5 ms·

> Slack doesn't have an on-prem option. Microsoft Teams doesn't have an on-prem option. What are enterprises supposed to use, RocketChat? Matrix? With no clear

> Slack doesn't have an on-prem option. Microsoft Teams doesn't have an on-prem option. What are enterprises supposed to use, RocketChat? Matrix? With no clear migration path? Mattermost[1], with a clear migration path from Slack, at least. [1] https://mattermost.com/ https://mattermost.com/

apple4ever 8y ago
We use Slack now, and are looking to migrate to Mattermost (since we run GitLab already). We don't want to pay the price we'd need to pay to keep Slack, and plus we want to host our own.
- jawilson2 8y ago
  We moved from Slack to Mattermost, and Mattermost is garbage. Messages are delivered late (by hours), if ever. You don't get notifications correctly. It takes seconds (more than 10 sometimes) to load a page. Sometimes the page goes blank. Much of our office has reverted to email and phone calls for many things that would have worked fine with Slack.
  - JeremyNT 8y ago
    I'll counter that anecdote with an observation that I have never observed any of those issues. In our deployment Mattermost is reliable and I've never heard any complaints like those from my colleagues. It could be a question of scale; we only have probably 50 or so regular users. That said, even though it works as advertised the product is not perfect. The Mattermost UI is bare bones and some things like conversation threading are implemented poorly.
    - it33 8y ago
      Thanks @JeremyNT! Mattermost team here. May I ask which Mattermost version you're running? Also, what features would you like to see? We ship new improvements monthly, so if you're on an older release you could quickly add a lot of features: emoji reactions, GIF selector, custom emojis, Slack-compatible keyboard shortcuts, hashtags, slash comments, Slack-compatible integrations, etc.
      - _V_ 8y ago
        I, for one, would like to see normal package upgrade process - atleast for debian-based distros. I really don't like the current way of "copy old directory somewehere, copy a new one and replace some files from the old one". That is very painfull and this process does not really invoke a lot of confidence. edit: typo
      - JeremyNT 8y ago
        We're on 4.10.1, so I think we have most if not all of what you mentioned. Thanks for the great open source product! I should be clear, my own UI complaints are minor, but I want to acknowledge that people expecting a 1:1 copy of Slack won't exactly find it. Mattermost works well for us, but I recognize that an enhanced UI with tight media integration must be important to many people, otherwise Slack would not have become as popular as it has. Threading is really the only gripe I have personally - I don't like how it works, and I don't use it much because of that. But then I also don't have any real observations about how it could be improved either, and not using it (and basically operating as if it's IRC) is a perfectly fine solution!
      - h1d 8y ago
        I wish the search feature to be more straightforward. It seems to be trying to be smart about searching close matches but it just misses exact matches and when I really have to search some messages I have to search it with SQL in the database. It's not good when I can't tell my members to use the search feature when I know it's unreliable. For instance, I try to search for "pass" hoping to dig out the password someone pasted and it shows results containing words like "wordpress" and "css" that petty much buries the actual matches even if they're somewhere way down in the result.
  - it33 8y ago
    Hi @jawilson2, Mattermost team here. Sorry to hear you're having issues, it sounds like websockets haven't been fully installed on your Mattermost instance. a) When you hit "Refresh" on your browser, do new messages appear? b) Do you ever get blue bar message reading "Please check connection, Mattermost unreachable. If issue persists, ask administrator to check WebSocket port."? If so for either of these, here's a solution you can send to your IT Admin: https://docs.mattermost.com/install/troubleshooting.html#please-check-connection-mattermost-unreachable-if-issue-persists-ask-administrator-to-check-websocket-port https://docs.mattermost.com/install/troubleshooting.html#ple...
    - brendanr 8y ago
      Is it okay to rely solely on websockets these days? I was always impressed by pusher.com's commitment to a variety of fallback protocols (and there are three blog posts about it, see https://blog.pusher.com/how-we-built-pusher20-part-1/ https://blog.pusher.com/how-we-built-pusher20-part-1/)
