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On the trailTeam chatv1.0

Cairn Chat

Team chat is where your company actually talks — channels, threads, direct messages, search. Cairn Chat is a production-ready messenger you run in your own cloud, with the conversations and the code both yours.

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What you get

A complete app, yours to keep.

Every Cairn Trail ships as a complete, AI-native application — full source in your own repository, a native MCP server, and a first-class CLI. Here’s what Cairn Chat includes out of the box.

  • Channels, threads, and direct messages
  • Full-text search across your whole history
  • File sharing and link previews
  • Presence, mentions, and notifications
  • Self-hosted — your messages never leave your cloud
  • Native MCP server and CLI for agent-driven workflows
Built onKotlinSpring BootPostgresTypeScriptReact
Know your options

Every way to get team chat.

We’d rather you saw the whole map than a sales pitch. Here are the tools teams actually evaluate — what each is good at, said plainly. Cairn is one option among them.

Commercial

Hosted, polished, rented — your data lives on their cloud.
SlackThe category-definer for channel-based chat with the deepest third-party app ecosystem, though pricing climbs fast as teams grow.Microsoft TeamsBundled with Microsoft 365, so it's the default for Office shops — but heavyweight and tightly tied to Microsoft's ecosystem.Google ChatIncluded with Google Workspace and frictionless if you live in Gmail and Docs, but thinner on features than Slack or Teams.DiscordVoice-first and community-oriented with a generous free tier; great for informal or external groups, weaker on corporate compliance.TwistBuilt by Doist for asynchronous, thread-first communication; calmer than real-time chat, but a deliberately smaller integration set.Zoom Team ChatPersistent messaging bundled into Zoom, convenient if meetings are already your hub, though chat plays second to its video roots.

Open source

Self-hostable and yours to run — read each license closely.
MattermostAGPL-3.0 / commercialEnterprise-focused self-hosted Slack alternative popular in security- and government settings; capable, but the monorepo mixes open and commercial licensing.Rocket.ChatMITFeature-packed platform with omnichannel and customer-support tooling; powerful, but can be heavy to run and configure well.ZulipApache-2.0Threaded, topic-based model that keeps busy channels organized; loved by async and open-source teams, though the UI is an acquired taste.Element / Matrix (Synapse)AGPL-3.0Client for the decentralized, federated Matrix network with end-to-end encryption; very private, but federation adds real setup overhead.Stoat (formerly Revolt)AGPL-3.0Open-source, self-hostable Discord-style chat, renamed from Revolt in 2025; community-friendly and free, but younger and less enterprise-proven.WireAGPL-3.0Security-first, end-to-end-encrypted messaging for regulated teams; more a secure messenger than a channel-heavy Slack replacement.Nextcloud TalkAGPL-3.0Chat and calls built into the Nextcloud suite; convenient if you already self-host Nextcloud, but messaging is a secondary feature.
// where Cairn fits

So why Cairn?

Slack and Teams are frictionless and deeply integrated — and they own your history, priced per seat, forever. The open-source messengers fix the ownership problem but ask you to run someone else's roadmap. Cairn Chat hands you a complete team chat as code you own outright — channels, threads, and search, working out of the box and ready to reshape into exactly the workflow your team wants.

Yours, for good

However you get there, Cairn Chat is software you own — full source in your GitHub repository, running in your own cloud. No phone-home, no license server, no kill switch. Export your data any time; Cairn could disappear tomorrow and your software would keep working.

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