13 ms·

Five Open-Source Slack Alternatives

316 points by shea256 11y ago

hoechst 11y ago
for bunch of more alternatives, see https://github.com/cjbarber/hipchat-alternatives https://github.com/cjbarber/hipchat-alternatives
pnathan 11y ago
Can someone explain the attraction that nerds have for Slack/Hipchat over a well-tended IRC server?
- oldmanjay 11y ago
  IRC generally means more futzing around than Slack and Hipchat. It's just a normal value proposition, like not growing our own food or making our own clothes or building our own cars, even if those things are possible.
- askafriend 11y ago
  As patio11 puts it: UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX See more: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660931499680657409 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660931499680657409 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660931665275916288 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660931665275916288 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660931949645533184 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660931949645533184 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660932099742957568 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660932099742957568 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660932289002508288 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660932289002508288 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660932918672420865 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660932918672420865
  - dataker 11y ago
    UXUXUX... is also a feature of many open source alternatives.
    - Killswitch 11y ago
      You mean "Lets clone Slack's UI and say 'look we are just as good at UX as Slack!'"
    - urda 11y ago
      This is the part where you offer a few links to alternatives and demonstrate why said "open source alternative" meets that requirement. Otherwise, you have a noisy and unhelpful comment.
  - pnathan 11y ago
    A well administered IRC channel has all of those, though typically you farm out to an image hoster for the pasting of images.
    - empath75 11y ago
      So we're hiring an IRC administrator now?
      - unixhero 11y ago
        Hey. They're the only ones who can dish out k-lines!
    - briandear 11y ago
      How about searching message history? Notifications when you aren't at your computer? Where's the mobile client with push notifications?
  - Albright 11y ago
    Which is kind of a frustrating answer, because Slack's UX sucks. Its desktop app is just a wrapped web page; the fonts and colors match nobody's operating system; the fffffffffffffffffriendly scroll bar; all the cutesy messages and iconography; "Reconnecting…"; etc, etc. Yes, I understand that it's still friendlier to use than IRC, but there's a middle ground between "easy to use" and "still looks and works like a proper, professional desktop application." In fact, HipChat is pretty close, even though it's just a wrapped web page too. It's kind of frustrating to see that all of these Slack alternatives are pretty much taking the same crappy UI cues from Slack. It's kind of like how, until the last few years or so, many common Unix/Linux desktops looked like Win95 rip-offs… You don't need to strive for familiarity if what people are familiar with sucks.
    - brenschluss 11y ago
      None of your comments about Slack's UX are actually about UX; they're about the UI.
      - Albright 11y ago
        Fair enough. How's this: If the UI of a desktop application does not match the standard appearance and interface of the rest of the operating system, a bad UX is almost a certainty, in my experience.
        tptacek 11y ago
        If I want to share a diagram with Patrick on our internal Slack --- which we set up in under 10 minutes --- I select the diagram on my desktop and drag it into the window for the Slack channel. Everyone on that channel sees the diagram immediately. I do not give a shit what Slack's buttons look like. I can't do that with IRC. Even if we're all standardized on a modern OSX IRC client, we're still going to end up "sharing" URLs.
        Albright 11y ago
        Again, you can use HipChat and get something closer to the best of both worlds; drag-and-drop file sharing with a standard (well… more standard-ish) OS X interface. It's great for you that look-and-feel isn't so important to you, but it is to a lot of people, and that includes myself. At any rate, on Slack, I once drag-and-dropped a text file with the output of a shell script that a colleague wanted to see. He started telling me how it was strange that the output seemed to cut off right in the middle of a line. lol, just kidding, Slack was just cutting it off like that, since Slack apparently can't show more than the first few K of a text file for some reason SO WHY IS IT SHOWING IT AT ALL ARGH
  - rdtsc 11y ago
    Well not sure if there are enough repeated UX-es in there. If there would be, maybe 5 more, I'd be convinced, but so far not really.
  - vox_mollis 11y ago
    ...except irssi and WeeChat offer substantially better UX* * personal opinion, yes, but it seems quite obviously true.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    True. But that's my personal problem with Slack, and I guess that of many others too - Slack could be just as awesome as it is if it used IRC on the backend. Instead, it just fragments the already shredded realtime communications infrastructure. For me, this smells of a typical SV startup that tries to "disrupt" something by locking people in and then extracting value out of them before eventually getting acquihired and hanging them out to dry. As it is now, the success of Slack and HipChat is a danger to communication on the Internet.
- itistoday2 11y ago
  IRC simply lacks important desirable features, making it poor for community building (given the existence of better alternatives). The two biggest missing features are persistence and search. Other important missing features are ease of use in terms of creation of topic-focused channels, private channels, and high quality mobile and desktop clients.
  - pnathan 11y ago
