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Top 23 Communication system Open-Source Projects
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Indie hackers also leverage collaboration tools like Nextcloud for file sharing and team projects, and Mattermost or Rocket.Chat as self-hosted alternatives to Slack. These tools empower remote teams and foster efficient communication across diverse development projects.
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Project mention: Adventures in Homelabbing: From Cloud Obsession to Self-Hosted Shenanigans | dev.to | 2025-04-09
I began to self-host a Minecraft server using Crafty Controller, an Excalidraw instance, Docmost to replace Notion, Plane to replace Jira, and Penpot to replace Figma. To be able to access them from the internet, I used Nginx Proxy Manager to set up reverse proxies with SSL. You can use Traefik or Caddy instead, but I enjoyed the ease-of-use of NPM. For a dashboard solution, I started with Homarr, but later switched to Homepage because I'm apparently incapable of making a decision and sticking with it.
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Mattermost
Mattermost is an open source platform for secure collaboration across the entire software development lifecycle..
Indie hackers also leverage collaboration tools like Nextcloud for file sharing and team projects, and Mattermost or Rocket.Chat as self-hosted alternatives to Slack. These tools empower remote teams and foster efficient communication across diverse development projects.
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Jitsi Meet
Jitsi Meet - Secure, Simple and Scalable Video Conferences that you use as a standalone app or embed in your web application.
Project mention: The 50 best open-source alternatives to popular SaaS software | dev.to | 2024-07-10GitHub: Jitsi GitHub Repository
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chatwoot
Open-source live-chat, email support, omni-channel desk. An alternative to Intercom, Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud etc. 🔥💬
Project mention: Show HN: Jelly – A Simpler Shared Inbox for Small Teams | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-11-12This is one of those tools that do one thing and do it very well. Also the pricing is convenient. Congratulations to the creators.
If you want to go the open source + self hosted route, Chatwoot [1][2] may be for you. It is more feature rich (or bloated, depending what you need) and complex to set up, defined as "Open-source live-chat, email support, omni-channel desk. An alternative to Intercom, Zendesk, Salesforce Service Cloud etc.", and it has a shared inbox feature [3].
[1] Website: https://www.chatwoot.com/
[2] Github: https://github.com/chatwoot/chatwoot
[3] https://www.chatwoot.com/features/shared-inbox
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Zulip
Zulip server and web application. Open-source team chat that helps teams stay productive and focused.
Project mention: Discord co-founder and CEO Jason Citron is stepping down | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-04-26 -
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InfluxDB
InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads. InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
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Listmonk
High performance, self-hosted, newsletter and mailing list manager with a modern dashboard. Single binary app.
Example File
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Project mention: Looking for the best forum software to start a new forum community in 2025 | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-12-26
Flarum is great [1].
Looks good, works on mobile, continuously updated.
Try it out.
Edit: Oh wow, downvoted for posting a good recommendation?
1: https://flarum.org/
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Mail-in-a-Box
Mail-in-a-Box helps individuals take back control of their email by defining a one-click, easy-to-deploy SMTP+everything else server: a mail server in a box.
I looked into Purelymail when searching around for good email solution. Google Workspace was getting a bit costly and there were too many things I did not need.
Zoho Mail provides another option - $1.95 per month I think for my use where I am (AU) and has all the features I need for my small indie business.
One other option I tried was to actually run mail myself with Linode VPS - https://mailinabox.email/
I know it sounds a little scary at the start running your own thing, but so far it's been working out great - zero issues so far. I may turn off Zoho one day and go fully into self-hosted option.
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Project mention: Any social platforms not focused on algorithms? | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-02-21
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Tinode
Instant messaging platform. Backend in Go. Clients: Swift iOS, Java Android, JS webapp, scriptable command line; chatbots
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Gotify
A simple server for sending and receiving messages in real-time per WebSocket. (Includes a sleek web-ui) (by gotify)
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Am I supposed to type my bluesky password into some random website?
Why would there be no 2FA options, like when using https://element.io for a homeserver?
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Project mention: Misskey: A free and open interplanetary microblogging platform | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-10-26
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$ cd /opt $ git clone git clone https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized $ cd mailcow-dockerized $ ./generate_config.sh
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berty
Berty is a secure peer-to-peer messaging app that works with or without internet access, cellular data or trust in the network
Depending upon which OS are on. If Android - Briar is the most famous and obvious choice. On iOS? There are not any options really but wasn't any usable one around a year back the last I had checked.
On iOS there are not many options for P2P w/o Internet (I assume that is what you meant - otherwise if you want P2P over Internet then there are some options although not really "truly" P2P of course - and of course if Internet is shut down or overwhelmed then it will be down). There's https://github.com/berty/berty (the last time I tried it was crashing incessantly but it might have improved). I do not know of anything else really (there might be few but I am not sure).
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stalwart
Secure, scalable mail & collaboration server with IMAP, JMAP, SMTP, CalDAV, CardDAV, WebDAV support.
Project mention: Mozilla launching "Thundermail" email service to take on Gmail, Microsoft 365 | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-04-02They are using stalwart, another open source product, for the backend stack. So you should be able to host your own server instance with custom domain when it gets built out. Stalwart itself just received a European funding grant to build out the features needed. From Thunderbird announcement:
> Thundermail is an email service. We want to provide email accounts to those that love Thunderbird, and we believe that we are capable of providing a better service than the other providers out there, that aligns with our values. We have been experimenting with this for a while now and are using Stalwart as the software stack we are building upon. We have been working with the Stalwart maintainer to improve its capabilities (for instance, we have pushed hard on calendar and contacts being a core piece of the stack).
https://thunderbird.topicbox.com/groups/planning/T437cd854af...
https://stalw.art/
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Project mention: Mumble: An AI app with hands-free journaling and mood detection | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-10-30
Kind of a bad name given the existence of https://www.mumble.info/
Which is a large OSS voice server
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SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
NOTE:
The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars.
The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or
since we started tracking (Dec 2020).
Communication systems discussion
Communication systems related posts
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Discord co-founder and CEO Jason Citron is stepping down
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Ask HN: What are your favorite IRC clients/channels
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A New Form of Verification on Bluesky
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Show HN: I built a tool that texts you if your server goes down
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Rallly: Open-source (AGPL) scheduling tool for organizing events and meetings
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Setting up mailcow on mail server on an EC2 instance
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Adventures in Homelabbing: From Cloud Obsession to Self-Hosted Shenanigans
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A note from our sponsor - SurveyJS
surveyjs.io | 24 May 2025
Index
What are some of the best open-source Communication system projects? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Rocket.Chat | 42,639 |
| 2 | penpot | 38,186 |
| 3 | Mattermost | 32,590 |
| 4 | Jitsi Meet | 25,565 |
| 5 | chatwoot | 23,722 |
| 6 | Zulip | 22,909 |
| 7 | ZeroNet | 18,536 |
| 8 | Listmonk | 16,899 |
| 9 | Flarum | 15,755 |
| 10 | Postal | 15,519 |
| 11 | Mail-in-a-Box | 14,473 |
| 12 | Lemmy | 13,783 |
| 13 | Tinode | 12,514 |
| 14 | Gotify | 12,503 |
| 15 | Element | 11,773 |
| 16 | Misskey | 10,563 |
| 17 | Mailcow | 10,303 |
| 18 | Lets-Chat | 9,807 |
| 19 | Mailpile | 8,833 |
| 20 | Tox | 8,755 |
| 21 | berty | 8,239 |
| 22 | stalwart | 7,614 |
| 23 | Mumble | 6,918 |
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