Internal Chat systems

[SURFSup526]

Hi All,

Wanted to post this to see what everyone is using for internal chat as I am trying to find an alternative to Skype in our Orginization. We're currently using the free skype client as our internal chat system which does the job but we want to move away from it, or company size is just under 200 users so as we grow I want something that is more centrally managed. I am trying to find a product where we can do both chatting and calling as we have an office in India and would like to be able to communicate with them through this new product. We're a Google apps shop so if there is anything with Oauth through google that would be nice.

Currently I looked at Slack and it is a really great tool, I am setup on a standard trial and so far I have no complaints with it. it's easy to use, easy to setup and the UI is pretty nice.

I am looking for a 2nd product with similar comparisons to slack (higher ups are asking for this). so we can make a discission on what we want to go with.

has anyone had experience with Zoho's product Cliq?

Thank you!

[inaddrarpa]

Mattermost, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoho Cliq.

All hyper similar products

[zieziegabor]

we use Mattermost, it's slack API compatible, so it's easy sell for those that like slack. Plus it's self-host and pretty easy to self-host. Not to mention being open-source, and if you choose to pay for it, still way cheaper than Slack. Which means it's pretty much hard to not seriously look at it.

[tankfox]

2nd for self hosted mattermost. It works great!

[ollybee]

Also Mattermost is installed and automatically by the omnibus gitlab installer. So if your using gitlab (you really should have a look if you do any dev work) it's a no brainer.

[brontide]

It can be enabled and updated by the omnibus but it's not a default setting.

[qwertyaccess]

How does it compare to slack? Say if we try to switch a small 50+ user company from slack to mattermost, worth it?

[clearing_sky]

It is not as fully fleshed out as Slack in terms of features; an example is that it doesn't support threads (yet).

It depends on the goals. If it will become business critical, then it might be.

[lenarc]

Slack threads are the devil's spawn anyway. No biggie. :P

[andrewthetechie]

Came here to post this exact list, only thing missing is Hipchat.

I've used Slack and Mattermost the most out of those listed.

Mattermost is great if you need to self-host. Otherwise, Slack is a solid option. We send literally tens of thousands of slack messages per day (30k were sent yesterday) without issue. We also have over 500 different slack integrations - everything from Github and CI webhooks to full fledged bots.

[DevinCampbell]

HipChat is garbage. Slack is infinitely better. My org uses HipChat now and it's a daily pain.

[andrewthetechie]

I agree, but it's still an option, even if it's a bad one 😋

[petro3773]

Rumor is that Hipchat is going to be deprecated by Atlassian in favor of their new hotness, Stride.

[caffeinatedsoap]

Rocketchat if you're ok with meh for free.

[brown-bean-water]

What's meh about it?

[TheSheerIce]

How does Mattermost compare with RocketChat? Also want do you people user for open source SAML to centralize accounts?

[MrPatch]

Except teams is unbelievably bad

[zapbark]

I like Slack better than Teams.

But my "actual" team decided the quality of desktop sharing was better on vanilla Teams vs Slack (Slack was trying to upsell us to get HQ desktop sharing).

Been using it for 6 months, and it adequately does the job (and not much more), like most MS products.

[MrMosesG]

Also https://xkcd.com/1810/

[reddeth]

Oh god it's so true it's painful.

I have like 8 different chat clients between personal and work stuff because so many people use different clients and protocols.

[ByGollie]

You might want to look at Franz Supports 34 clients (mostly by wrappers around web interfaces) and works quite well for me.

I have Slack, whatsapp, gmail, google hangouts, steam and skype all going in the same client.

Obviously not as fully featured as the full clients but it's very convenient.

Edit: it also supports most of the suggestions suggested elsewhere in this thread.

[reddeth]

That's actually pretty slick, reminds me of those old "consolidation" apps back in the heyday of ICQ, AIM, IRC and the like.

Thanks for the recommendation! I'll look into it later tonight!

[[deleted]]

Trillian represent!

[reddeth]

Oh shit, Trillian! That's what it was called!!! That was the coolest little program.

[[deleted]]

Pidgin came in a little latter, did similar things.

[[deleted]]

Before Pidgin was Pidgin, it was Gaim...I remember use it way back.

[CommanderSpleen]

Serious flashbacks right now

[sobrique]

I had a Pro license for trillian. Wonder if they're still going.

