Every mainstream chat tool eventually runs into the same wall: it lives on somebody else's cloud, under somebody else's jurisdiction. For a hospital, a bank, a utility, or a government agency, that's not a footnote in a compliance review, it's disqualifying. So teams end up choosing between three bad options: a polished cloud tool they're not cleared to use, no sanctioned tool at all (which means sensitive conversations quietly drift to personal WhatsApp and Slack), or a self-hosted tool that's a decade behind on features and polish. CometChat Air is built to remove that choice entirely.
Why does this matter to IT and security leadership?
If you're the CISO, CIO, or compliance lead signing off on what your teams are allowed to talk on, you already know the real risk isn't the sanctioned tool — it's everything that happens around it. No approved messenger means proprietary conversations end up on personal phones, on servers you don't control, sometimes feeding someone else's AI. That's the gap Air is built to close: a messenger with the UX people actually want to use, running somewhere your audit team can actually sign off on.
It's also built by people who've only ever built messaging. CometChat's infrastructure already handles 7M+ messages a day across 113,000+ apps in 163+ countries, at 7ms API response time and a 99.999% uptime SLA, with a proven ceiling of 1M+ concurrent users in a single channel. Air puts that same infrastructure inside your walls instead of CometChat's cloud.
Key features and capabilities
Channels & direct messages:
Public channels, private groups, and 1:1 DMs, with presence, reactions, and pins.
Threads & search
Keep conversations organized with threads, and find anything with fast in-app search.
Voice & video calls
1:1 and group calling with screen share and recording, built into the messenger rather than bolted on.
Files & rich media
Documents, images, and voice notes, stored entirely within your environment.
AI agents & assist:
Optional AI for summaries, replies, and in-chat agents, enabled only when you turn it on.
Moderation & guardrails
Keyword and pattern filters, roles, and policies built for regulated conversations.
Three ways to deploy:
Air-gapped (on-prem, no outbound connectivity at all — built for classified, clinical, and regulated environments), on-prem connected (self-hosted, with only the specific external services you approve allowed to reach out), or cloud-hosted (the same messenger on CometChat's managed cloud, for teams that want it running in days rather than quarters).
What's interesting about the tech
The obvious way to build an "air-gapped messenger" is to make the whole thing a sealed box: nothing in, nothing out, full stop. Air does something more deliberate. The core: Messaging, channels, calls, files, is isolated by default and never reaches outside your network. But moderation, AI, push notifications, translation, and location services are built as separate, opt-in layers on top of that core. Each one only calls out if you explicitly enable it, and you can skip all of them and stay 100% air-gapped. That means a security team isn't stuck choosing between "fully sealed" and "fully modern" they can turn on exactly the connected capabilities they've approved, nothing more, and the default posture never assumes connectivity you didn't grant.
Reference links
Nivedita Bharathy
Product Marketing Specialist , CometChat