Slash Chat is a self-hosted communications and field-operations platform — team chat, dispatch boards, video calls, and softphone calling, all running on infrastructure you own and control.
No per-seat licensing. No third-party cloud. No data leaving your servers.
North Coast Wireless Communications needed a platform that could grow into the operational backbone for field dispatch, technician coordination, and customer support — without per-seat SaaS fees, vendor lock-in, or operational data living on someone else's servers. Rather than pay for enterprise licensing tiers of an off-the-shelf product, NCW forked an open-source core and built the features it actually needed on top — keeping full control of the source, the data, and the roadmap.
Actively developed and in daily use running a regional ISP.
Channels, direct messages, threads, reactions, file sharing, and search — with a purple-forward visual identity across web, admin console, and mobile.
A real-time kanban board grouped by technician, with per-tech color coding and a toggle-able sidebar panel. New appointments in the billing system appear automatically — no manual entry.
Self-hosted Jitsi conferencing. Type /meet to create a room instantly, or use the native join button on desktop and mobile. Screen sharing included.
A fully forked mobile app — custom name, icon, and splash screen, with a self-hosted push relay (no Firebase dependency), the dispatch board in your pocket, and unread conversations surfaced to the top. Android live, iOS in progress.
A native desktop application for Windows and Linux (macOS pending), fully rebranded — Slash Chat's first proper desktop client.
Custom user groups, announcement banners, guest accounts, and granular permission controls — features normally paywalled, included at no cost. Plus a Quick Links plugin for surfacing frequently-used links.
In progress
Turning Slash Chat into a full softphone — placing and receiving real phone calls from web, desktop, and mobile, connected to your existing phone system. Each employee gets an individual extension inside the app they already use for chat. No separate softphone to install.
Next: an encrypted, browser-compatible transport to the phone system, then native call handling on Android and iOS.
The dispatch board refined for a field technician's phone — auto-filtered to their own appointments, larger tap targets, and push notifications ahead of each job.
Real-time status for every work order — en route, on site, submitted — visible to dispatch, with an automatic end-of-day summary.
The same app, extended to subscribers with a restricted view: support chat, video calls with technicians, appointment notifications, and a bandwidth-usage dashboard.
The server and every plugin are open source (AGPL-3); the mobile and desktop apps are open source (MIT / Apache-2.0). All of it is available to any organization that wants a self-hosted, field-operations-ready communications platform without the SaaS price tag.
Downloads & source