Salesforce is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. that aims to help businesses manage their customer relationships. It’s a popular customer relationship management (CRM) platform.
Slack is a cloud-based team communication platform designed to be businesses-to-business service, offering a central hub for messaging, tools, and files, enabling teams to collaborate and communicate.
While Slack is available for Linux, it’s proprietary software. We recommend the best free and open source alternatives for Linux.
1. Element
Element is a free and open-source software instant messaging client implementing the Matrix protocol. It offers end-to-end encrypted messaging with voice and video support.
You choose where your messages are stored, putting you in control of your data. It gives you access to the Matrix open network, so you can talk to anyone. Element provides a new level of security, adding cross-signed device verification to default end-to-end encryption.
2. NeoChat
NeoChat is another great Matrix client. It allows you to send text messages, videos and audio files to your family, colleagues and friends using the Matrix protocol.
3. Mattermost
Mattermost is an open-source, self-hostable online chat service with file sharing, search, and integrations. It is designed as an internal chat for organisations and companies, and mostly markets itself as an open-source alternative.
Mattermost distinguishes itself from proprietary messaging software thanks to several features, namely:
- Slack-compatibility: users can import other users, public channel history, and theme-setting colours;
- Good mobile experience with comment threads and file sharing features;
- Mobile and desktop apps, in addition to web apps; and
- User-friendliness: Mattermost is easy to deploy, manage, and upgrade.
4. Zulip
Zulip combines the immediacy of real-time chat with an email threading model. With Zulip, you can catch up on important conversations while ignoring irrelevant ones.
Apart from the web interface, Zulip officially supports other clients, all of which are open sourced. These include a terminal based client for Linux.
Other useful open source communication software includes Jitsi, qTox, and Wire.
All articles in this series:
| Alternatives to Salesforce's Products | |
|---|---|
 | Quip is a collaborative productivity software package. It allows groups of people to create and edit documents and spreadsheets as a group |
| Slack is a cloud-based team communication platform designed to be businesses-to-business service, offering a central hub for messaging, tools, and files, enabling teams to collaborate and communicate. |
 | Tableau is a visual analytics platform transforming the way we use data to solve problems |