The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has cut Workplace by Facebook (FB  ), removing all of its employees from Facebook's professional communications platform.

One of the main reasons CERN cited was cost, though privacy and low usage also played significant roles in the decision to take their business elsewhere. At the moment, the research organization is considering open-source platforms instead, including Mattermost and Discourse.

Facebook launched Workplace in 2016, prompting companies like Walmart (WMT  ) and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK  ) to adopt the platform. That's around the same time that CERN joined.

At first, Facebook offered CERN, the Switzerland-based particle physics laboratory, a free trial, which prompted the beginning of their four-year relationship. However, around October 2019, Facebook informed CERN that the organization would have to pay.

"In particular, for CERN, [Workplace] made the enticing offer of waiving the fees and so we took the opportunity to test the platform," said CERN, regarding their free trial.

As time went on, however, CERN became less than impressed with Workplace. In addition to cost, privacy concerns and not enough active users contributed to CERN's decision. "Representatives from HR, IT and IR worked together to carry out dedicated trials within their department/sector to gather feedback. Reactions were not always positive," CERN said.

"Many people preferred not to use a tool from a company that they did not trust in terms of data privacy," said CERN in a release. "To date, about 1000 members of the CERN community have created a Workplace account and," noting low usage, "there are roughly 150 active users of the platform per week."

Outside of advertising, about 1% of Facebook's revenue comes from services like Workplace. While Facebook hasn't officially disclosed its sales generated from Workplace, the social media and advertising giant could generate $144 million annually from its platform. Facebook announced late last year that Workplace had exceed 3 million paid users.

The other 99% of Facebook's revenue comes from its advertising market, with the vast majority of advertising sales coming from Twitter (TWTR  ) and Google's parent company Alphabet (GOOGL  ).

CERN's news of dropping Workplace by Facebook comes around the same time that International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) (IBM  ) decided to adopt the platform Slack Technologies (WORK  ) for its internal company communications.

Aside from Slack, another major competitor of Workplace is Microsoft Teams (MSFT  ).