> 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.
Mattermost[1], with a clear migration path from Slack, at least.
Who knows if that had any influence on their success?
Everyone has different needs, different existing environments, different service expectations+++
So you can't effectively stick to one price for the "large" tier. Given the differences in complexity and capacity consultants are needed. Startups can't build in-house service teams - the economics are misaligned. Not that you can get away from consultants if you buy from Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, or IBM...
Plus there are issues in terms of pricing and domain expertise across different industries - Federal, Education, Health.. legal issues in what your pricing can be and serious issues around their compliance environment means you need different teams of people to serve different verticals.
If you really need HA you are going to call anyways to negotiate. No one puts 15000 licenses on a credit card.
Since there aren't that many true enterprises that will allow you to test public prices like you can with consumer and SMB products, you have to go private.
The political dynamics you mention apply to developer pull products but you can easily fix that by calling or sending an email. In many Enterprise cases you want to talk to a VP or CXO for a full deployment and the free and medium offers cover the developer pull demand. If you really don't want to talk to sales AND you can spend $500k+ a year, you're a very rare case.
Why not communicate using a made-up or real life anonymized case-study? Example: For <n> people organization, with an environment of type <description>, it typically costs <$x> per user. To be really effective give 2, 3 such example scenarios.
Potential customers would be more than happy to extrapolate from this data to start their internal discussions.
s/extrapolate from/fixate on/.
Seriously, even made up "anchors" for potential enterprise pricing have a tendency to really severely mess up purchase negotiations--for both the vendor (losing them sales when the customer says "it's going to cost four times the example number for a company our size because we need it to integrate with our bespoke, ancient CMS/IAM solution? Hard pass!") and the customer ("this was supposed to be a productivity adder, but since it won't integrate with our bespoke, ancient CMS/IAM solution at a price we can afford, we'll have to train everyone on new processes and duplicate data/access credentials all over the place, making it a time waster and security hole.").
Number of employees and environment type (whatever that means) are not indicative of enough common scenarios in the large-enterprise space to be used to automate pricing decisions.
That's not a statement in favor of opaque pricing or service-provider-highway-robbery; just an observation of the real complexities of big (and often old), unique businesses.
We don't want to pay the price we'd need to pay to keep Slack, and plus we want to host our own.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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#ple...
Not affiliated with anyone here, but I think the answer is yes.
web/apps have been pretty much completely rewritten too. it's noticeably better, if you haven't used it for a while.
10 second load times and slow/wrong notifications have not been a problem for us at all.
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?
Disclaimer: I'm from Flock ( https://flock.com ) . It’s currently rated the #1 slack alternative on PC Mag(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 !
edit: also https://github.com/Cadair/skill-matrixslack
There is a replacement homeserver (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).
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/3331 etc.
I mean, my 10-active-users off-the-shelf XMPP server (ejabberd) uses about 100MB RAM currently.
Fit for orgs with external partners, providers, customers, freelances, remote and home office workers...
edit: btw, the number of comments you've made in this thread to “sell” your solution is… abusive?
It's actually not as bad as I remember (time made me think it's worse than it really is) - it's really only large rooms that feel slow. Oops.
I just guess the whole thing doesn't feel responsive. Messages sent take a while to sync between different clients, etc.