Franz Review: The Ultimate Social App

So if you are like me you have quite a few accounts for many different services and you hate switching between them, then this the application for you. It is basically a web wrapper for all the different services. Let’s take a look at Franz.

Before I jump in first of all I would like to thank Taylor Martin for mentioning it in his Slack group.

So, what is Franz? It’s a social aggregation service allowing access to many messaging networks from one central dashboard. Talking of services, these ones are the ones that currently are supported:

• Slack
• Facebook Messenger
• WhatsApp
• Telegram
• SkypeWeChat
• HipChat
• ChatWork
• Flowdock
• Hangouts
• GroupMe
• RocketChat
• Mattermost
• Grape
• Gitter
• TweetDeck
• DingTalk
• Steam Chat
• Discord
• MySMS
• Inbox by Gmail
• Gmail
• Outlook.com

So that’s a large amount of services with what I can understand, more are going to be added over time. Which is a good thing since Franz is missing one feature for me.

Before I show you how I have set up up Franz, I will quickly mention that Franz is available for Windows, Mac and Linux, so know matter what platform you are on Franz is available for you. Well minis ChromeOS, but it has the three main OS’s anyways.

So once you install it you are taken to the to the main menu were you add all of the accounts you wish to add. You can also name each account and re-arrange them into any order. But by far the best feature is you can add multiple accounts to each service.

So here is how I set Franz up. From right to left. MobileTechTalk Slack, MOD Slack, Facebook Messenger, Discord, junk Gmail, personal Gmail, Hangouts, TweetDeck and finally Skype. The more observant of you will have noticed that Skype is grey and isn’t in the usual Skype colors. This is because you can also mute each integration too. Which is super useful if you don’t want to be bothered by a certain account. Pretty darn simple and that is what makes this such a good app. It is simple yet you can do everything you need.

So that’s how it works. So lets move on to what I don’t like about Franz. Well there isn’t much really. There are really only three issues:

1. It doesn’t boot with Windows
2. There is no IMAP support
3. No single sign on

So the first thing is an easy fix. Just follow this guide from How To Geek and it’ll boot when you login (find it here) and the second issue can easily be resolved in an update. The final flaw is that if you want to use Franz on multiple computers you have to add all your accounts each time. But once you’ve set it up that is it.

For anyone traversing a large number of clients currently it’s a great app, and add the fact that it is free and it makes it almost a no brainer. You can’t really go wrong. Just download it and give it a go. I will also quickly mention that I have since uninstalled the Slack app since Franz can do that and have many more services too. It really is a great tool.

Download it here and let us know what you think of Franz.