      - lawl 8y ago
        > Is it okay to rely solely on websockets these days? Not affiliated with anyone here, but I think the answer is yes.
        Freak_NL 8y ago
        It's supported in all relevant browsers after all. Mattermost works perfectly for us.
        brendanr 8y ago
        It's not a question of browser support, it's a question of infrastructure support. When I was using them years ago, there were a lot of networks which blocked them.
  - acoard 8y ago
    Approx how many users?
    - shaan7 8y ago
      And Mattermost's UI team was considerate enough to have a dark theme. Something Slack couldn't be bothered for.
  - Groxx 8y ago
    Worth noting that mattermost has made pretty significant improvements around this in the past several months, now that there's a large customer: https://eng.uber.com/uchat/ https://eng.uber.com/uchat/ web/apps have been pretty much completely rewritten too. it's noticeably better, if you haven't used it for a while.
    - lucb1e 8y ago
      Unfortunately I can't name any names, but I can say that Uber isn't the largest company Mattermost, neither in terms of revenue nor number of employees. I don't know for how long not-Uber has been using it, but at least a bit more than a year now.
      - ahojka 8y ago
        the fact that companies like HP builds/sells mattermost deployment/support/... yet internally still relies on lync is a joke (and pain to live with)
        lucb1e 8y ago
        They use Mattermost internally, they don't sell it to customers (not sure if you were assuming I was talking about HP or a similar company that just deploys Mattermost for customers).
        ahojka 8y ago
        hp, hpe, dxc.. whatever 'division' is one part of .. then it must be deployed in a small amount of centres as most support teams (of any kind) that I've interacted with were all tied to lync only
      - Groxx 8y ago
        Neat. Thanks! I haven't kept up on other-users outside of the uber post, good to hear there are more fish in the ocean :)
  - sams99 8y ago
    For us at Discourse we find Mattermost perfectly acceptable as a chat program. 10 second load times and slow/wrong notifications have not been a problem for us at all.
  - Shivatron 8y ago
    Some additional observations on Mattermost (currently on 4.0.0.43 of the OS X desktop client) 1. The contact list interface lacks in a couple obvious ways. At the top there is an "Unreads" list, except there is a different unread list depending on which Team you're in. Except maybe it's not different, because unread Direct Messages will always appear in Unread, but unread Channels will only appear in their Team. There's also no option to sort anything contact-related: you have to have your Channels at the top (Public, Private), then your Direct Messages, subsorted alphabetically. (In particular, you can't sort by "most recent", so if you're chatting with 5 people during the day and you have 40 people in your DM list up, good luck finding them after they're marked as read.) 2. There is a keyboard shortcut for "Switch Channels" (Command-K), which you can use to send a DM to someone—but you can't use it to send a DM to two people at once (ie. typing Command-K+"alice" sends a DM to Alice, but typing Command-K+ "alice, bob" does nothing). 3. It's incredible that the native client will mark you as "Away" when you're working on your computer if the Mattermost app is not in focus. 4. I guess this is hard to get around given that there are slash-commands, but if I had a dime for every time I tried to paste a path and Mattermost said "Command with a trigger of '/home/shivatron/foo' not found...", I'd be a rich man. 5. Speaking of paste, I'm glad the message character limit got increased from 4000 to ~16k in 5.0. Does it offer to automagically truncate like Slack, or do I still have to delete some characters and try again in a loop until the message sends?
  - locusofself 8y ago
    I run 25+ deployments of mattermost (some free and some enterprise for LDAP support) and don't have those issues on any of my systems. Some features we would love to see arent there, but all the basics work great if your network and configuration is good.
  - lloeki 8y ago
    Something seems off in your setup. I've been doing some crazy live database massaging straight from psql and everything has been reflected basically instantly across all Mattermost clients.
  - tadzik_ 8y ago
    We had a similar experience (moved from IRC to Mattermost). We're on Matrix now, running with no problems.
  - me551ah 8y ago
