MacChat & Messaging

Chanty and Twist are the two that pitch themselves against Slack most directly. Chanty’s own pricing page runs a comparison quiz against Slack and a dozen other tools, and its App Store reviews include one titled “Fantastic Slack Alternative” — its free plan is real, not a disguised trial, with unlimited chats, unlimited one-on-one calls, and a built-in Kanban task manager for up to 5 team members before Business pricing starts at $3/user/mo billed annually. The tradeoff for that price: App Store reviews flag Mac-client stability issues, including a white-screen bug and slow reconnects. Twist, built by Doist (the company behind Todoist), takes the opposite pitch — its own App Store listing opens by contrasting itself with Slack and Teams, trading real-time presence (“no green dots,” no typing indicators) for threaded, asynchronous conversations. Its free plan never expires and covers up to 500 members, but message history is capped at a rolling one month; reopening older messages needs the $6/user/mo Unlimited plan.

Zulip and Mattermost are the two open-source, self-hostable options built for teams that want to run their own server. Zulip is fully open source on GitHub, with topic-threading inside every channel — parallel conversations stay organized instead of collapsing into one feed — and its own case studies make the comparison explicit (one is titled “More efficient communication than Slack at Semsee”). The self-hosted edition is genuinely free with every feature included at any team size; Zulip Cloud’s free tier is real too (10,000 messages of history, 5GB storage), but its paid Cloud and self-hosted tiers list no public per-seat price. Mattermost carries the most literal label of the six — Homebrew’s own cask description, independent of anything Mattermost says about itself, reads “Open-source, self-hosted Slack-alternative.” It ships channel messaging, threads, and 1:1 calls with screen sharing, but has repositioned hard toward government and “mission-critical” enterprise deployments (FedRAMP, STIG-hardened images, air-gapped installs), and its current pricing page offers no public self-serve number at all — Professional, Enterprise, and Enterprise Advanced are all “contact sales,” with only a limited-use technical-evaluation edition free.

Feishu and Discord round this section out from opposite directions. Feishu is ByteDance’s China-market build of Lark, bundling channel-based team chat with docs, calendar, and video meetings in one workspace — the same territory Slack itself competes in, per a third-party comparison and Homebrew’s own “project management software” categorization. The catch: feishu.cn, the vendor’s own homepage, couldn’t be independently verified for this listing, so pricing is marked unknown rather than borrowed from the identically built international version, Lark, at larksuite.com — worth checking which one actually matches your team before installing. Discord isn’t marketed as workplace software at all, but it’s the free-first pick plenty of small teams already run instead of Slack for community-style chat: voice channels you drop in and out of without a formal call, and no feature paywall on core chat, voice, or screen sharing. Nitro, from $2.99/mo, is cosmetic and quality-of-life extras only, never required to use a server.