Kato.im Launches Kato Teams, A Free Chat Platform for Businesses

There’s a lot of Alt + Tab (or if you’re on a Mac: Command + Tab) going on when we work, and it can sometimes be overwhelming.

Kato.im, a team chat service, launched Kato Teams today, a free chat platform for businesses.

Kato Teams has similar features to other team chat services such as Hipchat or Slack, but what makes it unique is that it lets you see all your conversations side-by-side at the same time.

Up until today, the company’s chat service was in a private, invite-only mode, but has had an Android and iOS app available since earlier this month.

Kato Teams works on the web right now and soon will be available as a native desktop app. The company, which raised a Series A round of $1.8 million last year, wants to lower the amount of apps users have open by providing an all-in-one service with cross-platform support.

2014-02-28_kato_mark_icon_solo

Kato Teams offers the same features other team chat applications do, such as 1-to-1 and group messaging, screen sharing, video and voice messaging and drag-and-drop file sharing, but CEO Andrei Soroker says Kato also lets users perform global searches to identify specific conversations in chat history.

Soroker said users can control the noise level for alerts from different chat rooms, and admins can designate members as restricted users with limited access to people or rooms in the company. This allows companies to chat with other businesses without disrupting workflow.

Kato Teams integrates with third-party services like ZenDesk and GitHub and aggregates notifications into a single stream of information.

While the user interface doesn’t look as good as Hipchat or Slack and can appear cluttered, Kato Teams seems like a good, free alternative and might be more useful with people using more than one screen at their workstation.