Chatstead

Chatstead is a self-hosted team chat: you install it on your own server and your messages, files and accounts never leave it. There is no third-party service anywhere in the product — no Firebase, no Agora, no analytics, no telemetry — and licensing is verified offline, so an installation keeps working even without an internet connection. It covers what a team expects day to day: 1:1 and group chats over WebSockets with typing indicators, presence and read receipts; replies, forwarding, editing and deleting; emoji reactions and a built-in emoji picker; full-text search; image, file and voice-message sharing; and 1:1 voice and video calls over WebRTC that connect peer to peer without any external calling service. Administrators get a browser-based setup wizard (there is no default password), a panel for users, groups, content review with an audit log and statistics, optional self-registration protected by captcha and rate limiting, and white-label branding — workspace name, logo, icon and accent colour. A native Android app is included as a signed APK. It is one generic app: each person types the address of your server when signing in. Because a self-hosted deployment has no push service, the app keeps its own connection to your server through a background service, so notifications still arrive when the app is closed. On iPhone and desktop the web client installs as a PWA. Technically it is Node.js with Express and Socket.IO, using the SQLite engine built into Node — there is no separate database server to run. Installation is a single command on Ubuntu with an automatic Let's Encrypt certificate, or Docker Compose if you prefer. It runs comfortably on a small VPS, on-premise hardware, or an isolated internal network. Full source code is included with every purchase.