The free, open-source Gather alternative

Gather and livehuddle share the idea that a remote team should meet in a place, not a grid of faces: everyone is a little character, the office has rooms, desks and a coffee corner, and you can see who is around before you say hello. In livehuddle you walk in as your own pixel character in your own colour, sit at a desk or round the meeting table, show a status above your head, and talk in speech bubbles. Portals take everyone from one room or tab to the next.

Start from the Virtual Office, the Team Pod, the Coworking Space or the All-Hands Hall, or build your own from rooms, walls, desks, chairs, sofas, meeting tables, rugs, plants, bookshelves, a water cooler and a coffee machine.

Gather’s heart is proximity video and audio: the people near you are the people you hear. livehuddle has proximity audio and calls built, but they are switched off in production while they are finished, so today a team keeps its usual call (Meet, Zoom, Teams or anything else) open beside the Space. If talking inside the office itself is what you need, Gather is the better pick for now.

Every livehuddle Space is also a board, so the walls of a room hold the meeting: sticky notes, text and stickers, with a Timer or a Stopwatch on the wall, and one person can hold the facilitator baton so the timer answers to them. Bring Focus offers everyone a jump to what you mean, and comments with mentions, reactions and assigned actions keep the follow-ups with the Space.

livehuddle has no paid tier and no plan to introduce one: every user gets every feature at livehuddle.app. The whole codebase is MIT-licensed and public, so anyone can read exactly how it works. A guest’s new Space is kept in their browser until they press Share, which syncs it in one step, and accounts are optional.