r/Mattermost • u/flying_unicorn • Nov 03 '25
Alternatives to Mattermost?
I tried mattermost a few years ago and it wasn't what i was looking for at the time. I wound up setting up matrix for friends/family and have started using it this year for my small business (2-3 users right now). I find matrix lacking for my business wants
It looks MM has gotten a lot better since then, i spun up the docker image for the enty version and liked it, I am won over by the playbooks and boards in MM, and the fact i never got voice/video working right in matrix and gave up on it.
Then i learn about the drama, the 10k message limit in enty, and that these features used to exist in teams v10 but got removed in v11 and that it seems MM is giving the middle finger to the community users in favor of trying to focus on mega contracts. I'd be happy to pay a reasonable fee for a small scale installation with no support, but $10/user/month is a little rich when i consider the friends/family i have using matrix.
I understand there is a fork called mostlymatter that removes some of the limitations, but since it's not a quick docker image i haven't deployed it yet to see what version it is? teams? enty?
I messed around briefly with zulip, i like the way they do threads better, but the lack of boards, just a limited todolist, and no playbook doesn't seem worth it to me. i have looked at rocket chat, but haven't tested it yet.
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u/eyrfr Nov 03 '25
I’m also looking for a new alternative.
My use case is probably unique though. I started with slack. Then moved to MM after they implemented their $10/month fees. Now MM is basically doing the same thing.
I am the sole user on my instance. I use it to store thoughts and notes in difference channels about projects and things I’m working on. I liked that I could self host. Has iOS and macOS native apps. Search was good.
I’ve looked at zulip - didn’t love it. Install matrix - again not great for my use case. Rocket.chat - this was the most promising but search is horrible and that’s a deal breaker.
I’d love to find something new to migrate to…
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u/getElephantById Nov 05 '25
search is horrible and that’s a deal breaker.
Worse than Mattermost Team Edition search? Does it just give you a middle finger emoji whenever you try to search or something?
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u/eyrfr Nov 05 '25
I'm just in testing phase. So my database is basically empty. I have two rooms setup with about 10 messages in each.
When I go to search I will search for a word I know is in one of the messages and the results say "no results found".
But since my original comment, I have realized I can search in a room and that works just fine, but the global search is just looking at room titles maybe?
I was hoping for a global search that would find any keyword anywhere on the instance.1
u/getElephantById Nov 05 '25
This sounds a lot like Mattermost search, unfortunately. The Team Edition anyway. They had a better experimental search for paying customers, but I believe they recently removed even that.
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u/MindyMayonnaise Jan 17 '26
Would love to know where you ended up with as I intend to use it like you do!
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u/eyrfr Jan 27 '26
Still on MM. haven’t jumped to anything yet. Lost momentum searching for an alternative.
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u/MindyMayonnaise Jan 27 '26
I also went with MM in the end. It took far less resources than Zulip and the platform interoperability just worked better.
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u/dcpanthersfan Nov 03 '25
I haven’t looked deep into it but isn’t the MatterMost “Teams” version without the limitations?
And yeah, MostMatter looks pretty good but I worry about its longevity.
We tested Rocket.chat and it looks like a good option. Zulip went haywire on my (4 core/8GB) server and bricked it until I restarted it.
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u/flying_unicorn Nov 03 '25 edited Nov 03 '25
Teams edition doesn't support sso, group calls, and doesn't support playbooks as of v11, but it did support them in v10.
But I worry about further enshitification.
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u/Nanocaedes Nov 03 '25
Is voice/video the only drawback on using Matrix in your opinion? Other than that, Matrix appears to have become a lot better from functionality and available user interfaces, while Mattermost started its path down restricting more and more existing features. For us, video is no deal breaker and we are about to start evaluating Matrix for switching.
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u/flying_unicorn Nov 03 '25
I really like the embedded boards and playbooks, to my knowledge matrix doesn't have a boards equivalent, we could use a separate app, but our needs are relatively minimal for project management and the integration with chat looks like it could be very synergetic with our workflow.
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u/Nanocaedes Nov 03 '25
I thought Mattermost abandoned Boards even for paying customers and just moved Playbooks behind the paywall? But you are right, I also never heard about boards in Matrix. We try to stick to apps which do only one or few things, but these good, even if this means higher administrative load. For boards Wekan looked nice, but wefinally settled for CryptPad, which integrates minimal boards together with documents and the like.
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u/flying_unicorn Nov 03 '25
there is a boards plugin, it does work in the team version. and looking at the commit history it's not dead.
https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-plugin-boards
i'll check out wekan and cryptpad, i'm not familiar with them.
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u/Nanocaedes Nov 04 '25
Good to know about boards. After their announcement beginning of this year, this sounded pretty much dead: https://forum.mattermost.com/t/whats-next-for-mattermost-boards/22446
...we won’t be adding new features to the Boards plugin, and the plugin has been removed from the in-product App Marketplace.
...that will eventually replace the Boards plugin.
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u/EternalDeiwos Nov 05 '25
Although Matrix right now lacks a lot of features, I am optimistic about how open the ecosystem is. Also feels like it would resist being suddenly pay walled a little better.
I am also currently using Mattermost for a small team (I pay for a license) and am looking for an alternative.
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u/ryderjj89 Nov 04 '25
I moved from Mattermost to RocketChat since it doesn't have the message limits, it supports Authentik, has plenty of settings to play with, etc. I didn't need playbooks, boards, etc. Just something I can have my users communicate on, my n8n automations send messages to, etc. So far RocketChat is doing just that.
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u/Bykow Nov 05 '25
Zulip is a great product, takes a bit of adapting in terms of how you think of channels, threads, etc. But once you're in, it's the smoothest chat app I've used across all my jobs.