    > The two biggest missing features are persistence and search. A well-tended IRC server has those via bots. Other important missing features are ease of use in terms of creation of > topic-focused channels wut? This is totally easy in IRC: /join #topic-channel makes the channel > private channels I'm tempted to say that a bot can provide that... but sure. > and high quality mobile and desktop clients. Not buying that, sorry, I've been happy with my mobile/desktop clients; they are relatively full-featured.
    - ashark 11y ago
      Does your mobile IRC client notify you (push message) when you're mentioned or receive a private message, but only when you're idle or offline on your desktop client?
      - mugsie 11y ago
        yes. and it is consistently faster than slacks push notifications.
        darklajid 11y ago
        Honest question: Which client would that be? I'm looking for a solution myself.
        ashark 11y ago
        I looked in to it after that answer. Colloquy[1] was the top hit for my search, and yeah, it does it, but (of course) you've got to have a bouncer[2] running all the time and connected to any channels you want to monitor. Probably pretty nice once it's set up, assuming there's a way to run it on a cheap VM or Raspi or something rather than your workstation or laptop. Looks like their mobile client attempts to register its device ID with bouncers in a channel when it connects, so that's automatic. Not exactly a competitor with what Slack and similar are doing—not having to set up and manage this sort of thing to achieve those services' features is exactly why people pay them—but seems like a nice solution if you prefer IRC. [1] http://colloquy.info http://colloquy.info [2] http://colloquy.mobi/bouncers.html http://colloquy.mobi/bouncers.html
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- dwb 11y ago
  Where I work, before Slack, we had Campfire and only us developers bothered to sign up for it, get the client, etc. We switched to Slack and suddenly everyone was on it. UX matters so much. We don't have time to tend an IRC server and act as support for it. Slack lets the whole company sign up ultra-easily and get on board – there's simply no contest. I lament the passing of the age of new open protocols too, trust me, I really do. But IRC+ecosystem just isn't that good these days, and getting stuff done matters more.
  - ownagefool 11y ago
    I'd argue there's little reason one of the chat clones couldn't be backed by an IRC server and give us a similar experience.
    - steeef 11y ago
      Sure, but getting there takes a lot of work, something that Slack already gives you out of the box.
- 1123581321 11y ago
  For us, it's the difference between only developers using chat and the whole company using chat.
  - mikeokner 11y ago
    Sounds like a good reason to keep using IRC amirite?
- AaronBBrown 11y ago
  The second part of your question is a big part of the answer...an IRC server needs to be well tended in order to support the features that people want. I run a Technical Operations (DevOps, SysEng, whatever you want to call it) team...the last thing I want them spending their time doing is futzing with IRC software when there is a solution that takes 5 minutes to set up and is ready to go. Businesses should focus on their core competencies. For me, the biggest problem was when my computer was turned off overnight, I had to go to some external source to read the transcript of the conversations that transpired rather than having it available immediately, in my application. DMs can also be sent when the user is offline, which is great for "hey, get back to me when you're back on." I was able to solve some of these issues by setting up my own Quassel or ZNC server, but these were hacks and the clients were no where near as refined as Slack or HipChat.
- michaelcampbell 11y ago
  Ad hominems aside, personally I like the multi-line block code pastes, the inline markdown, and the ability to post images from the clipboard. I haven't frequented IRC much since the mid to late 90's so perhaps it has those features now.
  - gregmac 11y ago
    So surprising more people don't mention multi-line messages (whether code blocks or not). IRC doesn't have this because the protocol itself simply doesn't support it. The standard answer is "pastebin" but that raises the barrier to entry, so to speak. We use Hipchat at work but I assume Slack has feature parity here: If I want to paste a code block to discuss, I literally press paste (ctrl+v) and send (enter). The first few lines show up for everybody, with an "expand" button so they can see the whole thing. No one has to have a specific client, no one has to visit a separate website (including me). It. Just. Works. Same goes for images, by the way: I can post a URL ending in jpg/png/gif and it shows up for everybody, inline (and intelligently: resized, and animated gifs are hidden by default). I can also screenshot an image and paste it into chat, and it automatically converts to an uploaded file: take screenshot, press ctrl+v, enter, image is there.
- balls187 11y ago
  > Can someone explain the attraction that nerds have for Slack/Hipchat over a well-tended IRC server? 1. Nerds (like me) have to talk to non-nerds. 2. Nerds (unlike me, but not unlike my wife) aren't interested in complex solutions to simple problems. And frankly, who is the "tender" of the "well-tended" IRC server? I don't want to maintain it. My wife and I used slack as the primary means with which we communicate for "couple stuff." We've used it to: Plan our Wedding Ceremony. Plan our Wedding Party. Plan our Honeymoon. Plan for our first child. Plan our next house purchase. Manage our Finances. Plan Dates. Plan our Meals. Archive Recipes. There would be no way my wife (a nerd) and I (a different type of nerd) could do this on IRC.
  - lfowles 11y ago
    Interesting, because my wife (non-tech, but still nerdy EE) and I communicate a lot via IRC! I've never used Slack, but my assumption is that it's ephemeral messaging at the core. Could you expand on how you archive recipes? I should probably expand that IRC for us is pretty stateful, since we both run our own irssi instances in screen on a VPS.
    - allannienhuis 11y ago
      Slack's design is exactly the opposite of ephemeral. Everything you post, including documents, is indexed and searchable.
      - lfowles 11y ago
        Ok, that makes more sense. I had something like Skype in mind... in theory I have my entire Skype history, but going back more than 100 lines or so is cumbersome. I'd rather teach my wife how to grep logs than to deal with that.