    Doing on premise is hard. Office networks have firewalls with not so great configurations. Mobile networks can be incredibly flaky and unless you have geographically distributed servers it's hard to guarantee latency and performance. While building Flock , we faced multiple issues with firewalls which took us a great deal of time to tackle to ensure that notifications work well ( We ditched TCP with TLS and came up with our own protocol similar to Facebook zero which relies on shared secured key for encryption). Cloud based solutions are much easier to set up and much more reliable compared to on premise solutions , which is another reason why Atlassian also created Hipchat cloud and Confluence cloud. Disclaimer:  I'm from Flock ( https://flock.com https://flock.com ) . It’s currently rated the #1 slack alternative on PC Mag(https://goo.gl/eGZqH8 https://goo.gl/eGZqH8). We've also created a tool to help you quickly import all your team data from HipChat to Flock in case you're interested in trying us out. Please let me know if you have any queries !
  - h1d 8y ago
    I'm using Mattermost in a small team but a web app that's taking hours to update seems like a problem with your server or network setup unless your team is so large that it was never designed for such load even with serious hardware thrown in.
solatic 8y ago
Enterprise E20 pricing (with the all-important high-availability clustering feature) is unlisted. Yeah, going back to opaque pricing and needing consultants to take care of anything and everything is a real step up /sarcasm
- sparkling 8y ago
  Hiding enterprise pricing is quite common for many SaaS companies.
  - solatic 8y ago
    And yet, Atlassian got as big as they did in large part because of transparent pricing. Because enterprise sales have such a long sales cycle, that transparent pricing gave people inside their enterprises the confidence to push for a product they knew their budget could afford, rather than spend large amounts of internal political capital getting colleagues to rally behind a solution that wasn't affordable for them to begin with. It makes adoption more risky and more difficult.
    - davnn 8y ago
      > And yet, Atlassian got as big as they did in large part because of transparent pricing. Who knows if that had any influence on their success?
      - qaq 8y ago
        Hmm "everyone" for many "Enterprise" shops the spend on sales team is bigger than on software eng. so one of the reasons Atlassian was always profitable is they didn't have a sales team until they were huge.
      - walterbell 8y ago
        This is widely accepted because they did not spend money on an enterprise sales team in their early years, yet saw enterprise adoption.
  - 8y ago
Arathorn 8y ago
Matrix also has migration paths from Slack, eg https://github.com/lampholder/concorde https://github.com/lampholder/concorde edit: also https://github.com/Cadair/skill-matrixslack https://github.com/Cadair/skill-matrixslack
- ReverseCold 8y ago
  The matrix homeserver is... suboptimal. I'm running it for a personal instance (two users), and it's using insane amounts of RAM (4-8 GB) and still managing to lag (even though I gave it 4 cores on a Ryzen 2700X). Forget talking in a matrix.org room, even talking to people on other personal/single user servers isn't fully stable. There is a replacement homeserver (https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite) but it's not done yet. Also, client support is awful. The only one I can reasonably tell a non-technical user to use is Riot - but that's somehow more resource hungry than the Slack desktop app. There are good ones, but they are either only for technical users (weechat) or are extremely barebones (nheko, quaternion).
  - Arathorn 8y ago
    Disclosure: i work on Matrix. We're basically doing nothing but fixing Synapse's performance problems currently, and improvements are on the horizon. We're late because we got sidetracked fixing flaws in the protocol, but as of the last few weeks we're back on perf again. So far we've sped up /sync by 2x and reduced CPU by about 20%, but the RAM improvements should land over the coming weeks unless we have further distractions. Meanwhile, on Riot, we're busy landing performance fixes which should make it much less resource hungry than Slack. These are literally landing as we speak: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/2970 https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/2970, https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/3331 https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/3331 etc.
    - arendtio 8y ago
      Why is you current solution so ressource hungry? I mean, my 10-active-users off-the-shelf XMPP server (ejabberd) uses about 100MB RAM currently.

