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Mattermost – open-source platform for secure collaboration

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Re: Mattermost – open-source platform for secure collaboration

#111

Post by darkteflon »

alya wrote: post #103
darkteflon wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We tried Zulip about a year ago. There were loads of things we loved about it - the threading model in particular - but the learning curve was steep for non-technical members and the mobile app lacked a couple of key features (share sheet integration was the big one, from memory). We also looked at Quill, which had a similar threading model but … was bought and then sank without a trace. We ended up on Slack, which i…

Head of Product for Zulip here. I'd love to dig in deeper to understand what's confusing to non-technical folks as they are starting out, so that we can keep working to improve the product and documentation to address it. If anyone is up for a chat, please reach out by email at support@zulip.com, or in the #feedback stream in the Zulip development community ( https://zulip.com/development-community/ )!

Hello there, thanks for the offer, very much appreciated and characteristic of the Zulip community as a whole.

I actually did open and/or add to issues on GH, and actively participated in the development Zulip instance on the issues that came up for us as a team. I found the community to be very receptive.

I just want to reiterate, for anyone coming across this thread now or later, that Zulip really is a fantastic product and open source project. The main uphill battle for us was getting non-technical people to buy in to a paradigm of effectively “filing” their messages up front. That’s not some kind of problem with, or criticism of, Zulip as a product. For messages to be in correct context, the sender needs to _put_ them there. To want to do that, it helps if they buy in to the paradigm in the first place.

“Why do I have to do this?”

“Because it makes it possible for anyone to come along later and get the whole picture.”

“Okay, that’s worth a bit of friction up-front.”

It’s really a people thing - not a Zulip thing.

Just 2c from our little team.

Best of luck and thanks for all your great work. We’ll definitely be checking it out again soon.

Re: Mattermost – open-source platform for secure collaboration

#112

Post by alya »

darkteflon wrote: post #111
alya wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Head of Product for Zulip here. I'd love to dig in deeper to understand what's confusing to non-technical folks as they are starting out, so that we can keep working to improve the product and documentation to address it. If anyone is up for a chat, please reach out by email at support@zulip.com, or in the #feedback stream in the Zulip development community ( https://zulip.com/development-community/ )!

Hello there, thanks for the offer, very much appreciated and characteristic of the Zulip community as a whole. I actually did open and/or add to issues on GH, and actively participated in the development Zulip instance on the issues that came up for us as a team. I found the community to be very receptive. I just want to reiterate, for anyone coming across this thread now or later, that Zulip really is a fantastic pr…

Thank you for elaborating and for the kind words!

Re: Mattermost – open-source platform for secure collaboration

#113

Post by mstaoru »

Slack was fine for our team of ~10, but frequently blocked by Chinese great firewall, and overall experience was slow. We moved to a free self-hosted Mattermost instance and been using it for a better part of a year. Conversations are fast, we own our data, and there is no looming 10000 messages limit all the time. Bleve search is working just fine for us as well. Win!

Mattermost is an amazing product with a few quirks:

* it is hard to set up any kind of integration with a TUI: `matterircd` is quite buggy and also eats the CPU like there is no tomorrow, `matterbridge` doesn't sync correctly, or at least we couldn't make it work, and `matterhorn` is a standalone product (which would be much nicer as an e.g. weechat module) trying too hard to look like a web UI;

* web UI is still being polished, e.g. if you connection is unstable, web UI websocket is going to behave badly, requiring frequent refreshes to not miss any messages, or it still doesn't scroll to bottom sometimes on new messages, this has been the case since v.4.x and we're now on v.7;

* what I think is different from Slack is that threaded responses are shown in the main channel as well, and if there are many threads it is the same mess as if there were no threads at all :D

* somewhere around v.6 update the Focalboard push was a bit jarring, thankfully after disabling the plugin it disappeared for good.

Keep up the good work! Once our org is larger and requires Enterprise features, I'm pretty sure we stick with Mattermost.

Re: Mattermost – open-source platform for secure collaboration

#114

Post by agnivade »

mstaoru wrote: post #113

Slack was fine for our team of ~10, but frequently blocked by Chinese great firewall, and overall experience was slow. We moved to a free self-hosted Mattermost instance and been using it for a better part of a year. Conversations are fast, we own our data, and there is no looming 10000 messages limit all the time. Bleve search is working just fine for us as well. Win! Mattermost is an amazing product with a few quir…

> web UI websocket is going to behave badly, requiring frequent refreshes to not miss any messages, or it still doesn't scroll to bottom sometimes on new messages, this has been the case since v.4.x and we're now on v.7;

That shouldn't be the case with 7.0. We recently released a feature called "reliable websockets" that makes a connection reliable across websocket disconnects. If you have any repro steps, please feel free to create an issue and we will take a look.

> what I think is different from Slack is that threaded responses are shown in the main channel as well, and if there are many threads it is the same mess as if there were no threads at all :D

With 7.0, our Collapsed Reply Threads feature is now in GA: https://mattermost.com/blog/collapsed-reply-threads-generall.... Feel free to enable it to get a better threading experience.