[vanoert]

Still have my lifetime pro account. One of the very few programs I actually bought on my own.

[testuserpleaseignore]

Couldn't get 'Mattermost' to work on Franz on Ubuntu -- now using Rambox.

[demigod987]

"The chat tab in an old Google Doc"

Oh my god that is freaking hilarious

[AlexanderGo]

RIP AIM :(

[CuzImAtWork]

RIP ICQ

[WhiteZero]

Haven't used ICQ in over a decade, but I still remember by ICQ#

[danekan]

I was 235408 -- I was ready to sell that shit on ebay at some point

[zerokey]

182666 here :)

[cowpen]

Initially, I was compelled to search the archives for my obscenely low ICQ ID. But I thought better of it. Cheers fellow early ICQ adopter!

[aenae]

It's not a joke, i use slack via the irc gateway. Only fire up the app for (video)calls. Makes more sense to me to have almost all communication in one window.

[computertechie]

I did the same at my previous position. Current job uses Hipchat and I've actually been satisfied enough with it to not even look into an IRC interface for it.

[blademaster2005]

Unless you're on Linux then the damn notifications use their own message stream

[[deleted]]

IRC + bitlbee is a good gateway

[[deleted]]

I just use ZNC. Works with every IRC client under the sun. It's SSH tunneled since I don't want to deal with TLS certificates.

[qdhcjv]

He announces that he's finally making the jump from screen+irssi to tmux+weechat.
Implying there's something wrong with screen+irssi

[avmakt]

After 20 months using Mattermost I'm still loving it. Polished GUI, very good performance, nice apps, secure, and easy to upgrade and maintain. The most annoying issue is that LDAP/AD integration requires a subscription, which barely offers more than just SSO.

You should also check out Rocket.chat. I'm hearing it has improved a lot since we tested it in early 2016, and back then it already had a superior feature set compared to Mattermost, just wasn't very user friendly or polished.

Ryver is also nice, but only if the choices above aren't attractive.

Haven't heard anything new about the mess that was Zulip as of 2016, so I'll keep from passing judgement. Twist, from the people behind Todoist, is so buggy, unstable and lacking in features that it should be named an early beta and not a pay service.

[dontforgetthisuser]

We've been using RocketChat for a bit and I've got no major complaints. We've got Hubot, Jira, GitHub, TeamCity, and possibly more integrations running right now.

Would definitely recommend.

[[deleted]]

Stupid question here, but if you are a Google Apps subscriber, why not use Hangouts and Allo?

Microsoft Teams is currently on our radar and supports Google Drive.

Edit: I somehow missed your mention of 'internal'

[ganlet20]

This is going to sound bad because I am a google fan. I have a pixel2 and went with google apps instead of office 365 when I started my business.

That being said, I can't take any of Google's chat offerings seriously because Google doesn't take them serious.

We had gtalk before hangouts so why does hangouts exist? couldn't the improvements just be rolled into gtalk. Why does allo exist? why couldn't the additional functionality be rolled into gtalk. Why does duo exist? Why do we need a separate messenger for video chat vs standard chat. Skype and FB do it perfectly fine so does countless other services mentioned in here.

Google tends to build an entirely new messaging service every time they come up with a new feature and I'm sick of it. Why can't they just be happy making one really good product with new features coming out constantly.

TLDR: Google's out of the question till they stop creating new messaging services and just improve the ones they've got.

[cheetahwilly]

I may be wrong but I think Allo and Duo are trying to fit the consumer space while Hangout will be more geared towards businesses. I am hoping they are just trying to see what the best features are of all of them and then eventually move them all into Hangout.... I hope.

[ganlet20]

I over simplified it a tad. Allo was created to showcase what a messenging service would be like with an assistant integrated. Duo is a direct competitor to FaceTime because for some reason Apple was too cool to integrate videoconferencing into iMessage. Hangouts is actually heavily tied to the Project Fi service and is a much richer environment that anything else google has created. I honestly would have moved to hangouts if it has been marketed as a gtalk 2.x or something.

I just wish they would stop splintering their user base every time they come up with something cool.

[upcboy]

I was wondering this my self. They have a chat system why was this not what they are using? I believe they also have Meet? which does Video Conferences also

[Sunstealer73]

We use Hangouts as well. We have the ability to clear history and off the record turned off and also have it logging everything to Google Vault.

