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  1. Stackups
  2. Stackups
  3. Flowdock vs Kaiwa

Flowdock vs Kaiwa

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Flowdock
Flowdock
Stacks101
Followers81
Votes165
Kaiwa
Kaiwa
Stacks3
Followers11
Votes0

Flowdock vs Kaiwa: What are the differences?

Developers describe Flowdock as "Flowdock is your team's chat with a shared inbox. Teams using Flowdock react in seconds and never forget anything". Flowdock is a web-based team chat service that integrates with your tools to provide a window into your team's activities. With the team inbox, everyone on your team can stay up to date. Stay connected with Flowdock's iOS and Android apps. On the other hand, Kaiwa is detailed as "A modern and Open Source Web client for XMPP". Inspired by the best and built for XMPP, Kaiwa is a beautiful web-based client for the only standardized chat protocol. Combined with Prosody, one of the best XMPP servers out there, Kaiwa provides an unparalleled XMPP experience, on par with well-known commercial alternatives.

Flowdock and Kaiwa can be categorized as "Group Chat & Notifications" tools.

Some of the features offered by Flowdock are:

  • Team Inbox
  • Group Chat
  • 1-On-1 Private Chat

On the other hand, Kaiwa provides the following key features:

  • Message History Syncing
  • Active Chat Syncing
  • Reliable Connections

Kaiwa is an open source tool with 1.36K GitHub stars and 153 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Kaiwa's open source repository on GitHub.

Advice on Flowdock, Kaiwa

Andrey
Andrey

frontend developer at Deveo

Mar 18, 2021

Review

I'm a big fan of threaded conversations. After getting used to them, you start realizing what a terrible mess unthreaded chat systems such as Slack are. They are just horribly unproductive.

FlowDock is the only team chat system I know that has threads done right. Unfortunately, it has two flaws: 1. It has not seen any development in years. The app has changed ownership recently, so this might change for the better. 2. It is stupidly easy to misuse by newbies who are not yet familiar with threads: instead of replying to threads, they just keep starting new ones and mess up conversations. Teaching everyone to use threads in FlowDock is hard.

For this reason, I cannot recommend FlowDock to a team of 66, especially if it includes non-technical staff. Unless you're eager to patiently work with every individual teammate to constantly remind them to not start new threads.

I'm submitting a feature request to FlowDock asking to solve this problem for good.

The second best is Microsoft Teams. Its threads are not nearly as efficient as FlowDock, but they exist and they do their job. And it does not suffer from the newbie misuse problem.

Don't use Slack. Slack claims to have threads, but its threads implementation is a patch on top of unthreaded conversations, and it actually makes things worse. Slack is counterproductive.

Discord is the only chat system I know that is perfect for open and semi-open (invite-only) communities. There's also Gitter but it hasn't seen progress in years. Discord has no threads and no benefits for a closed team.

136 views136
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Flowdock
Flowdock
Kaiwa
Kaiwa

Flowdock is a web-based team chat service that integrates with your tools to provide a window into your team's activities. With the team inbox, everyone on your team can stay up to date. Stay connected with Flowdock's iOS and Android apps.

Inspired by the best and built for XMPP, Kaiwa is a beautiful web-based client for the only standardized chat protocol. Combined with Prosody, one of the best XMPP servers out there, Kaiwa provides an unparalleled XMPP experience, on par with well-known commercial alternatives.

Team Inbox;Group Chat;1-On-1 Private Chat;Chat & Threads;Search All History;Notify and be notified;Mention someone by their @name;iOS and Android apps;Tags;Custom emoji;Notifications;File sharing;Tool integrations;Persistent history
Message History Syncing;Active Chat Syncing;Reliable Connections;Message Correction;Timezone Indications
Statistics
Stacks
101
Stacks
3
Followers
81
Followers
11
Votes
165
Votes
0
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 34
    Threaded chat
  • 30
    Simpler integrations than others, team inbox = awesome
  • 18
    Great interface
  • 17
    Extremely easy to manage multiple conversations
  • 15
    Team Inbox
No community feedback yet
Integrations
GitHub
GitHub
Git
Git
Heroku
Heroku
Pivotal Tracker
Pivotal Tracker
Trello
Trello
Jira
Jira
Semaphore
Semaphore
Bitbucket
Bitbucket
Woopra
Woopra
New Relic
New Relic
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Flowdock, Kaiwa?

Slack

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.

HipChat

HipChat

HipChat is a hosted private chat service for your company or team. Invite colleagues to share ideas and files in persistent group chat rooms. Get your team off AIM, Google Talk, and Skype — HipChat was built for business.

Zulip

Zulip

Zulip is powerful, open source team chat that combines the immediacy of real-time chat with the productivity benefits of threaded conversations. Zulip allows busy managers and others in meetings all day to participate in their teams chats.

RocketChat

RocketChat

Rocket.Chat is a Web Chat Server, developed in JavaScript, using the Meteor fullstack framework. It is a great solution for communities and companies wanting to privately host their own chat service or for developers looking forward to build and evolve their own chat platforms.

Mattermost

Mattermost

Mattermost is modern communication from behind your firewall.

Gitter

Gitter

Free chat rooms for your public repositories. A bit like IRC only smarter. Chats for private repositories as well as organisations.

Microsoft Teams

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.

Telegram

Telegram

Users can send messages and exchange photos, videos, stickers, audio and files of any type. It provides instant messaging, simple, fast, secure and synced across all your devices.

Keybase Teams

Keybase Teams

Keybase is for anyone. Imagine a Slack for the whole world, except end-to-end encrypted across all your devices. Or a Team Dropbox where the server can't leak your files or be hacked.

Fleep

Fleep

Leave email behind and manage all conversations with your team, partners and clients in Fleep. If some of them are not Fleep users yet, they will receive all messages as normal emails.

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