Pick up to 4 tools and see their free plans, entry prices, platforms and limits in one table. Every fact comes from each vendor's own pages, checked 7 November 2026.
Group chat with text, voice and video, built around gaming and community servers
Secure messaging and calls built on the decentralised Matrix standard
Self-hostable secure messaging platform with Matrix and XMPP federation
Free plan
No
Element Server Suite Community is free of charge for non-professional deployments and evaluations, for 1 to 100 users, and you run it yourself
Starter is described as a free self-managed workspace for technical evaluation, small businesses and non-profits; its user and feature limits were not shown on the pages read
Open communities and fan groups that want voice and text in one place
Creators and developers building a public community around a project
Government and public institutions that need to host and control their own messaging
Organizations that want federation between servers and vendors
Individuals or small groups that want an encrypted chat app
Public sector and defense teams that need to host chat themselves
Organizations that want to federate with Matrix or XMPP users
Teams replacing an older on-premises chat system
Watch out for
Aimed at gaming and social use; Discord describes itself as a platform for connections around playing games
Nitro adds personal perks and is not a team plan with admin or compliance controls
The pages read do not state business pricing or enterprise controls
Paid prices are not published; the pricing page sends buyers to sales
The pricing page describes self-hosted deployments only, so a hosted option was not confirmed
Running a server means you manage it yourself on the free tier
Commercial pricing is not published
The home page markets mainly to defense, government and critical infrastructure
Licence terms were not stated on the pages read
Made by
Discord
Element
Rocket.Chat
Entry prices are the cheapest paid plan, as each vendor publishes it; “What it covers” says what that price is per (a user, a channel, a brand, a number of contacts). The sources are listed on each tool's page.
Every tool in team chat apps is on its category page, with the written head-to-heads on Compare.
