The open-source Mattermost <i>intentionally</i> lacks a couple of pieces of basic functionality to push you to pay, like the ability to stop regular users from deleting channels, and no way to set a reasonable password policy that requires more than 5 characters.<p>Mattermost (and specifically their CEO, who is vigorously replying to messages on this thread, but probably won’t engage with this one) haven’t responded positively to requests to include these basic features:<p><a href="https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/6320" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/6320</a><p><a href="https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/5935" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server/issues/5935</a><p>As far as I’m concerned, Mattermost isn’t any kind of a competitor to free-tier Slack until these issues are resolved. This exact thing has turned more than one team I’m on away from Mattermost.
When I checked mattermost a year ago, the mattermost opensource edition had no basic permissions/access control. Any user could archive any channel. I have seen many teams fall into this "trap" only to find this basic restriction later. We since moved to Rocket.Chat. Is this still the case?
I have a small team, but about a year ago, we deployed Mattermost on our K8s cluster using their Helm chart and I have been very pleased with the performance and stability. We never looked back at slack. I have not had to fiddle with the configuration at all since deploying it. It just works. And that is also considering that to save costs, I launched it on preemptible instances which go down usually once every 24 hours. Mattermost recovers and reboots flawlessly every time.
The biggest problem with Mattermost is that the mobile client cannot connect to multiple teams. You can add the beta client and connect to a second team, but more than two teams is impossible. This may be a function of living in the Bay Area but I'm on 4 or 5 different Slack groups for various communities.<p>All but my employer would be in great shape to switch to Mattermost but it's just not possible. Some have switched to Discourse but it's not great for real-time communication and people have a hard time with the UI.
We went Skype => Slack => MS Teams => Mattermost for our developers. If Teams wasn't such garbage at basic things like markup and pasting screenshots, we might still be using it for everything.<p>I had no real concerns with Slack from a development perspective. We simply wanted to try a unified messaging platform for the whole enterprise (our non-developers much prefer Teams/Skype for some reason). That experiment failed for our developers, so we now maintain 2 stacks - Teams for company-wide communications, and Mattermost for developer-intensive communications (or anyone else willing to teach themselves how to use a new thing).<p>Mattermost has proven to be an incredible solution for our development duties. I just installed it directly on a EC2 t3.small instance and we've been using it for about 9 months now without any pain points to speak of. I literally haven't touched that machine since I turned it on day 1. To be fair, we are <10 developers, but we get pretty heavy with the screenshots and json/code dumps throughout the day. We did make some compromises with authentication in favor of expediency of deployment, but it's really not a big deal for our developers to keep track of their LDAP vs their mattermost credentials. If someone complains enough I'll spend a few hours to hook up LDAP too.
Love the fact people are adopting Opensource solutions but corporates won’t budge. I think the hardest penetration for anyone right now is Microsoft Teams. Since they started bundling teams with Office they have been able to boast about numbers and actually hurt Slack. I wonder what is roadmap for Mattermost. Shameless plug I myself did an opensource version of a chat server called raspchat <a href="https://github.com/maxpert/raspchat" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/maxpert/raspchat</a> which was able to handle almost 5K very active chatters on a Raspberry Pi Model B (Just 512 MB of RAM). My original dream was to build a drop and run server on cheap raspberry pi for local areas but man has to feed his family and I had to make a tough choice. It’s harsh IMHO out there to get attention and then convince folks to develop integrations for you. I hope this space doesn’t endup with duopoly and products like Mattermost take off.
Uber currently uses Mattermost but will most likely move to Slack.
During my 2 years at Amazon, the SFO based Prime Now team used Mattermost but we were eventually forced to move to Chime a pitiful example of a chat client.
This space is downright awful.<p>20+ years ago corporate IT was concerned about the phone on my desk (how quaint).<p>They put one there on the back of a PBX.<p>They put in a system that was LOCAL for local needs and accessed the public network when it needed to.<p>It worked because it was built on the back of a proven standard (telephone).<p>We don't have a working chat standard, and it shows and we need to fix it.
I'm probably going to sound old and grumpy but I've been using Slack for work for 5 years now, plus I've briefly checked out Mattermost and Riot/Matrix, and I've yet to be convinced that they couldn't just be replaced by a fancy IRC client that supports markdown, autoloads images n' stuff.<p>While they may offer some higher-ups some benefits I don't see anything I'd miss if we moved to IRC, quite the contrary — I could maybe even reclaim some of my RAM and get to choose a client to my preference (which is not an Electron app).
