Remote work is the de facto way of operating for most companies today. This means breaking silos, working asynchronously, communicating with clarity, and collaborating across your organization.
The path to enabling seamless collaboration isn’t always straightforward. You need the right tools, processes, and workplace habits to keep the information flowing across teams and departments. Concerns around data and IT security, and access control also don’t make it easy.
Fortunately, you have great collaboration apps that do most of this. It boils down to picking one that suits your needs the best. So, we’ve picked two high-performing collaboration tools and pitted them against each other—Mattermost vs. Slack.
Here’s a detailed comparison with attributes, limitations, pricing, and more to make it easy for you to decide.
P.S.: We’ve added an alternative that could replace multiple collaboration apps. Wait until the end! (or scroll to get here sooner 🤩)
Slack Vs. Mattermost: Which Collaboration Tool Is Best?
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat Is Slack?
Slack is a cloud-based collaboration and communication platform for teams and workplaces. It’s a hub for your team to chat, share files, work with external partners, hold audio or video meetings, and record and share updates—all in real-time.
It’s a popular tool among hybrid and remote organizations to enhance collaboration and productivity while maintaining flexibility.
Ironically, Slack doesn’t let you slack off! 😉
Slack features
Now, let’s look at the features that make Slack one of the best team collaboration tools.
1. Collaboration
Slack’s collaborative features, like Channels, allow you to organize work, chat, share files, and make decisions.
If your work involves collaboration with external teams like your partners, vendors, or customers, you can use Slack Connect.
Other features include—DMs, Huddles, and Clips—allowing employees to chat, have voice and video calls, and even share and record clips— making communication much easier than those back-and-forth email exchanges.
2. Automation
If you’re looking to automate your tedious, routine tasks but do not have the technical skills to do that, Slack knows a guy—it’s Workflow Builder. With some dragging and dropping, you’ll be ready with an automated workflow.
If you have coding skills, you can custom code your business processes using Slack’s application programming interface (API) to suit your workflow.
With popular apps and integrations, you can plug in your favorite tools and keep work flowing without extra effort. 🤩
3. Knowledge sharing
Your team can search for conversations and files across channels and DMs through a powerful search option.
Teams often need to archive old projects, documents, and channels to keep the interface clean and updated, but looking for the old files can get tedious. However, the Slack Archive feature makes searching for these old conversations and documents easy.
4. Security and compliance
Slack implements industry-accepted best practices and frameworks to keep your data safe. Only the right people can access company information with device and identity management.
Your customer data is encrypted and protected with tools like Slack Enterprise Key Management and Data Loss Prevention. 🛡️
Slack pricing
- Free
- Pro: $7.25/month per user
- Business+: $12.50/month per user
- Enterprise Grid: Custom pricing
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat Is Mattermost?
Ideal for technical teams, Mattermost is an open-source collaboration and communication platform known for its strong privacy and security compliance. It’s an integrated platform of productivity tools that provides channel-based communication, structured workflow execution, and project workflows.
It helps with workflow orchestration and eliminates the need for context-switching between different applications.
The experience with Mattermost is similar to Slack as it offers one-on-one and group messaging and other tools to plan communication better.
Best recommended for in-office use, technical and operational teams worldwide favor Mattermost.
Mattermost features
Let’s see what features make this open-source collaboration platform a popular collaboration tool.
1. Collaborative messaging
Exchanging messages is great until you’re racing against a deadline. Mattermost’s channel-based tools allow native audio calling and screen sharing, making it easy to get stuff done faster.
Real-time message syncing, searchable history and file, image, or link sharing—all make collaborating easier.
2. Mattermost Playbooks
A geographically-diverse team following multiple processes can often lead to confusion and duplication of work. Mattermost’s Playbooks help your team members get and stay on the same page through built-in checklist-based automation that helps increase visibility and accountability.
This gives everyone daily updates with automated triggers and actions, status updates broadcast on dashboards, and prescribed timelines and reports.
3. Plugins
Having all your favorite tools in one place simplifies your work and saves you time. With Mattermost plugins, you can automate routine tasks with your preferred tools without switching between them.