    - balls187 11y ago
      Ah, we just have a channel called "recipes" which we post links to. Search works pretty well to find them. Admission: my wife is pregnant, so she really only wants me to make one thing. http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/corn-and-lobster-chowder-107469 http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/corn-and-lobste...
- nodamage 11y ago
  It's amazing to me that people still don't understand the importance of user experience (and low friction setup processes). Do you remember having to hand write your Xorg.conf files to setup a Linux desktop back in the day? Wasn't that a colossal waste of time? Aren't you glad that's not a thing anymore? Sure, I could try to set up an IRC server and the relevant bots and scripts to attempt to emulate what Slack provides natively, and then look for mobile apps that will connect to IRC and send me push notifications on relevant activity, or I could just use Slack.
  - briandear 11y ago
    Exactly it. I don't have time to manage an IRC server. I don't have time to help people figure out IRC when they first join the team. I also don't want to waste time on something that adds zero value to the products we're building. I use Slack for the same reason I own a dishwasher. I could hand wash dishes and it might even be slightly better, but then I'm spending time washing dishes rather than using the time for higher value activities. This rubbish about people worrying about Slack having access to your internal communications is just that -- rubbish. It's paranoid nonsense. The last thing anyone at Slack wants to do is read through 80 million lines of emojis and notifications and some private conversation about adding a counter cache to the Products table.
    - icebraining 11y ago
      Slack itself probably doesn't care. What about the company that aquires them? What about the companies that will buy that data from them? And obviously one doesn't actually "read" the conversations, we're not in the 80s anymore, we have software to identify the juicy bits.
      - victorhooi 11y ago
        Do you encrypt your email? Do all of your recipients? Slack is sold as a replacement for email, in many cases - so I fail to see how it's any worse than sending unencrypted emails all over the interwebs. And this tin-foil hat conspiracy insanity about how you shouldn't use external services like Gmail, or Slack because "Oh noes, they have our data" is just that - insanity. Sure, if you're paranoid, you're free not to use those services. But let's be honest, most of aren't working at Lockheed Martin, or the NSA. Our personal lives are inane and boring, and the majority of our work discussions are probably, outside of the context of our work groups, inanely boring as well. Nobody cares (which is fine). On the list of things to worry about, from meteorite strikes to global warming, I'd put, my chat provider trawling through my personal chats fairly low on the list.
hellbanner 11y ago
I'm seeing "No e2e encrypted DMs" as one of the cons for most of these.. anyone have a solution?
- zokier 11y ago
  For the usecase I see these to be useful, I don't see lack of e2e such a huge concern. I would assume that in most cases the server would be more or less trusted in the context they are used in, so TLS style client-server security would be adequate. In other words, if I really wanted to have discussion secret enough to warrant e2e I probably wouldn't be using company/project chat for that no matter what sort of promises it gives. That being said, of course e2e chat would be beneficial addition, and might help especially in larger enterprise deployments.
  - squidlogic 11y ago
    For less important things, I agree, run of the mill TLS is enough. But for things that are critical to the business, trade secrets, strategy, SWOT analysis of a recent breach, etc, I think every company should have an e2ee chat/file sharing app in their toolkit.
  - meowface 11y ago
    >if I really wanted to have discussion secret enough to warrant e2e I probably wouldn't be using company/project chat for that no matter what sort of promises it gives. Why not, though? Assuming logging is disabled by both parties and the E2E is working as intended, you have something that's almost as secure as in-person conversation. The only weakness is if someone has malware actively on their machine recording the conversation as it's occurring... but then you also have many other issues.
- itistoday2 11y ago
  Rocket.Chat does have an open issue with discussion about this: https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/issues/36 https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/issues/36
- bitstacker 11y ago
JoshMnem 11y ago
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.
- itistoday2 11y ago
  > I wish that someone would build an easy-to-use layer on top of an open protocol like IRC or XMPP. They have: http://getkaiwa.com http://getkaiwa.com
- Arathorn 11y ago
  They have - e.g. http://vector.im/beta http://vector.im/beta on top of the Matrix.org protocol. [disclaimer, I work on Matrix]
  - zokier 11y ago
    Not to be too negative but based on quick glance it would seem like the Matrix protocol is really "noisy" if compared to something like IRC (which admittedly is ridiculously spartan). How much data ends up flowing down the wires for a simple "hello world" message?
    - vvpan 11y ago
      But why does it matter? Bandwidth is super-cheap.
      - chetanahuja 11y ago
        "But why does it matter? Bandwidth is super-cheap" If this comment is serious (and I have my doubts), I'm left speechless... Don't even know where to start. I'll just leave it here http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/28/9625062/facebook-2g-tuesdays-slow-internet-developing-world http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/28/9625062/facebook-2g-tuesd...
hrjet 11y ago
Also, Matrix.org Open, federated protocol, multiple client and server implementations, integrated IRC bridge.
- ausjke 11y ago
  this looks neat, and you can self-host it too.
  - ausjke 11y ago
    http://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html http://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html
devit 11y ago
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.
