What is Gitter and what are its top alternatives?
Top Alternatives to Gitter
- Slack
Imagine all your team communication in one place, instantly searchable, available wherever you go. That’s Slack. All your messages. All your files. And everything from Twitter, Dropbox, Google Docs, Asana, Trello, GitHub and dozens of other services. All together. ...
- Discord
Discord is a modern free voice & text chat app for groups of gamers. Our resilient Erlang backend running on the cloud has built in DDoS protection with automatic server failover. ...
- GitHub
GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Over three million people use GitHub to build amazing things together. ...
- Riot
Riot brings custom tags to all browsers. Think React + Polymer but with enjoyable syntax and a small learning curve. ...
- Mattermost
Mattermost is modern communication from behind your firewall.
- Spectrum
The community platform for the future.
- Discourse
Discourse is a simple, flat forum, where replies flow down the page in a line. Replies are attached to the bottom and top of each post, so you can optionally expand the context of the conversation – without breaking your flow. ...
- Microsoft Teams
See content and chat history anytime, including team chats with Skype that are visible to the whole team. Private group chats are available for smaller group conversations. ...
Gitter alternatives & related posts
- Easy to integrate with1.2K
- Excellent interface on multiple platforms877
- Free850
- Mobile friendly694
- People really enjoy using it690
- Great integrations331
- Flexible notification preferences315
- Unlimited users198
- Strong search and data archiving184
- Multi domain switching support155
- Easy to use82
- Beautiful40
- Hubot support27
- Unread/read control22
- Slackbot21
- Permalink for each messages19
- Text snippet with highlighting17
- Quote message easily15
- Per-room notification14
- Awesome integration support13
- IRC gateway12
- Star for each message / attached files12
- Good communication within a team11
- Dropbox Integration11
- Jira Integration10
- Slick, search is great10
- New Relic Integration9
- Asana Integration8
- Great communication tool8
- Combine All Services Quickly8
- XMPP gateway7
- Google Drive Integration7
- Awesomeness7
- This tool understands developers7
- Twitter Integration6
- Replaces email6
- Google Docs Integration6
- BitBucket integration6
- Guest and Restricted user control5
- GREAT Customer Support / Quick Response to Feedback5
- Jenkins Integration5
- Gathers all my communications in one place4
- Clean UI4
- Mention list view4
- GitHub integration4
- Excellent multi platform internal communication tool4
- Threaded chat3
- Easy3
- Visual Studio Integration3
- Easy to add a reaction3
- Easy to start working with3
- Timely while non intrusive3
- Android app3
- Perfect implementation of chat + integrations3
- Great on-boarding3
- Markdown2
- Message Actions2
- It's basically an improved (although closed) IRC2
- Great Channel Customization2
- Simplicity2
- Great interface2
- Eases collaboration for geographically dispersed teams2
- So much better than email2
- Intuitive, easy to use, great integrations2
- Community1
- Integrates with just about everything1
- Better User Experience1
- Very customizable1
- Great API1
- Flexible and Accessible1
- API1
- Multi work-space support1
- Easy remote communication1
- Get less busy1
- Dev communication Made Easy1
- Great Support Team1
- Targetprocess integration1
- Finally with terrible "threading"—I miss Flowdock1
- Complete with plenty of Electron BLOAT1
- Archive Importing1
- I was 666 star :D1
- Travis CI integration1
- It's the coolest IM ever1
- Easy to useL0
- Platforms0
- Can be distracting depending on how you use it12
- Requires some management for large teams6
- Limit messages history5
- Too expensive4
- You don't really own your messages4
- Too many notifications by default3
related Slack posts
Sentry has been essential to our development approach. Nobody likes errors or apps that crash. We use Sentry heavily during Node.js and React development. Our developers are able to see error reports, crashes, user's browsers, and more, all in one place. Sentry also seamlessly integrates with Asana, Slack, and GitHub.
Using Screenhero via Slack was getting to be pretty horrible. Video and sound quality was often times pretty bad and worst of all the service just wasn't reliable. We all had high hopes when the acquisition went through but ultimately, the product just didn't live up to expectations. We ended up trying Zoom after I had heard about it from some friends at other companies. We noticed the video/sound quality was better, and more importantly it was super reliable. The Slack integration was awesome (just type /zoom and it starts a call)
You can schedule recurring calls which is helpful. There's a G Suite (Google Calendar) integration which lets you add a Zoom call (w/dial in info + link to web/mobile) with the click of a button.