Mattermost also lets you add powerful customizations to the server, desktop, and web apps without needing to make changes to the codebase. This means you can do a lot without technical help. You can also customize your integrations with full API access. 🙌
4. Enhanced security
Mattermost is open-sourced, offering superior data security with a self-hosted solution that allows complete access to source code. Its advanced compliance auditing and reporting tools keep sensitive data safe without third-party monitoring.
You can also move data anywhere, anytime, with end-to-end encryption at rest and in transit.
Mattermost pricing
- Free
- Professional: $10/month per user
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
Summarize this article for me pleaseSlack Vs. Mattermost: Features Compared
The most apparent difference between Slack and Mattermost is that Slack is closed-source, so only vendors can access or change the proprietary code. Mattermost is an open-source secure communication tool, which means any organization that opts for it can customize it with its own plugins and open APIs.
Here are the critical differences between Slack and Mattermost.
| Features | Slack | Mattermost |
| Self-hosting | ❌ | ✔️ |
| Native video calls | ✔️ | ❌ |
| Free plans | ✔️ | ❌ |
| Maximum apps & integrations | ✔️ | ❌ |
| Customizable security & compliance | ❌ | ✔️ |
| Open-sourced | ❌ | ✔️ |
| Extra customer support | ✔️ | ❌ |
| Extensive multi-lingual support | ❌ | ✔️ |
| Migration friendly | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Advanced search functionality | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| White labeling | ❌ | ✔️ |
| AI tools | ✔️ | ❌ |
Now, let’s dig deeper.
1. Hosting
Whether you work out of an office or hybrid or fully-remote can impact how you choose to host your collaboration software. There’s also the consideration of who you work with.
For example, if you work with health care vendors or government entities, they might enforce you to use self-hosted software and expect you to comply with all their security and privacy expectations.
Slack
It’s straightforward to use since it’s a cloud-based tool. You can create public or private channels, make a team, add members, and start working.
Slack is the tool to collaborate effectively daily if your team is small and new. Since Slack is a proprietary software, you can customize it best with templates or tools, but you’ll not be able to self-host on Slack.
Mattermost
Open-source code allows you to self-host with Mattermost. Implement the software according to your organization’s security guidelines and opt for cloud-based deployment for remote work compatibility.
2. Apps and integrations
Since most businesses use different apps and integrations, you must pick a team collaboration platform supporting your work tools.
Slack
Slack offers more integrations for you to collaborate better with your team members. With over 2600+ apps & integrations and now newly formed partnerships with OpenAI and Salesforce, Slack will bring AI natively into the user experience.
With popular collaboration tools like Google Drive and Salesforce, Slack also lets you add custom integrations per your needs.
Mattermost
Mattermost offers a community of contributors with whom you can plug in custom apps, tools, and integration or make your own with full-access APIs.
Mattermost integrates directly with daily use apps like Asana, GitHub, Jira, Bitbucket, etc., making it easy to track your projects and tasks without switching between different tools.
For developers and large organizations with engineering or operation-heavy workflows, Mattermost’s open-source approach works best to customize the software.
3. Customization capabilities
Mattermost’s customization qualities help you build from scratch due to its open-source code, whereas Slack offers custom apps, templates, and integrations with or without coding.
Slack
With multi-lingual support of over 10 languages, Slack allows you to customize the sidebar, themes, profiles, welcome messages, and emoji or reaction customization.
You can also set your favorite mobile push notifications sound. Add custom emojis and welcome messages to make conversations fun.
Mattermost
You can white-label with Mattermost, wherein you can customize your branding with the software code. Customize your web, desktop, and mobile applications per your security protocols.
Advanced multi-lingual support in more than 16+ languages enables diverse and inclusive communication.
4. Security Protocols
Security concerns are significant when choosing the right collaboration platform for your business.
Slack
Slack’s security features include single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, domain claiming, custom session duration, identity and device management, and user and group provisioning.
Slack’s security controls align with the National Cyber Security Centre’s (NCSC) cloud security principles and other international regulatory and compliance standards/certifications.
