“However, I'd distinguish between:”
“The trade-off is that Slack has a considerably larger integration ecosystem and a more mature general-purpose collaboration experience.”
“General-purpose company communication | Slack has the advantage”
“Self-hosting | Yes | No”
“Air-gapped deployment | Yes | No”
“Short answer: Yes, Mattermost can replace Slack for an engineering team — with some caveats around search and the overall user experience.”
“Mattermost has proper threaded conversations, not just basic message replies.”
“Threading is good enough to replace Slack. I wouldn't consider it a blocker.”
“Search is perfectly reasonable for ordinary engineering conversations, but I wouldn't automatically assume it matches Slack's search experience for a large organization with years of accumulated discussions.”
“Mattermost's particular strength is engineering and operational workflows.”
“For example, its Playbooks feature supports:”
“Stop words: Common words such as "the" and "which" are excluded.”
“This introduces additional infrastructure and potentially licensing costs.”
“The trade-off is that Slack has a considerably larger integration ecosystem and a more mature general-purpose collaboration experience.”