The Workplace from Meta alternative that’s free right now

Openbook — it covers what Workplace from Meta does inside a full workspace (boards, docs, chat, whiteboards and 18 room types, plus AI agents that do real work), and every feature is free right now with no seat limits and no trial clock.

Yes. Meta announced that Workplace is being discontinued. The product entered a read-only phase in which existing content remains viewable but the network no longer operates normally, and after the final shutdown the platform closes entirely. The precise dates depend on announcements and on your agreement, so check the timeline that applies to your organization, but the direction is not in question. Practically, that means two deadlines: one by which your company needs a functioning replacement so internal communication does not go dark, and a final one by which anything you want to keep must be exported. Planning for both at once is what this page is for.

Yes, that is exactly what the Feed room is. It is a social intranet feed with posts, polls, announcements, and kudos, plus a bulletin sidebar showing birthdays and trending posts. People comment and react the way they did on Workplace, and because it is a persistent feed rather than a chat stream, announcements stay findable instead of scrolling away. Each space can have its own Feed room, so you can run a company-wide feed alongside department-level ones, mirroring how most organizations structured their Workplace groups. The interaction model will feel familiar to anyone who used Workplace, which keeps retraining to a minimum during a migration you did not choose.

They map to two Openbook concepts. Working groups, a department, a project, a location, usually become spaces, each with its own set of rooms and its own membership. Community groups, the running club, the parents channel, the ERGs, become Group rooms, which are purpose-built for interest communities inside a shared space. Roles and permissions control who can see and join what, which covers the open, closed, and secret distinctions Workplace administrators managed. The practical migration step is an inventory: list your active Workplace groups, decide which are working teams and which are communities, and rebuild each as a space or a Group room accordingly. Dormant groups are usually best left in the archive.

Yes. The Townhall room is designed for company-wide events. An organizer drafts the townhall in private, takes it live for the whole company, and ends it when the event is over, leaving a record behind. Guest access lets people outside your workspace join, useful for board members, partners, or alumni, and guests are always free. One honest caveat: Openbook does not stream native live video the way Workplace Live did, so companies that broadcast video all-hands will keep using their video tool for the stream itself while the Townhall room holds the event, the audience, and the record. Event rooms with RSVPs and a calendar cover the smaller gatherings around it.

Start with Workplace's own export tooling while the platform is still accessible, because after the final shutdown the data is gone. Export what has lasting value: pinned posts, policy announcements, the Knowledge Library, and the member lists of your important groups. Then rebuild structure in Openbook rather than trying to replay history. The 12 one-click space templates seed spaces with ready-made rooms, so standing up a company hub with a Feed room, Event room, and Wiki takes minutes rather than days. Most migrating teams move reference material into Wiki and Docs rooms, recreate active groups and events, and treat the old feed as an archive rather than something to import post by post.

Openbook runs in the browser, so anyone with a phone or a shared terminal and a login can open the feed, read announcements, RSVP to events, and post, with no desktop software to install. Guests and viewers are free and never count as seats, which helps with the broad, shallow access patterns frontline deployments need, and the interface is a familiar social feed rather than an enterprise portal, which is the property that made Workplace succeed with deskless workers in the first place. If your frontline rollout depends on specific device management or offline scenarios, test those in the free plan first, it includes all 18 room types, so the trial is a real trial.

Workplace charged per person per month for the social layer alone, and most customers ran project, docs, and chat tools alongside it at additional cost. Openbook's free plan includes all 18 room types for up to 10 members and 3 spaces, forever. Pro is $15 per user per month, or $12 with annual billing. Business is $29 per user per month, $23 annually, and adds SSO, an audit log, API access, and an org-level shared AI key with usage reporting. Billing is exact-seat with no five-seat increments, guests and viewers are always free, and every new workspace starts with a 14-day Pro trial with no credit card required.

Once Workplace shuts down fully, the platform and any content you did not export are gone, and there is no feed for your announcements, no groups for your communities, and no channel to your frontline staff. Companies that wait tend to end up migrating in a rush, which is how institutional knowledge gets lost and how bad tool decisions get made under deadline pressure. The safer sequence is to stand up the replacement while Workplace is still readable: create an Openbook workspace on the free plan, rebuild your key spaces and rooms, run the two side by side briefly, and switch the audience over before the archive access ends, not after.