Ask HN: What's Everyone Using These Days for a Desktop Chat App?

3 points by chasebank 2 months ago | 8 comments
My business partner and I might be among the last remaining users of Skype. Despite its bloated design and mediocre UI, it’s worked reliably for us over the years.

We’ve always used chat apps strictly for business and relied on iMessage for personal conversations. A key feature we value is online presence status—something we noticed is missing in otherwise strong contenders like Telegram and Signal.

We’ve trialed quite a few alternatives without much luck:

Trillian

Telegram

Signal

Element

Rocket.Chat

Discord

Microsoft Teams

...and probably a few others we've since forgotten.

Discord showed some promise but its UI is cluttered with ads, store links, and persistent upsells for Nitro, which we find distracting and unprofessional for our use case.

We're looking for a clean, business-friendly chat app that supports online status visibility and ideally has a lightweight, focused interface. Would love to hear what others are using these days for small-team or partnership chat workflows.

Any suggestions?

  • LinuxBender 2 months ago
    What type of business is this for? While I am not a fan of it, I found most developers liked Slack. The general consensus I received when trying to switch to an internal chat system was "You can take slack from our cold dead hands". This was in a financial company with a lot of developers. Compliance were OK with Slack after we had them add a lot of features, audit capabilities and limits.

    For non developers people seem to like Discord for the freedom, options, ability to chat with whomever. It's not great in terms of compliance in a public company but maybe your company is small and this is not an issue.

    The natural transition from Skype would be Teams and should be free if you are a small group. It is also free if you buy O365 or whatever they are calling it now. I can't keep up with the name changes.

    Without understanding your business model it is hard to suggest anything that fits into your regulatory and audit requirements. Beyond that it would also matter what you put in your SOC1/SOC2 documents and what policies and procedures they reference.

    • ludicrousdispla 2 months ago
      Some people I know at a large international NGO use Signal for chat and are very happy with it. They also use Microsoft Teams for meetings and checking 'online status' but they also complain about MS Teams and never about Signal.
      • solardev 2 months ago
        Slack is basically non-shitty Discord. It has online indicators, video chats, etc. Free for a 2 person team and minimal ads.
        • bix6 2 months ago
          What did you not like about Teams? Seems like the obvious switch from Skype, I believe it preserves your chats too?
          • chasebank 2 months ago
            We tried it for a day but the UI was extremely laggy and slow. Since we're forced to move, we'd like to move to E2E encryption as well.
            • Daedren 2 months ago
              It does migrate all your contacts and chat history, I was quite impressed with how well it went.
            • 2028163 2 months ago
              Have you tried slack?
              • chasebank 2 months ago
                Yes, we're looking for e2e. Should have mentioned. Telegram would be perfect if there was online status.
              • 2 months ago