convos.by

What It Is

Convos is a multi-user chat application positioned around “the simplest way to use IRC.” It lets users access IRC through a desktop or mobile browser, and can run on a home server, cloud service, or in Docker. Compared with traditional local IRC clients, its backend can stay online, remain logged in, and continuously record activity, making it suitable for communities or small teams that need to stay in channels long term.

Core Capabilities and Channels

From a communications perspective, Convos is an IM/IRC tool, not an email, SMS, or voice platform. Its features focus on enhancing the IRC experience: persistent chat archives, history search, desktop notifications when mentioned, Markdown rendering, emoji, inline display of images and videos, file uploads, and pastebin support. The frontend uses Svelte and the backend uses Mojolicious; the copy describes it as fast and lightweight, but does not provide measurable latency, throughput, SLA, or message delivery-rate figures.

Pricing, Integrations, and Compliance

In terms of pricing, the text clearly states that Convos is free to download and install, and is released under the Artistic License 2.0, making it a free and open-source product. There is no hosted plan, enterprise edition, or usage-based pricing mentioned. For integrations, Convos supports deployment via Docker or on your own server, and can connect to LDAP so existing users can be managed in a unified directory. On compliance and privacy, it emphasizes that it does not exchange data with third parties by default, and that users control their own settings, logs, and uploaded files; however, it does not disclose formal certifications such as GDPR, SOC 2, or ISO.

Pros, Cons, and Who It’s For

Its strengths are self-hosting, data control, free and open-source licensing, a relatively low deployment barrier, and bringing web access, archives, and notifications to IRC. Its limitations are that its use case is relatively narrow and mainly focused on IRC. If an organization needs SMS verification codes, email marketing, voice notifications, omnichannel customer support, or an auditable SLA, Convos is not a good fit. It is better suited to technical communities, open-source projects, small teams that need an internal IRC gateway, and users who want to keep chat logs on their own servers.

Access from China and Alternatives

The source text does not provide information on access from China, and whether the domain or demo can be reached directly and reliably cannot be determined from the text alone, so this is marked as unknown. Since Convos can be self-hosted, actual availability depends on the server location, connectivity to IRC networks, and local network policies. Payment information is also not disclosed, as the software itself is free. Comparable alternatives include The Lounge, Kiwi IRC, Mattermost, Rocket.Chat, and Zulip.