I already made a comment but you should also look at rocketchat and revolt, since they are basically FOSS discord clones
(I saw comments in the thread about wanting audio only calls.)
this post was submitted on 21 May 2025
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I use jami but i dont think it fits your need for guess links.
Still leave it here just in case
Jami is a free/libre, end-to-end encrypted, and private communication software.
Jami is a stability and security nightmare
I wouldn't recommend it
Please tell us more about the actual security problems!
Have you actually dug into the internals? It is pretty bad. Large poorly maintained code base with poor cryptography. Theoretically it is fine but I'd rather use Signal.
Im using it for 3 months now and I did not notice any stability issue. One time I experienced a long delay in receiving a message.
Do you have any details on why its a security nightmare?
All communications are peer-to-peer and end-to-end encrypted.
It is a massive code base which doesn't seem to get a lot of maintenance due to lack of developers. Jami also lacks a security audit which doesn't build confidence
From a security perspective it uses dTLS which isn't great for metadata sensitive applications. Message delivery is also finicky since it depends on peers working reliably.
Care to expand on that? I am seriously considering that as part of my post-skype future.
I would look into Jami, Signal and maybe Simplex Chat
You want either mattermost or the whole matrix stack (backend, plus element with voice/video calls).
Matrix/Element is more of a discord alternative, whereas mattermost tries to be more of a slack alternative, where it seems to have some calendar integrations.
Huly is pretty amazing and has a self host option. It supports chats and video calls, team rooms, and has some cool integration for speech to text note taking. It also functions as a task tracker.
Under super active development right now so host only if you can deal with occasional breaking changes.
Idk, I've heard things about HooliChat... Didn't their stream go down in the middle of a big title fight?
Plus that Gavin Belson guy keeps trying to jam his horrible signature into his products.
That guy is the woooorst
Considering
- nearly a
curl|shsetup - to run supply-chain risks
- of supply-chain risks
- for something without an immutable artefact and thus is its own supply-chain risk
It's already breaking ISO27002 in a few ways. I'm out.
What's their revenue model? Thanks for sharing
They have a SaaS option as well, I'm guessing that's the main revenue plan.
I haven’t tried it myself but Mattermost offers most of what you’re looking for.
I think a gitlab install has most of mattermost inside it, and that means installation and updates are handled. I found the install of MatterMost via its devs used to be very naive, but the gitlab people did something right in vendoring it into their massive install. Gitlab-ce is bloated as heck, but it's fire-and-forget on the proper platform and may allow inter-org linking with or without the matter bridge thing (which itself affords some interoperability).
Jit.si
I like Jitsi, but when I record a session it always silently aborts after about 40 minutes.
- no enterprise packaging
- java?
I mean, that's two strikes, but I know the people whom 8x8 bought in like 2019 so there's hope. Like, wow, their video-conf app and service was astoundingly good.
Self hosting allows you to improve screen share framerate
There is no way to do what teams does without significant infrastructure. Same with Slack and others.
If you want something that just gets close to the mark, look at Jitsi. It's about as complete as you could expect for just video/voice.
What you may not understand about conferencing platforms is that they are dozens of different hosted services working together to provide a cohesive UE. Video, SIP, VOIP, auth, identity...these are all separate services that are deployed as microservices to get what you get. If you find the bare minimum of the services you actually need, you can probably cobble something together, but it's not going to be a simple running of one service to get the same experience.
If you want something to mangle the formating on his Office documents there really is no alternatives available sadly. Chat there is.
I'm hosting a matrix server with a TURN server and it's fairly easy to selfhost. This sounds exaggerated.
That just covers voice/video. OP is asking about a lot more.
And chat. But yeah, no groupware.
Video+chat is all I'm wanting for the most part
Do you need Element for that? Also is there a way to do guest access with a link?
You can allow guest accounts, although it’s disabled by default in synapse.
Call supports depends on the client you’re using. Element is usually ahead in features implementation, but you can get a list of clients and filter by features in the matrix website.
Also I’m not sure what the other person meant by easy to setup. Matrix servers are notoriously hard to setup when compared to anything most things you would find yourself selfhosting, specially with WebRTC/TURN. I think there’s an ansible playbook somewhere, but I never tried it.
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I think Mattermost is intended to be just that.
Check out Big Blue Button - https://demo.bigbluebutton.org/
Their website talks all about using it for teaching students but it's really just like Jitsi with more features.
Big bluebutton is now integrated into Canvas, an open source learning management software (LMS) that every school I have went to has used.
Anyone know of something that isn't Nextcloud Chat?
Do you absolutely need to put ONE tag on it all and say this is it?
I have not tried Matrix yet but I hear it's a good replacement, fashioned more to the likes of Discord but I think it has everything you're looking for
I've been using matrix for quite a while now and I'm very happy with it.
The thing to be aware of though is that it takes quite a bit of work to get started, but once you've got it up and running it doesn't need much coddling. It's got video calling built into it now and can be entirely web based if you want it to be. I have all of my signal, WhatsApp and SMS messages being brodged over through it which is handy. I've also got a discord bridge set up which will bring all DMs and let's me bridge any of the servers I want to bring over.
it's been my one app for communicating with anyone that wants to talk to me on any IM platform I use, as well as any of the federated rooms and spaces I want to access from other home servers I want to work with.
Edit: I also recently added authentication via oidc which was great as now I don't need to worry about passwords as I just authenticate with passkeys on most of my self hosted services.
Jitsi
,but it is a pain in the ass to selfhost with good performance.
You can take a look here as well:
One alternative that is not on the awesome selfhosted list is: https://edumeet.org/
But it is even more of a PAIN to selfhost it.
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