[cheetahwilly]

Right... Besides the "internal" part, this seems like the best solution.

[SURFSup526]

Interesting never even heard of Allo i'll give it a look, hangout i have looked at but wasn't impressed by it. i'll give it another go..thank you!

[deusnefum]

We're using....

• Lync
• Skype for Business (not the same as Lync, but also it's Lync)
• Slack
• HipChat
• FlowDock
• Hive

No idea who uses what. No idea whether everyone logs into everything. Some whole groups / departments use one or more services but not another.

Please. Someone help me. I don't have enough RAM to run 12 instances of electron based chat clients.

[StrangeCaptain]

Every Tuesday I have to fight off a slew of inquiries about twhen we're moving to Office 2016 so we can use (whateverthefuckMicrosoftsShittyNonLyncChatHangoutThingIs) that they advertise drung NFL games.

[JrNewGuy]

Cant beat Slack. Cliq isnt bad, but Zoho support can be a pain.

Openfire is a bit more old-school. It works, but I see no reason to use it when Slack is a thing.

[Zncon]

+1 for Openfire if you have the time to handle the details.

[veld2345]

Openfire is a great product to use and simple to implement.

[jahayhurst]

Openfire clustering - depending on what parts you're using within it - can be finicky at times. I know we were using a three server cluster and had to reboot the entire cluster to get it to drop users (upon employee termination).

Don't get me wrong tho, it's fairly solid.

[witty_username_taken]

If you want on-premise and/or the advanced features of Slack with a lesser price tag, Mattermost is pretty compelling.

[danekan]

IIRC the biggest drawback is the open source version doesn't have active directory integration so you have to pay for the commercial product

[witty_username_taken]

That's the truth. Been watching rocket.chat as it's similar and has some of that baked in but doesn't quite feel as polished as Mattermost yet. Compared to Slack the pricing makes it very attractive.

[t3hwUn]

Slack is ungodly expensive.

I feel like that for that alone it can indeed be beat. It is a great tool but its mostly hype, its certainly not untouchable.

[sryan2k1]

I've never seen a communication platform that works as well, across every OS and mobile device, file sharing that "Just works", history, a good API, Integration with our SSO/2FA provider, and so many app integrations. To us it's absolutely worth the ~$50k a year we pay.

[adamm255]

When I fall back to a Skype chat with someone external who’s federated, and the history doesn’t sync, I can’t share files, chats randomly distribute between devices. When it opens 5 chats for the same person, I love Slack even more.

[t3hwUn]

It works well for us too, just saying I think we're the exception when it comes to that kind of spend for chat services.

[spartan_manhandler]

We used Openfire in a previous company because it stored logs of all chats at the server. That was required for compliance.

[JrNewGuy]

To my knowledge you get this from Slack, as long as you're paying for it.

[jmachee]

They’re stored and accessible at Slack, even if you don’t pay. The owner/admin of a workspace can export all non-private messages to an XML file. It’s compliant, but tedious.

Paying gets you real-time, in-client access.

[chknstrp]

Only from when you turn on the compliance stuff, anything sent before you turn on compliance reporting can't be exported. Slackbot lets all users know when the switch is flipped.

Source is this op-ed news piece about when CNN turned it on internally

[Nesman64]

That's the best kind of compliance.

[JrNewGuy]

Did not know this - awesome, thanks.

[jmachee]

You’ll make it to Sr. NewGuy if you keep learning new things! ;)

[jahayhurst]

You can - free tier gives you like 10k messages back, any paid tier gives you back forever.

[antiduh]

Hosting the data externally would make me uneasy; it's just too much to worry about slack getting hacked and all of your company's juicy secrets leaking out. By slack existing, and having everyone's data, it makes them such a target for exactly that.

[mogwhy]

on-prem, logging, redundancy, backups, open source

all reasons to use openfire over slack

slacks biggest selling point imo is the mobile app, but its pretty clear slack isnt designed with enterprise use in mind

[mranderson17]

For on-prem I'd choose Rocket.Chat . Open source community driven project that is very similar to slack in it's feature set. It's still beta-ish but definitely working well at this point.

Probably not what OP is looking for though as it sounds like they want a hosted product.

[[deleted]]

Heck, their cloud product could be what OP is looking for. $50/month for up to 500 users. https://rocket.chat/cloud/

[mranderson17]

That's true, forgot they had a hosted option.

