Management summary
- Rhaetix is a complete workspace suite: chat, mail, calendar, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drive and video meetings. One product, not a bundle of five subscriptions.
- Chat is end-to-end encrypted by default. Mail, documents and calendar are encrypted in transit and at rest, but readable server-side. We say exactly where that line runs, and why it runs there.
- Three foundations instead of building our own: Stalwart for mail and calendar, Matrix for chat and calls, Jitsi for scheduled meetings. All three are open, documented and self-hostable.
- Documents live where the work happens: as tabs inside the channel, including live-embedded spreadsheet ranges inside documents.
- Deploy it your way: self-hosted on your infrastructure, or managed and hosted in Switzerland. Same product, same encryption.
- No vendor lock-in: open protocols (Matrix, JMAP, CalDAV), standard formats, your own identity provider (BYO-OIDC).
The problem: convenience versus control
Most companies run their day-to-day work on a handful of tools owned by a handful of very large companies. It’s convenient, and it means your documents, messages and mail live on infrastructure you don’t control, under laws you didn’t choose.
The usual answer is more policy. A data-processing addendum, a hosting-location assurance, a compliance checkbox. Those are promises about behaviour. We care about properties of the architecture: things that hold even when owners, business models or laws change.
What Rhaetix is
A complete workspace suite that works together as one product: chat with channels and threads, mail and calendar, documents, spreadsheets and presentations, drive for files, plus huddles and scheduled video meetings.
The decisive difference isn’t the list. Others have that too. It’s that these parts are one product rather than five integrated ones, and that you can put the whole thing on your own hardware.
Messaging: more than a chat window
Chat is where most of a team’s communication actually happens, so we didn’t treat it as an accessory.
Channels have threads, so one discussion doesn’t block the whole room. There are polls for quick decisions, voice messages, reactions and direct messages. And there are huddles: one click in the channel and you’re talking. No invite, no link, no second app.
More important than the feature list is the foundation: messages and shared files are encrypted on your device before they reach the server (Matrix Olm/Megolm). The server — ours or yours — stores ciphertext it cannot read. Keys live on your devices; the key backup is protected by a recovery key only you know.
One detail that matters more in practice than it sounds: every login gets a stable device identity. That sounds technical, but it’s the difference between “my history is still there” and “my history is suddenly unreadable”. Anyone who has watched an E2EE system fill with undecryptable messages after a re-login knows why we call this out.
Tabs: documents where the discussion happens
The usual workflow is broken: you discuss in a chat, the document lives in another tool, and the link to it quietly goes stale.
In Rhaetix a channel isn’t just a message list. It has tabs. You create a document, spreadsheet or deck directly in the channel. It lives in Drive, is shared with the channel’s members, and opens inside the channel. The discussion and the result of the discussion sit side by side, not in two systems.
On top of that comes a connection we use daily ourselves: a document can embed a range from a spreadsheet live. Change the spreadsheet, and the document changes. No copying numbers into a report that is wrong by tomorrow.
The document suite
This is where “we also have an editor” separates from “you can actually work in this”.
Documents are a real-time editor: several people at once, comments, images with text wrap, tables. Plus typography you normally only find in desktop software: per-side page margins, paper sizes from A5 to Legal, tab stops with right, centre and decimal alignment, watermarks. PDF export runs through Typst, a modern typesetting engine: the result is properly typeset and reproducible, not a screenshot of the browser.
Spreadsheets have a full formula engine that runs in the browser. Recalculation needs no server round-trip. Plus charts, conditional formatting, data validation, filters and cell notes.
Presentations bring layouts, shapes, charts, presenter view and a present mode.
Drive holds it together: folders, sharing, versions, previews. Existing .docx, .xlsx and .pptx files are converted server-side on import, so you don’t have to leave your history behind.
Three decisions that shape the architecture
We deliberately did not build everything ourselves. For the foundations we chose open, established systems, and in each case decided against the obvious route.
1. Stalwart for mail and calendar
The classic route would be a stack: Postfix for SMTP, Dovecot for IMAP, something else for CalDAV: three daemons and a lot of glue between them.
We use Stalwart instead: a single, modern mail server that speaks SMTP, IMAP, JMAP and CalDAV at the same time.
First, JMAP. Our webmail speaks JMAP directly rather than IMAP through detours. JMAP was built for exactly this case: batched queries, push instead of polling. That is why the inbox feels fast.
Second, one system instead of three. Mail and calendar live in the same server, with one configuration and one backup. For anyone self-hosting, that’s the difference between a weekend and an afternoon.
And because these are open standards: your existing mail client keeps working, and moving away from us is a standard migration path, not an export project.
2. Matrix for chat — and the signalling of internal calls
For messaging we could have built our own protocol. It would have been faster and would have produced exactly what we wanted to avoid: a silo.
Matrix is an open, documented protocol with mature end-to-end encryption (Olm/Megolm), an active security community and independent implementations. Your messages sit in a format that isn’t ours.
The protocol is also federatable. Whether you open your server is your decision.
Login runs through our gateway: it authenticates you against your identity provider and then issues a short-lived, signed token that the Matrix server validates locally. No second password store, no copy of your directory.
An honest clarification: Matrix carries chat and the signalling of internal calls: room, membership, “who is in the huddle right now”. The media (audio and video) runs over a WebRTC SFU, with a TURN server for networks behind restrictive firewalls. An SFU is simply the right tool for that job.
3. Jitsi for scheduled meetings
A huddle in a channel and a scheduled meeting with external participants are two different problems. The second one needs a link for people without an account, a lobby, screen sharing for larger groups.
For that we use Jitsi: self-hostable and, more importantly, embeddable. We embed it directly into our own interface rather than sending your guests to someone else’s page.
The meeting happens inside Rhaetix and runs on your infrastructure if that’s what you want.
What is encrypted — and what isn’t
This is where most vendors get vague. We won’t, because an encryption promise without its limits is worthless.
- Chat messages, shared files and call signalling: end-to-end encrypted. The server cannot read them.
- Your keys: never held by us.
- Call media: encrypted in transit and relayed by the media server.
- Mail: encrypted at rest, but readable server-side. Delivery and spam filtering require it. That is how open mail standards work, at every provider.
- Documents, spreadsheets, presentations: encrypted in transit and at rest, but readable server-side. Real-time collaboration is merged on the server; that is the price of five people typing in the same paragraph at once.
- Metadata (who, when, sizes): visible. Nothing can be delivered without it.
Every “readable” above is a property of open standards, not a hidden decision. And it is precisely why Rhaetix is self-hostable: run it yourself, and this entire list sits on your hardware, under your law.
Deployment: your choice of control
Rhaetix runs two ways. Self-hosted on your own servers, for complete data sovereignty. We provide software, deployment and support. Or managed and hosted in Switzerland, with zero operations overhead. Same product, same encryption, your choice of control.
Either way you bring your own identity: Rhaetix has no passwords of its own. Every login goes through your OpenID Connect provider: Authentik, Keycloak, Entra ID, whatever you run. Groups from your directory drive roles. For partners reselling Rhaetix as a service, the platform is multi-tenant.
We’re just getting started
Rhaetix is a young product, built by a very small team in Switzerland. We publish what we’re working on here and why we decided the way we did, including the places where we made trade-offs.
If any of this resonates — whether as a company looking to switch or as a partner wanting to offer Rhaetix — we’d love to hear from you: contact@rhaetix.com
← Blog