Replacing Slack with hosted free code

[strypey]

Continuing the discussion that began here about possible replacements for Slack. In that issue, I said:

A few questions that would help me decide what to recommend:

• are you in a position to self-host a team chat package, or are you only interested in using hosted services?
• do you use Slack mainly for realtime chat, or asynchronous messages, or equally for both?
• is voice and video mission critical, or do you only need text chat? * how important is your chat history? Is it an essential archive of your institutional memory, like mailing list archives? Is it ephemeral, like idling in IRC, with your team usually summarizing Slack chat in docs on a wiki or whatever?
• is email integration of interest, or are you all drowning in email and not wanting email delivery/ replies as a option? (I'm guessing it's not that important since Slack has no email bridge, but...)

[strypey]

@bigokro gave this summary in reply:

Async No email No voice/video (we use Google Hangouts) History is debatable. Some think it's essential, some (like me) care more about the results - yes, we summarize in the white paper and other docs Unlimited users, although I think the non-profit plan for Slack of 250 should be enough Don't want to host

Things I especially like about the Slack client:

Very readable I use Slack for work and other groups, so it's easy to switch back and forth Desktop notifications of new messages (NOT email, PLEASE) Multiple channels, for more focused discussions of many sub-projects The ability to tag posts. We use that for "permalinks", welcome info, and keeping a running list of topics for the next hangout. Permalink invite for new members Easily searchable (for the history that is available, at least) Easy to attach/embed docs and images Quick polls for simple voting @user mentions

[strypey]

Just wanted to let you know I'm not slacking off on this (yes, pun intended ;)

I've been researching the available, free code, Slack replacements, but I'll need a bit more time to figure out the precise feature sets of each candidate, and compare them against your use case. In the meantime, feel free to share the notes on my wiki with your team.