- derwiki 11y ago
  In 2015, it's trendy to use things that aren't email.
  - swozey 11y ago
    That hardly started happening just now in 2015. I absolutely loathe using email, but I don't speak for everyone.
- eertami 11y ago
  I imagine most people use both [a combination of chat and email]. Real time chat channels are much better for fast moving ephemeral discussions and neither would I want that sort of thing in my inbox.
- dragontamer 11y ago
  Even in the late 90s when we had IRC, ICQ, and AIM for realtime chats.
seagreen 11y ago
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."
- akerl_ 11y ago
  You say that like there's not fragmentation on the closed-source side as well, with Slack, Hipchat, Skype, etc. The reason there's competition is because ~"let's only field one perfect option" sounds great if you think you're the one with the perfect product, or you're a user whose needs are exactly like that product's pitch. In reality, user needs are diverse: there's no singular perfect product.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - ajross 11y ago
    Realistically Slack's market share of the "IM technologies used by teams" world isn't that high anyway. I'm willing to bet that they remain well behind IRC even in their own market. All of this is a response mostly to buzz. Slack looks great, and is absolutely popular. So we (the open source community) want something "equivalently buzzworthy" while forgetting that we are, in fact, the entrenched monopoly already. I'm not losing much sleep, nor will I be retiring my IRC client or pastebin links any time soon.
  - seagreen 11y ago
    In general you're totally right! In this particular case though, note the title of the article. Wouldn't it be much more convincing as "A Superior Alternative to Slack (Which Happens to be Open Source)"? EDIT: You're second point definitely does apply here though.
    - ocdtrekkie 11y ago
      I think it should absolutely be noted that being open source is a key mark of superiority over Slack.
nodesocket 11y ago
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.
- akerl_ 11y ago
  "While Slack offers many benefits to customers, there are also downsides to using the platform, including high subscription fees and the risk of a massive leak of private data if Slack’s servers are ever breached (again)." Not everybody wants to pay to put their potentially sensitive data onto somebody else's systems, where they can't control the security of that data.
  - nodesocket 11y ago
    The one thing in terms of security that is even a blip on my radar is that slack does not encrypt data at rest (disks). [1](https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/467476452364279808 https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/467476452364279808) Their reason that they couldn't search through data if it were encrypted is not true. They are using AWS, and can simply use EBS encrypted volumes (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/EBSEncryption.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/EBSEncryp...). Should be an easy flag to turn on.
    - devit 11y ago
      Not sure what exactly that buys in terms of security. Both Slack and Amazon can steal all the data without being detected, regardless of whether the servers are encrypting it or not, since if the server can decrypt it, so can Amazon (just scan VM memory for the key from the hypervisor).
    - notacoward 11y ago
      The only thing that's on your radar. Do you speak for everyone else's needs or interests?
fsiefken 11y ago
Mattermost has the advantage of being bundled with GitLab, so organisations opting for GitLab might be tempted to use it as well.
VoiceOfWisdom 11y ago
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?
- Jonovono 11y ago
  Slack says it's coming, but no idea when: https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/504407968150851585 https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/504407968150851585
godata1 11y ago
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.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- derefr 11y ago
  Those other things aren't called Slack, though. Those are Slackware and Slack-time.
ixtli 11y ago
Is it really open source in spirit if message auth relies on a hosted, closed source, proprietary application like github?
guylepage3 11y ago
rocket.chat seems pretty cool. Just signed up however so I will have to dig deeper. Nice.
- marceloschmidt 11y ago
  Rocket.Chat allows you to deploy your own instance https://[my_instance].rocket.chat https://[my_instance].rocket.chat if you go to https://rocket.chat/deploy https://rocket.chat/deploy. [disclaimer; I contribute to Rocket.Chat]
arca_vorago 11y ago
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.
netheril96 11y ago
I find it curious that having a pure JavaScript implementation including the backend is listed as an advantage.
- bitstacker 11y ago
  That's not listed as an advantage - just highlighting the technology.
  - netheril96 11y ago
    My bad. I conflated the technology and pros section in my mind.
ex3ndr 11y ago
Please, add ours: https://actor.im https://actor.im We also have Layer-like SDK for building your own mobile chat applications
- itistoday2 11y ago
  Sure. We'll post a followup review with some of the ones we missed (including Matrix and Kaiwa).
justinhj 11y ago
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?
- chris_wot 11y ago
  Why wouldn't they?
  - justinhj 11y ago
    Because I worked with people with varying levels of technical ability. Slack is so much easier to setup and get everyone to use than irc.
foklepoint 11y ago
Could give yammer a chance. Not open but their freemium model is much better than slacks
tamebadger 11y ago
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.
nikolay 11y ago
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.
- thejosh 11y ago
  From one closed source system to the next.
  - nikolay 11y ago
    True, it's just that Gitter is so much better for development. Yet, developers are still pushing Slack. Anyway, wasn't Gitter open-source in the beginning though [0]? [0] https://github.com/gitter/gitter https://github.com/gitter/gitter
lokedhs 11y ago
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/ 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/ http://blog.potato.network/