Re: Mattermost – open-source platform for secure collaboration

#115

Post by mstaoru »

agnivade wrote: post #114
mstaoru wrote: post #113

Slack was fine for our team of ~10, but frequently blocked by Chinese great firewall, and overall experience was slow. We moved to a free self-hosted Mattermost instance and been using it for a better part of a year. Conversations are fast, we own our data, and there is no looming 10000 messages limit all the time. Bleve search is working just fine for us as well. Win! Mattermost is an amazing product with a few quir…

> web UI websocket is going to behave badly, requiring frequent refreshes to not miss any messages, or it still doesn't scroll to bottom sometimes on new messages, this has been the case since v.4.x and we're now on v.7; That shouldn't be the case with 7.0. We recently released a feature called "reliable websockets" that makes a connection reliable across websocket disconnects. If you have any repro steps, please fee…

Oh nice, we just upgraded to 7.0 this week, it was not a daily issue, so perhaps now it's gone. Will try the collapsed threads as well! Thanks a lot!

Re: Mattermost – open-source platform for secure collaboration

#116

Post by samtuke »

temp wrote: post #4

They decided to up their price per user by a significant amount not too long ago... our self-hosted instance suddenly became more expensive than Slack but with an obviously not nearly as polished product as Slack. So we moved over to Zulip because at least they do their own thing, we haven't had any regrets over the switch to Zulip.

We've been using Zulip at our startup for 2.5 years now and still generally love it.

We self host and haven't had any issues with that (pretty much zero maintenance so far). The Android app is awesome.

Searching messages sucks, and I don't know if Slack bots and apps are compatible.

Pretty much everything else is great, and we greatly prefer it to Slack and Mattermost (both of which we used before for years).

Re: Mattermost – open-source platform for secure collaboration

#117

Post by jillesvangurp »

mekster wrote: post #102
jillesvangurp wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're on a freemium plan for slack. Works fine and doesn't cost us a thing. We don't care about having an archive of chats. That's not what it is for. Self hosted would cost us more in devops money than we'd end up paying even for a premium SAAS contract for whatever you would use for this. People think devops is free, it rarely is and usually is the most expensive thing in terms of cost. Especially doing it properly…

> Self hosted would cost us more in devops money than we'd end up paying even for a premium SAAS contract for whatever you would use for this. People think devops is free, it rarely is and usually is the most expensive thing in terms of cost. Especially doing it properly can eat into development time quickly. Perhaps you have no idea how to manage servers but launching an instance and a docker container isn't magic w…

I'm an engineer and CTO and well aware of how a "why don't you just ..." can escalate into a significant side project. The thing is I know how these things work and I've seen them escalate repeatedly. We used to run things like jenkins and gitlab self hosted. And we had to deal with outages, backups, things running out of disk, etc. It was doable but definitely a bit of a time-sink.

If you don't care about devops, monitoring, uptime, and all the rest, then yes, you can run the entire company off a few beautiful snowflakes on some VM. If it goes down, you just do it again. Been there done that. But doing it properly requires a bit more effort. I shut down my last self hosted Jenkins about five years ago. Not doing that again. Just not needed anymore.

Anyway, for things like slack (which, again, we run for free), I don't see the value of self hosted.

Re: Mattermost – open-source platform for secure collaboration

#118

Post by jillesvangurp »

BenLloydPearson wrote: post #98
jillesvangurp wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're on a freemium plan for slack. Works fine and doesn't cost us a thing. We don't care about having an archive of chats. That's not what it is for. Self hosted would cost us more in devops money than we'd end up paying even for a premium SAAS contract for whatever you would use for this. People think devops is free, it rarely is and usually is the most expensive thing in terms of cost. Especially doing it properly…

We just launched a free forever SaaS offering that is competitive to Slack and includes kanban boards for project and task management and a few other bells and whistles for software developers. You should give us another look!

A link would help for that ...

Re: Mattermost – open-source platform for secure collaboration

#119

Post by Justine_G »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #118
BenLloydPearson wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We just launched a free forever SaaS offering that is competitive to Slack and includes kanban boards for project and task management and a few other bells and whistles for software developers. You should give us another look!

A link would help for that ...

It's called the Starter plan and here's the feature comparison matrix: https://mattermost.com/pricing/#compare-features. :)

Re: Mattermost – open-source platform for secure collaboration

#120

Post by njsubedi »

jasonblais wrote: post #16
kosolam wrote: post #14

Mattermost is amazing! We used it with multiple teams over a period of a few years. Self hosted. Cheap of resources. All of the necessary features are there and very well thought out.

Thanks for the kind words! Mattermost PM here :)

The only thing that prevented us from using MatterMost when switching away from Rocket.Chat was video/voice calls that would actually ring the mobile/desktop devices on the call. We had to settle with MS Teams and eventually got the MS365 bundle only because of the reliable calls in Ms Teams. Although chat is a pita in teams after using Rocket.Chat for years, we’re making more calls and writing fewer chat messages.
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