Recommendations for Teams alternative
I am looking for an alternative for Teams for my team (go figure) of up to 15 people. I say up to since the core team is just 8 people, and the rest are contractors who occasionally need to log in. I looked at Zulip which looks like the best, however with…
I am looking for an alternative for Teams for my team (go figure) of up to 15 people. I say up to since the core team is just 8 people, and the rest are contractors who occasionally need to log in. I looked at Zulip which looks like the best, however with self hosting, there is a limit of 10 devices for push notifications. Campfire by 37 signals looks amazing and really simple and well thought out, but threaded chats is a requirement for us. If there is a way to get that or something similar, I am all ears. I tried to set up Matrix with element, but the number of moving parts means that I am simply not able to get a stable working app, and reading a bit around this sub, it seems like this is a shared experience. Happy to have any suggestions here. Our main requirement is generally a main message, which gets responded to by a bunch of people and then eventually the topic is closed. if there is a sort of ticketing system, I think I could get it to work.
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This, and together with jitsi, works well for us(35 people)
Yes, doing it for my business. I understand the issues around uptime, and reliability, however in our case, we can easily temporarily shift to whatsapp in case of an outage. Also, most of the team access our apps in-house, with the rest using wireguard while they are logged in, so I do not intend to expose at all.
Thanks. I shall have a look
The amount of maintenance you have to do, the security that's in your own hands, the lack of collaboration with other companies that do run in teams? Not saying these are issues but they could be
Wow. This is interesting. PWA on phones as well? If notifications work this would be amazing.
Whoa this like quite nice. I'll have to see for it compares to jitsi
This looks so promising and the documentation is fantastic. Shall definitely be trying it out.
yes, it works on both phones and desktops - you're welcome to try 'my' Fable+Opus vibe-engineered branch 🤠 let's see if it will be good enough to merge into upstream eventually https://github.com/kerray/zulip/tree/webpush image is ghcr.io/kerray/zulip-server@sha256:5782f1b6772bed975b00a899311c1ada12749c8d4d2a64a7635a33f39246f90e The two things you must set Web push is off by default, so out of the box you'll see nothing at all — the feature and even its user-facing setting stay hidden. You need: ` WEB_PUSH_ENABLED = TRUE turns the feature on web_push_vapid_private_key A secret key your server signs push messages with Zulip keeps those two categories in separate files: settings in /etc/zulip/settings.py, secrets in /etc/zulip/zulip-secrets.conf. You don't edit either file. In Docker you set environment variables and the container writes both files on startup, using two prefixes: SETTING_* → goes into settings.py SECRETS_* → goes into zulip-secrets.conf So in your compose file's zulip service environment: SETTING_WEB_PUSH_ENABLED: "True" SECRETS_web_push_vapid_private_key: "<the key from below>" The True must be capitalised — it's written into a Python file verbatim. Generating the key openssl ecparam -name prime256v1 -genkey -noout \ | openssl pkcs8 -topk8 -nocrypt -outform DER \ | base64 -w0 | tr '+/' '-_' | tr -d '=' An EC P-256 private key, base64url-encoded, on a single line. ⚠️ -w0 is not optional. Plain base64 wraps output every 76 characters, and the entrypoint hard-fails on a secret containing a newline — the container exits with ERROR: Secret "web_push_vapid_private_key" contains a newline! rather than starting. Keep this key. Regenerating it invalidates every existing browser subscription, and users must re-subscribe. If you'd rather not put the key in compose The entrypoint supports two safer routes: ` SECRETS_web_push_vapid_private_key_FILE: /run/secrets/vapid # read from a file or drop a Docker/Swarm secret named zulip__web_push_vapid_private_key into /run/secrets/, which takes precedence over the env var. Gotchas worth knowing up front HTTPS is mandatory. Service workers and the Push API only run in a secure context. localhost is exempt; any real hostname needs a valid certificate, or push silently won't register. Secrets survive restarts. /etc/zulip/zulip-secrets.conf is a symlink into the /data volume, so the key persists across container recreation — you set it once. Not on Docker? On a bare-metal install the same two values go directly into /etc/zulip/settings.py (WEB_PUSH_ENABLED = True) and /etc/zulip/zulip-secrets.conf (under [secrets], as web_push_vapid_private_key = …), then restart Zulip. This is separate from Zulip's mobile push service. It delivers notifications to browsers and installed PWAs from your own server — it does not involve Google/Apple and does not need the mobile push bouncer. Once it's up: a user enables notifications in Settings → Notifications, and the browser prompts for permission. If the setting isn't visible at all, WEB_PUSH_ENABLED didn't take.
I was curious about that. The OP says it's for their business and I wondered why not nextcloud for files, calendar, chat and video/voice talk.
Another for Rocket. It's awesome.
I would generally advise against that. Why?
Just moved from Mattermost to Zulip, I have a working branch with PWA, including unlimited notifications
Another vote for Zulip. I set it up for my company years ago and we couldn’t live without it now. Since then, I have also set it up for two other non-profit organizations.
Are you going to self host this for your business? I would generally advise against that.
A text chat is one of the simplest things to self host. It's not really latency-sensitive, nobody will notice if a message comes in with a 200ms delay. So a reliable backup routine and keeping up with updates cover most of the risks. For small-to-medium businesses it can be complicated to self host real-time audio and video, where you're responsible for the turn infrastructure and scaling bandwidth. And of course every delay is noticeable. For internal chat for 10-20 people, you're well clear of that
The French Government has developed a tool like Zoom: https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet You can have more information on all the tools developed by this team on their GitHub: https://github.com/suitenumerique (you have to scroll to get the English).
Rocket.chat
Nextcloud talk?
The only proper alternative, if you also consider file sharing and collaboration that Teams comes with, is Nextcloud Talk. You can see comparison table here: https://nextcloud.com/talk/
Just heard about chatto: https://www.hmans.dev/blog/chatto-is-open-source
You can do use the new buzz and your own relay. https://buzz.xyz/
I would still go with matrix, yes there are lots of moving parts, depending on your requirements i dont think you can really get around it. Some advice for selfhosting, Use the ess-helm chart. it has a pretty solid walkthrough for spinning up a single k3s node but offcourse you dont need to. If you are using a external reverse proxy for tls you probably need to check that you can also forward the tcp/udp for the videocalls. Lastly, if you are using it for anymore than 3 people, for the love of god turn on the workers. you will thank me later.
Nextcloud
Most alternatives still store readable data on the server. The version that actually solves the problem is one where everything is encrypted in the browser before it leaves the device.