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Comment by Simon321 | Hacker News Reader

There is also Mattermost. An open source Slack.

We recently did a test run for Mattermost to see if it's a better fit for us than Slack.

This is a note to others who may be considering the same. Specific needs will vary greatly across teams/companies.

We found Mattermost web client to be ok, however phone apps and integration coverage are both poor by comparison to Slack. We also found running, securing, and maintaining our own server to be roughly as or more expensive than using Slack.

I'm hopeful the Mattermost project keeps momentum to improve. Currently though it doesn't quite seem in the same league.

Might still be a good alternative to companies that want Slack, but cannot afford to pay for it? (Assuming they're not finding what they need in the free version.)

Or that don't want third parties to have access to their internal communications.

This is an important point. It surprises me that many non-US companies use slack for their internal and secret communication.

We found Mattermost to be more expensive than a paid version of Slack for our team of 16 after factoring in the costs of hosting, maintaining, and securing our own servers. It shifts the engineering cost burden onto your team.

As others point out, Mattermost vs. Slack is more a discussion of self-hosted vs. 3rd party cloud-hosted.

I found the same. However the newest version (4.0) has proper mobiles apps done with React Native I think, which are a league above the older ones.

This will likely always be the case with open source chat solutions.

Developing clients is hard. Especially good UIx and complex feature sets across a zillion platforms like Slack does. A lot of their day I bet these days is simply tracking down obscure bugs on certain platform combinations and trying to keep feature parity between everything working properly. I think most of us can stipulate Slack does a decent job there - or at minimum is far better than the competing (open) solutions.

I really wish there was a Slack alternative where I could purchase a really nice unified frontend and simply connect to an open protocol backend such as IRC or Jabber or whatever. This was the original intent behind IRC as well - back in the 90's there were a number of shareware style IRC clients developed for Windows - and you saw some interesting protocol hackery to make some more graphical features work.

I have yet to see open source really truly compete in the "client" arena, save for an exceedingly few notable exceptions. However, it excels at the backend where you will have developer interest and competence - and the long tail of possible bugs (and user competence) is a much more sane problem to tackle.

No, I do not expect this to ever exist for obvious reasons :)

Mattermost team here,

There's connectors to Mattermost from IRC, XMPP, Slack, Discord and many other services: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge

There's a wonderful Pidgin plug-in (https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-mattermost) that even has its own installer to bundle Pidgin itself (https://github.com/Brightscout/mattermost-pidgin-client)

Here's a Terminal client for Mattermost written in Haskell (https://about.mattermost.com/galois-releases-matterhorn/).

Also, we've upgrade the polish on Mattermost UI for our 4.0 release this month: https://about.mattermost.com/mattermost-4-0/

Agree good UI/UX in open source is hard, I think there are two challenges: a) Attracting top UI/UX talent, b) Having a project that prioritizes UI/UX.

That said, I would also propose that what has already happened is not impossible.

Mattermost team here, thanks for the mention, the feedback and the well wishes!

Yes, we needed better mobile apps, and new ones are here (React Native in iOS and Android with full source code): http://bit.ly/2w33V3D

Huge thanks to over 2000 beta testers that helped vet the apps along with all the community contributors.

We've also recently added a directory for making it easier to find integrations: https://about.mattermost.com/community-applications/

Our focus is helping increase productivity for companies who need total control of their infrastructure. Thousands of companies use Mattermost for that purpose and we're excited about bring them more and more value in each of our monthly releases.

And rocket.chat

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