apple4ever 8y ago

We use Slack now, and are looking to migrate to Mattermost (since we run GitLab already). We don't want to pay the price we'd need to pay to keep Slack, and plus we want to host our own.

jawilson2 8y ago
We moved from Slack to Mattermost, and Mattermost is garbage. Messages are delivered late (by hours), if ever. You don't get notifications correctly. It takes seconds (more than 10 sometimes) to load a page. Sometimes the page goes blank. Much of our office has reverted to email and phone calls for many things that would have worked fine with Slack.
- JeremyNT 8y ago
  I'll counter that anecdote with an observation that I have never observed any of those issues. In our deployment Mattermost is reliable and I've never heard any complaints like those from my colleagues. It could be a question of scale; we only have probably 50 or so regular users. That said, even though it works as advertised the product is not perfect. The Mattermost UI is bare bones and some things like conversation threading are implemented poorly.
  - it33 8y ago
    Thanks @JeremyNT! Mattermost team here. May I ask which Mattermost version you're running? Also, what features would you like to see? We ship new improvements monthly, so if you're on an older release you could quickly add a lot of features: emoji reactions, GIF selector, custom emojis, Slack-compatible keyboard shortcuts, hashtags, slash comments, Slack-compatible integrations, etc.
    - _V_ 8y ago
      I, for one, would like to see normal package upgrade process - atleast for debian-based distros. I really don't like the current way of "copy old directory somewehere, copy a new one and replace some files from the old one". That is very painfull and this process does not really invoke a lot of confidence. edit: typo
    - JeremyNT 8y ago
      We're on 4.10.1, so I think we have most if not all of what you mentioned. Thanks for the great open source product! I should be clear, my own UI complaints are minor, but I want to acknowledge that people expecting a 1:1 copy of Slack won't exactly find it. Mattermost works well for us, but I recognize that an enhanced UI with tight media integration must be important to many people, otherwise Slack would not have become as popular as it has. Threading is really the only gripe I have personally - I don't like how it works, and I don't use it much because of that. But then I also don't have any real observations about how it could be improved either, and not using it (and basically operating as if it's IRC) is a perfectly fine solution!
    - h1d 8y ago
      I wish the search feature to be more straightforward. It seems to be trying to be smart about searching close matches but it just misses exact matches and when I really have to search some messages I have to search it with SQL in the database. It's not good when I can't tell my members to use the search feature when I know it's unreliable. For instance, I try to search for "pass" hoping to dig out the password someone pasted and it shows results containing words like "wordpress" and "css" that petty much buries the actual matches even if they're somewhere way down in the result.
- it33 8y ago
  Hi @jawilson2, Mattermost team here. Sorry to hear you're having issues, it sounds like websockets haven't been fully installed on your Mattermost instance. a) When you hit "Refresh" on your browser, do new messages appear? b) Do you ever get blue bar message reading "Please check connection, Mattermost unreachable. If issue persists, ask administrator to check WebSocket port."? If so for either of these, here's a solution you can send to your IT Admin: https://docs.mattermost.com/install/troubleshooting.html#please-check-connection-mattermost-unreachable-if-issue-persists-ask-administrator-to-check-websocket-port https://docs.mattermost.com/install/troubleshooting.html#ple...
  - brendanr 8y ago
    Is it okay to rely solely on websockets these days? I was always impressed by pusher.com's commitment to a variety of fallback protocols (and there are three blog posts about it, see https://blog.pusher.com/how-we-built-pusher20-part-1/ https://blog.pusher.com/how-we-built-pusher20-part-1/)
    - lawl 8y ago
      > Is it okay to rely solely on websockets these days? Not affiliated with anyone here, but I think the answer is yes.
      - Freak_NL 8y ago
        It's supported in all relevant browsers after all. Mattermost works perfectly for us.
        brendanr 8y ago
        It's not a question of browser support, it's a question of infrastructure support. When I was using them years ago, there were a lot of networks which blocked them.
- acoard 8y ago
  Approx how many users?
  - shaan7 8y ago
    And Mattermost's UI team was considerate enough to have a dark theme. Something Slack couldn't be bothered for.
- Groxx 8y ago
  Worth noting that mattermost has made pretty significant improvements around this in the past several months, now that there's a large customer: https://eng.uber.com/uchat/ https://eng.uber.com/uchat/ web/apps have been pretty much completely rewritten too. it's noticeably better, if you haven't used it for a while.
