Hey there,
I’m on the search for an alternative to Mattermost for a small institution I’m working with. Mattermost was the strongest contender for our needs, yet they changed their policy regarding self-hosted instances. The factor that killed it for us, is the hard cap on 250 registered users, as we potentially might need to commodate more than that.
Rocket.Chat has similar caps.
We found Zulip, and it seems as it might be what we are looking for, but we haven’t tested yet. Nonetheless, I wanted to address this community, as you may have another good idea?
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Of the ones I’ve tried that are fully open-source, zulip is the best one regarding UX functionality.
I’ve found Matrix is a UX nightmare, with many different clients implementing different features, or having issues if a non-default login mode is used, ending in people getting locked out after the browser logged them out because they forgot to copy a key when they were logged in.
Others like rocketchat are opencore like matter most, which means they can do the switcheroo.
The things I would care the most when checking this kind of service are:
- UX: how easy it is to use for nontechnical users
- how well-backed is the project, socially and financially, to ensure it lasts a long time
- how easy it is to get the (public) conversations out, as an exit strategy, if the one above isn’t looking so good.
Thank you for the summary!
People suggest matrix but matrix really doesnt replace mattermost for an org.
mattermost is oriented towards org needs. It has boards, playbooks, better levels of access control. Admin panels etc.
We really need a sane Slack alternative that is at least fully free for self hosting.
It seems Zulip is the Slack alternative you wish for?
Zulip still has cuck licensing (permissive license). Same thing that happened to mattermost will happen to all permissively licensed projects.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters IMAP Internet Message Access Protocol for email SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol SSO Single Sign-On XMPP Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (‘Jabber’) for open instant messaging
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.
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Zulip is great, it’s very powerful and works well even when you rely on their hosting. The only issue I have with it is its ui could be better but its not something you can’t figure out. Search feature isn’t always the most reliable so that practise isn’t gonna work there.
Out of curiosity would matrix work for you?
No, if it is too complicated for me – it will be too complicated for 95 % of our potential “users”.
Having used and administered both, I would put it on the same level with mattermost
You can try Delta Chat. It’s self hosted, E2EE and they use SMTP and IMAP protocols, so it’s compatible with any email account (not 100% real this, didn’t work with tutamail or Proton mail)
Hey, thanks for the recommendation. Delta doesn’t offer the features we need.
I keep seeing Zulip tossed around as an alternative, but I don’t know what’s up with their licencing. There’s also Framateam, but I think that might just be Mattermost as a service.
Matrix would be great if it wasnt so user-hostile, but it is :-(
It seems to be indeed Mattermost as a service 😀
I’m late to the party here, but did you consider just paying for Mattermost? If it meets your needs, and your organization has 250 people, the cost for licensing is going to be relatively small compared to your IT budget (right?). They have “contact us” pricing, which means you can negotiate it.
Sadly there is nothing you could call an IT budget. As with many small-to-mid-sized institutions.
There is also Nextcloud Talk, but it can be a bit overwhelming to set up (needs the high-performance backend for video and stuff). But, it’s entirely self-hosted and has no user cap as far as I am aware.
Yeah, the high-performance backend is — sadly! — no good for us.
Have you checked out rocketchat or stoat? 🙏
I’ve mentioned Rocket.Chat in my initial post, and isn’t Stoat “just” Revolt?
Whoops my bad. Yes, Stoat is the re-brand of Revolt. I’ve also seen mentions of Sharkord.
Matrix is great