Meeting recordings (video and audio) are really nice, you get recordings stored in the cloud on the higher tier plans. One of our engineers, Jerome, actually built a cool little Slack integration using the Slack API and Zoom API so that every time a recording is processed, a link gets posted to the "event-recordings" channel. The iOS app is great too!
#WebAndVideoConferencing #videochat
Discord
- Unlimited Users61
- Unlimited Channels57
- Easy to use52
- Voice Chat49
- Fast and easy set-ups and connections48
- Clean UI44
- Mobile Friendly42
- Free41
- Android App32
- Mention system27
- Customizable notifications on per channel basis26
- Customizable ranks/permissions26
- IOS app22
- Good code embedding21
- Vast Webhook Support19
- Dark mode16
- Roles14
- Easy context switching between work and home14
- Very Resource Friendly12
- Great Communities12
- Great Customer Support12
- Easy to develop for12
- Bot control12
- Video Call Conference11
- Robust11
- Video call meeting11
- Able to hold 99 people in one call10
- Sharing screen layer10
- Easy Server Setup and joining system9
- Shares screen with other member9
- Great browser experience9
- Easy8
- Easy to code bots for7
- Lower bandwidth requirements than competitors7
- Noice5
- Easily set up custom emoji3
- For gamers9
- Not as many integrations as Slack9
- Limited file size4
- For everyone4
- Sends data to US Gov3
- Unsupportive Support1
- Suspected Pedophiles in few servers1
- Undescriptive in global ban reasons1
related Discord posts
Shortly after I joined Algolia as a developer advocate, I knew I wanted to establish a place for the community to congregate and share their projects, questions and advice. There are a ton of platforms out there that can be used to host communities, and they tend to fall into two categories - real-time sync (like chat) and async (like forums). Because the community was already large, I felt that a chat platform like Discord or Gitter might be overwhelming and opted for a forum-like solution instead (which would also create content that's searchable from Google).
I looked at paid, closed-source options like AnswerHub and ForumBee and old-school solutions like phpBB and vBulletin, but none seemed to offer the power, flexibility and developer-friendliness of Discourse. Discourse is open source, written in Rails with Ember.js on the front-end. That made me confident I could modify it to meet our exact needs. Discourse's own forum is very active which made me confident I could get help if I needed it.
It took about a month to get Discourse up-and-running and make authentication tied to algolia.com via the SSO plugin. Adding additional plugins for moderation or look-and-feel customization was fairly straightforward, and I even created a plugin to make the forum content searchable with Algolia. To stay on top of answering questions and moderation, we used the Discourse API to publish new messages into our Slack. All-in-all I would say we were happy with Discourse - the only caveat would be that it's very helpful to have technical knowledge as well as Rails knowledge in order to get the most out of it.
From a StackShare Community member: “We’re about to start a chat group for our open source project (over 5K stars on GitHub) so we can let our community collaborate more closely. The obvious choice would be Slack (k8s and a ton of major projects use it), but we’ve seen Gitter (webpack uses it) for a lot of open source projects, Discord (Vue.js moved to them), and as of late I’m seeing Spectrum more and more often. Does anyone have experience with these or other alternatives? Is it even worth assessing all these options, or should we just go with Slack? Some things that are important to us: free, all the regular integrations (GitHub, Heroku, etc), mobile & desktop apps, and open source is of course a plus."
