View Image

Franz is a free messaging app / former Emperor of Austria and combines chat & messaging services into one application. Franz currently supports Slack, WhatsApp, WeChat, HipChat, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Google Hangouts, GroupMe, Skype and many more. Franz allows you to add each service many times. This makes Franz the perfect tool to manage multiple business and private accounts all at the same time. You could even use five different Facebook Messenger accounts at once, if some inexplicable reason urges you to do so. Collaborating with various partners from different parts of the world usually involves finding a common ground and a suitable platform that allows for smooth communication and quick file sharing between team members.

After a typical installation process and upon first launching the app, you are greeted by its very intuitive user interface. As expected, you are required to input the credentials for each of the services described above to use Franz.

You can start off by adding new services from the provided list. It is at this point that you can think about Franz as a somewhat simplistic web-browser, as each newly added service is displayed in its own tab on the upper part of the main window.

Taking all of the above into consideration, at least in principle, it is really hard to fault Franz. It does an excellent job of bringing together the most popular messaging and collaborative tools under a single roof, all without feeling counterintuitive or cumbersome.