Top 10 Team Chat Software for a Self-Hosted environment specifically designed for Large Enterprises

You need a platform to host your enterprise work conversations!

Indeed that’s the only way you bring your teams together to exchange work ideas and discuss more work.

Making your teams rely on personal chat applications at your workplace is no fun when you seriously look for productive outcomes from them. Instead, give them the best self-hosted slack team chat software like Troop Messenger, Flock, Rocket Chat, Mattermost, etc., to stay informed and monitored about all the work routines and updates.

These days, the business entities, corporations, Start-ups, SMEs, large enterprises, etc., are bombarded with many collaboration tool options. And, most of the tools are available in the variants of SaaS and Self-Hosting.

Data is crucial for every industry, but enterprise risk management is true of high priority for large enterprises and Governments. That being said, an instant messaging solution that delivers self-hosting is recommended for such kind of data-specific industries. Let us have a look at the following business collaboration tools that safeguard the internal communication needs of these entities.

Troop Messenger

The work you plan and structure needs to be duly conveyed to your teams to achieve the right work outcomes. Troop Messenger provides you the best team collaboration like never before. It empowers a great user experience with its simple and seamless user interface.

All your work conversations are taken care of with instant messaging, group conversations, voice-video calling, screen sharing, Fork out, Burnout, and more. It extends high-form of security to user’s work/business conversations with strong end-to-end encrypted algorithms.

It has been designed for small teams, SMEs, large enterprises, Governments, security organizations, etc., Besides SaaS, Chat APIs, and custom application development, the self-hosted delivery model has been exclusively developed for large enterprises keeping their data-sensitivity in mind. 

Pros

• Unique collaboration feature-stack
• Cost-Effective
• Great customer support
• Advanced Filters that gives quick search results
• Easy to understand help documentation. 
  
  

Cons

• Does not support migration
• Need to have more Add-Ons

 Pricing

Troop Messenger has a quite economical pricing structure when compared to its competitors. The one who registers the application is given a one-month enterprise free trial. Besides this, the premium pricing plan is charged at $1 per user/per month and Enterprise at $5 per user/per month. It offers a special plan for self-hosting at $5+per user/ per month. 

Rocket chat
 

Rocket Chat is famously known for its open-source team communication. The two delivery models that are available with this tool are; SaaS and Self-Managed. Large Enterprises can hugely benefit from this tool as it extends high security to message-exchanges with two-factor authentication, E2E encryption, SSO and OAuth providers. An exclusive feature of real-time translation translates its UI to over 50 languages that make users feel native. The self-managed version allows users to download the docker image and install the application on their servers.

Pros

• It has an unlimited free plan
• It supports endless customizations that include; Integrations, Plugins, Themes and Powerful APIs
• Easy-to-implement data importers
• Scale as per your needs  

Cons

• Lack of in-depth documentation
• Need better support and sales system

  Pricing

Rocket Chat provides different pricing structures for Self-Managed and Cloud. For Self-Managed, it has come up with the pricing plans of Community @ Free, Pro @ $3/per user/month, and Enterprise @ Tiered pricing. The Bronze, Silver, and Gold pricing plans of the Cloud/SaaS delivery model comes at $2/user/month, $4/user/month and tiered pricing respectively.

Mattermost

Mattermost introduces itself as a ‘High Trust Messaging for the Enterprise’, and it is true. An exceptional self-hosted open source messaging platform that extends secure communication across the industries of all forms and sizes. It can be deployed on a private cloud within the premises of local servers. The organizations which are high on privacy-conscious believe Mattermost as their flexible partner for all internal instant communications. The tool is popular on GitHub, and it provides an extensive level of documentation that helps in docker installation.

Pros

• Build custom workflows
• Enables Dev Ops workflows
• Enterprise-grade scalability and security
• Supports Migration

Cons

• Tedious deployment process
• No in-app voice-video call feature. Need to integrate.

Pricing

Mattermost comes with two delivery models; cloud and self-hosted. Large Enterprises who look for self-hosting can go with server download that supports both Linux Install and Docker Install. Moving forward, it extends the free 30-day trial of Enterprise Edition(E20). And, the other plans E10 and E20 are priced at $3.25 user/month and $8.50 user/month when billed annually. 

Zulip

Catch upon only important conversations and ignore irrelevant ones, is what Zulip says. Open-Source software that was built by hundreds of developers across the globe. The self-hosted delivery model specifically designed for Large Entities provides an excellent production installation guide that lets users deploy it on their networks. Besides its 90 native integrations, Zulip supports more integrations from Hubot, Zapier, and IFTTT. It has excellent user documentation ranging from product installations guides to stream management.