GitHub
- Open source friendly1.8K
- Easy source control1.5K
- Nice UI1.3K
- Great for team collaboration1.1K
- Easy setup864
- Issue tracker503
- Great community484
- Remote team collaboration480
- Great way to share450
- Pull request and features planning441
- Just works145
- Integrated in many tools131
- Free Public Repos119
- Github Gists114
- Github pages110
- Easy to find repos82
- Open source61
- Easy to find projects59
- It's free59
- Network effect56
- Extensive API48
- Organizations42
- Branching41
- Developer Profiles33
- Git Powered Wikis32
- Great for collaboration29
- It's fun23
- Community SDK involvement22
- Clean interface and good integrations22
- Learn from others source code19
- Because: Git15
- It integrates directly with Azure14
- Standard in Open Source collab9
- Newsfeed9
- It integrates directly with Hipchat8
- Fast7
- Beautiful user experience7
- Cloud SCM6
- Easy to discover new code libraries6
- Smooth integration5
- It's awesome5
- Integrations5
- Graphs5
- Nice API5
- Quick Onboarding4
- Remarkable uptime4
- Hands down best online Git service available4
- CI Integration4
- Reliable4
- Loved by developers3
- Free HTML hosting3
- Security options3
- Simple but powerful3
- Uses GIT3
- Unlimited Public Repos at no cost3
- Version Control3
- Easy to use and collaborate with others3
- Nice to use2
- IAM2
- Ci2
- Easy and efficient maintainance of the projects1
- Good tools support1
- Beautiful1
- Free HTML hostings1
- Self Hosted1
- All in one development service1
- Easy to use1
- Easy source control and everything is backed up1
- Leads the copycats1
- Never dethroned1
- IAM integration1
- Issues tracker1
- Very Easy to Use1
- Easy deployment via SSH1
- Free private repos1
- Profound0
- Owned by micrcosoft52
- Expensive for lone developers that want private repos37
- Relatively slow product/feature release cadence15
- API scoping could be better10
- Only 3 collaborators for private repos8
- Limited featureset for issue management3
- GitHub Packages does not support SNAPSHOT versions2
- Does not have a graph for showing history like git lens2
- Have to use a token for the package registry1
- No multilingual interface1
- Takes a long time to commit1
related GitHub posts
I was building a personal project that I needed to store items in a real time database. I am more comfortable with my Frontend skills than my backend so I didn't want to spend time building out anything in Ruby or Go.
I stumbled on Firebase by #Google, and it was really all I needed. It had realtime data, an area for storing file uploads and best of all for the amount of data I needed it was free!
I built out my application using tools I was familiar with, React for the framework, Redux.js to manage my state across components, and styled-components for the styling.
Now as this was a project I was just working on in my free time for fun I didn't really want to pay for hosting. I did some research and I found Netlify. I had actually seen them at #ReactRally the year before and deployed a Gatsby site to Netlify already.
Netlify was very easy to setup and link to my GitHub account you select a repo and pretty much with very little configuration you have a live site that will deploy every time you push to master.
With the selection of these tools I was able to build out my application, connect it to a realtime database, and deploy to a live environment all with $0 spent.
If you're looking to build out a small app I suggest giving these tools a go as you can get your idea out into the real world for absolutely no cost.
























Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:
- GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
- Respectively Git as revision control system
- SourceTree as Git GUI
- Visual Studio Code as IDE
- CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
- Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
- SonarQube as quality gate
- Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
- VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
- Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
- Heroku for deploying in test environments
- nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
- SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
- Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
- PostgreSQL as preferred database system
- Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)
The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:
- Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
- Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
- Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
- Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
- Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
- Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.
- Its just easy... no training wheels needed13
- Light weight. Fast. Clear13
- Very simple, fast11
- Straightforward9
- Minimalistic6
- Great documentation4
- Simpler semantics than other frameworks4
- Easier than playing Teemo3
- Great engineering2
- Light, flexible and library friendly2
- Mastered under an hour1
- Smaller community1
related Riot posts
- Open source59
- On-premise deployment40
- Free25
- Built using golang22
- Fast and easy to use20
- Docker image provided for easy setup14
- Full text search14
- Built using react12
- Search and data archiving11
- Supports multiple teams10
- Very professional10
- Keeps us focused, effective, concise8
- Webhooks support7
- Clean and simple look7
- Integration with Gitlab7
- Well documented6
- Use #Hashtags like Twitter6
- Import Slack logs3
- Reactive community and ease of use3
- Secure2
- Self managed data2
- On-premises Deployment2
- Checklists1
- Kanban1
- Slack-compatible integrations1
- On premise installation1
- Markdown support1
- Easy webhook integration1
- Basic permissions only in enterprise edition1
- Not compatible with Telegram keys, which used by FSB1
- Custom sidewide themes only in enterprise1
- Many basic features are enterprise only1
- Less integrations and plugins than slack1
related Mattermost posts
I use Slack because it offers the best experience, even on the free tier (which we're still using). As a comparison, I have had in depth experience with HipChat, Stride, Skype, Google Chat (the new service), Google Hangouts (the old service). For self hosted, Mattermost is open source and claims to support most Slack integrations, but I have not extensively investigated this claim.
