Open Source Slack Alternatives

Mattermost is an open-source, self-hostable enterprise team collaboration and messaging application. The software can be deployed to on-premis or to cloud instances. Mattermost is designed for internal use within organizations and businesses in financial services, government, healthcare, remote work, and enterprise DevOps, where teams use Mattermost to power collaboration at every stage of the DevOps lifecycle.

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Zulip is an open-source real-time chat with an email threading model. With Zulip, you can catch up on important conversations while ignoring irrelevant ones. Zulip provides modern apps for every major platform, powered by Electron and React Native. The software is 100% open source software, built by a vibrant community of hundreds of developers from all around the world.

A free, unlimited and open-source chat software. Rocket.Chat have set out to be a replacement for email, HipChat & Slack and is provided as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or a self-hosted community edition. Rocket.Chat is feature packed and can be used for video conferencing, file sharing, voice messages and more. The software integrates with third-party services like GitHub, GitLab, JIRA, and Confluence and provides an API that can be used for authentication and integration across these services.

Matrix.org is an open network for secure, decentralized communication. It gives you a simple HTTP APIs and SDKs (iOS, Android, Web) to create chatrooms, direct chats and chat bots, complete with end-to-end encryption, file transfer, synchronised conversation history, formatted messages, read receipts and more. All conversations on Matrix are replicated over all the servers participating in them, meaning there are no single point of control or failure.

Jitsi is an open-source project and software toolset that allows you to easily build and deploy secure video conferencing solutions. At the heart of Jitsi are Jitsi Videobridge and Jitsi Meet, which let you have conferences on the internet, while other projects in the community enable other features such as audio, dial-in, recording, and simulcasting.  Jitsi supports popular protocols such as SIP, XMPP/Jabber, ICQ/AIM, Windows Live, Yahoo!, Google Hangouts, OTR, ZRTP and more.

Threema is a messenger application that puts security and privacy first. The application is designed to generate as little user data as possible. The service is fully GDPR-compliant and the company has its own servers hosted in Switzerland. With Threema you can keep in touch with friends, family and co-workers while enjoying privacy and rest assured that you personal data is not commoditized.

Gitter is an open-source instant messaging and chat room system for developers designed to make community messaging, collaboration and discovery as smooth and simple as possible. Gitter is provided as software-as-a-service and integrates with GitLab and GitHub repositories to make discussion around code even easier. With Gitter, you can can easily create, organise and grow your communities, inviting others to join just in one click. Over 1.5M users across 100K communities use Gitter to discuss code and development progress.

Ripcord is a desktop chat client for group-centric services like Slack and Discord. It provides a traditional compact desktop interface designed for power users. It has a small resource footprint, responds quickly to input, and gets out of your way. With Ripcord, you can connect with friends, family and co-workers.

Mumble is a free and open-source voice over IP application primarily designed for gamers. The application features a customizable in game overlay, application skins, conversation recording, and advanced voice activity detection. Anyone can download and use Mumble for free, but if you want your own server, you can rent a managed solution from the company behind Mumble, or host your own.

Signal is a cross-platform encrypted messaging application that has a strong focus on privacy. The application is developed by Signal Messenger LLC and provides users with features like one-to-one and group messages, which can include files, voice notes, images and videos. The software is famous for being used by the whistleblower and privacy advocate Edward Snowden who once said "I use Signal every day, it is the most scalable encryption tool we have".