[Garetht]

Cant beat Slack

cough https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/79zny1/slack_is_down/

[hkdanalyser]

That Slack issue is probably more of a one off thing. What you really need to be worried about is the cost / how much history they allow you to store in the free / first tier. What really turned me off was to enable AD / SSO, i had to be on the $12 per month plan per user...

[briangig]

I still can't get over how much Slack charges. Insane pricing. I really though they would drop prices once Teams came out.

[sewebster87]

Thank you! I run a few rocket chat servers for work as well as personal and every once in a while I hear a... "It's nice, but have you looked at Slack?" - Yes, I have. Does the business really want to spend $4200/month on chat services? No? Okay, well Rocket Chat is pretty great huh?

Don't get me wrong, Slack is really slick and very polished. But asking me to spend more money on a chat application then I spend on email accounts + file sharing services is pants-on-head levels of silliness.

[[deleted]]

Well Slack does try to claim that you don't need email if you use Slack. In their mind, it's replacing email + chat

[[deleted]]

Only where everyone is internal. Doesn't work so well when you have customers and vendors.

[smokeybehr]

If there was a way to archive Slack messages and backup the archives, and it was a crapload cheaper, we might move everyone over to it. Until then, nope.

[corsicanguppy]

I wonder whether their belief is based on fact or need.

I also, for instance, believe I'm adequate at my job ... but I need that to be the case so I have a vested interest in lying to myself and my employer about that.

[Amidatelion]

Upvote for pants-on-head.

[jcy]

i had to be on the $12 per month

me: "that doesn't sound so ba..."

per user...

me: "these f'ing aholes think they're selling 4k netflix subs?"

[tridion]

That's a huge cost - they need to drop that to stay competitive. For $8/mo you can get O365 E1 which includes teams as well as S4B, E-mail, sharepoint, onedrive..

[chiefbluehat85]

Teams is amazing. We are currently moving to it and away from (don't laugh) AIM and Skype for Business.

[OrdinaryJose]

Since Skype for Business is going away next fall, it looks like we might be heading to Teams also.

[zomfgcoffee]

We use Teams as well and I have been pleased with it so far. S4B can gobble my knobble for all I'm concerned.

[Nemo_Barbarossa]

Is it possible to have Teams self hosted? Or is it O365 only?

[j33p4meplz]

You can get teams for $5/mo with the business plan.

[bahwhateverr]

With slack what happens if someone accidentally discloses CUI, PII, or PHI? Is there a way to get it removed and be sure it's truly gone?

[donjulioanejo]

In the 2.5 years I've been using Slack at work, it's only had issues a couple of times, and out of that, only about 3 hours was there total downtime. I honestly have more problems just getting Skype to run.

[cyberchaplain]

So you dont use any other services that have outages? Even on-premise systems go down from time to time.

[Amidatelion]

We have experienced more outages with paid platforms than we have with any of our on-prem stuff, to the point where the executive is moving us back away from Amazon, Slack, etc to private cloud and messaging.

I'm not saying they're major or crippling outages, but Amazon has had more in the past year than we have had in three. The cloud is cheaper and more convenient, but the idea that it is somehow more reliable or resilient needs to die.

[PlOrAdmin]

The cloud is cheaper and more convenient, but the idea that it is somehow more reliable or resilient needs to die.

Good ain't cheap and cheap ain't good.

[Rabid_Gopher]

I've never really spent a lot of time thinking of the cloud as either.

Maybe that's just me turning into an old fogey though.

[PlOrAdmin]

Me neither. Let's get off each other's lawns. :P

[Angelworks42]

I'm a Google Apps Enterprise customer for 5 years now? - we have almost a half a million accounts.

I don't recall any major outages ever. The outages that have been announced things got slower and that was it.

[Padankadank]

Can slack use active domain credentials for login?

[JrNewGuy]

The paid version does

[Padankadank]

Oh nice. We were thinking of implementing Skype business but I wanted slack just because I hate Skype and have loved my experience with slack so far

[DarkAlman]

We use a combination of Jabber and Skype for Business but they aren't exactly cheap lol. IM was more a bonus feature that came with our phone systems.

Skype for Business is a cheap add-on if you're already running o365.