Mattermost
This is where Mattermost rules! It’s one of the most flexible and secure collaboration tools that addresses the most challenging private messaging security needs.
With self-hosted private cloud deployment, you can access advanced mobile security features and control sensitive data without third-party monitoring.
Related
Summarize this article for me pleaseSlack Vs. Mattermost on Reddit
We checked Reddit to see what people are saying on the matter of Slack Vs. Mattermost. About Slack, users have commented on the easy usage capabilities:
“Advantage over email is that it gets rid of the awkward super long ‘reply to all’ when a bunch of people is involved and discussing a topic.”
Other Reddit users have said Mattermost is a great option if you want to self-host with customizable security measures:
“We switched from on-prem Hipchat (thanks Atlassian) to on-prem Mattermost server, and it’s pretty good. Using a cloud platform for potentially sensitive network details wasn’t something I was happy with.”
Still not sure about Slack Vs. Mattermost? We have a team collaboration app that can replace all your tools! 🤩
Summarize this article for me pleaseMeet ClickUp: The Best Alternative to Slack Vs. Mattermost
We know Slack and Mattermost are popular, but have you considered ClickUp?
ClickUp combines hundreds of features to collaborate better, improve productivity, and complete work faster!
Become a pro organizer by dividing teams and departments into Spaces, grouping big projects and actions into folders, and breaking tasks into lists to view your work.
Get the option to choose from over 35+ ClickApps to customize every task for any type of work.
Collaboration on ClickUp improves the productivity of your team members, so work is always fun. Let’s dive deeper into ClickUp’s major collaboration tools.
ClickUp Chat
Welcome to the world of cohesive conversations and operating with integrated tools. Bring all of your team communication to one place with ClickUp Chat.
Tag and assign tasks on real-time chat with @mentions in comments. Also, embed videos, documents, and files as attachments and send them to your team.
Communicate clearly with rich formatting features or create chat views of specific teams, work, or departments inside ClickUp—control who’s viewing the chats as per hierarchy.
ClickUp Collaboration Detection
With ClickUp Collaboration Detection, you’ll instantly know what your teammate is working on or when they add a comment.
Edit docs in real-time with your co-workers and even get instantaneous feedback in new comments.
More collaboration tools on ClickUp
- Dashboards: Build your mission control center for each project and track progress with deeper insights and high-level overviews
- Integrations: Enhance productivity with 200+ native integration tools and 1000+ free tools
- Automation: Save time with 100+ automation options to refine workflows, routine tasks, project handoffs, and more
- ClickUp AI: Access hundreds of handcrafted and research-backed AI tools that will help you draft and edit content and brainstorm
ClickUp Tasks
Organize, collaborate, and plan effectively on almost anything with ClickUp Tasks. Assign work to multiple people and save time with shareable screen recordings.
Structure work by dividing it into actionable subtasks to visualize it in various views. Customize your workspace by naming conversations and bifurcating them based on task types.
Did we mention ClickUp’s free plan? Well, now would be a great time to discuss pricing options.
ClickUp pricing
- Free Forever: Best for personal use
- Unlimited: $7/month per user
- Business: $12/month per user
- Enterprise: Contact sales for pricing
Summarize this article for me pleaseSlack Vs. Mattermost: Who’s the Winner?
Slack and Mattermost are robust collaboration tools that integrate with popular apps. However, a clear winner depends on your organizational needs.
For example, Slack is for organizations that prefer cloud-based access without placing heavy emphasis on custom security protocols. So, if a remote organization needs an easy communication tool that eases workflow and increases productivity, Slack is your go-to.
If your organization needs a fully customizable open-source self-hosting team management and collaboration tool, then Mattermost is ideal. Unlike Slack, it’s made by developers for developers. So, the platform needs heavy technical expertise to set up as per your use case. It’s better suited for technical and operational teams.
If you’d like to experience more than collaboration, try ClickUp. Manage your projects with task creation, multiple views, statuses, templates, and more.
Start your free ClickUp trial today!
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