Real time chat applications have been around since the beginning of Internet. However, even with the many number of options available, the workplace chat app, Slack, has been enormously successful.
In just two years, Slack has attracted 675,000 paid users, 2.3 million users globally. The company has an annual revenue of over $64 million. Slack’s popularity is an example that old technologies like chats, are popular even in today’s day and age. This fact is not altered by the fact that the chat app has a lot of scope for improvement. Slack suffers from certain limitations which nearly all proprietary cloud apps do.
The user’s data is based in someone’s else’s servers with limited customisation options. One has to hope that the company will make the changes you want to the Slack app and resist from changes you don’t want. This is the prime reason that open source community is racing to make improved versions of Slack, despite the huge number of chat apps which already exist.
Two of the most popular alternatives to Slack are Mattermost and Rocker.chat. These chats had ranked high in the Black Duck Rookies of the Year report, which is an yearly list of new open source projects attracting several developers and producing several codes. These chats as well as other open source chats like Friends and Let’s Chat are gearing towards offering not just a more open option to Slack but will beat the company at its own game by offering features which Slack doesn’t have.
