Open-source team chat you run yourself.
Every feature, every platform, free. No per-seat pricing, no sales call, and no AI reading your messages. Want us to run the server instead? $99 a month, flat.
Message content never passes through OpenChime infrastructure. Not by policy — by architecture. Your team connects straight to your server, and nothing we operate sits in that path or could be made to.
Product screenshot
Drop the image at wwwroot/img/app.png and swap this
block for <img src="~/img/app.png" alt="An OpenChime
channel with an open thread" />.
How it works
The thing that makes OpenChime different isn't a feature. It's where the server lives, and what we can see from where we stand.
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Run the server
Put OpenChime on your own box — a VPS, a rack in your office, a machine with no route to the internet at all. Or click once and we'll provision one for you.
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Enroll it
Your server generates a keypair and proves it holds the private half. We only ever see the public one. That handshake is the entire trust relationship.
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Your team connects
Clients talk directly to your server over an encrypted connection. We never dial your box — every call runs outbound, from you to us, never the reverse.
What we broker, and nothing more. The optional federated services handle single sign-on, mobile push wake-ups, the app directory, and SCIM. They carry identity and notification metadata. They cannot carry a message, because a message never reaches them.
Everything you actually use
A complete chat system, not a stripped-down one you'll outgrow.
Conversations
Public and private channels, direct messages, threads, replies, reactions, edits, deletes, pinned messages, and @mentions.
Voice and screen
Huddle-style voice calls in any channel, and screen sharing when talking isn't enough.
Finding things
Full-text search across your entire history — with no message limit, because your history lives on your disk.
Files
Attachments backed by your own object storage, with per-channel file listings and no vendor-imposed quota.
Staying focused
Per-channel notification levels, do-not-disturb, presence and typing indicators, and mobile push that wakes you without revealing what was said.
Running the place
Roles and tenant administration, guest accounts, incoming webhooks, an audit log, and an app directory of integrations.
There's only one version
Every competitor sells you a tier and holds the rest back. We don't have tiers. Paying us buys a server we operate — it never buys a feature.
- Single sign-on with your identity provider
- SCIM provisioning and deprovisioning
- Multi-factor authentication
- Guest accounts
- Compliance export
- Data-loss prevention at send time
- Audit log
- Voice calls and screen sharing
- Unlimited message history
- Every client on every platform
Free means free. Self-host OpenChime and the federated services — sign-on, push, the app directory, SCIM — are included at no cost. There is no seat count, no trial clock, and no feature waiting behind an upgrade button.
Chat from anywhere
One shared core, a native client per platform. Including a terminal client, because some of you asked for exactly that.
- Windows
- macOS
- Linux
- iOS
- Android
- Terminal (TUI)
Bring your Slack history with you
The reason most teams stay on a tool they resent is the thought of losing years of conversation. Import your Slack export — channels, messages, threads, and files — and pick up where you left off.
What it costs to stay
Slack and Teams bill per seat, every month, forever. A hundred people on a mid-tier plan runs well past a thousand dollars a month. OpenChime is $99 flat, or nothing at all if you run it yourself.
What it costs to leave us
Nothing. It's open source and the data is already on your server. If we vanished tomorrow, your self-hosted workspace would keep running and you'd still have the source.
Three ways to run it
Same software in all three. The only question is who operates the server and how much of us you want involved.
Stand-alone
Your server, zero dependency on us. Air-gap it if you like — it runs with no route to the internet. Federated-only features like mobile push are simply absent.
Self-hosted, federated
Your server, plus whichever of our free services you want: sign-on, push, the app directory, SCIM. Opt in per function, opt out any time.
Hosted
We provision and operate the server for you at $99 a month, up to 100 users, starting with a 7-day free trial that needs no card. You still own every message, and we still can't read one.
Start talking on your own server
Download it and run it today, or have us stand one up for you in about a minute.