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?
Nextcloud Talk - actually free and fully-fledged unlike the alternatives that either require you to pay money or don’t support more advanced features like video calls
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.
Is XMPP not good enough ? Or GNU-Jami.
Any recommendations for a good XMPP web client?
See my requirements in other comment.
Movim & Gajim. Dino is pretty good too
I tried Zulip for a small org. Used their hosted version since it’s quite generous for nonprofits. I personally liked it, but I was very much in the minority. Most of our people didn’t like it. I don’t think anyone articulated very well why they didn’t like it so it’s hard for me to characterize it other than people bitched about the UI a lot. I personally think it works fine, just be ready for some pushback.
We also tried Mattermost, and the uptake seemed a little easier. If you’re used to slack, discord, etc., most of them are pretty easy to transition to, but if you’re dealing with people that never used a real time chat platform, all of them (even slack) are like pushing a rock uphill because people can be impressively resistant to sensible change.
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.
Nextcloud talk, but it’s no small feat to setup properly
I’ll give a vote for Zulip. It’s come a long way over the years, and if you really look at the way they’ve built it, it’s so much better than most options as there is a built in concept of context in threaded conversation.
This sounds like exactly my research arc over the last few months. I went with rocket because the 50 user limit is probably fine… Doesnt work with podman regardless of the docs.
Curious to see where you land
I’m in the same boat, running a Gitlab Mattermost instance for a small team.
Gitlab has not announced yet what will happen with the bundled Mattermost, but I guess it will be dropped entirely, or be hit by the new limitations (what will hit us the hardest is the 10000-most-recent messages limitation, anything further than that will be hidden behind a paywall - including messages sent before the new limitations come in effect - borderline ransomware if you ask me)
I know there are forks that remove the limitation, may end up doing that if the migration path is not too rough.
I used to run a Rocket.Chat instance for another org, became open-core bullshit as well. I’m done with this stuff.
I have a small, non-federated personal Matrix + Element instance that barely gets any use (but allows me to get a feeling of what it can do) - I don’t like it one bit. The tech stack is weird, the Element frontend receives constant updates/new releases that are painful to keep up with, and more importantly, UX is confusing and bad.
So I think I’ll end up switching this one for a XMPP server. Haven’t decided which one or which components around it precisely. I used to run prosody with thick clients a whiiille ago and it was OK. Nextcloud Talk might also work.
My needs are simple, group channels, 1-to-1 chat, posting files to a channel. ideally temporary many-to-many chats, decent web UI.
Voice capabilities would be a bonus (I run and use a mumble server and it absolutely rules once you’ve configured the client, but it doesn’t integrate properly into anything else, and no web UI), as well as some kind of integration with my Jitsi Meet instance. E2E encryption nice but not mandatory. Semi-decent mobile clients would be nice.
For now, wait and see.
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 :-(
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.
Of the ones I’ve tried that are fully open-source is the best ons regarding UX functionality.
For example, 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.
On Matrix, as long as you have your username and password, it’s not possible to get “locked out” due to not having your keys. In fact, your keys are only necessary if you plan to participate in encrypted chats, in which case it’s obvious that losing your key will mean losing access to old messages. However, you will still be able to receive new messages by generating a new key.
Nothing (well maaaaaaybe IRC) beats XMPP / Jabber when it comes to installing for small institutional needs. There are pretty good servers around, such as Prosody.
The servers are great, but the currently available clients are only great for non-corporate usecases IMHO.
Yep. I tried xmmp over matrix and while the setup was relatively solid and straightforward to configure the clients and lack of central history were too much of a step back so I went back to matrix.
You must have used a very outdated client (like Pidgin) because history is syncronized via the server reliably since 10+ years on xmpp with clients that support the MAM standard.
I was using conversations and from what I understood the server handles syncing of history from clients that have all the history so of one disappears your history disappears. That is what played out in my tests.
That must have been a severly misconfigured server then. Normally history is stored on the server and synced on demand.
Of course with modern e2ee you can’t actually decrypt old history on new devices, but that is an intentional feature with PFS.
Have you checked out rocketchat or stoat? 🙏
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 15 acronyms.
[Thread #59 for this comm, first seen 4th Feb 2026, 08:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
