Zioan for Remote Teams: One App for Distributed Work
Chat, video calls, documents, task boards, and calendars in one self-hosted app. Built for teams that work across time zones.
When your team is spread across cities or time zones, the number of tools you depend on grows fast. Slack for real-time chat. Zoom for calls. Notion for documents. Asana for tasks. Google Calendar for scheduling. Each tool runs on its own cloud, has its own per-seat pricing, and stores your data on servers you don't control.
For a 10-person remote team, that stack costs $300/month or more. And the bigger problem isn't the money. It's that your team's knowledge is scattered across five apps that don't share context. Someone in Berlin writes a document in Notion. Someone in New York discusses it in Slack. Someone in Manila updates the related task in Asana. None of these tools know about each other.
Zioan puts chat, video calls, documents, kanban boards, calendars, and CRM into one application that runs on your server. One database. One search. One set of permissions. Your entire team works in the same place, whether they're online at the same time or not.
The problems remote teams deal with every day
Async and sync work live in different tools
Real-time conversations happen in Slack. Long-form thinking goes into Notion. Task updates live in Asana. When half your team is asleep, the other half makes decisions in chat that never get documented. When people wake up, they scroll through hundreds of messages trying to figure out what changed. Important context falls through the cracks between tools.
Video calls require a separate app
Your team uses Slack for chat and Zoom for calls. That's two vendors, two billings, two sets of credentials. When someone shares a file during a Zoom call, it doesn't end up in the project where the work happens. When you need to discuss a task, you switch to a different app, share a link, and hope everyone can join. The call recording lives in Zoom, disconnected from the conversation that prompted it.
Per-seat pricing hits remote teams harder
Remote teams tend to be distributed across countries with different cost structures. You might have developers in Eastern Europe, designers in Southeast Asia, and a project manager in the US. Per-seat pricing treats all of them equally: $7.25/user/month for Slack, $10/user/month for Notion, $11/user/month for Asana. A 15-person distributed team pays over $425/month just for collaboration tools. Onboarding a new contractor means adding another seat to every tool.
Data sovereignty is hard when your tools are all US-hosted
Slack stores data on Salesforce's US infrastructure. Notion runs on AWS. Asana is US-based. If your company operates in the EU or serves EU clients, GDPR compliance gets complicated fast. You're trusting multiple vendors to handle your data correctly, and you have limited visibility into where your information actually lives.
No single place to see what's happening
When your team is remote, visibility matters more than in an office. You can't walk over to someone's desk and ask what they're working on. Instead, you check Slack for recent messages, Asana for task updates, and Notion for document changes. Three different apps, three different activity feeds, three different notification settings. Keeping track of your team's work requires constant app-switching.
How Zioan works for distributed teams
Chat and video calls in the same app
Channels for team-wide conversations, direct messages for private chats, and threads for focused discussions. When you need face time, start an audio or video call with screen sharing directly from any channel or DM. All media runs on your infrastructure, not a third-party service. Pin important messages, set reminders on things you need to follow up on, and forward threads between channels when a conversation needs a wider audience.
Async-friendly documents
Write meeting notes, project specs, or team wikis in a rich-text editor. Every document has version history, so you can see what changed and who changed it. Import existing content from Markdown, PDF, DOCX, or HTML. Link documents to related tasks and chat discussions. When someone in a different time zone updates a document, the change is visible to everyone in the same workspace where the conversation happens.
Kanban boards everyone can see
Visual task management with customizable columns, priorities, due dates, multiple assignees, labels, and checklists. Log time directly on tasks with estimated vs. actual tracking. Board-level activity logs show exactly who did what and when. For remote teams, this means no more "what's the status of X?" messages in chat. The board is the status.
Shared calendars across time zones
Personal calendars, space-level calendars, and CRM-linked calendars in one view. Each user configures their own timezone, and Zioan auto-detects it on setup. Task deadlines from kanban boards appear automatically as calendar events. Set reminders before meetings. Filter by source to see just your events, your team's events, or everything. When you schedule a meeting, everyone sees it in their local time.
One search across everything
Press Cmd+K and search across chat messages, documents, tasks, boards, code snippets, and folders. No more opening three apps to find the thing someone mentioned last week. Every piece of information your team creates lives in the same database, so search actually works. Filter by content type if you know you're looking for a document vs. a task vs. a chat message.
Self-hosted with full GDPR control
Zioan runs on your server via Docker. Pick a hosting provider in the EU, and your data stays in the EU. No US-based vendor processes your team's conversations, documents, or client data. Zioan offers managed hosting in Germany for teams that want GDPR compliance without managing their own servers. Updates happen inside the app with no DevOps knowledge required.
AI assistants with full context
Connect Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini to your workspace through Zioan's built-in MCP server. The AI can search messages, create documents, manage tasks, and answer questions about your workspace with full context. Ask it to summarize what happened on a board while you were offline, draft a document from a chat thread, or find all tasks assigned to you across every project. The AI works with your actual workspace data, not a generic chatbot.
One app, one price, every time zone
A 15-person remote team paying for Slack, Notion, Asana, and Zoom easily spends $500/month. That's $6,000/year in subscription fees, and the bill goes up with every new hire or contractor.
Zioan is a one-time payment of €999. Unlimited users, all features, your server. Optional renewal at €199/year for updates and support. The software keeps working whether you renew or not.
30-day trial, all features, no credit card. Install it on a server your team can reach and see how it feels to have everything in one place.