-source alternatives, there's Zulip
[[https://zulip.com](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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

~~~
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/](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.

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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...](https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/mobile-push-
notifications.html)

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](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.

~~~
ralala
Thank you for your great work, Zulip is overall a very great experience!

(OT: The one thing I still miss on Android is the handling of the share
Intent)

~~~
Cyphase
This is in the works now.

Here's the issue: [https://github.com/zulip/zulip-
mobile/issues/117](https://github.com/zulip/zulip-mobile/issues/117)

Here's a recent (~3 weeks old) and active pull request:
[https://github.com/zulip/zulip-
mobile/pull/4124](https://github.com/zulip/zulip-mobile/pull/4124)

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dementik
Rocket.Chat. Works flawlessly for us with 100 or so users. Has been working
for several years.

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kkirsche
Mattermost

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TXV
Typetalk.

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

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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.

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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.

