I haven't experienced MS Teams, but Skype 4 Business can go and die in a garbage fire as far as I'm concerned. The mobile client just sucks monumentally, and the desktop client is missing functionality that every other good chat client has had for years.
Teams is neat. I looked back at Slack at first, but no more. Multiple teams, threaded conversations, mobile app (IPhone) works nicely as well. It's there to stay.
Any thoughts on Cisco spark? I have yet to see it mentioned in the few threads about hangouts alternatives... any reason for that? Just curious what HN users have against it.
I think Cisco spark is a niche product that is going to be important to big enterprise, but solely as a communication tool, specifically to facilitate meetings and calls. Just my opinion, but I don't think it has much of a future has a 'hub' of all activity for a company.
I've started using Discord[0] with a team, we are pretty happy with it. It's great how you can easily see who's in a call and can join and leave without any cost (you don't have to invite someone to the call, or ask to be invited, etc)
I think some of it is a branding fail on Mattermost's part (or a branding win on Slack's). Case in point - I was recently in talks with a non-tech company who are HUGE users of freemium Slack. They don't want to actually spend money on it, but they have a person whose (partial) job description is to monitor all 15+ Slack channels for 'anything that looks important, and archive the conversation wholesale into the company wiki'. If they paid for Slack, their annual cost would be $10k+. I proposed to build them a Mattermost server for a flat rate of $5k and they're responsible for the hosting costs (~$20/mo for a VM somewhere). For a small recurring fee I would handle regular updates, etc, to the server. CEO's response was "Nope, we like Slack", with no further explanation or elaboration. The rest of the teams had been demo'd on Mattermost, agreed it did All The Things(tm), agreed it was the superior solution because then Jim in shipping wasn't tasked with copy/pasting convos into the wiki, etc, but in the words of the CFO, "<CEO> is irrationally attached to being a 'Slack user'". Not so much that they'd be willing to pay money for it though.
This is changing though- the lack of attention giving to the freemium slack is causing a lot of problems for the communities I'm in, and the majority of them are exploring other options.
For instance, I reported a DoS bug that can cripple freemium communities and they basically told me "oh well". For obvious reasons I'm not going to go into details here, but I've got a script I can point at a slack freemium slack community to wipe out a lot of it's functionality that I built as a proof of concept and they just don't seem to care.
There are also huge issues with moderation and harassment on the freemium Slack. Since there is no way to block or ignore a user it gives trolls an insane amount of power (and before someone tells me that you can mute notifications from a person, I'll mention that all the troll needs to do is create a new chat room, force invite the person to it, and continue trolling to bypass it).
Personally I find it really frustrating that slack has kind of destroyed a bunch of IRC communities, but is refusing to build the tools needed to manage these replacements. As more and more freemium communities are figuring this out and migrating I imagine the people pushing Slack because it's what they are familiar with is going to drop.
If you have a problem user on slack, you ban them from the team. If the team has gotten so large that it's impossible to moderate in that way, you shouldn't be using slack, imo.
Agreed, completely. Slack is very much an inappropriate tool for most communities that aren't using a paid plan. That was in fact the point of my post- for lots of people using the freemium version to manage communities does not actually make any sense.
I think mattermost is an appealing alternative, but don't think it has the potential to dominate the enterprise market, but more develop as a successful niche player for the most security conscious companies. It's also something I imagine the other players will address at some point for some kind of a premium enterprise offering.
You do not even have to be too conscious about security as a company. A lot of contracts with companies and/or government agencies in the EU (at least in Germany) require that you handle data according to EU/German laws. If you use a SaaS which does not host in the EU it is a lot harder to satisfy those requirements. To be compliant it is a lot easier to spin up your own Mattermost in a data center here.
I've managed a rocket.chat server at a previous job, and its very stable as well. The big plus is that its completely free (including ldap support) vs slack and mattermost.
I'm aware. But the important features for a small company (external auth, ldap) are on a paid tier for Mattermost. Its good that mattermost can tie into gitlab's authentication via ldap (no ldap group permissions though with the OSS tier).
One reason for propreitary SaaS over open source used to be setup--but now that Mattermost is on Bitnami it's easier than ever to deploy Mattermost to AWS, Azure, GCP and OCP: https://bitnami.com/stack/mattermost
That is definitely a plus, but the mobile app(s) for mattermost are pretty bad.
I'm guessing it was built a long time ago on cordova or one of those other "write once, run everywhere" frameworks where they just run everything in a WebView.
While the first generation Mattermost mobile apps used web rendering, we have next generation apps in React Native releasing end of March that are rendering natively.
The next generation apps are much faster, and we're excited to release them soon.
We're testing out Teams at work because of our O365 subscription. About 15 people now. Most seem to like it other than the massive amount of whitespace the chat window takes up. I personally hate the massive animated emojis.
Though a little hokey, it's free for us and people really just want some sort of chat system. I've looked at rocket chat but I'm a jr level sysadmin with CTO/Sr Sysadmin boss in a Windows-only environment.
I'm a little hesitant to let it loose in our 100+ person environment but Skype for Business sucks and Slack would be too expensive.
My current employer uses hipchat, and I've used Slack at previous jobs, social/professional groups, and with some of our contractors now.
Features:
Slack wins. Slack is usually a little ahead. Hipchat was catching up and then I just popped back with threaded convos.
Uptime:
Slack wins I think. Hipchat goes down/slow kind of often. Approximately github often. I don't use Slack as intensely, but can't think of many times that slack was down aside from major internet outages.
Rooms/Channels:
Hipchat has rooms, slack has channels. Basically parity in terms of group/private/team channels.
Pricing:
Hipchat wins. Both have free tiers, but those are for toy groups. Hipchat is about $2/user vs $10/user for slack. Slack doesn't charge you for inactive users though (2 weeks dormant), so it can be competitive if you have a small team of actually active users.
Mobile:
I find hipchat to be slower and a little worse in tiny annoying ways. For instance on my phone/watch, I get notifications for 1:1 messages and @mentions. But in hipchat, if i'm not already in the room where someone mentioned me, it doesn't show up when I open the app, even if I get there by swiping the notification. Come on hipchat!
Feels old, clunky, and not fun to use compared to Slack. The hosted solution has also had major reliability problems over the past 6-12 months (may not apply if you use the on-prem offering). The mobile apps are very outdated and tend to botch notifications and message delivery/syncing.
On the bright side, the desktop client uses very little RAM compared to Slack.
Exact same until you need to easily deal with code formatting. Slack uses Markdown Hipchat uses nonsense. Also Hipchat's reliability is garbage: getting @mentions hours later or not at all. Hipchat is horrible. You also have audio and video calling in Slack.
