12 Best Self-hosted Chat Platforms For Team Communication

Gomathi Ramachandran Published On August 14th, 2024 Insights

“Looking for a customizable communication solution for your business? Explore how our self-hosted chat service can help you with it.”

Self-hosted team chat apps have recently been on the rise driving collaboration and employee productivity to the max. 

Not only do these apps offer different communication channels for teams to collaborate, but help businesses gain complete control over their messaging infrastructure as well. 

Therefore, in the post below, we will explore the following concepts

1. Different yet innovative self-hosted corporate chat software
2. Why is it important for your business?
3. How to select the right self-hosted chat for your best team communication app?

What Is The Importance Of Self-Managed Chat Apps?

On-premise corporate chat platforms or self-hosted apps help businesses customize messaging apps as per their needs and deploy them on their own premises. In addition to this mega benefit, its other positives include:

• Complete Customization: Helps enterprises to add, modify, or remove chat features according to their team needs.
• White-labeling: Gives businesses the ability to brand third-party team chat apps with their own branding elements like logos, themes, and fonts.
• Higher Security: Businesses can build a custom self-managed solution taking full control of security and encryption standards.
• Greater Scalability: These apps tend to scale the team messaging platform based on growing user demand.
• On-premise Hosting: One of the prime advantages of going ahead with this model is the flexibility to host group messaging apps on your own servers.

Now, let us see the much-awaited part.

12 Best Team Communication Apps For Business

Below is a curated list of the 12 best self-hosted team messaging apps like MirrorFly, Mattermost, Zulio, Nextcloud, and Rocket.chat that offer unique collaboration features and lets you take full control of your data.

1. MirrorFly

MirrorFly stands as a leading in-app communication provider of video, voice, and chat SDKs, helping developers to quickly build interactive team chat apps in a jiffy. 

Plus, MirrorFly’s customizable call and chat SDKs help businesses to add features that they require and take 100% control over their app’s messaging and security infrastructure. 

Most Notable Features

• 100% customization
• White labeling/branding
• Helps add AI-powered chatbots
• Lifetime ownership of codes

 

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2. Lets Chat

Lets Chat is the next team chat app on our list that is completely designed to help budding team conversations within any businesses. 

Being an open-sourced platform, it is flexible to deploy on premises and offers a wide range of benefits which we will see below.

Most Notable Features

• LDAP authentication
• XMPP multi-user chat
• Runs on MongoDB

3. Nextcloud

Nextcloud is a completely secure team chat app fostering safe conversations between teammates.

It achieves this through implementing several authentication mechanisms like Kerberos, LDAP, and SAML.

Most Notable Features

• Complete customizations
• Pre-built calendars and contact
• Third-party integration support

4. RingCentral

RingCentral is a cloud-based communication and collaboration platform that was first founded in the year 2015.

It offers varied task management capabilities to assist teams in completing their ongoing projects and keep future tasks on track.

Most Notable Features

• Secure messaging solution
• Audio and video calls
• Screen sharing

5. Matrix.org

Besides offering team messaging capabilities, it is also a decentralized conversation store that is known to replicate messages to users. 

Plus, it is built atop strong cryptographic ratchets like Megolm and Olm. 

Most Notable Features

• Real-time corporate chat, video, voice
• Presence indicators
• Room management, chat rooms
• AI chatbots

6. Rocket.chat

Rocket.chat is an open-source team collaboration platform that allows businesses to engage with their internal teams using advanced messaging capabilities. 

Additionally, it complies with all the latest standards and compliance parameters ensuring top-notch security

Most Notable Features

• Real-time messaging
• Video conferencing
• Third-party integrations, MFA
  

7. Element.io

Element.io is by far the most secure messaging solution built on the Matrix protocol. 

It offers exquisite team collaboration features, and decentralized mode of communication for team members or communities. 

Most Notable Features

• Group messaging
• File sharing
• Video/voice calling
• Secure guest access

8. Mattermost

Mattermost is one of the most widely used group messaging apps by businesses because of its secured self-hosted chat service.

Plus, it allows them to share files, videos, and links with anyone without compromising on security.

Most Notable Features

• Real-time messaging
• Customization and scalability
• Integration capabilities
• GDPR and HIPAA-compliant

9. Zulip

Zulip’s corporate chat platform acts like a moderator in sending in only relevant messages and ignoring the spamming ones. It follows a threading model and hence topic-based chats are seamlessly possible.

Additionally, Zulip is scalable making it suitable for all team sizes.

Most Notable Features

• Topic-based chats
• LDAP integration
• Image moderation
• Video calling

10. Jitsi

Jitsi is completely a video conferencing platform making it a reliable team chatting platform. With exquisite features like screen sharing, and real-time messaging, it makes it ideal for businesses in improving employee productivity.

Plus, it provides a dual hosting model to host chat apps and data.

Most Notable Features

• HD-video calling
• Customizable meeting links
• Real-time chatting

Which Self-hosted Chat Is Right For Your Team Communication?

Always choose a team messaging app that gives you the following for your business.

• Remarkable feature sets like 1:1 chats, group chats, file sharing, push notifications, video conferencing, and more.
• Lets you customize the features they offer to meet your business requirements.
• Brand their apps to look like yours to your teams.
• Allows you to set different security settings and meet different compliance standards.
• Gives you dedicated developer support if you are going ahead with integrating self-hosted SDKs.
• Does not bill you extra besides the one-time license fee.

Well, these were some of the factors you must stumble upon to find the right self-hosted team chat solution for your business.

Final Verdict

To put it in words, choosing the right self-hosted chat platform for your team is very important for fostering collaboration, productivity, and in-house security.

That being said and by considering the above factors like customization, on-prem hosting, scalability, and integration capabilities, MirrorFly’s self-hosted SDKs can help you streamline communication and drive results.