---
draft: false
title: "Element is Group Chat without Big Tech Eavesdropping"
cateogry: productivity
date: 2026-06-26T00:00:00+08:00
---

# Meet Element: Messaging and Collaboration You Actually Own

If your team is on Slack, Teams, or any other proprietary messaging platform, you're renting your communications infrastructure from a vendor who controls your data, your uptime, and your future pricing. Element is the open-source alternative that puts you back in control — fully sovereign, end-to-end encrypted, and built on an open standard that no single company owns.

It's the messaging platform chosen by European governments, defense agencies, and public institutions that simply can't afford to depend on a vendor that might be used against their interests. But the same reasons they chose it apply to any technical team that takes data sovereignty seriously.

## Built on Matrix — Not Locked Into Anything

Element is built on Matrix, an open, decentralized communication standard. Think of Matrix the way you think of SMTP for email: it's the protocol layer, and Element is one implementation of it. That means you can communicate across organizations that run different Matrix-based solutions, without either party being locked into the same vendor. Different tools, different servers — interoperability built in by design.

This is a fundamentally different model from Slack or Teams, where your communications are siloed inside a proprietary platform and federation is either non-existent or tightly controlled.

## Digital Sovereignty in Practice

Element is designed for organizations that need to own their communications infrastructure outright. You self-host it — on your own servers, in your private cloud, or even in air-gapped environments with no internet connectivity at all. No central point of failure, no dependency on Element's uptime, no data passing through anyone else's infrastructure.

For high-security deployments, Element supports isolated and high-side instances, mesh networking, and satellite connectivity. It's the kind of resilience that matters when you're a government ministry, a defense contractor, or any organization operating in environments where standard cloud connectivity can't be assumed.

A Forrester study commissioned by Element found that a significant majority of IT leaders say their organizations struggle to maintain privacy and control of data shared via communications technologies. Element is built specifically to solve that problem.

## What It Actually Looks Like to Use

Despite the serious infrastructure credentials, Element is designed to feel like a consumer messaging app — familiar enough that people actually use it. End-to-end encrypted messaging, voice and video calls, file sharing, and real-time collaboration, all connected to workplace systems and built for compliance requirements.

The underlying server technology — Synapse and the professionalised Matrix server stack — can host any Matrix-based solution and is built to scale to enterprise deployments.

## Who It's For

Element's sweet spot is organizations where the words "vendor lock-in" and "data sovereignty" make decision-makers genuinely uncomfortable: government agencies, public institutions, defense and intelligence adjacent teams, healthcare organizations, and any technically sophisticated company that has decided the cost of depending on a proprietary communications platform is too high.

Karsten Wildberger, Germany's federal minister for digital affairs, put it plainly: "Digital sovereignty means having choices, so no single technology and provider become a dependency that can be used against our interests."

## The Bottom Line

If your team is evaluating messaging and collaboration tools and data sovereignty is a real requirement — not a checkbox — Element is the serious answer. It's open source, self-hostable, end-to-end encrypted, and built on an interoperable open standard. You're not just choosing a tool; you're choosing an infrastructure model that no vendor can take away from you.

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Learn more at [federated.computer](https://federated.computer). Want to offer Element/Matrix to your customers or partners? Check out [Federated Enterprise](https://enterprise.federated.computer).