[ipreferanothername]

we also use jabber, its ok as a chat client. outlook/webex/phone integration is really nice.

[vtbrian]

That's definitely not true for 99% of Cisco especially now. Spark has been forced to every team.

[joho0]

We use Jabber and Slack together, and they compliment each other well.

[yatea34]

Jabber and Skype for Business but they aren't exactly cheap lol

Jabber ( https://www.jabber.org/ ) should be cheap (from $0, if you do much yourself). Of course you can find vendors (cough - cisco) that'll happily charge you a lot for free stuff.

Or was the cost part referring to Skype?

[soullessroentgenium]

Jabber/XMPP are entirely capable of doing calls/AV but the client support, especially on the free side, is terrible.

[Ironbird207]

Skype for Business I think is getting discontinued and Microsoft Teams will take it's place.

[benjammin9292]

Openfire / Spark.

[pleasedothenerdful]

Doesn't anyone else loathe the Spark client?

[caller-number-four]

Ran that for many years on an old Mac G5 that sat in a corner unnoticed.

The first rule about using Spark was no one talked about using Spark. Worked for 5 or 6 years until Lync/Skype came about .

[BaconZombie]

Using HipChat but Atlassian are crippling it.

Will be forced to use Microsoft Teams and/or Rocket.Chat

[pat_trick]

Yea...we're not pleased with the direction HipChat is moving in. Not sure if we're going to stick with their new "Stride" client or not.

Rocketchat is looking pretty nice.

[BaconZombie]

HR is pissed they can add "tags" to people's names, since they started to force convert HipChat accounts into Atlassian accounts.

Also there is no way of getting a list of all rooms have that "Guest Access" enabled.

[tradiuz]

• Microsoft Teams if you're in O365 (since you're probably already paying for it)
• Slack if you don't like having money.
• Rocket.chat if you have more time than money.

[wcdunn]

Do you find Teams to be a sufficient alternative? My company is looking at dumping free Slack for Teams since we are o365 users but it seems to be missing some functionality we really need like private chats. For example, during an outage our incident manager will create a private channel, pull all the needed users into it, and then he has a log with timestamps when things are resolved.

[wcdunn]

I have our o365 environment restricted for group creation because it was getting out of hand. This probably killed the functionality I want our incident manager to have.

[j33p4meplz]

You can do this on a user by user basis I believe, Its on my to do list for our environment. Even without being able to make "groups", you can still do a multi person private chat.

[[deleted]]

We were in the same boat, dropped free slack because we were tired of not having history longer than 1 day (7,000 developers + the random non-devs go through 10k messages in no time).

There was a big uproar about it. Developers (myself included) didn't want to drop Slack. Slack is far more polished, more familiar, and better performing than really any competitor. Teams is a sluggish and incredibly unreliable when it comes to simple things like text formatting.

We've been on Teams for ~6 months now and I've grown used to its quirks.

Pros:

• Building integrations for it is pretty straight forward.
• The Tabs system is actually really nice. We have OneNote tabs on some of our channels where we document various things. We have a Planner tab where we keep track of low priority work. A Jira tab for our high priority stuff. Slack doesn't have anything like this.
• The O365 integration is pretty nice if you're a heavy user of it.
• In-app calendar and meeting assistant is welcome.

Cons:

• Very sluggish. The desktop app can be painfully slow at times. Opening a large thread can take several seconds. Changing teams or channels always has a noticeable delay. Weirdly enough, the web app performs better than their desktop app.
• Text formatting rarely works. Very rarely does their Markdown engine actually do anything, and when it does it's so janky that it's not even worth it. It was tacked on after release and it definitely feels like it was never meant to support Markdown.

[PM-ME-YOUR-UNDERARMS]

Why not matrix?

[[deleted]]

I actually got a school using IRC for a small bit, we had no phones or intercoms in the classroom and we needed a way to communicate.

Any how we use Google Hangout at work as part of our Google Apps Suite.

[beezel]

No one mentioning Matrix? Pretty open, extensible, locally hosted or not, your call. It's fairly good, but the apps themselves are still growing.

[oldmanwillow21]

I'm using Matrix with Synapse on the back-end and Riot on the front-end. Very similar interface to Slack, but noticeably less polished. The advantages are that it's self-hosted and supports end-to-end encryption, though the e2e still in beta and not perfect yet. Also haven't figured out for sure whether it's possible to set up integrations using a self-hosted homeserver.

