What's the best self-hosted team chat?

Our top pick is Mattermost: Slack-clone for self-host. Channels, DMs, threads, integrations.

Is self-hosted team chat hard to deploy?

Most picks ship as Docker containers and deploy on any VPS in under 30 minutes. Specific options vary in complexity — see each pick's notes.

Self-host · own your data

Self-hosted team chat replaces Slack with full data ownership. Critical for compliance-heavy industries and privacy-first orgs.

Closest Slack cloneMIT + Enterprise

Slack-clone for self-host. Channels, DMs, threads, integrations.

Internal + external chatMIT

Team chat + customer support widget in one tool.

E2EE + federatedAGPL-3.0

Federated, end-to-end encrypted. Government-grade privacy.

Lifetime members get deep curator takes per repo + 13 stack bundles. ₹99 once.