Team chat apps in 2026
4 commercial products, ranked by how many people read about each, or about its maker, on Wikipedia's mobile site. Of those with an article of their own, Discord has the most readers, about 42k a month. 7 open-source projects, ranked by GitHub stars and how recently each was worked on. Zulip leads with 26k stars, ahead of Element-web. 6 had code pushed in the last three months. Most common licenses: AGPL-3.0 (3), Apache-2.0 (2) and GPL-3.0 (2).
Commercial team chat apps
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1
Discord Discord Inc.
American online communication software
Complete system Production-ready You run a public or semi-public community, such as gamers, an open-source project or a creator audience.
42k readers a month Since 2015 Commercial -
2
Microsoft Teams Microsoft
Team collaboration application
Complete system Production-ready Your business already pays for Microsoft 365 and wants chat and video meetings without another vendor.
20k readers a month Since 2017 Commercial -
3
Slack Salesforce, Inc.
Boost productivity and save time with Slack – the AI work platform for managing projects, automating workflows and connecting teams securely. Start working smarter today.
Complete system Production-ready A team wants the chat tool with the widest integration ecosystem and is willing to pay per seat.
8.4k readers a month Since 2013 Commercial -
4
Google Chat Google
Learn how Google Chat helps individuals, groups and businesses to connect and collaborate online with secure messaging and powerful features from Google Workspace.
Complete system Production-ready Your company runs on Google Workspace and wants basic team chat that is already included.
2.5k readers a month Since 2017 Commercial
Open-source team chat apps
Complete systems you can adopt 7
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1
Zulip zulip
Zulip server and web application. Open-source team chat that helps teams stay productive and focused.
Complete system Production-ready Your team finds Slack threads chaotic and wants organised, asynchronous conversations, self-hosted or hosted.
★ 26k Apache-2.0 Python Active, pushed today -
2
Element-web element-hq
A glossy Matrix collaboration client for the web.
Complete system Production-ready You use Matrix and want the most complete client, or want to host your own web client.
★ 14k AGPL-3.0 TypeScript Active, pushed today -
3
Chat tinode
Instant messaging platform. Backend in Go. Clients: Swift iOS, Java Android, JS webapp, scriptable command line; chatbots
Complete system Usable You want to embed or run your own messaging service with ready clients.
★ 14k GPL-3.0 Go Active, pushed 8 days ago -
4
Synapse element-hq
Synapse: Matrix homeserver written in Python/Twisted + Rust
Complete system Production-ready You want to run your own Matrix server for a team or community that can federate with others.
★ 4.8k AGPL-3.0 Python Active, pushed today -
5
Quiet TryQuiet
A private, p2p alternative to Slack and Discord built on Tor & IPFS
Complete system Experimental A small group values running chat with no server at all and accepts missing features compared with Slack.
★ 2.7k GPL-3.0 TypeScript Active, pushed today -
6
Colanode colanode
Open-source and local-first Slack and Notion alternative that puts you in control of your data
Complete system Experimental A small team wants chat and docs together on its own server with offline support.
★ 5.2k Apache-2.0 TypeScript Slowing, pushed 7 months ago -
7
Raven frappe
Simple, open source team messaging platform
Complete system Usable Your company runs ERPNext or other Frappe apps and wants chat inside the same system.
★ 839 AGPL-3.0 TypeScript Active, pushed today
Compared head to head
Looking for an alternative to
Open-source licenses
- Network copyleft: 3. Like GPL, and running a changed version as a web service counts as distributing it, so its users get the source too.
- Permissive: 2. Use it anywhere, including in closed products. You keep the copyright notice; Apache-2.0 also grants patent rights.
- Strong copyleft: 2. If you distribute the program or anything built on it, you must release the whole source under the same license.
Languages
TypeScript 4, Python 2 and Go 1.
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