Alternatives to RocketChat

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.

We're using GitHub for version control as it's an industry standard for version control and our team has plenty of experience using it. We also found many features such as issues and project help us organize. We also really liked the fact that it has the Actions CI platform built in because it allows us to keep more of our development in one place. We chose Slack as our main communication platform because it allows us to organize our communication streams into various channels for specific topics. Additionally, we really liked the integrations as they allow us to keep a lot of our in formation in one place rather than spread around many different apps.

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.

I own an Escape Room. Since right now everyone is practicing social distancing, I would like to run my Escape Room games virtually. I would like to allow approx 4 users to log in to play. They can chitchat a few minutes before their game to get to know each other. Then once the game begins, I will introduce myself and give them the plot to their escape game. I will have a wide-angle camera mounted to the wall to show the room, and as the game master, carry a tablet or webcam around as players talk to me and direct me to show them certain items in the room, move in for closeups in certain areas, try lock combinations, etc. I will be their hands while they solve the puzzles. I am not sure if Google Hangouts Google Meet or Zoom is better for this. I did try it yesterday using google hangout meet and it was good, but I think there may have been a wifi issue where it was choppy. Just trying to figure out the best option. Thank you! Catherine

I'm looking for advice on what App to use in conversation and phone calls to someone who lives out of the country. Should I use Google Hangouts, Google Hangouts Chat, or does anyone have any other suggestions? I would greatly appreciate any help you could possibly provide. Thank you

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."

We use Zulip for group chat at the Recurse Center, both for our team (< 10 people) and for our alumni community (1,300+ people). We tried Slack, but Zulip is way better. Among the many reasons: It has a much better threading model and is open source.

We use DigitalOcean mainly to provide remote development environments for Zulip contributors in situations where developing locally using our Vagrant setup isn't practical. There's a range of reasons:

• Situations where one needs a public IP address and SSL certificate (e.g. Facebook's OAuth system require that even for testing)
• Giving a contributor a development environment when their computer doesn't have the few GB of free RAM needed to run one locally
• Developer sprints, where our snapshot-based system can provision a working development environment for a potential new contributor in under a minute. This use case is particularly great because a machine that one only needs for 3 days is essentially free with Digital Ocean's pricing.
• A backup development environment when someone's laptop is being repaired.

One could do all of this with many hosting providers, but we've found it particularly convenient to use Digital Ocean for these applications.

Hello there, We're developing a team chat application which would consist of direct (one-to-one) conversations and channel (group) conversations. I'm not the developer (of course), but my team suggested to go with Redis.

I've seen tech stacks of BIG team chat applications like Slack and Flock...but they haven't used RabbitMQ and used Redis instead.

A quick question, what's a good choice to go with for RabbitMQ or Redis for a message queue system in our case?

Uploadcare is mostly remote team and we're using video conferencing all the time both for internal team meetings and for external sales, support, interview, etc. calls. I think we've tried every solution there is on the market before we've decided to stop with Zoom.

Tools just plainly don't work (Skype), are painful to install for external participants (Webex and other "enterprise" solutions) can't properly handle 10+ participants calls (Google Hangouts Chat).

Zoom just works. It has all required features and even handles bad connections very graciously. One of the best tool decisions we've ever made :)

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.