Short Bytes: Slack has exploded in popularity among a wide variety of teams for coordination and planning. It has especially become notable in infrastructure and information technology on both the development and operations sides. One of the biggest and most crucial aspects of working in a team is communication, and this is where Slack, and now Mattermost, shine.
Mattermost is feature rich communication platform. It’s open source, is extensible through plugins, and it is built to be fault tolerant, which is a must for anything IT related. Mattermost aims to take down the competition, namely Slack, by supporting all Slack third party addons and plugins with little to no modification, and by putting more control in the hands of users and maintainers.
The Mattermost messaging supports rich text formatting, audio, video, and other attachments. This brings a new level of customization to messaging typically not seen in the professional community. With the ability to create several chat channels, with multilingual character set support, and one on one chat, it looks like Mattermost can fill the needs of a team of any size.
The platform also supports archiving and searching, with an emphasis on hashtags and names so you can be sure you’ll be able to find that file or link even months later. This combined with the open source and powerful PostgreSQL database back-end provides robust options for storage and backup solutions.
To top this off, there are also the multi-platform clients for Windows and Mac, Android and iOS, as well as a web client.
Slack can cost quite a bit for a small company if they would like the additional features, but Mattermost does everything that Slack can and more, and it’s FOSS.
Do any fossBytes readers have any experience with Mattermost? Does anyone want to try it? Let us know what you think about Mattermost in the comments below.
Also Read: Top Apple Open Source Projects You Must Know
