Mattermost Team Edition

WebsiteLicense: AGPL 3.0Language: Go

Mattermost is an open-source Team-focused chat app similar to Slack. Mattermost offer additional features via their Enterprise Edition, but we will focus on the open-source Team Edition only.

Mattermost comes with all the features of a modern text chat, including threads, file uploads and reactions. We use Markdown for text formatting, and buttons below the submit box provide formatting help. We even get code blocks with syntax highlighting for all common languages.

Notably missing is voice or video chat, instead it provides integrations for third-party solutions such as Zoom. But native voice chat and screen sharing are under development.

A Mattermost instance is separated into teams, each have their own channels and members. Its role system is limited, with only system admin and member roles. Advanced permission management is available on the Enterprise Edition.

With the Mattermost desktop and mobile apps, we can easily manage multiple Mattermost instances.

Besides chat, Mattermost also comes with two other major components: Boards and Playbooks.

Boards is a kanban-style project management solution with support for arbitrary fields. It comes with several templates such as roadmaps, task management and meeting agendas, demonstrating its flexibility.

Playbooks is a workflow engine for humans. It lets you define manual tasks that can be enhanced with Mattermost commands for partial automation.

For developers and administrators, Mattermost can be managed through a web console, API and even a CLI. A Docker image and Helm chart is available for easy deployment.