Slack is so slow! Here are 5 lightweight open source alternatives

Slack is a popular communication soft bloatware for teams. It allows you to chat with other users, groups and in channels (rooms), like good old IRC. However, the main issue with Slack is that is it way too bloated and loads too slowly. It takes 105 requests, 18 MB of data and 30 seconds to load!

So if you are concerned about your data plan, performance, or security of your business correspondence stored on third party servers, you should consider one of the lightweight open source web alternatives for Slack:

Let's Chat - loads in ~5 seconds:

JabbR - loads in ~8 seconds:

Candy - loads in ~5 seconds:

Echoplexus - loads in ~6 seconds:

Shout - finally a web IRC client, loads in ~5 seconds:

Each of them is open source, so you can install it for free on your private server and keep your internal business communication secure.

UPDATE: There is a new project called Mattermost - check it out!