Best Free Slack Alternatives for Effective Project

Communication is important and with these apps, you can send and receive messages in real-time wherever you are. Free and for personal and professional use. Instant messaging has become one of the communication tools most popular with email and supplanting traditional telephony. Today it is common to talk to a friend, family member or coworker by text message instead of making a phone call.

In the personal sphere, WhatsApp, Snapchat and increasingly Telegram stand out, along with Facebook Messenger or the Apple Messages app. And professionally, along with the classic Skype, it is common to come across Slack as an instant messaging app for office or remote workgroups.

But as always happens with software and the Internet, when something is good, alternatives arise that try to improve the present and offer more. In this case, we offer you several free instant messaging solutions that are also open source.

Riot

With a design that will remind you of Slack, Riot is a multiplatform instant messaging app, that is, you can use it from your browser, from the desktop and from your iPhone, iPad and Android devices.

Like any self-respecting messaging app, it allows you to create individual conversations or chat groups, filter rooms and conversations through the search engine, etc. In addition, along with text messages, you can send files, make audio and video calls, share links, YouTube videos …

You can also use stickers, bots, search for images or GIFs from the app itself, name someone to get their attention, etc.

Among the advantages of Riot, in addition to being free, its free code allows anyone to program it to their advantage. And as for security, the conversations are encrypted point to point.

For the rest, when creating a user account you can choose between using Riot’s public server, hiring your own paid server or looking for other public servers.

Mattermost

Among the particularities of Mattermost, the possibility of creating your own server stands out in order to centralize your internal conversations in your office or company. So you can choose between hiring the paid version or taking care of the server so that your own Mattermost network works for free.

Available for Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, iPad and Android, Mattermost is used to carry out text conversations, share files, integrate third-party services, make video calls and audio calls, share the screen.

Another interesting aspect of Mattermost is the possibility of working through VPN, encrypting conversations using SSL and TLS and, ultimately, managing all aspects related to the tool and its server.

Zulip

Another interesting alternative to Slack is Zulip, which also moves between the free and paid versions. With the free one, you can manage a volume of 10,000 messages in the search history and 5 GB to store files online.

The app itself offers everything you need to communicate privately or in groups. To start, you can format your texts using Markdown and LaTeX, you can insert images, videos and Twitter messages that will be seen directly, mention someone in a conversation to get their attention, integrate third-party services …

Zulip is available to use both on your desktop and on mobile devices: Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android …