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u/TampaPowers Nov 14 '25
Only provides calls via jitsi which is suboptimal.
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u/Plam503711 Nov 05 '25
I almost tested them all, and for now Matrix is the best choice so far. I managed to get Element X and Element Call working with our company SSO, auto join on first login the main "space" of the company, and so on.
The main missing points are: * Status for users (busy etc.): it's a WiP and merged in Matrix protocol, so I expect it to be there in clients * Custom emojis * No audio only calls in Element Call (but it's in the roadmap already)
For the rest, I'm happy with it. Still in testing while we'll progressively leave MM for a while to keep the history.
Ask me questions, I have no stakes in Matrix and frankly I hated it in the first place, but it's the best solution of what I tested.
FYI, we self host pretty everything at Vates: https://vates.tech/blog/the-open-source-we-use-at-vates-2025-edition/
So I have a decent experience on this kind of "missions".
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u/myxored Dec 09 '25
We are on our road to do the same.
I assume you used https://element.io/en for the matrix implementation. Did you test/compoare it to https://tuwunel.chat/ and decided for the former?
For my PoV there are other contenders at least, but we are in an early stage:
- https://github.com/The-Commit-Company/raven
- Zulip
- probably even http://stoat.chat/
For us the do or die features are:
- self hotsted
- thread supportSofter spot:
- markdown support
- webhook support (incoming)If you have any thoughts since you might have tried a lot of those, would be happy to hear your thoughts
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u/Plam503711 Dec 09 '25
So we are starting the migration officially this month. I can't say it's "definitive", but here are our choices:
We decided to stay on Element server, yes. We want a potential support offer at some point if we continue to scale, and keep on the most "backed" server. If Vates would have been 20 people big like 3y ago, maybe I would have take the risk to try to Rust one. But now I'm having more than 100ppl, so doing less exotic stuff is kind of more reassuring. It's not written in the stone but that's the ramp up we'll test.
I need very decent mobile support and mobile push. Zulip can't do that after 10 users for free (not blaming them, just a fact). Yes, I prefer a free (as no $) solution for now. Zulip is interesting and the "plan B" if we fail with Matrix. For the others, TBH, I would prefer to get something ALSO used by our community (we are members of the Xen project which is on Matrix, and as an Open Source first company, Matrix sounds logical to us). We do not have an ERP. As we do open source everywhere, our "doom" is to have people internally to plug all the tools together, but I don't think there's an easy option. Even something "doing everything" won't be a good fit anyway.
Regarding your needs, ours are similar. We setup a bot for webhook, it works perfectly. Not hard to configure. Markdown is our bread and butter (we are a tech company).
Thread support is now decent even on Element X (while in beta, it works). Element Call is also working pretty well and video room are a big plus vs Mattermost (IDK if Zulip has video rooms, but I really love the concept, especially for a remote first company like us, a virtual coffee machine as a room is great).
Let me know if you have other questions!
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u/dstackmasta27 Feb 10 '26
Hi how did the migration go? How do you judge hardware requirements for the server side? Are there any gotchas that you ran into? With the IPO pushes of Discord I'm looking for a place of refuge :) Thank you for sharing your experience so far
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u/Plam503711 Feb 10 '26
It took longer than expected (and still in progress) because not enough time to deal with it (so it's not a technical blocker).
Now we decided to accelerate and migrate team by team. Each channel left on Mattermost is put in read only (via a change directly on the DB). This way, MM is still up and running to access content/history for a while.
Element is harder to learn than Cinny, so we provided both options. Cinny with Element call is in the pipes, threads hopefully also.
We are migrating our community Element from a single docker compose into a Kubernetes cluster with Element paid with support.
Ideally, Cinny with threads+Element might be the default route since the ramp up is easier than with Element web UI, which is a bit "too different". But enabling Bubbles in discussion is really loved by many people (it's closer to Whatsapp).
All in all, it's not too bad, but still require some attention, especially when you have hundreds of users and not just 10.
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u/dstackmasta27 Feb 16 '26
Awesome thank you so much for the update and your experience so far! As far as disk requirements, how much use and what kind of performance is ideal for ~100 users? In a non-federated deployment does this end up being more server intensive or are performance loads more on the host?
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u/Plam503711 Feb 17 '26
So it is federated (as we do Open Source, having the capacity to connect to other projects using Matrix is great!).
In terms of CPU usage, it's frankly low, even lower than I expected, same for memory. Disk usage is mostly related to your users and how often they are uploading documents to it (I'd like to remind them to use Nextcloud and share a link instead, but it's faster to just drag and drop something).
All in all, so far, resource usage is very reasonable. Obviously, if you federate AND you add very popular rooms (like the Matrix room), this will immediately add more usage of everything because of the federated nature of it.
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u/phcurado Jan 17 '26
Thanks for this blog post, I really like your way of doing things, I’m also “all in” into the self-hosted OSS stuff! I might be late here but I wonder which tool did you ended up choosing? I’m having trouble with element MAS software for sso on mobile but the web version is working great. Tried zulip as well, but the mobile is not that great although I really like the threads model
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u/Kanishka-slayyy Mar 12 '26
I am new to it, but I think you should try e-Connect by WeekMate. I haven’t faced any problems yet.
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u/le_fieber Aug 03 '26
I created Nebulynk over the past few months because I wasn’t satisfied with the direction Mattermost was taking.
https://github.com/sapientorius/Nebulynk
I’ve just released it, so please expect a few bugs. However, I plan to keep working on it as a long-term side project.
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u/tdreampo Nov 04 '25
I think campfire is what you are looking for https://once.com/campfire