Zulip is the best chat application, from a “design” perspective at least, but slack has huddles and works really well and is pretty standardized. Screen sharing with slack is amazing as you can draw on your coworkers screen without them needing to enable anything. Discord has the best long term voice calls, but is really weird for messages. And screen sharing isn’t as nice for work stuff but is great for video games.
this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
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That's my answer. Used them at my last job for 5 years, nothing but love for them. Support is top notch.
Same
How does other communication in the business work? E.g. are you using email and chat? Do you share files and centrally comment on them? Are you using a tool like slack or teams? Are you all on a standardised company hardware (e.g. iPhone)? I ask as some of the tools that fill those gaps may also have video as a channel.
As someone who's been on Discord for almost 10 years: don't use Discord for your company. There's no backups, account management, or other kind of enterprise / B2B support.
Slack can do most of that.its owned by Microsoft so if you were already comfortable with Skype it's not a huge departure. There is HIPAA compliance, but there is also Microsoft.
However it enshittifies over time and I'm planning to move away for my team.
Slack is not owned by MSFT. Maybe you are thinking of Teams. Slack is owned by Salesforce.
Oh, sorry, you're right. Looks like Microsoft was interested at one point but didn't.
Why would you not go with Teams? I assume you all are using Microsoft Office if you were using Skype. Pretty sure Teams is included in the Office 365 license.
It's literally Microsoft's successor to Skype.
We don't have 365 licenses, so it's $4/user/month that we weren't paying before. But this was my chance to get the company on something better, so I was investigating options.
I really think the hour meeting limitation is going to be a problem for the free accounts, but dealing with that seems more likely than the company paying $800/year, or whatever the headcount is.
Teams is sort of a drag though. Very resource intensive for what it does. But if everyone in your company has ram and CPU to spare, it’s mostly painless.
Thanks for all your advice. Here's a report on my experiences for anybody that may have a similar question. I demo'd Zulip with Jitsi, Jami, and Nextcloud Talk today.
I've actually used Signal desktop for years, and love it, but don't really want to mix work with personal, and if I didn't already use it, I'd squirm about the required mobile app on my personal phone. Telegram might be a little easier that way-- I don't think you have to have an app to make an account, just a phone number.
I liked Zulip, but I didn't like Jitsi. It required a google account or a github account to host a meeting, it ran in browser instead of embedded in the Zulip app somehow, and the Jitsi desktop app seemed to be from 2003.
Jami was ok. I was able to set it up pretty easily, but I didn't know if others in the org can handle that it's P2P so you can't leave messages for others off hours. Also there seemed to be a lot of complaints about its reliability in its own forum.
NextCloud talk on the free servers didn't really work. I could get voice and text, but screen sharing just errored. I think I'd have to set up a TURN server or something like that. So if that requires hosting anyway, might as well do Matrix. Also the free servers were really slow.
So next test for me is Matrix. Is there a way I can try it out for free to see if I can recommend it to the rest of the company? Without spending hours on it? I've probably wasted more company time on this project than I would've saved in subscriptions.
You can sign up for free on most servers. I think tchncs.de has video and audio conferencing enabled if you want to try that out.
I think signal would be the easiest to set up and agrees to all your requirements. It's got windows and iOS android apps.
Good if you have company phone numbers as it requires a phone number to create an account.
For the meeting point: Lokas - Record and transcribe your meetings in complete privacy.
Your sound file is then sent to our not-for-profit association’s servers, where free software installed by us will transcribe it. These files will be automatically deleted after processing.
In complete privacy, but sending it to them? I expected something different from the "complete privacy" label/claim.
Is Lokas RGPD compliant?
From a legal point of view: it’s a work in progress.
[Framasoft, the publisher of Lokas, is] A non-profit association founded in 2004, financed by your donations, which is limited to a dozen employees and about thirty volunteers (a group of friends!)
It a proof of concept. I don't know if they plan to keep working on it as it wasn't received well because it's AI
It does work pretty good and from a simple app