Thanks for all your advice. Here’s a report on my experiences for anybody that may have a similar question. I demo’d Zulip with Jitsi, Jami, and Nextcloud Talk today.

I’ve actually used Signal desktop for years, and love it, but don’t really want to mix work with personal, and if I didn’t already use it, I’d squirm about the required mobile app on my personal phone. Telegram might be a little easier that way-- I don’t think you have to have an app to make an account, just a phone number.

I liked Zulip, but I didn’t like Jitsi. It required a google account or a github account to host a meeting, it ran in browser instead of embedded in the Zulip app somehow, and the Jitsi desktop app seemed to be from 2003.

Jami was ok. I was able to set it up pretty easily, but I didn’t know if others in the org can handle that it’s P2P so you can’t leave messages for others off hours. Also there seemed to be a lot of complaints about its reliability in its own forum.

NextCloud talk on the free servers didn’t really work. I could get voice and text, but screen sharing just errored. I think I’d have to set up a TURN server or something like that. So if that requires hosting anyway, might as well do Matrix. Also the free servers were really slow.

So next test for me is Matrix. Is there a way I can try it out for free to see if I can recommend it to the rest of the company? Without spending hours on it? I’ve probably wasted more company time on this project than I would’ve saved in subscriptions.

If you are not looking to selfhost, how about a Matrix provider?

For example, etke.cc has offers from 15 USD/month. There are plenty of options, see etke.cc/order

I am not affiliated with them, I just happen to have heard of them because they are well-known and have an excellent reputation. There are others. See e.g. matrix.org/ecosystem/hosting

Less than 30? Self-host an Ejabberd server on an old desktop under some desk for private message & multiuser chats + Jitsi which handshakes over the same protocol as the chats, XMPP. If you need some unified UI for everyone & a bit of posts, Movim can also sit on top of the XMPP server. If need need some low-latency, low-resource audio chat, let folks idle in a Murmur server.

Matrix uses way too many resources & is way too slow/inefficient at the protocol level.

https://www.rocket.chat/

The software itself is free for less than 50 employees. Has all the features you need. You can very easily host it for cheap (From $4.0/month ) on http://pikapods.com/apps#chat

Mattermost, wire, jitsi, Zulip

I’m in the same predicament here. What industry are you in? You might want to look into your regulatory requirements.

My current top pick is Nextcloud Talk.

• Element Matrix doesn’t support small business if you are not selfhosting
• Mattermost has no Group Callings
• Nextcloud Talk has all the features Skype had and additionally everything else that Nextcloud has to offer.
• Teams is a nightmare, ask any sys admin. And looking at how MS plans to add Ads to the free version fo office they likely will do the same for Teams
• Discord is a privacy Nightmare
• Google Meet is… well makes you once again dependent on a US Company
• Signal really just has a shit desktop application. Due to their security focus only very few messages can load from your phone
• Telegram is not a secure service
• Jami I actually need to check out 🤔

Zulip or Mattermost if you want basically a free (as in freedom) and open source alternative to Teams and slack But as you mention self-hosting isn’t really an option it can become expensive.

Maybe a mix of Signal and Jitsi Meet (there is several public free instances) if you want a good balance between privacy, price and efficiency

Maybe look at the kSuite from Infomaniak it’s not the best but might be a good balance too for your team.

If you didn’t have the screen sharing requirement, I would suggest Mumble. It does everything else you want and the ease of install is like “apt get and edit a config file.” The server configuration to get the rooms and privacy settings you want is a whole different story, it’s the OPPOSITE of intuitive, but once you figure it out it’s quite robust.

The right tool for the job as described is definitely Matrix, but it does take some advanced troubleshooting (in my experience) to get it working. Some folks I know say the Ansible playbook just works, but I’ve been part of three deployments and that’s NEVER ONCE been my experience. Maybe the Ansible playbook “just works” if you’ve been using Ansible regularly for years and sometimes dream in yml. That’s not me.

IMHO, when compared with the ease of install of Mumble (or even Lemmy), the difficulty on installing Matrix is somewhere in between a joke and something that should be a mild point of embarrassment to the dev team (who built a great tool, so I’m not out to shame them here).

But right now, we have a situation in America where activists and organizers BADLY need alternatives to third party hosted apps… and the team has built this great tool that only fairly hardcore sysadmin / devops folks can get working. The difficulty of installing / maintaining is the biggest obstacle to the immediate, swift and widespread adoption of Matrix by US activist groups. I should know.

Matrix