Open-source chat plat toasts rival after picking up $50m in funding: 'The better Slack does, the better Mattermost does'

Mattermost, the open-source take on enterprise instant messengers like Slack and Teams, has trousered an impressive $50m in funding, less than five months after pocketing a cool $20m. Investor enthusiasm for all things messaging does not appear to be waning as CEO Ian Tien rolled his wheelbarrow of cash away from the offices …

[ds6]

Haha. "Oh yes, Slack, thank you for doing our marketing for us."

I can't tell if that's pompous or genius. Or just really smooth riding of coattails. Or all three.

I've tried Mattermost and while it doesn't feel completely ready for primetime it's got promise. An open-source Slack is something I'm sure a lot of people will be interested in, but it's yet to be seen how profitable their choice of revenue model will be.

[sal II]

Never used any of these in "real world", so can't comment on features/usability. But the pricing for on prem offering seem a bit on the high end compared to Slack, and completely out of touch compared to Teams, given that a lot of businesses are already paying the O365 license so Teams is free or close enough.

[Charlie Clark]

I think you're missing the point that lots of companies realise that it is precisely services like these that will lock them into a particular provider. This is also why Microsoft is being so aggressive with Teams at the moment to get them hooked.

[Sykowasp]

The key feature is being able to host it on the premises, rather than relying on a cloud hosted (usually in the US) service.

Mattermost is okay, to be fair. It could do with some more theming/font/configuration, and better/simpler threading/conversations but it does the job.

[Charlie Clark]

It's a bit tongue in cheek: a lot of companies will hear about Slack and then look for an open source version, because free, or want to host the service themselves. Being the open source version of Slack will get some attention but won't be enough for any serious company deployment.

Slack's terms for non-profits are also a bone of contention for some.

[TheSmokingArgus]

Aw, not even a mention of RocketChat, boy guess that whole "tool of Isis" smear campaign really stuck. Well whichever solution wins, I am in full agreement that on-prem is far from dead, despite whatever the cloud zealots may preach.

I have to figure the rampant de-platforming bySilicon Valley socialists whereby poof... and all your content is gone has an effect on the psyche beyond the Social Media Wars as the lesson holds true when you trust your enterprise wholly to the cloud. Poof.

[ds6]

We have O365 at work, and one day it just stopped working. Some gubbins with the AD server being upgraded. Our fallback Exchange server worked flawlessly when we had to boot it up. Took Microsoft and our contracted vendor 3 days to fix it.

God I love cloud shit.

[don't you hate it when you lose your account]

Been running for a while

Using it as a replacement to WhatsApp for those I need to stay in touch with. And so far there's no evidence I'm spying on myself