Note
Sabha began as a fork of Campfire by 37signals and grew into its own project, adding multi-tenancy and more.
Sabha is an open-source, self-hosted chat platform for friends, groups, and communities — a calm alternative to Discord and Slack. Run it on your own server and own every byte. No per-seat pricing, no message limits, no platform telling you what your community is worth.
Real-time chat — public rooms for the whole community, private rooms for smaller groups, direct messages for one-on-one talks, and threads to keep side conversations tidy. New messages appear the moment they're sent.
Flexible sign-in — members can sign in with a password, with a one-time code sent to their email, or with single sign-on. Use one, two, or all three side by side.
Single sign-on — already have users signing in to your own product, course, or service? They can join your Sabha community with that same login — no second account, no extra sign-up step.
Activity inbox — one page that collects every mention, thread reply, and reaction directed at you. Catch up after a busy day in a minute.
Calm email notifications — get a single summary of what you missed, hourly or daily — your pick. No firehose, no per-message ping.
Bots and AI ready — drop a bot or AI agent into any room with one invite link. The agent reads what's said and replies like a normal member. The OpenClaw plugin is the easy way to put an LLM in a room.
Installable PWA app — install Sabha on your phone, tablet, or computer like a regular app. Push notifications, badge counts, and offline support — no app store needed.
Your branding — set the name, logo, colors, and support email. Members see your community, not a generic chat app.
Slack import — bring your existing Slack workspace over: people, channels, messages, threads, and reactions, all in one go.
One-command deploy — run it on a small server with a single command. No external database to set up or pay for.
Short clips of Sabha in action — rooms, threads, and an AI agent answering in a room.
room-sabha.mp4
threads-sabha.mp4
bot-sabha.mp4
Sabha is a Rails 8 monolith with the added simplicity of SQLite, all on one server.
The frontend is Hotwire/Turbo + Importmap + Tailwind CSS v4. Real-time delivery runs through AnyCable. Background jobs run on Solid Queue.
See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md for the full breakdown.
Self-host (free, MIT) — single-tenant: one community per instance. Kamal or Docker Compose on a small VPS. See the deployment guide.
Managed hosting — don't want to run a server? Sabha Cloud hosts a dedicated Sabha instance for you with continuous backups, custom domain support, and managed updates. Same open-source app, you manage the community we manage the server.
Multi-tenant — Sabha is based on Campfire, which is single-tenant by design and MIT-licensed. We added multi-tenancy on top to power the free communities at sabha.co; that engine lives in saas/ under the separately-licensed Sabha SaaS License rather than MIT. See docs/multi-tenant/ for details.
- Ruby 4.0.1
- SQLite3
- Redis
- Node.js 24+
- pnpm (for Tailwind CSS compilation)
bin/setup # Install deps, prepare DB, build CSS
bin/dev # Start dev serverbin/rails test # Full self-hosted suite
bin/rails test test/models/user_test.rb # Single file
SAAS=true bin/rails test saas/test/ # SaaS suiteSee docs/DEVELOPMENT.md for the full guide.
Built on Once Campfire. Some additional features inherited from the Small Bets fork by Antiwork.
Sabha is available under the MIT License. The multi-tenant SaaS engine in saas/ is licensed separately — see saas/LICENSE.