  - lucb1e 8y ago
    Unfortunately I can't name any names, but I can say that Uber isn't the largest company Mattermost, neither in terms of revenue nor number of employees. I don't know for how long not-Uber has been using it, but at least a bit more than a year now.
    - ahojka 8y ago
      the fact that companies like HP builds/sells mattermost deployment/support/... yet internally still relies on lync is a joke (and pain to live with)
      - lucb1e 8y ago
        They use Mattermost internally, they don't sell it to customers (not sure if you were assuming I was talking about HP or a similar company that just deploys Mattermost for customers).
        ahojka 8y ago
        hp, hpe, dxc.. whatever 'division' is one part of .. then it must be deployed in a small amount of centres as most support teams (of any kind) that I've interacted with were all tied to lync only
    - Groxx 8y ago
      Neat. Thanks! I haven't kept up on other-users outside of the uber post, good to hear there are more fish in the ocean :)
- sams99 8y ago
  For us at Discourse we find Mattermost perfectly acceptable as a chat program. 10 second load times and slow/wrong notifications have not been a problem for us at all.
- Shivatron 8y ago
  Some additional observations on Mattermost (currently on 4.0.0.43 of the OS X desktop client) 1. The contact list interface lacks in a couple obvious ways. At the top there is an "Unreads" list, except there is a different unread list depending on which Team you're in. Except maybe it's not different, because unread Direct Messages will always appear in Unread, but unread Channels will only appear in their Team. There's also no option to sort anything contact-related: you have to have your Channels at the top (Public, Private), then your Direct Messages, subsorted alphabetically. (In particular, you can't sort by "most recent", so if you're chatting with 5 people during the day and you have 40 people in your DM list up, good luck finding them after they're marked as read.) 2. There is a keyboard shortcut for "Switch Channels" (Command-K), which you can use to send a DM to someone—but you can't use it to send a DM to two people at once (ie. typing Command-K+"alice" sends a DM to Alice, but typing Command-K+ "alice, bob" does nothing). 3. It's incredible that the native client will mark you as "Away" when you're working on your computer if the Mattermost app is not in focus. 4. I guess this is hard to get around given that there are slash-commands, but if I had a dime for every time I tried to paste a path and Mattermost said "Command with a trigger of '/home/shivatron/foo' not found...", I'd be a rich man. 5. Speaking of paste, I'm glad the message character limit got increased from 4000 to ~16k in 5.0. Does it offer to automagically truncate like Slack, or do I still have to delete some characters and try again in a loop until the message sends?
- locusofself 8y ago
  I run 25+ deployments of mattermost (some free and some enterprise for LDAP support) and don't have those issues on any of my systems. Some features we would love to see arent there, but all the basics work great if your network and configuration is good.
- lloeki 8y ago
  Something seems off in your setup. I've been doing some crazy live database massaging straight from psql and everything has been reflected basically instantly across all Mattermost clients.
- tadzik_ 8y ago
  We had a similar experience (moved from IRC to Mattermost). We're on Matrix now, running with no problems.
- me551ah 8y ago
  Doing on premise is hard. Office networks have firewalls with not so great configurations. Mobile networks can be incredibly flaky and unless you have geographically distributed servers it's hard to guarantee latency and performance. While building Flock , we faced multiple issues with firewalls which took us a great deal of time to tackle to ensure that notifications work well ( We ditched TCP with TLS and came up with our own protocol similar to Facebook zero which relies on shared secured key for encryption). Cloud based solutions are much easier to set up and much more reliable compared to on premise solutions , which is another reason why Atlassian also created Hipchat cloud and Confluence cloud. Disclaimer:  I'm from Flock ( https://flock.com https://flock.com ) . It’s currently rated the #1 slack alternative on PC Mag(https://goo.gl/eGZqH8 https://goo.gl/eGZqH8). We've also created a tool to help you quickly import all your team data from HipChat to Flock in case you're interested in trying us out. Please let me know if you have any queries !
- h1d 8y ago
  I'm using Mattermost in a small team but a web app that's taking hours to update seems like a problem with your server or network setup unless your team is so large that it was never designed for such load even with serious hardware thrown in.