316 points by shea256 11y ago

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

pnathan 11y ago

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

oldmanjay 11y ago
IRC generally means more futzing around than Slack and Hipchat. It's just a normal value proposition, like not growing our own food or making our own clothes or building our own cars, even if those things are possible.
askafriend 11y ago
As patio11 puts it: UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX UX See more: https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660931499680657409 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660931499680657409 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660931665275916288 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660931665275916288 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660931949645533184 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660931949645533184 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660932099742957568 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660932099742957568 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660932289002508288 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660932289002508288 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660932918672420865 https://twitter.com/patio11/status/660932918672420865
- dataker 11y ago
  UXUXUX... is also a feature of many open source alternatives.
  - Killswitch 11y ago
    You mean "Lets clone Slack's UI and say 'look we are just as good at UX as Slack!'"
  - urda 11y ago
    This is the part where you offer a few links to alternatives and demonstrate why said "open source alternative" meets that requirement. Otherwise, you have a noisy and unhelpful comment.
- pnathan 11y ago
  A well administered IRC channel has all of those, though typically you farm out to an image hoster for the pasting of images.
  - empath75 11y ago
    So we're hiring an IRC administrator now?
    - unixhero 11y ago
      Hey. They're the only ones who can dish out k-lines!
  - briandear 11y ago
    How about searching message history? Notifications when you aren't at your computer? Where's the mobile client with push notifications?
- Albright 11y ago
  Which is kind of a frustrating answer, because Slack's UX sucks. Its desktop app is just a wrapped web page; the fonts and colors match nobody's operating system; the fffffffffffffffffriendly scroll bar; all the cutesy messages and iconography; "Reconnecting…"; etc, etc. Yes, I understand that it's still friendlier to use than IRC, but there's a middle ground between "easy to use" and "still looks and works like a proper, professional desktop application." In fact, HipChat is pretty close, even though it's just a wrapped web page too. It's kind of frustrating to see that all of these Slack alternatives are pretty much taking the same crappy UI cues from Slack. It's kind of like how, until the last few years or so, many common Unix/Linux desktops looked like Win95 rip-offs… You don't need to strive for familiarity if what people are familiar with sucks.
  - brenschluss 11y ago
    None of your comments about Slack's UX are actually about UX; they're about the UI.
    - Albright 11y ago
      Fair enough. How's this: If the UI of a desktop application does not match the standard appearance and interface of the rest of the operating system, a bad UX is almost a certainty, in my experience.
      - tptacek 11y ago
        If I want to share a diagram with Patrick on our internal Slack --- which we set up in under 10 minutes --- I select the diagram on my desktop and drag it into the window for the Slack channel. Everyone on that channel sees the diagram immediately. I do not give a shit what Slack's buttons look like. I can't do that with IRC. Even if we're all standardized on a modern OSX IRC client, we're still going to end up "sharing" URLs.
        Albright 11y ago
        Again, you can use HipChat and get something closer to the best of both worlds; drag-and-drop file sharing with a standard (well… more standard-ish) OS X interface. It's great for you that look-and-feel isn't so important to you, but it is to a lot of people, and that includes myself. At any rate, on Slack, I once drag-and-dropped a text file with the output of a shell script that a colleague wanted to see. He started telling me how it was strange that the output seemed to cut off right in the middle of a line. lol, just kidding, Slack was just cutting it off like that, since Slack apparently can't show more than the first few K of a text file for some reason SO WHY IS IT SHOWING IT AT ALL ARGH
- rdtsc 11y ago
  Well not sure if there are enough repeated UX-es in there. If there would be, maybe 5 more, I'd be convinced, but so far not really.
- vox_mollis 11y ago
  ...except irssi and WeeChat offer substantially better UX* * personal opinion, yes, but it seems quite obviously true.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  True. But that's my personal problem with Slack, and I guess that of many others too - Slack could be just as awesome as it is if it used IRC on the backend. Instead, it just fragments the already shredded realtime communications infrastructure. For me, this smells of a typical SV startup that tries to "disrupt" something by locking people in and then extracting value out of them before eventually getting acquihired and hanging them out to dry. As it is now, the success of Slack and HipChat is a danger to communication on the Internet.
itistoday2 11y ago
IRC simply lacks important desirable features, making it poor for community building (given the existence of better alternatives). The two biggest missing features are persistence and search. Other important missing features are ease of use in terms of creation of topic-focused channels, private channels, and high quality mobile and desktop clients.
- pnathan 11y ago
  > The two biggest missing features are persistence and search. A well-tended IRC server has those via bots. Other important missing features are ease of use in terms of creation of > topic-focused channels wut? This is totally easy in IRC: /join #topic-channel makes the channel > private channels I'm tempted to say that a bot can provide that... but sure. > and high quality mobile and desktop clients. Not buying that, sorry, I've been happy with my mobile/desktop clients; they are relatively full-featured.
  - ashark 11y ago
    Does your mobile IRC client notify you (push message) when you're mentioned or receive a private message, but only when you're idle or offline on your desktop client?
    - mugsie 11y ago
      yes. and it is consistently faster than slacks push notifications.
      - darklajid 11y ago
        Honest question: Which client would that be? I'm looking for a solution myself.
        ashark 11y ago
        I looked in to it after that answer. Colloquy[1] was the top hit for my search, and yeah, it does it, but (of course) you've got to have a bouncer[2] running all the time and connected to any channels you want to monitor. Probably pretty nice once it's set up, assuming there's a way to run it on a cheap VM or Raspi or something rather than your workstation or laptop. Looks like their mobile client attempts to register its device ID with bouncers in a channel when it connects, so that's automatic. Not exactly a competitor with what Slack and similar are doing—not having to set up and manage this sort of thing to achieve those services' features is exactly why people pay them—but seems like a nice solution if you prefer IRC. [1] http://colloquy.info http://colloquy.info [2] http://colloquy.mobi/bouncers.html http://colloquy.mobi/bouncers.html
deleted 11y ago
