Communications
Slack is a unified communication platform built with an optimized workflow to keep modern teams focused and productive. A familiar chat interface facilitates discussions while advanced features are easily exposed based on context. Hover over a message to see more options such as emoji reactions, sharing and pinning features and more. A navigation bar provides easy access to key features including a powerful search to find important discussions, files and more.
Conversations are organized across dedicated Channels, neatly arranged in a responsive sidebar with collapsible sections. These Channels are highly configurable and allow for flexibility in working with various teams but can also be shared externally, making it easy to hold discussions with partners and clients.
Whether you’re part of a school club, a gaming group, a worldwide art community, or just a handful of friends that want to spend time together, Discord makes it easy to talk every day and hang out more often. Create an invite-only place.
• Discord servers are organized into topic-based channels where you can collaborate, share, and just talk about your day without clogging up a group chat.
• Voice channels make hanging out easy. Grab a seat in a voice channel when you’re free. Friends can see you’re around and pop in to talk, without having to call.
• Reliable tech for staying close. Low latency voice and video feels like you’re in the same room. STAY CLOSE WITH TEXT, VOICE, AND VIDEO
• Wave hello over video, watch friends stream their games, or gather up and have a drawing session with screen share.
• Turn any image into your own custom emojis and share them with friends.
• Share anything from a funny video to your latest group photos, and pin your favorites to remember later.
FOR A FEW OR A FANDOM
• Custom moderation tools and permission levels can group up your friends, organize your local book club, or bring together music fans from around the world.
• Create moderators, give special members access to private channels, and much more.
Element is a Matrix-based end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) secure collaboration and messaging app.
It provides instant messaging, voice and video calls, screen sharing and file sharing; for 1:1s to huge chat rooms. It’s available to use across Web, Android, iOS, macOS, Windows & Linux.
Its decentralised design delivers digital sovereignty, enabling deployment on-premise or through any cloud provider.
Element Matrix Services (EMS) is the most popular SaaS for corporate use of Element. EMS provides fast performance and enterprise-grade add-ons.
Being Matrix-based, Element provides interoperability between traditional siloed apps. It can bridge into proprietary ‘walled garden’ systems such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram and Discord to enable easy connections between different organisations.
End-to-end encryption is provided by default to keep users’ conversations and files safe. Cross-signed device verification uses QR codes or emoji comparisons to guard against imposters and eavesdropping.
Element is built on the Matrix.org open standard which provides bridges to other systems such as Slack, IRC and a lot more soon.
Keybase is a new and free security app for mobile phones and computers. For the geeks among us: it's open source and powered by public-key cryptography.
Keybase is for anyone. Imagine a Slack for the whole world, except end-to-end encrypted across all your devices. Or a Team Dropbox where the server can't leak your files or be hacked.
Keybase is a messaging platform where:
- you can write securely to any twitter, reddit, facebook, github, and hacker news user
- you don't need to know someone's phone number or email address
- all messages are secure, end-to-end encrypted
- multi-device: your messages survive and transfer with encryption to new phones & computers
- free for everyone, and free of ads
- open source
- multi-platform, w/apps for macOS, Linux, and Windows
Telegram is a messaging app created by former VK creators with a focus on speed and security. It’s superfast, simple and free. It is like SMS, but more powerful.
You can send messages, photos and videos to people who are in your phone contacts (and have Telegram). You can also create groups for up to 200000 people or channels for unlimited subscribers.
Your chats are not encrypted by default, which enables other people to see what you are writing. You can enable a "Secret Chat" to enable end-to-end encryption.
Telegram offers a Premium plan too: by subscribing to Telegram Premium, users unlock doubled limits, 4 GB file uploads, faster downloads, exclusive stickers and reactions, improved chat management – and a whole lot more. At the same time, all existing features that users have come to expect and rely on for nearly a decade remain free. Moreover, non-premium users will be able to enjoy some of Premium's benefits: for example, download the extra-large documents and view stickers sent by premium users, as well as tap to increase counters on premium reactions that were already added to a message. There are different prices for the Premium subscription based on your country, also if you buy it via the @premiumbot you don't have to pay the app store fees.
Telegram's security model has received notable criticism by cryptography experts. They criticized the general security model of permanently storing all contacts, messages and media together with their decryption keys on its servers by default and by not enabling end-to-end encryption for messages by default.
Telegram's client-side code is open-source software, whereas its server-side code is closed-source and proprietary. The service also provides public APIs with which developers can access the same functionality as Telegram's official apps to build their own messaging applications.
Telegram also provides a bot API for programmers to create different kinds of Telegram bots. Bots are simply Telegram accounts operated by software – not people – and they'll often have AI features. They can do anything – teach, play, search, broadcast, remind, connect, integrate with other services, or even pass commands to the Internet of Things.