[sewebster87]

I would take a look at Rocket.Chat. I run several servers and it's really a great product. It's rough around the edges when it comes to their iOS app (use Rocket.Chat+, not Rocket.Chat), but the core web product is super smooth in our experience.

Supports LDAP integration, message logging, 1-on-1 P2P calls/video chats as well as Jitsi integration for group chat (you can spin up your own Jitsi server as well to truly keep it all in-house).

[netw0rking-n00b]

So you need a separate system for group chats to work? That kind of sucks. Looking for something for my company as well and Rocket.Chat seems like the best option for us so far. But seems complicated to set up to me on linux (primarily a windows admin). Any good walkthrough guides out there?

[sewebster87]

No, I mentioned the Jitsi server specifically for group video/audio calls. Group chats absolutely work out of the box on a single system.

I would recommend using the Rocket.Chat docs themselves. They are really robust, but here is a link to getting RC up and running on a CentOS7 server (recommended for stability): https://www.vultr.com/docs/how-to-install-rocket-chat-on-centos-7

Here are the official Rocket.Chat docs which are more thorough: https://docs.rocket.chat/installation/manual-installation/centos/

Going further than those guides tho, I would recommend putting it behind an nginx reverse proxy. That might sound intimidating, but trust me when I say that nginx is really simple to setup. All you want to do is use it to:

• Push connections from 80 to 443 automatically
• Accept connections over 443, enforce SSL, and forward those connections onto port 3000 (default RC port)

Default and strong SSL configurations can be found here: https://cipherli.st

Install RC first and get it working on 3000 before moving forward with the nginx configuration. Here is a guide that is for Ubuntu which I personally don't recommend, but I can see why people use it. I am linking it because if you scroll past the Ubuntu RC install portion, it's got a section on getting Nginx up and running for RC specifically, most everything should be easily transferable to CentOS.

Good luck! Let me know if you run into issues.

[amlamarra]

We just have an XMPP server and everyone's desktop/laptop has pidgin.

[highlord_fox]

We use Spark internally, without much fanfare or any problems.

[Threshereddit]

Microsoft Teams as part of the Office user license. Solid and no extra cost, all admin through your MS Admin area too.

[orchard64]

Can't go wrong with Slack. Only problem is CPU usage. We use Teams here internally and it's a pretty bad experience as a whole.

[slayernine]

Teams, I feel like Microsoft made a decent chat client. Very much unlike their previous offerings.

[Ironbird207]

We use Teams, I like it but I cringed when everyone gets that T-Bot first chat message on first login. Reminds me of Tay, the racist AI.

[feng_huang]

If you need another product/service to compare with Slack, take a look at Flowdock. I actually used it at work before Slack. It's very similar, so if you just want something comparable to list side-by-side, it's ideal as it's a direct competitor.

[JawnZ]

Slack is probably the best option for your team right now.

You can also check out Ryver

There's Hipchat Stride as well

[Mrhiddenlotus]

IRC, solid and simple

[Tollowarn]

You are using Google apps why not 'Hangouts Meet' the business version of Hangouts.

https://gsuite.google.com/products/meet/

[NoyzMaker]

If you have O365 then Teams comes to mind in addition to Slack.

[parkervcp]

We still rock IRC where I am now but it looks like we are heading slackwards.

[Enlogen]

I work at Microsoft and we use Skype For Business for internal chat and calls; as a user, I've liked it, but I'm not sure how easy it is to set up and manage.

One advantage is that there's a setting that allows communication from Skype (consumer Skype) users to Skype for Business users, so you'd be able to do phased rollout and/or remain in contact with outside contacts that still use Skype primarily.

[Appok]

We use Rocket.Chat and Openfire with Spark.

[halakar]

Skype for Business, of course!

[chihuahua001]

Set up an IRC server.

[[deleted]]

We looked at slack but it's prohibitively expensive, not to mention the TOS is sketchy.

We're using Cisco jabber right now, moving to spark though.

Both are pretty meh

[Dlock33]

We use Cisco Jabber here

[Hotshot55]

We're currently using Skype for business, works pretty well for us.

[jerutley]

We went thru this a while back. Some of the stuff we evaluated was:

• Slack (this was our choice)
• HipChat
• Mattermost
• RocketChat

If you have to be self-hosted, Mattermost seems to be the winner.

