Open Source Alternatives to Microsoft Teams

Switching from Microsoft Teams to an open source alternative means dropping a Microsoft 365 dependency in favor of tools you can self-host and inspect. Element covers the persistent chat and channels side, built on the federated, end-to-end encrypted Matrix protocol, so your organization’s messages don’t have to live on Microsoft’s servers. Jitsi Meet handles the video meeting side, with no per-seat licensing and full self-hosting for meetings, screen sharing, and recording. Mattermost and Rocket.Chat are closer like-for-like replacements for Teams’ chat-and-channels experience: both are MIT-licensed at the core with a separately licensed, paid Enterprise Edition for SSO, compliance, and advanced admin controls, and both can be paired with a video tool like Jitsi to round out meetings. Mattermost leans toward enterprise DevOps teams, with built-in Playbooks and Focalboard for structured workflows and task tracking; Rocket.Chat adds an Omnichannel layer for organizations that also need to handle customer-facing chat over WhatsApp or social messaging. None of these is a single drop-in replacement — most teams pair a chat tool with a meetings tool — but together they cover Teams’ core chat-plus-meetings workflow without the Microsoft 365 bundle or per-user licensing costs, at the expense of Teams’ deep native integration with Word, Excel, and SharePoint.