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About Franz

Franz is the former Emperor of Austria – but also an elegant multi messaging app for Mac, Windows and Linux, combining chat & messaging services like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Slack, Telegram, Gmail and many more into one application.

Franz is being built and developed in beautiful Vienna, Austria by a small team working tightly around Stefan Malzner, the founder of Franz. Offering both free and paid plans, Franz is a valuable communication tool relied upon daily by hundreds of thousands of people around the world. A steady stream of premium features being added has made the app increasingly popular with creative professionals, freelancers and large corporations.

As of Franz 5, the source code for the app is available on Github under the Apache 2 License. True to the Open Source spirit, everyone is invited to file bugs, create feature requests or support the project in general.

About Stefan Malzner

Stefan Malzner is an award winning, Vienna based product designer, burger lover and proud father. He started his career at the young age of 14, founding his first startup Global Artists – a community for digital designers and photographers.

After an apprenticeship in graphic design he worked as a digital designer for companies like Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Shell, Volkswagen, and toured Europe as a DJ on weekends. For the last couple of years he has been on a mission to find the best burger recipe and founded Horst, Grete, Bloodirony Games – and Franz.

When Stefan started building Franz in 2016, he saw that being part of different communities often requires you to use different messaging platforms. So he set out to solve a problem that he shared with millions of people around the world: You end up with lots of different apps and browser windows, having trouble staying on top of your messages and chats. Driven by that, Stefan built Franz – a revolutionary one-step solution to an everyday problem.