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dwb 11y ago
Where I work, before Slack, we had Campfire and only us developers bothered to sign up for it, get the client, etc. We switched to Slack and suddenly everyone was on it. UX matters so much. We don't have time to tend an IRC server and act as support for it. Slack lets the whole company sign up ultra-easily and get on board – there's simply no contest. I lament the passing of the age of new open protocols too, trust me, I really do. But IRC+ecosystem just isn't that good these days, and getting stuff done matters more.
- ownagefool 11y ago
  I'd argue there's little reason one of the chat clones couldn't be backed by an IRC server and give us a similar experience.
  - steeef 11y ago
    Sure, but getting there takes a lot of work, something that Slack already gives you out of the box.
1123581321 11y ago
For us, it's the difference between only developers using chat and the whole company using chat.
- mikeokner 11y ago
  Sounds like a good reason to keep using IRC amirite?
AaronBBrown 11y ago
The second part of your question is a big part of the answer...an IRC server needs to be well tended in order to support the features that people want. I run a Technical Operations (DevOps, SysEng, whatever you want to call it) team...the last thing I want them spending their time doing is futzing with IRC software when there is a solution that takes 5 minutes to set up and is ready to go. Businesses should focus on their core competencies. For me, the biggest problem was when my computer was turned off overnight, I had to go to some external source to read the transcript of the conversations that transpired rather than having it available immediately, in my application. DMs can also be sent when the user is offline, which is great for "hey, get back to me when you're back on." I was able to solve some of these issues by setting up my own Quassel or ZNC server, but these were hacks and the clients were no where near as refined as Slack or HipChat.
michaelcampbell 11y ago
Ad hominems aside, personally I like the multi-line block code pastes, the inline markdown, and the ability to post images from the clipboard. I haven't frequented IRC much since the mid to late 90's so perhaps it has those features now.
- gregmac 11y ago
  So surprising more people don't mention multi-line messages (whether code blocks or not). IRC doesn't have this because the protocol itself simply doesn't support it. The standard answer is "pastebin" but that raises the barrier to entry, so to speak. We use Hipchat at work but I assume Slack has feature parity here: If I want to paste a code block to discuss, I literally press paste (ctrl+v) and send (enter). The first few lines show up for everybody, with an "expand" button so they can see the whole thing. No one has to have a specific client, no one has to visit a separate website (including me). It. Just. Works. Same goes for images, by the way: I can post a URL ending in jpg/png/gif and it shows up for everybody, inline (and intelligently: resized, and animated gifs are hidden by default). I can also screenshot an image and paste it into chat, and it automatically converts to an uploaded file: take screenshot, press ctrl+v, enter, image is there.
balls187 11y ago
> Can someone explain the attraction that nerds have for Slack/Hipchat over a well-tended IRC server? 1. Nerds (like me) have to talk to non-nerds. 2. Nerds (unlike me, but not unlike my wife) aren't interested in complex solutions to simple problems. And frankly, who is the "tender" of the "well-tended" IRC server? I don't want to maintain it. My wife and I used slack as the primary means with which we communicate for "couple stuff." We've used it to: Plan our Wedding Ceremony. Plan our Wedding Party. Plan our Honeymoon. Plan for our first child. Plan our next house purchase. Manage our Finances. Plan Dates. Plan our Meals. Archive Recipes. There would be no way my wife (a nerd) and I (a different type of nerd) could do this on IRC.
- lfowles 11y ago
  Interesting, because my wife (non-tech, but still nerdy EE) and I communicate a lot via IRC! I've never used Slack, but my assumption is that it's ephemeral messaging at the core. Could you expand on how you archive recipes? I should probably expand that IRC for us is pretty stateful, since we both run our own irssi instances in screen on a VPS.
  - allannienhuis 11y ago
    Slack's design is exactly the opposite of ephemeral. Everything you post, including documents, is indexed and searchable.
    - lfowles 11y ago
      Ok, that makes more sense. I had something like Skype in mind... in theory I have my entire Skype history, but going back more than 100 lines or so is cumbersome. I'd rather teach my wife how to grep logs than to deal with that.
  - balls187 11y ago
    Ah, we just have a channel called "recipes" which we post links to. Search works pretty well to find them. Admission: my wife is pregnant, so she really only wants me to make one thing. http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/corn-and-lobster-chowder-107469 http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/corn-and-lobste...
nodamage 11y ago
It's amazing to me that people still don't understand the importance of user experience (and low friction setup processes). Do you remember having to hand write your Xorg.conf files to setup a Linux desktop back in the day? Wasn't that a colossal waste of time? Aren't you glad that's not a thing anymore? Sure, I could try to set up an IRC server and the relevant bots and scripts to attempt to emulate what Slack provides natively, and then look for mobile apps that will connect to IRC and send me push notifications on relevant activity, or I could just use Slack.
- briandear 11y ago
  Exactly it. I don't have time to manage an IRC server. I don't have time to help people figure out IRC when they first join the team. I also don't want to waste time on something that adds zero value to the products we're building. I use Slack for the same reason I own a dishwasher. I could hand wash dishes and it might even be slightly better, but then I'm spending time washing dishes rather than using the time for higher value activities. This rubbish about people worrying about Slack having access to your internal communications is just that -- rubbish. It's paranoid nonsense. The last thing anyone at Slack wants to do is read through 80 million lines of emojis and notifications and some private conversation about adding a counter cache to the Products table.
  - icebraining 11y ago
    Slack itself probably doesn't care. What about the company that aquires them? What about the companies that will buy that data from them? And obviously one doesn't actually "read" the conversations, we're not in the 80s anymore, we have software to identify the juicy bits.
    - victorhooi 11y ago
      Do you encrypt your email? Do all of your recipients? Slack is sold as a replacement for email, in many cases - so I fail to see how it's any worse than sending unencrypted emails all over the interwebs. And this tin-foil hat conspiracy insanity about how you shouldn't use external services like Gmail, or Slack because "Oh noes, they have our data" is just that - insanity. Sure, if you're paranoid, you're free not to use those services. But let's be honest, most of aren't working at Lockheed Martin, or the NSA. Our personal lives are inane and boring, and the majority of our work discussions are probably, outside of the context of our work groups, inanely boring as well. Nobody cares (which is fine). On the list of things to worry about, from meteorite strikes to global warming, I'd put, my chat provider trawling through my personal chats fairly low on the list.

