Braid is a group chat application that promotes productive team communication, while still respecting each individual's need for focus.

Instead of chatrooms, Braid takes a new approach: discrete conversations and tags.

Braid's design fosters conversations that stay on topic and allows for deep integrations with other services (think "1:1 sync", not just "chat bots").

Our goal is to develop Braid into an open platform that unites all of a group's communication streams.

If you work in a remote and distributed team...

If you hate the idea of open-offices...

If you get annoyed by when your flow is disrupted...

If you want to stay in sync with your team, but still get things done...

...you'll love Braid.

Most existing group-chat apps are based on the concept of "rooms" or "channels". Each room consists of a stream of messages, and each group typically has multiple active rooms. The general approach hasn't changed much since it's inception in the early 70s.

Over the last few years, products like HipChat and Slack have brought chat-rooms into our offices, with claims of "finally killing the scourge that is email!", or "being less busy", but as many have pointed out, the situation has become worse, not better:

• chatrooms require constant checking (or else you'll miss your chance to contribute to a conversation)
• anyone can demand your attention at any time
• conversations frequently devolve or get off-topic
• it's difficult to find past conversations in a stream of interwoven chatter
• ...and much, much, more

Several factors converge to make chat-rooms bad at fostering productive group communication (you can read our thoughts on the matter), but, at its core, it comes down to chat-rooms being single-threaded: each room is a linear stream of messages. The "flat vs threaded" debate is an old one, and, unfortunately, the other end of the spectrum – full threading – has it's own set of problems. But perhaps we can find a happy middle...

Braid started out as a weekend experiment: what if, instead of multiple rooms, you had one place where you can have many short conversations?

...each conversation would stick around only for as long as it was relevant, and could be tagged to direct it to the appropriate recipients (and to help with future retrieval). We made a quick proof-of-concept, and quickly realized that we were on to something.

Braid has evolved quite a bit since then, so here's how it looks now:

You may be thinking: "Isn't this pretty much like email ...except optionally real-time ...and with integrations ...and with shared tags?"

Well... Yes. Yes it is.

And it's awesome.

Give Braid a Try

Braid has most of the features you'd expect from other chat clients and new ones are added every week.

• archives + search
• drag and drop file sharing
• desktop and mobile apps
• private conversations
• notifications
• email digests
• rich text formatting and emoji
• integrations support
• ...and more

• federation and E2E encryption via Matrix
• group audio/video/screen streaming
• moderation tools
• better inbox filtering
• better search
• decreasing resource usage
• polishing the UX
• improving the mobile apps

Question, bugs, and feature requests are tracked at https://github.com/braidchat/braid/issues

A full backlog of features is tracked at https://github.com/braidchat/planning/issues

There are many ways to be involved, from coding new features to helping write user guides. See our Contributing Guide for more details.

Thank you to all of our contributors!

To get Braid working locally, see: Developing Braid

If you want to deploy it in production, see Deploying Braid

If you just want to use Braid, but not set it up yourself, you can get a hosted account at: https://www.braidchat.com

• The Primary Repo

  https://github.com/braidchat/braid

  API server, desktop web client, mobile web client, docs

• Native Desktop Client

  https://github.com/braidchat/electron

  An Electron app that wraps the desktop web client

• Native Mobile Client

  https://github.com/braidchat/cordova

  A Cordova app that wraps the mobile web client

• Other Repos

  https://github.com/braidchat

  Other repos, including sample bots, marketing materials, and miscellany.

If you run into any problems, please let us know.

Join us on Braid: braid @ Braid

Or, if you must, on Slack: #braid-chat @ Clojurians

Braid is distributed under the Eclipse Public License, the same as Clojure.