Pros

• It has a high-quality developer-friendly code.
• Build your integrations with its APIs
• Unique threading approach
• Supports migration

Cons

• Steep learning curve
• Minimalistic features

Pricing

Zulip cloud and Zulip On-Premise are two different pricing models that it offers. The former comes with Free and Standard Plans at unlimited and $6.67/user/month respectively, and the later comes with the plans of Community Support as Free and Open source forever. The Enterprise pricing variant of the same varies with support required. Users need to contact their sales team.

Matrix.org

Besides a messaging protocol, Matrix is known as a decentralized conversation store. It replicates the sent message over all the servers where user participation is active. An exceptional self-hosted delivery model that provides strong end-to-end encryption via the Olm and Megolm cryptographic ratchets. It helps to build your apps, chat rooms, direct chats, and chatbots, with a simple RESTful HTTP/JSON APIs. 

Pros

• Each server has full level control over users' data.
• Open specification of Matrix standard
• No single points of control or failure
• Supports Bridging

Cons

• Not available on the cloud 

Pricing

Matrix.org never charges. It's completely free. Its free servers are open to all for public registrations.

Lets Chat

Yours is a small team and want to have a full-scale control over your team collaboration. Then Lets Chat is the right self-hosted tool exclusively made for small teams. It runs on Node.js and MongoDB and deployed easily at your local servers. It supports Docker and Vagrant platform installations. Lets Chat has some interesting features; private/password protected rooms, Image embeds, transcripts/chat history and more.

Pros

• Supports LDAP/Kerberos Authentication
• Supports BYOS (Bring your own server)
• It has multiple chat rooms
• It is Hubot-friendly

Cons

• Not available over the cloud
• It doesn’t support any integrations.

Pricing

 It’s free(MIT Licensed)

nextcloud

The self-hosted collaboration tool built for protecting the user data through multiple layers of security offers a wide range of products like Nextcloud Files, Nextcloud Talk, Nextcloud Groupware, Nextcloud at home, and industry solutions. Nextcloud says, ‘control is key to data’. To ensure this, it implements the authentication mechanisms of SAML, Kerberos, and LDAP. It’s an open-source application with the code available on GitHub for developers.

Pros

• It has two variants; Nextcloud at home and Nextcloud at Enterprises.
• Adhere with the compliances of HIPPA and GDPR
• Enterprise support
• Direct access to core Nextcloud Engineering.

Cons

• Has fewer issues with deployment on shared hosting
• No detailed manual installation guides. 

Pricing

Nextcloud offers three pricing plans; Basic, Standard, and Premium. The annual pricing for Basic, Standard, and Premium for 50 users is priced at 1900Euros, 3400Euros, and 4900Euros respectively.

Wire

Modernize the way you collaborate, is what Wire says. It offers uncompromised end-to-end security to protect users' communication and data. Wire adheres to the compliances of ISO, CCPA, GDPR, and SOX. It allows the new users or the migrators to adopt it with different deployment options. Cloud, private and on-premises are three deployment choices available to the users. The wire is 100% open-source and its source code is available on GitHub.

Pros

• It is independently audited
• It provides forward and backward secrecy
• Simple privacy policy
• No phone number required, just register with email id

Cons

• The learning curve is steep
• Occasionally slow

Pricing

The highly secured team collaboration platform comes in three pricing plans; Wire Pro, Wire Enterprise and Wire Enterprise Technology. All the three plans are charged at 4Euros per user/per month, 8 Euros per user/per month, when billed biennially. The users need to contact their team to understand the Wire Enterprise Technology pricing.

Jitsi

Jitsi is a 100% free multi-platform open-source video conferencing tool that looks good and sounds amazing. The users/developers across the world can use Jitsi or build their own apps using the tools of it. Jitsi has two projects; jitsi Video bridge, and jitsi Meet. Both are open-source and WebRTC compatible that allows users to develop high-quality and scalable video conferences.

Pros

• Jitsi Desktop allows calls, chat, conferencing, file transfer and more
• It is an open-source community
• It encodes/decodes the audio/video flows
• Recording and live streaming for Jitsi Meet

Cons

• Rare issues with the connections

 Pricing

It is 100% free.

 Tox Chat

Another instant messaging application for large corporations and governments. TOX is a free, easy-to-use messaging tool that comes without advertising. It's a people made a tool, that is highly encrypted and distributed. The other features of Tox include; voice, video, screen sharing, file sharing and groups

Pros

• A simple and secure messaging tool
• Encrypted voice calls

Cons

• Your IP is visible to others

Pricing

No corporate interests and no hidden agendas, it's free.

Signing Off

At the end of the day, it is all about how you safeguard your organization's data. Choose a highly secured on-premise collaboration tool that has no access to any third-party vendors.

Originally Published at Troop Messenger