FAQ
This is a question and answer site for questions related to Buddycloud Ltd. and Buddycloud's Products and Services.
The Product and Service.
What is Buddycloud?
Buddycloud is an open source project that helps developers add chat, video and social features to their app without being locked into a proprietary solution. We do this by producing an open source messaging server and working with standards committees to ensure everything we do is open and free for others to use.
Find all the Developer components of Buddycloud on the Features Page.
How is Buddycloud different?
Buddycloud is different:
- The ability to build services that interoperate with other sites using federation give you access to a much larger user community. Your users can find friends on other services and access Buddycloud content anywhere on the internet.
- Unlike other messaging stacks, Buddycloud can also be run on-premises, giving you total control over how you decide to integrate your messaging stack with external services (for example your user database).
- Buddycloud's open design keeps you flexible: Instead of building a closed and proprietary system, we took the best of open protocols and built on them. Then we released this all as open source so you can innovate and avoid service lock-in.
Who uses Buddycloud?
A community of 500+ developers and many organisations are currently building products on Buddycloud. Corporate customers include Government departments, finance institutions, healthcare organizations, ISPs and Game developers.
Is it a messaging app?
Buddycloud is a service for developers to build their own apps. There are two demo apps:
The Buddycloud software ecosystem pages give a full list of applications.
What benefit does Buddycloud add that I don't already have?
Buddycloud gives you a set of tools, libraries and services to build user-to-user, group and social messaging into your apps. Check out all the Buddycloud features and use those that your users need.
If you are a community, you can use BC:Communities and Channels to easily build a community in your existing site. Get in contact with us to know more about this Buddycloud product.
The Design and Technology.
Which platforms are supported?
Buddycloud supports Web and Mobile application development with SDKs for the main platforms.
The Buddycloud features run on any unix-like system.
Buddycloud uses the Postgres database.
Buddycloud can be setup to authenticate against your existing user databases (external-auth).
How is Buddycloud secure?
Buddycloud is the only in-app messaging stack that can be run on-premises giving you total control over your security. This option is particularly popular with government, healthcare, finance and defense customers who for regulatory reasons must run services behind their firewall.
The complete Buddycloud Stack is open source and the development team's design decisions are transparent. This protects you against malicious backdoors and replaces the "trust us" with a "trust us, and if you don't, the code is there for your inspection".
Encryption of the Buddycloud message stream and the option to enable per-message end-to-end encryption means that your secrets stay secret.
How do users control privacy?
Users should always know what information is shared and with whom. We've designed Buddycloud to avoid privacy confusion and developed three ways to share:
A selected few trusted users: a private channel, for example surprise-party@my-domain.com
Just people on the local domain: a local channel: for example all-hands@company.com
Open to the world: an open channel: for example my-fans@ladygaga.com
How is Buddycloud licensed?
All Buddycloud software, is developed in a transparent way and released under the Apache 2.0 licence
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