Mattermost
Self-hosted team chat with channels, calls, playbooks and boards, as a free MIT build or a commercial subscription.
Team Chat
Mattermost is a self-hosted collaboration platform: channels and threads, one-to-one and group calls with screen sharing, playbooks, boards and integrations, deployed as a single Linux binary against PostgreSQL, via the Kubernetes Operator, or in containers for testing. Two editions cost nothing. Team Edition is the open-source build licensed under MIT, intended for small teams, hobbyists or personal use under 250 activated users and without single sign-on, which the vendor is removing from it. Entry is the commercial Enterprise Edition binary running in a free mode: every Enterprise Advanced feature, but limited to 10,000 channel messages of history, and with no compliance features and no high availability. Paid self-hosted plans — Professional (up to 250 users), Enterprise and Enterprise Advanced — are sold as prepaid annual subscriptions per seat and priced only by quote. The trade-off of the free editions is the omissions list: no SSO, a message-history cap in Entry, and no compliance tooling or clustering unless you pay.
Key features
- Public and private channels, direct messages and threaded discussions
- 1:1 and group audio calls with screen sharing
- Slash commands, bots and webhooks for ChatOps workflows
- Playbooks with checklists, assigned tasks and due dates
- Boards with Kanban cards, checklists, labels and due dates
- Guest accounts and custom user groups for mentions
- SAML, OpenID Connect and AD/LDAP sign-in on paid editions
- EntryFree self-hosted
- LicenceProprietaryDeploymentSelf-hosted
- Team EditionFree self-hosted
- LicenceOpen source · MITUsersUp to 250 usersDeploymentSelf-hosted
- EnterprisePrice on request
- LicenceProprietaryDeploymentSelf-hosted
- Enterprise AdvancedPrice on request
- LicenceProprietaryDeploymentSelf-hosted
- ProfessionalPrice on request
- LicenceProprietaryUsersUp to 250 usersDeploymentSelf-hosted
Limits, notes & source
Entry
- Limits
- All Enterprise Advanced features with server-wide limits: 10,000 channel messages of history across all channels (older messages stay in the database but are not viewable or searchable), 1000 Board cards, 5 Playbook runs per month, 250 Agent queries per month, 40-minute Calls, 10,000 push notifications per month, no compliance features, no delegated granular administration, no high availability, community support only.
- Notes
- A free mode of the compiled Enterprise Edition, offered under Mattermost's commercial licence — not an open-source edition. Docs: "you can run it as-is in a free mode, known as Entry", "best suited for teams less than 50 users", and the limits marked with an asterisk "will take effect in a future release".
Team Edition
- Limits
- Intended for small teams, hobbyists or personal use under 250 activated users, where single sign-on is not required; SSO is being removed from Team Edition.
- Notes
- Docs: "Team Edition is a free-to-use, open source, self-hosted collaboration platform ... deployed as a single Linux binary with PostgreSQL and is licensed under MIT", and shipping it requires replacing the Mattermost trademark. The repository LICENSE.txt is a licensing policy rather than a single licence: binaries Mattermost compiles are MIT, source compiled by others is AGPL v3.0 (with exceptions) or a commercial licence, and admin tools and configuration files are Apache-2.0 — which is why GitHub's licence API answers NOASSERTION.
Enterprise
- Limits
- Everything in Professional plus enterprise-scale search with dedicated indexing, AD/LDAP group sync, eDiscovery and compliance exports, data retention policies, EMM mobile management and delegated granular administration.
- Notes
- No price is published; the pricing page routes to sales. Sold under Mattermost's commercial licence as a prepaid annual subscription per seat. Each server needs its own licence, including federated ones; a high-availability pair sharing one database counts as one server.
Enterprise Advanced
- Limits
- Everything in Enterprise plus classified and sensitive information controls, attribute-based access control for zero-trust deployments, mobile security controls and air-gapped deployment workflows.
- Notes
- The vendor's top tier, for multi-domain secure operations; no price is published and the pricing page routes to sales. Entry is the free mode of this same binary.
Professional
- Limits
- Channel-based collaboration, 1:1 calls and screen sharing, threaded discussions, core search up to 3 million posts, custom branding, guest accounts and custom user groups, with a maximum of 250 users; Kubernetes deployment is not available on this plan.
- Notes
- No per-seat amount is published — the pricing page offers "Contact Sales". The pricing FAQ states: "Mattermost Professional and Mattermost Enterprises licenses are sold as prepaid annual subscriptions based on the number of annual seat licenses purchased, or 'seats'." The plan table lists "Maximum 250 Users".
- Source
- mattermost.com/pricing ↗
- Cloud EnterprisePrice on request
- LicenceProprietaryDeploymentManaged cloud available
Limits, notes & source
Cloud Enterprise
- Limits
- A single-tenant cloud-managed Mattermost Enterprise hosted by the vendor; this is the hosted service, not the self-hosted edition.
- Notes
- Pricing FAQ: enterprises "can inquire about Mattermost Cloud Enterprise, as a single-tenant cloud-managed service for Mattermost Enterprise hosted by Mattermost, Inc." No price is published.
- Source
- mattermost.com/pricing ↗
Pros & cons
Strengths
- Free Entry mode is the full Enterprise Advanced binary running with published limits, not a stripped build. Source
- Team Edition is open source under MIT, installed as a single binary against PostgreSQL. Source
- Kubernetes Operator deployment scales across app nodes for high availability on paid plans. Source
Trade-offs
Show 1 more
- The Docker deployment the vendor documents is not supported for production or clustered use. Source
Mattermost replaces
Products this app is built to take over from, with the vendor's own evidence.
Moving your content across: Documented per product: what you do on the side you are leaving, what this app does with the result, and what does not survive the trip. Every step links to the page that documents it.
- ExportExport your data from Slack: the public-channel export is available on every Slack plan, while the full export including private channels and direct messages needs a paid plan.Source
- ImportTransform the archive with the mmetl tool, then upload and process it with mmctl against your own server.Source
- CaveatMattermost states the migration can be complex and that manual adjustments are often required during transformation and import.Source
- CaveatInstalled Slack apps, bots, slash commands, webhooks and canvases do not migrate, and threads may not all be preserved.Source
Similar apps
Other entries from this catalogue in the same category, with a free self-hosted edition first and then the higher star count. Only software we publish appears here — each card opens the entry, where its price, licence and check date are recorded.
Rocket.Chat
Team Chat
Self-hosted team chat with messaging, voice and video; free Starter and MIT Community editions, paid plans by quote.
Zulip
Team Chat
Open-source team chat with topic-based threading, self-hosted on your own Ubuntu or Debian server.