Slack alternative from Germany – what to look for

Many teams in Germany use Slack and like it. The question comes up later: where do our messages actually live, who can read them, and what happens if we want to leave? This article lists the five questions we would ask of any Slack alternative – including XenRooms – and says plainly when Slack remains the better choice.

1. Where do the messages live?

Slack runs only in Slack’s cloud. Its higher plans offer data residency, but the provider stays a US company. For a team that wants its chat in Germany, three answers are possible:

• Hosted in Germany – the provider runs the chat in a German data centre.
• A server of its own per company – your chat is not one tenant in a shared database but runs on its own server.
• On your own servers – you run the chat yourself.

XenRooms does all three: every company gets a chat server of its own in our data centre in Germany (Hetzner), and with Xenaxio On-Premise it runs on your servers. Mattermost and Element are good options if you want to run everything yourself from day one.

2. Can we chat with other companies?

Slack Connect is one of Slack’s strongest features: shared channels with clients and partners. It works between Slack workspaces – and in Slack’s free plan only one to one.

An alternative should answer: can we chat with partners who use something else? XenRooms uses Matrix, the open standard for chat between servers. Your team shares channels and direct messages with companies on XenRooms, Xenaxio or any other Matrix server, for example Element. Your administrator decides with whom – or keeps the chat internal only. More in Chat with other companies over Matrix.

3. What does the AI see?

AI summaries are becoming standard in team chats. Ask three things:

• Does the AI read with my permissions only, or with the whole company’s?
• Does it write into the chat?
• Which model runs, and are messages used for training?

In XenRooms the AI answers “What did I miss?” with a summary of unread channels and threads, reads only with the permissions of the person who asks, never writes to the chat and runs on Mistral through its EU endpoint or on your company’s own model. It comes with the paid plan and with Xenaxio; XenRooms Free is without AI.

4. How long is the history kept?

Slack’s free plan keeps 90 days of messages. For a small team that is often the reason to pay. XenRooms Free limits people instead of history: up to 10 people and 5 GB for files, with the whole history kept.

5. Encryption – what is honest?

“End-to-end encrypted” sounds best. But with end-to-end encryption the server cannot read the messages – so server-side search, AI summaries and the administrator’s control do not work. Slack, Microsoft Teams and Mattermost therefore work without it, and so does XenRooms: messages travel encrypted (TLS) and stay on your own chat server. If end-to-end encryption is a must for you, Element is the better choice.

When Slack is the better choice

• You rely on many Slack apps and integrations.
• You want AI notes from huddles and enterprise search across other tools.
• You need to bring your full Slack history – XenRooms has no Slack import yet. Webhooks in the Slack format do keep working.

In short

A good Slack alternative from Germany keeps your messages in Germany or on your servers, lets you chat with partners on an open standard, says plainly what the AI sees and does not hide the history behind a paywall. You can try XenRooms with your team in a minute: start for free or see XenRooms compared with Slack.