<i>One more differentiating factor for Mattermost is its extra special focus security. The product offers the industry’s most flexible and secure instant messaging capabilities across all devices.</i><p>Isn't Mattermost fundamentally the same thing, architecturally, as Slack? Slack has one of the industry's stronger security teams. I don't see the differentiator here.
Used Mattermost for a year, and I can attest to it's shittiness. There is a bug during switching channels that pins your view to some random location weeks before the latest post. The result is that switching channel in Mattermost has a 60% chance of requiring you to spend the next 30 seconds scrolling the window to the bottommost-recent-message. Horrible.
My Fortune 500 healthcare company successfully uses Mattermost because the lawyers aren't comfortable with us using slack. It's been great. Thank you @it33 and team.<p>p.s. we haven't run into the issue 6320 (users archiving channels), for exactly the reasons @it33 described in the issue report. He didn't explain it well, but permissions is a complex rathole, un-archive is a simple workflow for admins and if there's continued abuse, just ban the user.
> The company was founded in 2011 as “SpinPunch, Inc”, an HTML5 game engine developer.<p>Neat that both Mattermost and Slack have the same origin story of game developers building an internal chat app and then pivoting to that.
I been a mattermost user for two years, can't say enough good things about it. Love that it's written in go. We run ours with very little resources and it still chugs along.
As with mastodon and similar projects - having to deploy, secure and maintain a db server is a big friction point, I wish projects aiming at self-hosting would internalize that and use something like sqlite for small to moderate deployments and would even as go as far as suggesting that it is unlikely to ever be deployed at a scale that a single-writer-multi-reader sqlite service on a decent machine can't handle.
We've been using Hipchat for years at $work. There's very little is say is "good" about it, it was just the best option at the time as it needed to be self-hosted.<p>Mattermost is being trialled now, pasting code doesn't seem a lot better, but the overall experience is.<p>As a place that likes Go/Docker it has potential for us.
The article talks about Hipchat as a competitor but HipChat was shut down by Atlassian and HipChat users were strongly encouraged to adopt Slack: <a href="https://www.atlassian.com/partnerships/slack" rel="nofollow">https://www.atlassian.com/partnerships/slack</a>
Does anyone have legal experience and know what the restrictions are to forking of the Mattermost project?<p>I'm a programmer with experience in backend development and security and would be willing to donate some time to work on developing a stronger community implementation of Mattermost - only I'm not sure what the legally correct way is to go about it. What I'm hoping to find is a FOSS sherpa to help me navigate setting up a new project.
For a while we used Mattermost at my office. At the time we had a handful of startups in our incubator. Eventually we ended up switching to Slack. I don't think it had to do with anything other than momentum and popularity of Slack, in spite of Mattermost accomplishing the same thing with virtually the same interface, people just liked and wanted to be on Slack...
As some commenters pointed out, the name "MatterMost" might be a crucial thing holding this from reaching the development mainstream as an alternative to slack/teams, which aren't very dev friendly
Last I checked, Jabber could completely replace all of these things <i>except</i> there were no good iPhone clients. Anyone know of an even remotely usable iPhone Jabber client?
Does Mattermost still have LDAP issues? The company I work for was looking for a Slack alternative but in the end decided to stick with Slack because of this.
That’s the problem with Slack — too easy to switch to equivalent or superior alternatives. I suspect this issue will continue to weigh on their stock price.
Not a single comment here mention Google's Hangouts Chat<p>I'm not surprised, it's a garbage product.<p>We use it at work since it's bundled for free with GSuite<p>But
- The name is just awful, you can't even find it in Google's search since the previous (still live) Hangout chat app overshadows all search results
- Integrations and ecosystem around it is non existent
- App doesn't see any meaningful updates
- The Android app is so crappy I don't even know when to begin. Try initiating a conversation with some person by searching them. Or try sharing something from Android to a channel only to realize you cannot search for the channel in the list
- Api to write bots is pretty badly designed
- When you edit your message you cannot mention people anymore
- Deleted GSuite users just keep floating around as ghosts<p>I give this product a year top before it is canned