I use Zulip instead of Slack, Mattermost, or RocketChat because of its first class threading. One week after switching to Gmail (in 2004) I realized I was never (willingly) going to use an unthreaded email product again. I had that same experience the first time I saw Zulip.
Zulip is also fully open-source, with a well-maintained (e.g. 90+% test coverage, fully static python), easily extensible code-base. In many companies, your communication platform (chat or email) is the center of the workplace -- no one asks for a chat integration into their calendar, they ask for a calendar integration into their chat. A fully open-source codebase means you can customize Zulip to your needs, and are never at the whim of a corporate maintainer who can't or won't fix simple bugs, or who will charge you tens of thousands of dollars for making minor customizations.
related Spectrum posts
From a StackShare Community member: “We’re about to start a chat group for our open source project (over 5K stars on GitHub) so we can let our community collaborate more closely. The obvious choice would be Slack (k8s and a ton of major projects use it), but we’ve seen Gitter (webpack uses it) for a lot of open source projects, Discord (Vue.js moved to them), and as of late I’m seeing Spectrum more and more often. Does anyone have experience with these or other alternatives? Is it even worth assessing all these options, or should we just go with Slack? Some things that are important to us: free, all the regular integrations (GitHub, Heroku, etc), mobile & desktop apps, and open source is of course a plus."
Discourse
- Open source28
- Fast19
- Email digests13
- Better than a stereotypical forum9
- Perfect for communities of any size8
- It's perfect to build real communities7
- Made by same folks from stackoverflow7
- Built with Ember.js7
- Great customer support6
- Made by consolidated team with a working business3
- Translated into a lot of Languages3
- Configurations3
- Easy flag resolution2
- Heavy on server3
- Difficult to extend2
- Notifications aren't great on mobile due to being a PWA2
related Discourse posts
Shortly after I joined Algolia as a developer advocate, I knew I wanted to establish a place for the community to congregate and share their projects, questions and advice. There are a ton of platforms out there that can be used to host communities, and they tend to fall into two categories - real-time sync (like chat) and async (like forums). Because the community was already large, I felt that a chat platform like Discord or Gitter might be overwhelming and opted for a forum-like solution instead (which would also create content that's searchable from Google).
I looked at paid, closed-source options like AnswerHub and ForumBee and old-school solutions like phpBB and vBulletin, but none seemed to offer the power, flexibility and developer-friendliness of Discourse. Discourse is open source, written in Rails with Ember.js on the front-end. That made me confident I could modify it to meet our exact needs. Discourse's own forum is very active which made me confident I could get help if I needed it.
It took about a month to get Discourse up-and-running and make authentication tied to algolia.com via the SSO plugin. Adding additional plugins for moderation or look-and-feel customization was fairly straightforward, and I even created a plugin to make the forum content searchable with Algolia. To stay on top of answering questions and moderation, we used the Discourse API to publish new messages into our Slack. All-in-all I would say we were happy with Discourse - the only caveat would be that it's very helpful to have technical knowledge as well as Rails knowledge in order to get the most out of it.
- Work well with the rest of Office 365 work flow28
- Mobile friendly23
- Free19
- Great integrations12
- Well-thought Design11
- Channels10
- Easy setup8
- Unlimited users6
- Strong search and data archiving5
- Multi domain switching support4
- Easy to integrate with4
- Same interface on multiple platforms3
- Web interface3
- Great voice quality2
- Confusing UI17
- Bad performance on init and after quite a use12
- Bad Usermanagement10
- No desktop client (only fat and slow electron app)6
- Can't see all members in a video meeting6
- Unable to Mute users5
- No Markdown Support5
- You don't really own your messages4
- MIssing public channels4
- Forced WYSIWYG4
- Stubborn, unused friendly3
- Challenging Onboarding3
- No linux support3
- Audio support problems1
related Microsoft Teams posts
Looking for the pros and cons for a tool we can use best for cross-team collaboration (software development). Has anyone compared Google Hangouts Chat with Microsoft Teams? What were the advantages of either??
We use Microsoft Teams as our primary workplace collaboration tool. It enables our team to work remotely and still collaborate on projects - with integration to JIRA and Confluence, the tool enables us to create War Rooms when problems occur and also provides information-sharing capabilities. Replaced HipChat.