How do you move your team chat to a Russian messenger?

What gets in the way of a move

The history stays in the old service. Agreements with clients, decisions and files sit in old chats. If access to the service is cut off, there will be nowhere to find them. Slack restricted Russian workspaces twice: in March 2022 and in March 2024.

The team writes in two messengers. Some employees have moved, the rest keep writing in the old chat. To find an answer, you have to search both services.

In the new messenger, it's unclear where to write. An employee opens the new messenger and sees an empty list of chats. They don't know where their project is discussed, so they send a colleague a direct message.

Procurement and security ask for documents. They need to confirm that the service is in the Russian Software Registry and find out where the data is stored and how the service handles personal data.

What to check when choosing a Russian messenger

• A listing in the Russian Software Registry. The registry is run by the Ministry of Digital Development, and you can look a service up by name at reestr.digital.gov.ru. Spending on software from the registry can be deducted from the tax base with a coefficient of 2, as covered in the article "Spending on Russian software now counts double for tax purposes".
• Where the data is stored. Ask which country the servers are in and whether the company is listed in the Roskomnadzor registry of personal data operators.
• Import from your current messenger. Find out which services you can move history from, which chats will come over and on what terms.
• Compatibility with Russian operating systems. If your company runs Astra Linux or RED OS, ask for a compatibility certificate.

We compared the services in our ranking of the best team chat apps of 2026.

Pachca is listed in the Russian Software Registry. Data is stored on Selectel servers in Russia, and the company is listed in the registry of personal data operators. Pachca has compatibility certificates for Astra Linux 1.7 and 1.8 and RED OS 7.3 and 8.

How to move your chat history into Pachca

From Slack. Slack's basic export only includes public channels, without files or employee emails. Files and emails are added by an extended export through a bot, which we walk through in the article "How to keep all your Slack messages". Send the archive and the bot token to Pachca support, and we'll run the import. Pachca will get the channel names, the messages with their original authors, the threads and the files. The guide is in the article "Import chats from Slack".

From Mattermost. Export an archive with the mmctl export create --include-attachments command and send it to Pachca support. Public and private channels, messages, threads and files will come over. For messages to land with the same employees, their emails in Pachca and in Mattermost must match. The guide is in the article "Import chats from Mattermost".

From Telegram. The workspace Owner runs this import themselves. Export the history of each chat in Telegram Desktop as JSON, match the Telegram participants to employees in the mapping tool and upload the resulting file in the workspace settings. Only chats come over, Telegram channels don't. The guide is in the article "Import chats from Telegram".

Import from Slack and Mattermost is available when you pay for any Pachca plan for a year and costs nothing extra. It's done once: you can't add an archive later. The text part of the archive must be no larger than 5 GB unpacked. Import from Telegram is available on paid plans, you can run it several times, and the upload file must be no larger than 2 GB compressed.

What to keep in mind during the import

• Which chats to move. You can leave out chats with logs and notifications from other services. There's no need to delete them, just tell support.
• What to do while the import runs. You can already work in Pachca, but don't create chats with names from the archive or direct messages with employees from it. Otherwise the messages in those chats will get mixed up after the import.

How to move the team over

Put someone in charge of the move. This person makes the list of chats, sets up the workspace and answers employees' questions.

Decide how long the old messenger will keep running. You can switch it off right away, run it alongside Pachca for a while or switch it off team by team as they move. If both services run in parallel, name the date after which nobody writes in the old messenger.

Create chats before the team arrives. List the departments and their chats. Name the chats with prefixes: "[Team] Sales" for a department, "[Project] Billing" for a project that spans several teams. An admin creates group tags for departments in Members and adds them to chats. An employee with the "Sales" tag lands in every chat that has that tag right away. For other chats worth creating, see the article "How to organize communication in your team chat app".

Connect notifications from your work tools. If your old messenger received notifications from GitLab, Grafana or a CRM, set them up in Pachca before the team arrives. A bot for notifications is created in "Automations" → "Integrations", in the "Chat bots and webhooks" block. Over 250 services connect through Albato, and you can build your own automations in n8n or through the API.

Add employees. Invite employees by email or with a link in Members. If your company uses Active Directory, set up sign-in through SSO. After an import from Slack or Mattermost, the employees from the archive are already in Pachca, but you need to activate them: in Members, switch to Table view, apply the Deactivated filter, select the employees and choose Activate in the three-dot menu.

Create a chat for questions about the move. Call it "[Questions] Moving to Pachca" and pin the instructions for employees and the date the old messenger shuts down. The person in charge answers questions there, and everyone sees the answers. For companies with 100+ users, we run training calls for employees.

Where to start

Export an archive from the old messenger and see which chats are worth moving. Then create the workspace and chats, send the archive to support and move one team first. Once you see what questions employees ask, move everyone else.