Instant message usage is rising everywhere and Slack is one of the leading solutions for teams. It’s great but it’s not free and you have to create accounts for each team making it hard to share a channel across different teams, for example.
Instant messaging apps are at every corner, from Whatsapp, Skype, Microsoft Team, Telegram, Wire and so on, which one to choose for your team?
Jitsi Meet
Jitsi meet is free, no account needed video conference in your browser.
Features:
- 100% free and open source
- Share your desktop, presentations, and more
- Invite users to a conference via a simple, custom URL
- Edit documents together using Etherpad
- Pick fun meeting URLs for every meeting
- Trade messages and emojis while you video conference, with integrated chat.
Notable drawback
- No contact liste
- No archives
Jitsi meet is build on top of jitsian open source projects that build technology for video conferencing.
Riot IM
Riot.im is instant message for this century.
Features
- 100% Free and open-source
- Works on your browser, mobile or desktop
- Voice and video conferencing.
- Send, receive and view files while inline with the conversation.
- Persist information for ever
- Edit documents together using Etherpad
- Add widgets in conversation (youtube, google doc, custom, …)
- join or create rooms per topic, per team, per event…
- Add bots
- Deploy your own server (like email!)
Notable drawback
- No sub-room / Community management yet
- Search is super slow
In fact riot is a client for matrix and the project is amazing!
Discord
Discord was made for gammer. Their client is light and very close to Slack but contacts have only a pseudo and can’t be found by their email.
- 100% Free but NOT open source.
- Voice and video conferencing.
- Mobile App, Browser, Desktop
- Friends List
- Minimal CPU Usage
- Permissions
- Multiple Channels
- Direct Messaging
Notable drawback
- Only pseudo. Can’t find contact by email or other information
- Not open source.
What to choose?
Jitsi let you quickly launch a video conference, but you have no contact list. Therefore it’s not a very good choice for a team that works regularly together and need to stay connected.
In my opinion, riot is the best instant message for teams. For now they miss community and sub room but it’s on the top priority of the project. The ability to find contact with their email, pseudo, phone number and other information from their profile is super useful. You can create your own chat room like Slack, but it’s decentralised and open like email making it easy to invite anyone in a discussion. It can also be a good alternative to IRC for open source project.
Discord is super slick but use only pseudo. Not a big problem for a small team but it’s a deal breaker for larger one or team with not fixed members.