hellbanner 11y ago

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

zokier 11y ago
For the usecase I see these to be useful, I don't see lack of e2e such a huge concern. I would assume that in most cases the server would be more or less trusted in the context they are used in, so TLS style client-server security would be adequate. In other words, if I really wanted to have discussion secret enough to warrant e2e I probably wouldn't be using company/project chat for that no matter what sort of promises it gives. That being said, of course e2e chat would be beneficial addition, and might help especially in larger enterprise deployments.
- squidlogic 11y ago
  For less important things, I agree, run of the mill TLS is enough. But for things that are critical to the business, trade secrets, strategy, SWOT analysis of a recent breach, etc, I think every company should have an e2ee chat/file sharing app in their toolkit.
- meowface 11y ago
  >if I really wanted to have discussion secret enough to warrant e2e I probably wouldn't be using company/project chat for that no matter what sort of promises it gives. Why not, though? Assuming logging is disabled by both parties and the E2E is working as intended, you have something that's almost as secure as in-person conversation. The only weakness is if someone has malware actively on their machine recording the conversation as it's occurring... but then you also have many other issues.
itistoday2 11y ago
Rocket.Chat does have an open issue with discussion about this: https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/issues/36 https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/issues/36
bitstacker 11y ago

JoshMnem 11y ago

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.

itistoday2 11y ago
> I wish that someone would build an easy-to-use layer on top of an open protocol like IRC or XMPP. They have: http://getkaiwa.com http://getkaiwa.com
Arathorn 11y ago
They have - e.g. http://vector.im/beta http://vector.im/beta on top of the Matrix.org protocol. [disclaimer, I work on Matrix]
- zokier 11y ago
  Not to be too negative but based on quick glance it would seem like the Matrix protocol is really "noisy" if compared to something like IRC (which admittedly is ridiculously spartan). How much data ends up flowing down the wires for a simple "hello world" message?
  - vvpan 11y ago
    But why does it matter? Bandwidth is super-cheap.
    - chetanahuja 11y ago
      "But why does it matter? Bandwidth is super-cheap" If this comment is serious (and I have my doubts), I'm left speechless... Don't even know where to start. I'll just leave it here http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/28/9625062/facebook-2g-tuesdays-slow-internet-developing-world http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/28/9625062/facebook-2g-tuesd...

