Element — Matrix-based, end-to-end encrypted team chat client with a free AGPL community edition and paid Enterprise/Sovereign hosting for regulated organizations.

What is Element?

Element is a messaging and collaboration client built on Matrix, the open, decentralized communication standard that Element's founders created in 2014 and that is now governed independently by the Matrix.org Foundation. Because Matrix is federated rather than centralized, organizations running their own Element/Matrix homeserver can still message users on other organizations' servers, avoiding the vendor lock-in of closed platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams. The Community edition is free, AGPL-3.0-licensed, and intended for self-hosted evaluation and non-professional deployments; it includes Element Call for video and the official FOSS distribution of the Element Server Suite. Paid tiers move to a proprietary license (dual-licensed with a commercial option for organizations that don't want AGPL's copyleft terms): Enterprise runs a hardened Synapse Pro homeserver with SSO/LDAP, audit logging, retention policies, and autoscaling, priced per seat per month starting at 100 users; Sovereign supports fully air-gapped, offline deployments for government, defense, and other organizations that need complete infrastructure independence, priced per deployment. Element ships native apps for web, Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android.

Element is a secure messaging and collaboration client built on the Matrix open protocol, offering end-to-end encrypted chat, voice, and video with cross-organization federation instead of locking users inside one company's server. The Community edition is free and AGPL-licensed for self-hosting and evaluation; Enterprise, priced per seat per month starting from 100 users, adds SSO/LDAP authentication, auditing, retention policies, and high-availability autoscaling through the proprietary Element Server Suite Pro; Sovereign, priced per deployment, supports fully air-gapped installs with no internet dependency for government and defense customers. Element runs on web, Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android, and counts NATO, UN agencies, and several European governments and militaries among its users.

Standout feature: Matrix federation lets a self-hosted Element server exchange encrypted messages with users on entirely different organizations' servers, something closed platforms like Slack or Teams cannot do.

Biggest weakness: Enterprise and Sovereign pricing is not published; both require a sales conversation, and Enterprise pricing only applies from a 100-user minimum, making Element's paid tiers impractical to evaluate cost for small teams.

Element pricing

Free · verified undefined NaN, NaN from the vendor's pricing page

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