solatic 8y ago

Enterprise E20 pricing (with the all-important high-availability clustering feature) is unlisted. Yeah, going back to opaque pricing and needing consultants to take care of anything and everything is a real step up /sarcasm

sparkling 8y ago
Hiding enterprise pricing is quite common for many SaaS companies.
- solatic 8y ago
  And yet, Atlassian got as big as they did in large part because of transparent pricing. Because enterprise sales have such a long sales cycle, that transparent pricing gave people inside their enterprises the confidence to push for a product they knew their budget could afford, rather than spend large amounts of internal political capital getting colleagues to rally behind a solution that wasn't affordable for them to begin with. It makes adoption more risky and more difficult.
  - davnn 8y ago
    > And yet, Atlassian got as big as they did in large part because of transparent pricing. Who knows if that had any influence on their success?
    - qaq 8y ago
      Hmm "everyone" for many "Enterprise" shops the spend on sales team is bigger than on software eng. so one of the reasons Atlassian was always profitable is they didn't have a sales team until they were huge.
    - walterbell 8y ago
      This is widely accepted because they did not spend money on an enterprise sales team in their early years, yet saw enterprise adoption.
- 8y ago

Arathorn 8y ago

Matrix also has migration paths from Slack, eg https://github.com/lampholder/concorde https://github.com/lampholder/concorde edit: also https://github.com/Cadair/skill-matrixslack https://github.com/Cadair/skill-matrixslack

ReverseCold 8y ago
The matrix homeserver is... suboptimal. I'm running it for a personal instance (two users), and it's using insane amounts of RAM (4-8 GB) and still managing to lag (even though I gave it 4 cores on a Ryzen 2700X). Forget talking in a matrix.org room, even talking to people on other personal/single user servers isn't fully stable. There is a replacement homeserver (https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite) but it's not done yet. Also, client support is awful. The only one I can reasonably tell a non-technical user to use is Riot - but that's somehow more resource hungry than the Slack desktop app. There are good ones, but they are either only for technical users (weechat) or are extremely barebones (nheko, quaternion).
- Arathorn 8y ago
  Disclosure: i work on Matrix. We're basically doing nothing but fixing Synapse's performance problems currently, and improvements are on the horizon. We're late because we got sidetracked fixing flaws in the protocol, but as of the last few weeks we're back on perf again. So far we've sped up /sync by 2x and reduced CPU by about 20%, but the RAM improvements should land over the coming weeks unless we have further distractions. Meanwhile, on Riot, we're busy landing performance fixes which should make it much less resource hungry than Slack. These are literally landing as we speak: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/2970 https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/2970, https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/3331 https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/3331 etc.
  - arendtio 8y ago
    Why is you current solution so ressource hungry? I mean, my 10-active-users off-the-shelf XMPP server (ejabberd) uses about 100MB RAM currently.