Privacy

Matrix doesn't require self-hosting. There's a very good host out there etke.cc. They take care of everything, are European, and you just have to connect. It's 20€/month for hosting a medium sized server that can handle room with up to 3000 users (if I understand it correctly). They can bridge your server to other client services likes Google and Slack, and they can even bridge to WhatsApp and Signal meaning that people in your company could be added to rooms from WhatsApp or Signal. They even have an email bridge with which you can allow email users to chat in matrix rooms!

There is of course no limit to how long meetings can be, matrix has a wide range of clients (of which element is the most popular).

I would've recommended Element.io, but they have a "minimum number of users" 🤷

Anti Commercial-AI license

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.

Zulip with bigbluebutton or/and whereby

• https://zulip.com/features/
• https://zulip.com/integrations/doc/big-blue-button
• https://whereby.com/information/meetings

Same situation as you, we’re choosing to use Mattermost, it’s like Slack but we’re being more with this free version. After all our testing so far it works great.

We use Zoom at work and that is quite good. I used Teams, Jitsi, BigBlueButton and Citrix and so far Zoom has had the least problems (Citrix being a close second place). It also has clients for all major platforms and OS.

Their latest update greatly improved the chat functionality (in my opinion) and it is slowly replacing all other internal communication channels (mail/phone).

I only have used privacy-invasive solutions, and I don't know if there exists an easy way to do that securely.

Discord, Signal, Telegram: forget it, it's good to send a grocery list to my wife, but that's it.

Teams: I hate it, it's resource hungry and I always had issues with it.

I use Google Meet nowadays at my new job and it's fine. Everything is on the web, no need to install anything. Of course it's Google and it's bad, but so far I don't mind.

I've heard about https://jitsi.org/jitsi-meet/ once but I have never tried that.

Check out Teleguard from SwissCow.

I haven't seen an analysis of their privacy claims, so I'm not really sure (so when I say check it out, maybe you'll find info that I haven't).

What I know is I like how the connect new device process works - you essentially restore a backup to a new device, which requires the user ID (not your user name) and a code. Which likely means individual device data isn't sitting in the open somewhere.

They have a free and a paid tier, which they seem to be marketing toward business.

They claim messages are ephemeral on their servers, but I haven't found a third-party analysis of them, which is disappointing.

I haven't tried it myself, but Nextcloud talk seems to be an option as well. Doesn't need to be self-hosted, but wouldn't be free. I think it should be possible to find it at a reasonable price though.

What does your company use for IT services? Do you call Bob In A Truck? Or do you have a relationship with a Small Business IT consulting firm that understands proper long-term management?

Hopefully it's the latter (or even an MSP) - they'll (hopefully) have some experience here (it really depends, better consultants have the focus, some just implement what you tell them to implement).