Now, Facebook Workplace can be accessed by all

Social networking giant Facebook has made its new platform called the 'Workplace' for businesses available to the public on September 10.

The Workplace looks very much like the consumer version of Facebook with a news feed and a chat app, but there's a fee to use it.

Workplace, which is launching as a desktop and mobile app with news feed, groups both for your own company and with others, chat direct messaging, live video, reactions, translation features, and video and audio calling is now opening up to anyone to use, and the operative word here is "anyone".

Workplace's other competitors are bundles of products from Microsoft and Google. Microsoft's Yammer chat app, for instance, is part of its Office 365 package, which includes things like Excel and Word.

Workplace is opening for business long after a number of competing services have made their mark and picked up significant traction - popular rival software in the area of enterprise communication and messaging includes the likes of Slack, Yammer (now part of Microsoft), Chatter from Salesforce, Hipchat and Jive among many others.

More than 1,000 organizations around the world use Workplace (formerly known as Facebook at Work). People have created nearly 100,000 groups and the top five countries using Workplace are India, the US, Norway, UK and France. Workplace will now be available to any company or organization that wants to use it.

While accessing the personal Facebook account has no charge, in the case of Workplace, businesses need to pay between USD one and USD three a month per active user in the organization.