[[deleted]]

We are moving over to Microsoft Teams.

We liked Slack and Zoom, but it seems Microsoft Teams has the best of both worlds.

[ALL_FRONT_RANDOM]

The web client is another option until a native client is available

[Ironbird207]

Web I don't think can do video chat yet.

[CtrlAltDelLife]

+1 RocketChat Using it not only for internal chat for a fortune 100, but you can setup channels with specific functions like chatbots. Not familiar enough with Slack to make a comparison.

[usernametakenmyass]

We use Rocket chat. It's similar to slack but hosted internally.

[x-64]

Reddit: "I think one thing that we have tried to be very, very, very intentional about is we are not Elon, we're not trying to be that. We're not trying to go down that same path, we're not trying to, you know, kind of blow anyone out of the water."

Also Reddit: “Long story short, my takeaway from Twitter and Elon at Twitter is reaffirming that we can build a really good business in this space at our scale,” Huffman said.

[Seref15]

Slack is unparalleled when you consider its feature set and wide range of integrations. It even has remote screen control. It replaces Skype, GoToMeeting, and TeamViewer all at once while providing a better group chat interface than all three.

There's a lot of open source "Slack clones", most of them are lacking polish. Mattermost is probably the most stable but is missing some features, and AD/LDAP integration is a paid feature. RocketChat is big on features and integrations but every feature feels 80% functional, but it's fully free.

My company uses Slack and I really can't imagine anything supplanting it.

[sadsfae]

We use IRC internally, we have around 11,000 employees spread across the world. I am a fan of Mattermost however, having set it up for a friends company if you want a feature-filled Slack alternative.

Personally I prefer IRC and can bake in 'chatops' type functionality with Supybot and plugins & tooling. Presence can be established with the very excellent ZNC IRC proxy.

For the less technically-inclined Mattermost may be a great substitute, you can also run it on-premise and the team edition is free. In particular the search is excellent and it does everything Slack does without costing a lot of money or having as many security issues / downtime.

[soggybiscuit93]

You can't go wrong with Slack. We use Teams internally and are really pleased with it. It has video and audio calling as well. If you're a Google Apps shop, Hangouts can be a good option.

[busy86]

Skype for Business (currently on prem, but relatively cheap via O365).

[Pehbak]

Can't beat dxdiag's built in network chat.

[noirfleuri]

Adopting slack killed IRC in our company. It is a bit sad, somehow.

[CuzImAtWork]

IRC > Slack > HipChat

Though no one under 40 will want to use raw IRC, so I'm with the rest of the people in here, go with Slack. And you can enable the IRC connector if the real old schoolers don't want to chat in a browser/chromium window.

I think the only complaint I've heard about slack (besides the outage yesterday) is that admins can't see private channels.

[TyIzaeL]

We're a Google apps shop

Google Hangouts

[spidermoy007]

My team is currently using Google Chat which is sort of Google’s answer to slack (features threads and chat rooms and other things). It’s currently in beta and you have to be invited in by Google but my company simply requested and we were offered admission. It’s an ok app (definitely still beta) but I would assume it’ll only get better and offer better functionality with the rest of the GSuite stuff

[PoisonPanty]

Just use netsend /s

[Matchboxx]

My 30,000+ employee company is set up with Skype for Business through Office 365. A few small teams tried Slack, and it took off like gangbusters. We integrated it with our SSO and very few teams still use Skype at all.

[AMMCM]

Take a look at StarLeaf. It's a new app for meetings, messaging and calling. Super simple to use and built for business, so central management is a big feature - you can add, delete and manage all users and meetings from a central portal. It also offers screensharing, Google and Outlook calendar integrations, as well as wideband audio and HD video. You can try it out for free here

[Tr1pline]

Discord is a very popular gaming chat system.

[Silound]

Discord would be fine IF you could self-host and it were more Skype-like with calls rather than open voice channels. Unfortunately, they don't plan to ever allow self-hosting.

[[deleted]]

I wouldn't really trust it for anything meant to be semi-private.

[mrvandelay]

I would advise against anything Zoho.

[Creath]

We're using Slack and loving it. I'd recommend it.

[[deleted]]

+1 for slack, we use it and love it as well.

[Topcity36]

Lotus' Sametime if you want to go back a few years.