Campfire

If you’ve used Slack or Teams, you already know how to chat with Campfire. Pay once, download, run one command, and host your whole company on your own server. It’s yours.

What is it?

Campfire is an installable, self-hosted group chat system. Easily invite people. Make rooms. @mentions, DMs, and mobile support. The basics done right. And since you get the code and host it yourself, you can customize it however you’d like for your own use. Plus, you own your data.

But we already have Slack or Teams

Yes, and those products come with the worst feature ever: recurring charges that never end. It shouldn’t cost tens, hundreds or thousands of dollars a month forever to chat with your coworkers. That’s obscene. Besides, Slack and Teams have become unnecessarily complicated.

It fits in a lot of places

As your primary chat. Tired of paying month after month forever just to chat with your team? Slash your costs, switch to Campfire, and make it your primary internal chat system. As your backup chat. Want to keep Slack or Teams, but need a backup when those go down? Don’t pay in perpetuity for something on standby — just pay once for Campfire. As educational material. Buy Campfire and you get the code. Dissect it, study it, modify it, examine it from the inside. Let high code standards rub off on your team. As a private, executive space. Campfire’s a great way to set up a walled garden that only a select few can access. It’s a completely distinct system for maintaining separation. For conferences, events, and communities. Share a QR code on the big screen, people snap the QR with their phones, and instantly establish a chat room for all attendees. For boards. Set up a private “air gapped” chat for your board, completely separate from the chat system the rest of your company uses. No accidental leaks.