We use Slack now, and are looking to migrate to Mattermost (since we run GitLab already).
We don't want to pay the price we'd need to pay to keep Slack, and plus we want to host our own.
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 !