hrjet 11y ago

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

ausjke 11y ago
this looks neat, and you can self-host it too.
- ausjke 11y ago
  http://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html http://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html

devit 11y ago

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.

derwiki 11y ago
In 2015, it's trendy to use things that aren't email.
- swozey 11y ago
  That hardly started happening just now in 2015. I absolutely loathe using email, but I don't speak for everyone.
eertami 11y ago
I imagine most people use both [a combination of chat and email]. Real time chat channels are much better for fast moving ephemeral discussions and neither would I want that sort of thing in my inbox.
dragontamer 11y ago
Even in the late 90s when we had IRC, ICQ, and AIM for realtime chats.

seagreen 11y ago

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."

akerl_ 11y ago
You say that like there's not fragmentation on the closed-source side as well, with Slack, Hipchat, Skype, etc. The reason there's competition is because ~"let's only field one perfect option" sounds great if you think you're the one with the perfect product, or you're a user whose needs are exactly like that product's pitch. In reality, user needs are diverse: there's no singular perfect product.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- ajross 11y ago
  Realistically Slack's market share of the "IM technologies used by teams" world isn't that high anyway. I'm willing to bet that they remain well behind IRC even in their own market. All of this is a response mostly to buzz. Slack looks great, and is absolutely popular. So we (the open source community) want something "equivalently buzzworthy" while forgetting that we are, in fact, the entrenched monopoly already. I'm not losing much sleep, nor will I be retiring my IRC client or pastebin links any time soon.
- seagreen 11y ago
  In general you're totally right! In this particular case though, note the title of the article. Wouldn't it be much more convincing as "A Superior Alternative to Slack (Which Happens to be Open Source)"? EDIT: You're second point definitely does apply here though.
  - ocdtrekkie 11y ago
    I think it should absolutely be noted that being open source is a key mark of superiority over Slack.

nodesocket 11y ago

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.

akerl_ 11y ago
"While Slack offers many benefits to customers, there are also downsides to using the platform, including high subscription fees and the risk of a massive leak of private data if Slack’s servers are ever breached (again)." Not everybody wants to pay to put their potentially sensitive data onto somebody else's systems, where they can't control the security of that data.
- nodesocket 11y ago
  The one thing in terms of security that is even a blip on my radar is that slack does not encrypt data at rest (disks). [1](https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/467476452364279808 https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/467476452364279808) Their reason that they couldn't search through data if it were encrypted is not true. They are using AWS, and can simply use EBS encrypted volumes (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/EBSEncryption.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/EBSEncryp...). Should be an easy flag to turn on.
  - devit 11y ago
    Not sure what exactly that buys in terms of security. Both Slack and Amazon can steal all the data without being detected, regardless of whether the servers are encrypting it or not, since if the server can decrypt it, so can Amazon (just scan VM memory for the key from the hypervisor).
  - notacoward 11y ago
    The only thing that's on your radar. Do you speak for everyone else's needs or interests?

fsiefken 11y ago

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

VoiceOfWisdom 11y ago

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?

Jonovono 11y ago
Slack says it's coming, but no idea when: https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/504407968150851585 https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/504407968150851585

godata1 11y ago

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.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
derefr 11y ago
Those other things aren't called Slack, though. Those are Slackware and Slack-time.

ixtli 11y ago

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

guylepage3 11y ago

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

marceloschmidt 11y ago
Rocket.Chat allows you to deploy your own instance https://[my_instance].rocket.chat https://[my_instance].rocket.chat if you go to https://rocket.chat/deploy https://rocket.chat/deploy. [disclaimer; I contribute to Rocket.Chat]

arca_vorago 11y ago

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.

netheril96 11y ago

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

bitstacker 11y ago
That's not listed as an advantage - just highlighting the technology.
- netheril96 11y ago
  My bad. I conflated the technology and pros section in my mind.

ex3ndr 11y ago

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

itistoday2 11y ago
Sure. We'll post a followup review with some of the ones we missed (including Matrix and Kaiwa).

justinhj 11y ago

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?

chris_wot 11y ago
Why wouldn't they?
- justinhj 11y ago
  Because I worked with people with varying levels of technical ability. Slack is so much easier to setup and get everyone to use than irc.

foklepoint 11y ago

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

tamebadger 11y ago

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.

nikolay 11y ago

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.

thejosh 11y ago
From one closed source system to the next.
- nikolay 11y ago
  True, it's just that Gitter is so much better for development. Yet, developers are still pushing Slack. Anyway, wasn't Gitter open-source in the beginning though [0]? [0] https://github.com/gitter/gitter https://github.com/gitter/gitter

lokedhs 11y ago

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/ 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/ http://blog.potato.network/